Suzanne Muchnic

Suzanne Muchnic 1984 – by Sylvia Shap "Art World Women" series - Mixed Media on Ragboard 25¾" x 40" Private Collection

Suzanne Muchnic (born 1940) is an arts writer and for 31 years was an arts reporter and art critic working for the Los Angeles Times.

Education

She is a graduate of Scripps College and received a Distinguished Alumna Award in 1987.

Academic career

Prior to her decades long career as an art critic and art writer for the Los Angeles Times (from 1978 to 2009), Muchnic was the Southern California editor of Artweek. Muchnic was a lecturer on Art History and Criticism at Los Angeles City College, University of Southern California, and the Claremont Graduate School. Her articles have been published in Art News, Harper’s Bazaar, Gannet Center Journal, Arts, and Picture and Photoshow. She is also the author of Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture',” a critically acclaimed biography of the major California industrialist and art collector, published by the University of California Press in 1998."

Art critic

As a reporter, Muchnic took Los Angeles Times readers to all corners of the world to give art its proper context. From Moscow in 1988, she reported on the Soviet Union’s first auction of long-repressed Russian avant-garde and contemporary Soviet art, conducted by Sotheby's, introducing many works of art to an international audience. She also traveled to the world’s oldest continuously operating Christian monastery, Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, to write about the ancient home of icons and other artworks lent to an exhibition at the Getty Museum. She also accompanied a Getty Conservation Institute project to China to report on the restoration of the world’s richest trove of ancient Buddhist wall paintings and sculptures in a complex of art-filled caves along a riverbed in the Gobi Desert."

On the importance of her Scripps College education to her career, Muchnic said:

"It's impossible to imagine working as an art critic, reporter, and feature writer for a major urban newspaper without the kind of background Scripps provided. Just as no academic course stood alone in my Scripps years, no art world event can be isolated from the larger cultural sphere. My editors at the Los Angeles Times are under the delusion that I am a 'special' writer–one who concentrates on a specific subject and, presumably, has a narrow viewpoint. Thanks to Scripps, I know that I am a generalist. My endlessly intriguing challenge is to create a context and bring a broad perspective to the complex processes of creating, interpreting, exhibiting, conserving, collecting, and marketing art."

Recognition

Her art journalism earned her a Distinguished Alumna Award from Scripps College and Claremont Graduate University and first prize for arts and entertainment reporting from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Her book, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, a critically acclaimed biography of a major California industrialist and art collector, published by the University of California Press in 1998 [1] won the 2002 Donald Pflueger Local History Award of the Historical Society of Southern California. Her award winning biography told the story of how the wealthy entrepreneur Norton Simon (1907–1993), enriched the West Coast art world with his collection of art.

Selected Published Articles and Reviews

"Under the Microscope: In museums, schools, and research facilities, scientists and artists are swapping methods to illuminate natural phenomena and solve global problems" ArtNews, March 2013 "Beyond Tattoos: The Art of Body Adornment in Africa" Los Angeles Review of Books February 3, 2013