Harry Kramer

We see, for example, how an artist who belongs to the succeeding generation, the outstanding Harry Kramer, processes the culture through his unique gifts to make it his own. His image and vitality incorporate the Spirit of Abstract Expressionism and then reinvent it.

Mr. Kramer…is one of the finest painters of his generation. An artist who works in the New York School tradition, he has developed a distinctive vocabulary in a body of work that is both adventurous and tied, obliquely, to art of the past.

So who Kramer is, to put it bluntly, is a first-rate painter, with a tremendous sense of formal relationships. His work exudes a feeling of ‘rightness’ of line, color, degree of complication that improves any space in which it finds itself—and on a properly monumental scale. I think his paintings are, frankly, beautiful, and in this I have to admit I side with Keats: in art, beauty is truth and vice-versa.

It’s hard to think of anyone besides de Kooning who has as dynamic a relationship with paint as does Kramer, who revels in hand-to-hand combat with the medium and comes out the winner—or least, at a draw. The paint must have its day as much as the painter, and Kramer seems content to lose a few battles in order to get a victory.