Eleanor Munro

Eleanor Carroll Munro (March 28, 1928 – April 1, 2022) was an American art critic, art historian, writer, and editor. She was known for her work on women artists. Some of her published books included The Encyclopedia of Art, Originals: American Women Artists (1979); Memoirs of a Modernist's Daughter (1988), Through the Vermilion Gates (1971), and On Glory Roads: a Pilgrim's Book about Pilgrimage (1988). Munro was also known for her published interviews with women artists of note including Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Jennifer Bartlett, Julie Taymor, Louise Nevelson, Maya Lin, and Kiki Smith. Munro received the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature in 1988.

Early life Munro was born on March 28, 1928, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Lucile Nadler, was a pianist, and her father, Thomas Munro, an art educator. Her family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, when her father found a job with the Cleveland Museum of Art as a curator. Munro studied at the Hathaway Brown School and later graduated from Smith College in 1959. She studied in Paris at the Sorbonne University before returning to the United States to complete her master's degree at Columbia University. In 1979, her book Originals: American Women Artists was published. The book has profiles and interviews with noted women artists of the time including Georgia O'Keeffe, Alice Neel, Anne Truitt, Joan Mitchell, and others. In the book, she documented some of the struggles faced by the women artists and the evolving art landscape. In 1990s, she was visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Federation, Princeton, New Jersey. In 1991, Munro was awarded a residency fellowship at the Bellagio Study Center in Lake Como, Italy. In 1984, she received a residency fellowship to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Munro served on the board of directors of the Truro Center for Arts, (Massachusetts) starting in 1979; the board of The Living Theatre, New York City, starting in 1989; and was a member of the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists Association, the American International Association Art Critics, and the Authors Guild.

Personal life Munro married Alfred M. Frankfurter, editor of the ARTnews magazine, in 1960; they remained married until his death in 1965.

Books