Jed Perl

Jed Perl is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. The poet John Ashbery has called him "an almost solitary, essential voice," and a reviewer in The Atlantic observed of his most recent essay collection, Magicians and Charlatans, that he "may be the finest American critic at work today in any field." Perl was the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade. Writing about his two-volume biography of the American sculptor Alexander Calder--Calder: The Conquest of Time and Calder: The Conquest of Space--the novelist Fran Lebowitz observed that "all artists are critics, but very few critics are artists. Jed Perl is one of those few." Among Jed Perl's many books are Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I, Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, and New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, which was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book. He is also the editor of Art in America: 1945-1970, a 900-page anthology published by the Library of America. He has written for Harper's, The New Criterion, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He lives in New York City.