Agnes Gund, the New York arts patron, collector and a former president of MoMA, said of Ms. Glueck in a phone interview in 2021: “She was not afraid to speak her mind or report the truth. In a way, she very much shaped the art world as we know it today, certainly in New York.”
That art world then was rapidly changing. The loft movement opened up SoHo, inflating the scale of painting itself — as well as real estate values in that once-industrial Manhattan neighborhood. Record prices at the auction houses raised questions about artists’ royalties on resold art. Pop Art, like Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans and Brillo boxes, demanded column inches in the newspapers, as did the new waves of Op Art and Happenings. Corporate funding was transforming formerly intimate museums. The National Endowment for the Arts, established by Congress in 1965, was dispersing large sums all over the country.
Crisply dressed in tailored jackets, with a short, no-nonsense haircut and pedaling to appointments on her bicycle, Ms. Glueck became a frequent presence at galleries and artists’ studios. Drawing on her literary education, she wrote “naturalistically,” she said, setting an artist in the habitat of a gallery or studio in verbal portraits that were tactile in their detail and friendly in their intimacy.
The apparent effortlessness of her pieces, along with flashes of what Ms. Isenberg called “a wicked sense of humor,” was deceptive. “She bleeds when she writes, and rewrites, and rewrites,” the Times reporter Nan Robertson wrote in “The Girls in the Balcony,” her 1992 book that chronicled the fight for workplace parity by women at the paper.
Recounting an interview with Marcel Duchamp in 1965, Ms. Glueck wrote that he had “brushed a hand over his longish hair” and that “lean, lively and jauntily clad in corduroys and suede shoes, he looked not at all like a figure from Art History.” She captured his wry humor, quoting him as saying: “That’s the trouble with artists now. In my day, we wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. They have country houses, two cars, three divorces and five children. An artist has to turn out lots of paintings to pay for all that, hmm?”
