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PUBLISHER'S ESSAY Chronicling A Century   
The first issue of Hyde's Weekly Art News appeared on November 29, 1902. It was the only art periodical published in the United States, a one-sided, one-sheet affair, laid out, the writer Richard F. Shepard noted,"in five columns of print that would make a legal journal seem lively by comparison." James Clarence Hyde had been an art historian and art critic for the New York World and Tribune. His creation, which measured about seventeen by thirteen inches, had no illustrations, no criticism, and no advertising, but it was a national journal, even if one that devoted much space to art in Europe, which was where Americans still looked for cultural uplift. Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas were still at work. But few Americans were aware that Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder were alive, much less making works of beauty. Hyde wrote, "The endeavor will be to make the news interesting, up to date, and absolutely reliable. Appreciating that the value of this paper will be its bonafide news of art matters, the publisher will print only that which he believes to be trustworthy." Both art and the magazine have grown. Art, one of my distinguished predecessors, the late Alfred M. Frankfurter, wrote a half-century ago," has developed from a social diversion to a national expression." Hyde's Weekly, which became a monthly in 1946, is now read in 120 countries by nearly 250,000 people, the largest monthly art audience in the world. There have been galvanic changes in art in the past one hundred years-changes in taste and fashion, as well as in aesthetics. Soon after ARTnews and the twentieth century began, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism, but they had trouble selling a painting even when they were close to fifty. At almost the same time, in Paris, Henri Matisse, André Derain, and their friends showed some of their colorful paintings and were denounced as fauves—wild beasts. ARTnews has documented the artists and the art world through photographs as well as words. We featured portrait photographs of artists as early as 1904. Some of the photographers—Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Berenice Abbott, George Platt Lynes, Arnold Newman, Hans Namuth, and Duane Michals, among others—rank with their artist subjects. Some lesser-known photographers have also made pictures that epitomize an art movement or period. The early photographs, as this exhibition indicates, were elegantly formal, showing painters dressed as soberly as their banker clients. Today, the style is usually T-shirt and jeans. A long-lived publication, it has been said, is a perpetually self-renewing work in progress directed by a succession of creative people who, if is fortunate, materialize at the proper moment. I could mention some of our more celebrated contributors—Bernard Berenson, Duncan Phillips, Harold Rosenberg, Aldous Huxley, Kenneth Clark, Meyer Schapiro, Alfred Barr, André Malraux, Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Philip Johnson, Robert Rosenblum, Arthur Danto, Robert Rauschenberg. I could list some of our exclusive stories—the scandal over Nazi art loot in Austria; the secret art depositories in the Soviet Union, which the George Polk Awards Committee called "a remarkable East-West journalistic achievement." Or the six awards for excellence from the Society of the Silurians, the organization of veteran editors and reporters. None of the kudos would have come without the less celebrated editors, reporters, art historians, critics, and artists who have appeared on ARTnews's masthead and changed the course of art journalism. To all of them—my respect, admiration, and affection. What of the future? What will art become? I don't know. What our pages will contain depends on what will be happening in the world we cover—and on the larger forces that shape that world. I have no hesitation, however, in predicting that ARTnews will be there, reporting and analyzing what is going on, with a receptiveness to new ideas and the values embodied by James Clarence Hyde in 1902. We will use whatever technology is needed to do all this while at the same time resisting tendencies for technology to become the master rather than the tool of the magazine. Meyer Schapiro once said, "To perceive the aims of the art of one's own time and to judge them rightly is so unusual as to constitute an act of genius." ARTnews has not always perceived the art of its own time rightly. Back in 1911, our critic in Paris was upset over the "diabolical influence" of the so-called Cubists and hoped that American artists "will not become affected by this germ that makes for decay in the beauty of line, form and thought." Years later, the germ affected one of our critics, who was absolutely certain that Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase was the work of a "carpenter." Perhaps that's one of the reasons why, on our sixtieth birthday, Josef Albers summed us up this way:
Sometimes I love you,
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Milton Esterow