NEW YORK, NY.- Grace Glueck, a transformative journalist who broke new ground by making the art world a distinct beat at The New York Times, and who then helped bring an important sex-discrimination lawsuit against the paper, her employer of more than 60 years, died Saturday at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 96.

Her stepdaughter Susan Freudenheim confirmed the death.

In more than 3,000 crisply written, sometimes contentious articles for the Times, Glueck (pronounced gluck) approached art as a reporter rather than as a critic, effectively inventing the art beat at the newspaper and inspiring other newsrooms across the county to make it a journalistic standard.

Her news articles, interviews and profiles, filled with revelatory fact and often laced with wit, became a staple of the paper’s coverage of the visual arts in New York during the 1960s and ’70s in particular, a fertile and tumultuous period in which she began uncovering fractures in the glamorous white box of that art world.

Glueck “applied the techniques of political investigative journalism to the little-examined art world” and “was mother of us all,” art journalist Lee Rosenbaum wrote in 2021 on the blog CultureGrrl.

Barbara Isenberg, who was writing for the Los Angeles Times during Glueck’s era, said in a phone interview: “Suddenly in the 1960s there was a lot of money, and the arts took off. Other people around the country began to write in the 1970s and ’80s, but Grace was always the premier writer covering the news.”

That news included an intensifying feminist movement that had reached the art world as well as the Times newsroom itself, where Glueck was inspired to help initiate a 1974 lawsuit against the paper, accusing it of chronic underpayment and under-promotion of women. She had experienced it firsthand when she began working for the paper more than two decades earlier.

As a recent English-major graduate of New York University, Glueck started at the Times in 1951 as a copy girl with few prospects of a viable journalistic future. At the time, newspapermen were known to call women in the newsroom “skirts” and “gals.” A man who had interviewed her when she applied for the job had written “attractive brunette” on her evaluation. When she later asked about trying out for a writer’s job, a senior editor told her, “Why don’t you go home and get married?”

“I was not allowed to train as a reporter because I was a woman,” she said in an oral history program for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997.

For two years Glueck performed clerical tasks before landing at The New York Times Book Review as a picture researcher, pairing artworks with reviews, a job she would hold for 11 years as her career stalled.

Her fortunes changed in 1963 when she found an image of a nymphet by Balthus to accompany a review of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita.” The pairing attracted the attention of Lester Markel, the paper’s Sunday editor, and he asked to meet Glueck.

“I walked into his enormous, Mussolini-like office,” she said in the oral history, “he gets up from his desk, he brushes his hands over my lips and said, ‘You have too much lipstick on.’”

There had been art criticism in the Times but little art journalism, and it was Markel’s idea to enlist her to write a Sunday art column, “Art People,” a collection of short, chatty takes on art events and personalities.

“It was much looked down on by what you might call serious artists and critics,” Glueck said, “but in the end I think they found it a source of news.”

The column evolved to include serious interviews and hard reporting. “It was really anything I wanted to make it,” she said. And it caught the attention of the arts editors for the daily paper.

Soon after starting “Art People,” Glueck was doubling as a columnist and an arts reporter, splitting her time between the Sunday section, whose office was on the sixth floor of the Times headquarters on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, and the daily news operation on the third floor.

“It turned out that I was going to cover the art world from a news point of view,” she recalled. “I had never written a news story in my life.”

Agnes Gund, a New York arts patron, collector and a former president of MoMA, said of Glueck by phone: “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 op art and the performance art 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, 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 Isenberg called “a wicked sense of humor,” was deceptive. “She bleeds when she writes, and rewrites, and rewrites,” 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, 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?”

In one of her many profiles of female artists, Glueck quoted Georgia O’Keeffe musing in a 1970 interview about her widely photographed profile, “It would be terrible if I got a double chin.”

Glueck observed in her MoMA oral history: “If I had known these people all my life, if I had been overimpressed with them, in awe of them,” then “I might not have been able to have taken the same breezy view of them that I did.”

