Sam Hunter (January 5, 1923 – July 27, 2014) was an American historian of modern art.[1] He was emeritus professor of Art History at Princeton University and an Art Historian, Author, Museum Director, Professor and Curator.
He was an author, an Emeritus professor of art history at Princeton University, director of the Jewish Museum, founding director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Director of The Poses Institute of Fine Arts, acting director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and a visiting professor at the Clark Art Institute at Williams College, Harvard University and various other institutions of higher learning. While associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he organized the first major museum exhibitions of the work of Jackson Pollock and David Smith.
Hunter's early photographs of Francis Bacon and his studio, taken in London in 1950, were most recently seen in the 2008/9 Francis Bacon exhibition that originated at the Tate Modern in London, went to the Museo del Prado in Barcelona and ended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and that were used in the accompanying exhibition catalogue.
Hunter was a pioneer of 20th Century Art History who helped to create and build the field of art history as we know it today, along with his contemporary colleagues, art historians Thomas Hess, Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Dore Ashton and Irving Sandler, among others. In addition, Professor Hunter forged long term friendships and associations with many well known artists, museum directors, art critics, curators, dealers, collectors and other academics and authors of the twentieth century, from the mid-1940s, some of which endured into the early 21st century.
