Michael Kimmelman

Michael Kimmelman
Michael Kimmelman in Berlin
Born	New York City
Occupation	Critic, columnist
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University, Harvard University

Michael Kimmelman is an author, critic, columnist and pianist. He is the architecture critic for The New York Times and has written on issues of public housing, public space, infrastructure, community development and social responsibility. He was the paper's longtime chief art critic and, in 2007, created the Abroad column, as a foreign correspondent covering culture, political and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere. He returned to New York from Europe in autumn, 2011, as the paper's senior critic and architecture critic and his articles since then have helped to reshape the public debate about urbanism, architecture and architectural criticism.

A fellow at the Lomdon School of Economics, he was born and raised in Greenwich Village, the son of a physician and civil rights activist. He attended Friends Seminary in Manhattan, graduated summa cum laude from Yale College and received his graduate degree in art history from Harvard University. A pianist, who still regularly performs as a soloist and with chamber groups on concert series in New York and around Europe, he started as a music critic at the paper, then moved into art. A former editor at ID Magazine and architecture critic for New England Monthly, he has written at length about, among others, the artists Richard Serra, Michael Heizer, Lucian Freud, Raymond Pettibon and Matthew Barney along with the architects Shigeru Ban, Peter Zumthor and Oscar Niemeyer. Author of The Accidental Masterpiece, he has hosted various television features, appearing in the 2007 documentary film My Kid Could Paint That.

From fall 2007 into summer 2011 he was based in Berlin covering, among other subjects, the crackdown on cultural freedom in Vladimir Putin's Russia, life in Gaza under Hamas, the rise of the far-right in Hungary, Négritude in France, bullfighting in contemporary Spain, Czech humor in the context of political protest, and Holocaust education for a new generation of Germans.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, a 2012 Poynter Fellow at Yale, he also contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books.

Books

• The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (Penguin Press, 2005)
• Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere (Random House, 1998)
• Oscar Niemeyer (Assouline, 2009)
• More Things Like This (McSweeney's/Chronicle Books, 2009)
• Playing Piano for Pleasure by Charles Cooke, foreword by Michael Kimmelman (Skyhorse, 2011)

External links

• Articles in the New York Review of Books
• Interview with Kimmelman, Part I, *Part II, in the Kenyon Review
• Michael Kimmelman plays Debussy
• Michael Kimmelman plays Chopin

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