Milton Esterow, an award-winning journalist who owned and edited ARTnews for 42 years, died on Friday at 97. His loss of life was confirmed by his daughter Judith Esterow, who beforehand served as this journal’s affiliate writer. She didn’t state a trigger.
In a social media post, Robin Cembalest, who served as government editor of ARTnews underneath Esterow, wrote, “Milton educated generations of editors and writers, revealed scoop after scoop that received prize after prize, and was justly happy with the affect of the journal’s relentless investigative journalism—significantly when it got here to the restitution of Holocaust struggle loot.”
Associated Articles
She added that “his passing marks the top of an period, for artwork magazines and for artwork journalism.”
Esterow bought ARTnews in 1972 from Newsweek, which on the time was a division of the Washington Submit Firm, and owned it till 2014, when ARTnews was bought in 2014 to Sergey Skaterschikov. (The publication was then acquired two years later by Peter Brant, who additionally owned Artwork in America; each publications have been owned by Penske Media Company since 2018.) In the course of the time he owned ARTnews, Esterow reworked the journal right into a news-focused entity, infusing the publication with an power it had misplaced within the years after its critics had helped outline actions akin to Summary Expressionism and Pop through the postwar period.
ARTnews went on to realize nationwide recognition for a few of its investigative reviews, a few of which had been authored by Esterow himself. Below his management, the journal additionally launched the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list in 1990, which this fall will publish its thirty sixth version. The intently watched checklist is at the moment a cornerstone of ARTnews’s protection.
“Milton’s legacy of fantastic journalism is massively necessary to the journal,” mentioned Sarah Douglas, ARTnews Editor-in-Chief since 2014. “It has been a continuous touchstone as we’ve got moved ARTnews into the digital age.”
One may simply enumerate Esterow’s many achievements. In a 2023 New York Times profile, at age 94, he claimed to have written greater than 6,000 articles in his lifetime—and he continued writing much more articles through his 1950 Royal typewriter after the piece was revealed. Below his management, ARTnews received one Nationwide Journal Awards (for common excellence in 1981) and two George Polk Awards (each for cultural reporting in 1980 and 1991).
However Esterow went about his job with a modesty that didn’t go unnoticed by outdoors observers: the critic Ben Davis as soon as wrote that he was “hardly a flashy man.” Inside his newsroom, he was often known as each a nurturing presence, with a behavior of offering incoming hires with inspiration within the type of a printed packet of articles revealed by ARTnews. (One recipient of such a packet was this author when he was onboarded as an intern.)
A staple of that packet was a 1957 essay on the avant-garde by the artwork historian Meyer Schapiro revealed by ARTnews. Esterow as soon as mentioned was “most likely the one genius I’ve recognized.” After taking up, Esterow tried to persuade Schapiro to comply with a profile, however all the time obtained the reply that he was too busy. “Esterow repeated the request yearly or two, and the response was all the time the identical,” in keeping with a 2007 article on ARTnews’s high 10 articles. Schapiro lastly agreed after almost a decade, and Esterow revealed the article by journalist Helen Epstein in 1983.
Milton Esterow was born in 1928 in New York and was raised in Brooklyn. He confirmed an early predilection for journalism and even made his personal newspaper when he was a child, writing the articles by hand.
He attended Brooklyn School and, whereas he was a pupil there, obtained a job as a replica boy with the New York Occasions. His first process: going to Occasions Sq. to buy horse betting sheets for the managing editor.
Esterow went on to marry Jackie Esterow, with whom he had two daughters, Judith and Deborah. Milton and Jackie had been collectively for 74 years; she died earlier this 12 months.
In 1948, Esterow was named a reporter by the Occasions, main him to drop out of school. “The Occasions newsroom,” Esterow would go on to recall, “was my journalism faculty.” He initially targeted on crime, then turned his consideration to the humanities.
Esterow’s strategy, an uncommon one for its period, concerned treating artwork tales as events for investigative journalism. Whereas others on the Occasions seemed on at his work with befuddlement, Esterow plugged away and proved himself fairly adept. In 1964, he revealed a narrative on plundered artwork in Europe through the years after World Conflict II. The report made the entrance web page of the Occasions—a rarity for an artwork story each throughout its time and now.
He was promoted to assistant to the director of cultural information on the Occasions in 1968, although he went on to move up the publishing division of the Kennedy artwork galleries quickly afterward.
Then, in 1972, he led an eight-person investor group in buying ARTnews. The journal was on the time devoted primarily to criticism. It was central to the New York artwork world of the Fifties, however its readership had dwindled; Esterow, realizing it wanted a brand new focus, let go of almost everybody on the journal and proceeded to convey on a staff of recent hires. “The artwork world is fascinating and mysterious,” Esterow told the Times on the event of the acquisition. “It is usually underreported. There’s a real thirst for artwork info that publications haven’t been satisfying.” (Not everybody was glad. Thomas B. Hess, then nonetheless the editor of ARTnews, mentioned, “The lack of Artwork Information is a loss to my alter ego.”)
His management of ARTnews, along with his daughter Judith, put the journal on a brand new course, and his affect was most evident within the investigatory items it started to publish. One from 1984 started with a tip to Esterow: an Austrian monastery held many Nazi-looted masterworks, and nobody may go to it. Andrew Decker was assigned to the piece, and the resultant article grew to become one in every of many dedicated to restitution.
Esterow’s fascination with the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the artwork world was one cause he started the High 200 Collectors checklist in 1990. The general public knew that wealthy folks had been shopping for artwork, however there was little understanding of why, he recalled. Collectors “are in fact massive spenders, however on the similar time there are such a lot of totally different sorts of collections as there are collections,” Esterow advised NPR in 2009. “Some collectors are glad, some are tormented. Some purchase little or no, whereas others can’t assist themselves. Why do folks accumulate?” He needed to reply that query for himself and others.
After ARTnews’s 2014 sale, Esterow stored writing for retailers such because the Artwork Newspaper and the New York Occasions, with the latter paper persevering with to publish his articles as not too long ago as this previous spring. That he continued writing effectively after he relinquished management of ARTnews—effectively after he vowed to “take it a bit simple,” as he put it—confirmed his devotion to his craft.
He once said he had no regrets about spending a profession investigating the artwork world, save for one: “It hasn’t helped my tennis sport, however that’s one other story.”
