critics in the city. Like many other art writers, he had hoped at one time to be an artist himself and, long before he began to write about art, he had made sketching trips to Europe, developed a fine eye for color and composition, and steeped himself in art history. He was always in the deepest sympathy with the aspirations and pressures artists had to face. He was a success from the start of his new career; Vanity Fair listed him in its 1915 honor roll of "eight established critics" only two years after the appearance of his first weekly column. He aligned himself with the avant garde against the status quo and made fun of indignant, conservative art lovers who found Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Precisionism, and the other new movements beyond their understanding. McBride had an uncanny ability to discover major talent early. Reviewing the first exhibition of Charles Demuth, he marked the watercolorist as someone to watch, though he was knowledgeable enough about contemporary art to hope that Demuth would not fall too much under the influence of the equally talented John Marin. Originality was everything to McBride. He felt he saw a great deal of originality at 291, the advanced gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz which often exhibited work that left other critics puzzled or indignant. He applauded, long before most of his colleagues in the art press, the work of Seurat, Matisse, Kandinsky, Gaston Lachaise, Max Weber, Rufino Tamayo, Joan Miró, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield, Georgia O'Keeffe, Elie Nadelman, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. He helped to promote the Thomas Eakins revival at the time of the Metropolitan Museum's 1916 retrospective and shared his love of folk art with his readers. He met Gertrude Stein on a trip to Paris in 1913 and became an admirer of both her collection and her adventurous writing, and he saw Marcel Duchamp not as the threatening figure many did in World War I-era New York but as a liberating, comic spirit. His coverage of the opening of the Stein-Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford in 1934 was lengthy and appreciative, and he participated in the series of lectures sponsored by Katherine Dreier and the Societe Anonyme, aimed at promoting an understanding of modernism to the general public. McBride's response to modern art was not one of unquestioning support. The first show of the paintings of Oscar Bluemner