Henry McBride was one of America's most respected art critics in the period between the two World Wars, and a doughty fighter for native talents such as Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as a staunch internationalist. Since he was primarily a journalist, not an art historian, most of these pieces are short - too short, perhaps, in a number of cases, to be really worth preserving or reprinting.
Compared with the intellectual jargon of today, he wrote informally in what nowseems almost journalese - but then, so did Mencken, Runyan and many other New York figures of the times. McBride, however, wrote for an age and readership which has vanished, and today the results rarely seem of more than period interest.
