Suzanne Muchnic

Suzanne Muchnic (born 1940) is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums.

Academic career Muchnic is a graduate of Scripps College and received a Distinguished Alumna Award in 1987. She graduated from Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University) in 1963 and was subsequently inducted into its Alumni Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2010, Muchnic was a Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Workshop leader and mentor. She has lectured on art history and art criticism at University of Southern California, Los Angeles City College and Claremont Graduate University. a biography of the California industrialist and art collector, published by the University of California Press in 1998. was published by the Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation and Louis Stern Fine Arts in 2014. The Huntington Library Press published her most recent book in 2015: LACMA So Far: Portrait of a Museum in the Making, which tells the story of how the Los Angeles County Museum of Art became a major West Coast cultural center.

Art critic As a reporter, Muchnic took Los Angeles Times readers to all corners of the world to give art its proper context. From Moscow in 1988, she reported on the Soviet Union’s first auction of long-repressed Russian avant-garde and contemporary Soviet art, conducted by Sotheby's, introducing many works of art to an international audience. She also traveled to the world’s oldest continuously operating Christian monastery, Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, to write about the ancient home of icons and other artworks lent to an exhibition at the Getty Museum. She also accompanied a Getty Conservation Institute project to China to report on the restoration of the world’s richest trove of ancient Buddhist wall paintings and sculptures in a complex of art-filled caves along a riverbed in the Gobi Desert.

About her experience reviewing art for the Los Angeles Times, she said "I was primarily interested in contemporary art when I started writing, but over the years I developed a much deeper knowledge and love of art history. One of the best things about my job was that it was an ongoing education."

Recognition Her art journalism earned her a Distinguished Alumna Award from Scripps College and Claremont Graduate University. She was awarded a first prize for arts and entertainment reporting from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Her book, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, won the 2002 Donald Pflueger Local History Award of the Historical Society of Southern California. This award-winning biography tells the story of how the wealthy entrepreneur Norton Simon (1907–1993), enriched the West Coast art world with his collection of art.