The American art critic Henry McBride (1867-1962) is a figure unlike any of his successors in the last decades of the twentieth century that it now requires a certain leap of the historical imagination to think our way back to his exemplary career in the first half of the century.

The abundant, well appointed dealers’ galleries that now regularly bring us a vast range of new talent; the many well-established museums that boast the first-rate collections of the modernist classics while at the same time competing for the privilege of being the first to embrace new artistic developments; the friendly reception that is now accorded to even the most far-out innovations in art by critics in the mainstream press, academic opinion in the universities, and collectors with the means of acquiring expensive examples of the new art – all of this came much later, and in large part as a result of the pioneering efforts of a very small circle of artist and intellectuals. In that circle McBride was the premier critic of the modernist movement as it emerged in this country in the aftermath of the 1913 Armory Show in New York.

McBride was a close personal acquaintance with many of the leading European and American Artists of his time. He was as much at home in Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon as he was at Florine Stettheimer’s Manhattan soirees. He was in regular attendance at Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Alfred Stieglitz’s "291".

He knew everyone and went everywhere. He moved easily between the world of daily newspaper journalism and that of the elite literary intelligentsia – between in his case, the New York Sun, one of the outstanding newspapers of the day, and The Dial, the most distinguished American literary journal of the 1920’s, where his editor was Marianne Moore and his fellow contributors often included Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, Thomas Mann, and Bertrand Russell.