PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: criticism
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era....
French dramatist
MoliĂšre was a French actor and playwright who became the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius...
English writer who defined the novel of manners
Jane Austen was an English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. She published four novels during her lifetime: Sense...
French author
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and...
English writer and artist
John Ruskin was an English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical...
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shawâs 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
French composer
Hector Berlioz was a French composer, critic, and conductor of the Romantic period, known largely for his Symphonie fantastique (1830), the choral symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), and the dramatic piece...
French author
Stendhal was one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. His finest novels are Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red...
British critic
Matthew Arnold was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the âBarbariansâ (the aristocracy), the...
French author
Ămile Zola was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental...
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue...
British poet
Robert Browning was a major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work was The Ring and the Book (1868â69), the story...
Italian sculptor
Lorenzo Ghiberti was an early Italian Renaissance sculptor celebrated for his mastery of pictorial space and lifelike figures. His Gates of Paradise (1425â52) for the Florence Baptisteryâs east entrance...
British artist and author
William Morris was an English designer, craftsman, poet, and early socialist, whose designs for furniture, fabrics, stained glass, wallpaper, and other decorative arts generated the Arts and Crafts movement...
American author
Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic and the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature...
American artist
James McNeill Whistler was an American-born artist noted for his paintings of nocturnal London, for his striking and stylistically advanced full-length portraits, and for his brilliant etchings and lithographs....
German composer and musician
Carl Maria von Weber was a German composer and opera director during the transition from Classical to Romantic music, noted especially for his operas Der FreischĂŒtz (1821; The Freeshooter, or, more colloquially,...
British painter
Joshua Reynolds was a portrait painter and aesthetician who dominated English artistic life in the middle and late 18th century. Through his art and teaching, he attempted to lead British painting away...
British poet
W. H. Auden was an English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression. Most of his verse dramas of this period were written in collaboration...
French novelist, art historian, and statesman
AndrĂ© Malraux was a French novelist, art historian, and statesman who became an active supporter of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and, after de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, served for 10 years as Franceâs...
British author
Graham Greene was an English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat lifeâs moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings. Many of his most acclaimed...
French composer
Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer of the late Baroque period, best known today for his harpsichord music, operas, and works in other theatrical genres but in his lifetime also famous as a music...
American author
Toni Morrison was an American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community and for her poetic, luminous prose. Considered one of...
German dramatist
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for...
Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet
Lee Ufan is a Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet who was a prominent theorist and proponent of the Tokyo-based movement of young artists from the late 1960s through the early â70s known as Mono-ha...
American artist and collector
Katherine Dreier was an American art collector, artist, and writer who took it as her mission to promote the understanding and appreciation of modern art and the work of living artists, including Paul...
American critic
Clement Greenberg was an American art critic who advocated a formalist aesthetic. He is best known as an early champion of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg was born to parents of Lithuanian Jewish descent....
American artist
Elaine de Kooning was an American painter, teacher, and art critic who is perhaps best known for her portraits. A precocious young artist with a competitive streak that found an outlet in sports, Elaine...
German art historian
Johann Winckelmann was a German archaeologist and art historian whose writings directed popular taste toward classical art, particularly that of ancient Greece, and influenced not only Western painting...
Chinese artist
Mi Fu was a scholar, poet, calligrapher, and painter who was a dominant figure in Chinese art. Of his extensive writingsâpoetry, essays on the history of aesthetics, and criticism of paintingâa considerable...
British artist and writer
Wyndham Lewis was an English artist and writer who founded the Vorticist movement, which sought to relate art and literature to the industrial process. About 1893 Lewis moved to London with his mother...
American author
David Mamet is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter noted for his often desperate working-class characters and for his distinctive, colloquial, and frequently profane dialogue. Mamet began...
French painter
Paul SĂ©rusier was a French Post-Impressionist painter and theorist who was instrumental in the formation of the short-lived, but highly influential, late 19th-century art movement known as the Nabis. The...
American author
Harlan Ellison was an American writer of short stories, novels, essays, and television and film scripts. Though he eschewed genre categorization himself, his work was most frequently labeled science fiction....
American poet, scholar, and critic
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, scholar, teacher, and critic whose many volumes of poetry trace a stylistic transformation from formal, well-crafted but imitative poetry to a more personal and powerful...
Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter
Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter whose work is marked by verbal brilliance, ingenious action, and structural dexterity. Stoppardâs father worked in Singapore in the late...
American art critic
Harold Rosenberg was an American art critic known for championing the work of such painters as Jackson Pollock. He coined the term Action painting to describe the work of American Abstract Expressionists....
American orientalist and art critic
Ernest F. Fenollosa was an American Orientalist and educator who made a significant contribution to the preservation of traditional art in Japan. Fenollosa studied philosophy and sociology at Harvard,...
Italian poet
Pietro Metastasio was an Italian poet and the most celebrated librettist in Europe writing during the 18th century for the opera seria; his librettos were set more than 800 times. In 1708 his astonishing...
Northern Irish poet
Paul Muldoon is a Northern Irish poet whose oeuvre covers both intensely personal and political terrainâfrom his wifeâs miscarriage to the conflict in Northern Ireland. He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry...
Nigerian-born art curator
Okwui Enwezor was a Nigerian-born poet, art critic, art historian, and curator who helped bring global attention to African art. Enwezor was raised in Enugu in eastern Nigeria. In the early 1980s he relocated...
British musician and historian
Charles Burney was an organist, composer, and the foremost music historian of his time in England. After attending Chester Free School (1739â42), Burney returned to Shrewsbury, assisted his half-brother,...
Cuban author
JosĂ© Lezama Lima was a Cuban experimental poet, novelist, and essayist whose baroque writing style and eclectic erudition profoundly influenced other Caribbean and Latin American writers. Lezamaâs father,...
American writer
Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, eccentric, and self-styled genius whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II. Stein spent...
American composer
Gunther Schuller was an American composer, performer, conductor, teacher, and writer noted for his wide range of activity in both jazz and classical music and for his works embracing both jazz and advanced...
English author
John Evelyn was an English country gentleman, author of some 30 books on the fine arts, forestry, and religious topics. His Diary, kept all his life, is considered an invaluable source of information on...
Italian musician
Giuseppe Tartini was an Italian violinist, composer, and theorist who helped establish the modern style of violin bowing and formulated principles of musical ornamentation and harmony. Tartini studied...
German composer
Paul Hindemith was one of the principal German composers of the first half of the 20th century and a leading musical theorist. He sought to revitalize tonalityâthe traditional harmonic system that was...
Australian art critic and television personality
Robert Hughes was an Australian art critic and television personality known for his informed and highly opinionated criticism and his accessible and succinct writing style. After graduating (1956) from...
French composer
Camille Saint-SaĂ«ns was a composer chiefly remembered for his symphonic poemsâthe first of that genre to be written by a Frenchmanâand for his opera Samson et Dalila. Saint-SaĂ«ns was notable for his pioneering...