Forthcoming: feature essay on 'The Family of Man' [advance notice]
Citation
[Editorial staff.] “Forthcoming Issues” [advance notice of Family of Man feature essay]. The Art Digest 29, no. 10 (February 15, 1955). Arts Communications Group, L.P. ISSN 0004-4059.
Tier justification
Tier 3: a named publication (the Art Digest / Arts magazine, then under its earlier title) with editorial standards, covering fine art criticism. The item is an editorial advance notice, not a full review article, but it constitutes a contemporaneous primary document recording that a major US art magazine planned and announced coverage of The Family of Man in February 1955. The text was directly fetched and read from the open-access OCR file this session.
Relevance
The editorial advance notice in the February 15, 1955 issue of The Art Digest establishes that the exhibition was considered significant enough to be flagged as a major forthcoming feature by one of the leading US art-criticism magazines within weeks of its opening (January 24, 1955). Hilton Kramer was listed as Associate Editor of the magazine at this time (confirmed from the same issue’s masthead, fetched 2026-04-30). The planned feature was not found in any subsequent 1955 Art Digest issue examined in this session (issues checked: Vol. 29 Nos. 7–20, Vol. 30 Nos. 1–3); either the feature was delayed beyond December 1955, cancelled, or assigned to a different publication. This advance notice is therefore a document of editorial intention rather than published criticism, and should be cross-referenced with any later Art Digest / Arts Magazine issues from 1956–1958 to determine whether the feature was eventually published.
Key excerpts / pages
- Verbatim text from the forthcoming section (fetched 2026-04-30 via
https://archive.org/stream/sim_arts-magazine_1955-02-15_29_10/sim_arts-magazine_1955-02-15_29_10_djvu.txt): ‘Feature essay on “The Family of Man” photographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.’ - Other forthcoming features announced in the same notice (fetched 2026-04-30): a book review of Australian aboriginal art by Allyn Wood; a posthumous critical examination of André Malraux’s ‘The Voices of Silence’ by Joseph Frank; an essay on Yves Tanguy and the Surrealist Movement; a critical review of Paul Klee’s work; and Patrick Heron’s article on younger British artists (noted as postponed due to the author’s illness).
- Hilton Kramer listed as Associate Editor on the masthead (fetched 2026-04-30 from the same issue).
Notes
- Archive.org item confirmed 2026-04-30: identifier
sim_arts-magazine_1955-02-15_29_10, Vol. 29, Issue 10, February 15, 1955, 37 pages, publisher Arts Communications Group L.P., ISSN 0004-4059. Item is freely accessible (no access restriction). OCR text confirmed accessible viaarchive.org/stream/path. - Flagged
verified: true— the specific text was directly fetched and read from the open-access OCR file this session. - The feature essay promised in the forthcoming notice was NOT found in any subsequent 1955 Art Digest issue examined this session. Issues searched for FoM content (all returned no matches): Vol. 29 Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20; Vol. 30 Nos. 1, 2, 3. All OCR text files were directly accessed via
archive.org/stream/URLs this session. - The Art Digest changed its name to Arts in 1958 and then to Arts Magazine in 1961. Hilton Kramer became managing editor by 1955 (confirmed from later issues’ mastheads fetched this session) and later became editor. Wikipedia’s article on The Family of Man attributes a Hilton Kramer review to ‘Arts magazine’ — this is likely a later review (post-1958 under the renamed magazine) rather than a 1955 Art Digest piece, since no such article was found in any 1955 issue examined this session.
- To verify: search Art Digest / Arts issues from 1956, 1957, and 1958 for the promised feature essay. Also check Arts Magazine volumes for any Hilton Kramer article on The Family of Man.