Soon art reviews were added to her assignments. Philip Pearlstein, a New York figurative painter, said in a phone interview: “Unlike other critics, she was inquisitive, asked questions, got inside the minds of artists, and wrote about their intentions rather than her own reactions.”

Glueck often covered what the Times had missed. “The Times’ leading critics had long disparaged the American avant-garde, and Grace brought fresh air to its art pages,” said Elizabeth Baker, a former longtime editor of Art in America.

But how the Times treated women remained an issue for Glueck, and in 1969, when its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, posted a memo in the newsroom announcing promotions to top editorial positions, she immediately read between the lines: Women were conspicuously absent. She fired off a polite but pointed note to Sulzberger, concluding: “Why were no women included?”

Her letter was a shot fired across the bow in what would become a protracted class-action lawsuit against the Times, filed in 1974 by female employees who accused the company of sex discrimination in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Financial reporter Eileen Shanahan, the most prominent of the eight plaintiffs who officially filed the lawsuit, said, “Without Grace there would have been no lawsuit.”

A newsroom women’s caucus, formed in 1972, had pored over the rolls kept by the Newspaper Guild, the union that represented nonmanagement employees, and found patterns of unequal pay and unequal promotion. The “attractive brunette” remark from Glueck’s initial interview itself became evidence. The caucus demanded an affirmative action plan for women.

In late 1972, as the caucus gained strength and momentum, Glueck was promoted to cultural news editor of the daily paper. John Canaday, then the Times’ chief art critic, wrote of her in the paper’s in-house newsletter, Times Talk: “Since she went on the Women’s Lib kick, she objects to having attention called to her beautiful ankles and long eyelashes, paramount among her other attractions, but where else can you begin?”

He then proceeded to her skills: “Grace can dig out a story with the force of a construction crew dynamiting for a new subway and the precision of a dentist exploring a cavity in a movie star’s front tooth.”

But Glueck found that she didn’t like her new job as editor, a nonwriting position, and stepped down to return to her trusty bicycle and beloved art beat.

The lawsuit led to a court settlement in 1978 in which both sides claimed victory. The Times did not grant raises, make immediate promotions or substantially change its voluntary affirmative-action program. But the company agreed to place more women in jobs ranging from entry level to top management, and to create annuities covering costs of “delayed career advancement or denied opportunity.”

“Grace lit the fire,” said Mary Marshall Clark, who worked at the Times as an oral historian before becoming director of the Center for Oral History Research at Columbia University, “It was the most important sex-discrimination lawsuit in American journalism.”

Grace Glueck was born on July 24, 1926, in New York, the daughter of Ernest and Mignon (Schwarz) Glueck. She grew up in suburban Rockville Centre, on Long Island. Her father was a municipal bond salesman on Wall Street until the Depression and later an insurance broker. Her mother wrote for community newspapers and was a homemaker. After high school in Rockville Centre, Glueck attended New York University, where she was editor of its literary magazine, The Apprentice. She graduated in 1948.

In 2000, she married a fellow Times alumnus, Milt Freudenheim, a business and financial reporter. He died in January at age 94. In addition to her stepdaughter Freudenheim, Glueck is survived by another stepdaughter, Jo Freudenheim; two stepsons, Jack and Tom Freudenheim; and five step-grandchildren.

Glueck retired from the Times in 1991, the same year her book “Brooklyn: People and Places, Past and Present,” written with Paul Gardner, a former Times arts editor, was published. She also wrote “The Painted City” (1992), a book about New York as depicted by artists.

She then wrote briefly for the weekly The New York Observer before returning to contribute to the Times through the early 2010s.

Reflecting on her career at the Times in the MoMA oral history, Glueck acknowledged ruefully that before she became involved in the lawsuit, she had become inordinately wedded to the paper, and that tying her identity to it so closely had exacted a price.

“I liked working that hard,” she said. “It became my whole life, the paper, as it did for a lot of people. I couldn’t imagine an existence apart from it, which is unfortunate. So I didn’t complain. Or, if I complained, nobody took it seriously, including me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.