Grace Glueck (1926–2022) Died at the Age of 96. She Was a Pioneering Arts Reporter for the NYT!

A journalist for the arts in America named Grace Glueck. Between 1951 and the beginning of 2010, she was employed by The New York Times.

Grace Glueck Early Life

On July 24, 1926, Glueck was born in New York City. Her mother, Mignon (Schwarz), was a stay-at-home mother who contributed to local newspapers; her father, Ernest, was a municipal bond salesman on Wall Street up until the Great Depression.

Glueck grew up in Rockville Centre and finished high school there. At New York University, she later pursued an English degree, receiving it in 1948. She served as the editor of The Apprentice, the school’s literary magazine, while she was a student there.

Grace Glueck Death 

Grace Glueck, a seasoned art journalist who was instrumental in the 1974 sex discrimination lawsuit that forced The New York Times to admit female reporters, passed away on October 8 at the age of 96 in her Manhattan home.

Her writing on art was witty, revelatory, and appeared to be effortless; it was at its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the city’s art scene was exploding. Glueck over a career that spanned sixty years set a standard for art writing at the New York Times that elevated the subject to an essential one and that motivated newspapers all over the country to start covering the topic themselves.

She did this by bringing the eye of a reporter, rather than that of a critic, to her stories.

Grace Glueck, a journalist who broke new ground by making the art world a distinct beat at The New York Times, and who then helped bring an important sex-discrimination lawsuit against the paper, has died at 96. https://t.co/yWCUzjI8YL

— New York Times Arts (@nytimesarts) October 9, 2022

Grace Glueck was born in New York on July 24, 1926, and grew up in a Long Island suburb. She earned her BA from New York University, which was then primarily a commuter school rather than the block-eating behemoth it would later become.

There, she worked as the literary magazine’s editor for The Apprentice. She started working at a travel magazine for a short time after graduating in 1948. She started working as a copy girl for the Times in 1951 after a man who interviewed her for the position wrote across her application, “attractive brunette,” according to the official newspaper.

She started working at the New York Review of Books as a picture researcher two years later. She was given a Sunday art column in 1963 after suggesting using one of Balthus’s nymphets to illustrate an article on Nabokov’s Lolita. At the time, women were typically restricted to clerical and secretarial positions at the newspaper.

Her column, Art People, which incorporated hard news reporting with in-depth interviews and quick gossip pieces, quickly caught the attention of the editors at the Times’ daily news operation, who hired her as an arts reporter.

The turbulent New York art scene, which in the late 1960s and into the 1970s was marked by the loft movement that fundamentally altered the appearance of SoHo, the ascendance of Pop Art alongside Op Art, Minimalism, Happenings, and an uprising feminist art movement, was the subject of Glueck’s first serious reporting.

In her new position, Glueck, who by the time of her retirement had written over three thousand articles for the Times, wrote about or conducted interviews with hundreds of artists, including Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe, Willem de Kooning, and Marcel Duchamp.

Publisher of the Times Arthur Sulzberger published a list of editorial promotions in 1969 that did not include any women. Glueck demanded an explanation in a letter to Sulzberger.

The Times did not provide a satisfactory response, and five years later, eight women who worked there filed what Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Center for Oral History Research at Columbia University, would later call “the most important sex-discrimination lawsuit in American journalism,” accusing the paper of breaking the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The “attractive brunette” comment was used as evidence in the proceedings before the trial. The case was resolved in 1978 with the Times agreeing to hire more women at all levels of employment and to establish annuities to cover wages lost as a result of missed opportunities or delayed career advancement.

Glueck retired in 1991 after holding the position of cultural editor of the Times’ daily edition for a brief period before resigning to focus on reporting, which she preferred. She published two books, spent a brief period of time working for The Observer, and then went back to The Times, where she continued to contribute well into her eighties.

For Glueck, artistic journalism She told Sharon Zane, who interviewed her in 1997 for the Museum of Modern Art’s Oral History Program, that the work “really provided a life, and it was interesting.” “I did enjoy my work. I enjoyed meeting new people, and I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the clock and said, “Thank God, it’s time to go home.”