Canaday, John (1907–1985). American writer, born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin (BA, 1929), then at Yale (MA in the history of art, 1933), and after private study in Paris for several years taught at various colleges in the USA. During the Second World War he served in the marines. From 1953 to 1959 he was director of educational activities at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and from 1959 to 1977 he was art news editor for the
New York Times. In this position he often attacked contemporary art, particularly
Abstract Expressionism (for an example of his opinions, see
NEWMAN), and he became a controversial figure; in March 1961 a group of 49 artists, critics, dealers, and so on sent a joint letter to the
Times deploring his writings, particularly his use of words such as ‘charlatan’ and ‘fraud'. However, like Brian
Sewell in a similar situation 33 years later, Canaday had strong public support (after two weeks' correspondence, the
Times reported 311 letters defending him and 56 in favour of his critics). Although he disliked much of the art of his own time, Canaday wrote sensitively about earlier 20th-century art, notably in his book
Mainstreams of Modern Art (1959). In the preface to the second edition (1981), Canaday describes this as ‘a history of painting and sculpture in the nineteenth century with their immediate genesis in the late eighteenth and immediate continuations in the first decades of the twentieth’ (the first edition was rather broader in scope, taking the account further into the 20th century and also including a section on architecture). It is one of the best introductory books of its type—serious and well-informed, but written in an attractive, accessible style. His other books include
Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art (1962);
The Lives of the Painters (4 vols., 1969), a series of short biographies of artists from the Middle Ages to
Post-Impressionism; and
Metropolitan Seminars in Art, issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 24 monthly portfolios in 1958–60 and described as ‘assisted self-education’ (revised and extended in book form as
What is Art? (1980)). Canaday also wrote mystery novels under the pseudonym Matthew Head (seven were published between 1943 and 1955, three of them featuring a female medical missionary in Africa as the detective). He was a noted gourmet and from 1974 worked as restaurant critic for the
New York Times.
