Wright, Willard Huntingdon

Wright, Willard Huntingdon (1888–1939). American art and literary critic and novelist, brother of the painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright. He was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, grew up in California, and studied at Harvard University. In 1912 he moved to New York, where he worked as a journalist, and in 1913 (soon after seeing the Armory Show) he joined his brother in Paris, where he lived for the next two years. At the time he moved abroad his main preoccupation was philosophy (his first book was What Nietzsche Taught, 1915), but he turned more to art; one of the first articles he sent back from Paris was ‘Impressionism to Synchromism’ (The Forum, December, 1913), in which he discussed the avant-garde movement recently founded by his brother. In 1915 Wright returned to New York, via London, and his book Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning was published in both cities that year. The hero of the book is Cézanne, and John Rewald writes that, as far as American critics of his time were concerned, Wright was ‘in first place among those who seriously studied Cézanne's work', discussing it ‘with insight, erudition, and a philosophical as well as historical point of view’ (Cézanne and America, 1989). However, Wright was not so perceptive about van Gogh, ‘who did little more than use a borrowed and inharmonious palette to express ideas wholly outside the realm of art'.

In 1916 Wright organized the Forum Exhibition in New York, one of the most important avant-garde shows of its period, and in the same year he published an article (‘The Aesthetic Struggle in America', The Forum, February 1916) in which he attacked conservative critics such as Royal Cortissoz (1869–1948), Kenyon Cox (1856–1919), Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. (1868–1953), and the British-born Charles H. Caffin (1854–1918). Wright's last main contribution to art literature was The Future of Painting (1923). Soon after it was published he became dangerously ill (his health had never been robust); during a lengthy convalescence he was forbidden serious reading, so he got through hundreds of detective novels. Convinced he could do better, he took up the genre himself and in 1926—under the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine—he published The Benson Murder Case, the first of a series of books featuring the super-sleuth Philo Vance, whose scholarship and urbanity were modelled on Wright's own. The books were immensely popular and earned him a fortune.