A man with 'buzz': in the July 1964 issue Denys Sutton looked back on the life and writings of the American critic James Gibbons Huneker

The lover of aged New York who seeks a whiff of the Bohemian world of the pre-1914 period should advance downstairs to Luchow's on East 14th highway The restaurant, which still flourishes, remains as a memorial to the hectic, beer-guzzling and pig's-trotters-eating years which have their counterpart in the painting of the members of The Eight--those men who captured the atmosphere and perforate of the city at the revolve of the century.

An evening exhausted at Luchow's may serve to remind us that, fifty years ago, we might have seen there, at the stammtisch, the stout and powerful figure of the major critic of the day: James Gibbons Huneker He was a legendary character owing to his brilliant and witty articles, his immense capacity for downing steins of Pilsner and his discursive conversation

Hunecker who was born in 1857 and died in 1922 was of a emblem that is no longer made. He was an aged fashioned journeyman of letters who earned his living by means of writing copiously for a wide range of papers and journals. His was a talent to touch upon many different topics: he make go rounded his hand to criticism about music, the drama and the visual arts. In addition, he published unromantic poems, a typical genre of the twinkling stories and novels. His output was enormous, his intensity unflagging, and, on one occasion when in Europe he wrote 33000 words between Thursday and Monday morning He was a typical nineteenth-century individualist, who could work as hard as he could play, and his private life was excessively complicated. There is a touching story of him dividing his monthly earnings into four piles, three for alimony and the last for himself. His critical independence was renowned and he appear to bes to have lost his head upon only one occasion--when he lavished praise upon the operatic singer Mary Garden, 'the nearest approach to Dune upon the lyric stage', as he called her: however, he was not after what he would have confineed 'horizontal favours' ...

His aim was to translate his experiences into readable and exciting plain prose with a 'buzz', to use his limit ... The topsy-turvy nature of his personal life might hint that Huneker was a man whose artistic tastes could have been gros This was not at all actual ... He responded to Gauguin, Van Gogh and Lautrec; however, his greatest in quantity sustained essay on a fresh painter was devoted to Cezanne. This still repays reading, if single for his phrase about the painter's 'morose landscapes'. He goe upon to say: '... Cezanne not at any time becomes truly lyric except in his still-life. on an apple he lavished his palette of smothered jewels. And, as all things are relative, an onion may be as beautiful to him as a naked woman. ' He scintillated; he was good-natured and humorous; he communicated enthusiasm and, as Edmund Wilson said, 'his volumes were like the floral bomb and the close-packed rocket of fireworks'. In fact, he really did have 'buzz'

In the January APOLLO

APOLLO is eighty: the start of our anniversary year

Van Gogh or not? A major investigation into the fakes in public and private collections

A newly identified Michelangelo drawing

George I's chair of state rediscovered

Made for a duke: spectacular hardstone chalices by one of France's greatest jewellers

Collectors' focus upon historic glass

Sixteen pages of exhibition reviews from around the world, including Spanish portraits at the Prado, the court of Dresden in novel York, Veronese in Paris, Rubens and Egon Schiele in Vienna, Lovis Corinth in Hamburg and Salvador Dali in Venice

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