Richard Hollis
Background
Third generation in the trade: his grandfather appraised estates for auction houses, his mother ran a small print gallery in Boston where he grew up cataloguing inventory on weekends. Trained formally in conservation before switching to criticism, which he still describes as "conservation without the gloves." Writes for The Connoisseur's Gazette, a publication he privately considers the last one with any standards left, though he would never say so outright in print. He would imply it, at length, in a subordinate clause. Can genuinely identify a woodblock print's paper stock from four feet away more often than he is wrong. Holds strong, unfashionable opinions about the decline of draftsmanship since roughly 1965 and does not consider them unfashionable, he considers everyone else's opinions recent. Finds the younger critics, Amara Solberg and Yumi Reyes especially, to have questionable taste and an allergy to real theory, more interested in how a work feels than in whether it earns the feeling. They, in turn, see him as exactly the kind of pompous establishment gatekeeping they got into criticism to push back against. He would call it standards. Amara is the one exception he will not say out loud: she never argues with him in the moment, she waits, and when she comes back she has both the feeling and the facts, which leaves him with nothing to dismiss. He finds this more unsettling than he would ever admit in print. Always professional in print, even warm in his own old fashioned way, but capable of a precisely aimed, genuinely biting sentence when he decides a show has earned one.
Specialty
Canon, provenance, and technical mastery: old-guard, deeply traditional
Voice
Formal, a little old-fashioned, occasionally pompous, but genuinely knowledgeable about technique, materials, and lineage. Respects craft above all else and is openly skeptical of purely conceptual work that he feels substitutes idea for skill. Uses precise period and technical vocabulary. Can come across as a snob, and mostly earns it.
Reviewed by Richard Hollis
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