HName:  Ashton, Dore

DateBorn:  1928

Placeborn:  Newark, NJ

Datedied:  

Placedied:  

HDescrip:  New York Times critic, professor at Cooper Hewitt and scholar of the New York School of art. Aston was the daughter of Ralph Neil Ashton and Sylvia Smith Shapiro (Ashton).  Her father was a medical doctor.  She obtained a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1949, continuing for an M.A. at  Harvard University the following year.  Ashton began her career as associate editor of  the magazine Art Digest, published in New York, in 1951. She married Adja Yunkers (d.1983), an artist, in 1953.  She became associate art critic for the New York Times in 1955 and reviewed shows of the so-called first and second "New York School" of artists.  Her sympathies toward Abstract Expressionism rankled the senior art critic of the Times, John Canaday (q.v.), and when criticism of his anti-modernist stance mounted, she was fired in 1960. Ashton then lectured at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, between1962-1963 before an appointment at the School of Visual Arts, New York City, as a lecturer in philosophy of art. She was awared the  Frank J. Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association in 1963, followed by a Guggenheim fellowship in 1964.  She headed the department of humanities at the School of Visual Arts from 1965 to 1968.  In 1969 she was appointed professor of art history at Cooper Union, New York City.  In 1973 she published her history of the artists of Abstract Expressionism, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (the book had appeared the year before in England as The Life and Times of the New York School.  During these same years she lectured as an Instructor at the City University of New York in 1973 and at Columbia University in 1975.  She joined the New School for Social Research in 1986.  Ashton received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1980.  In 1985 she remarried to Matti Megged.

Ashton formed a part of the New York art critics who embraced and championed the New York School, whose members also included Harold Rosenberg (q.v.), Thomas B. Hess (q.v.) and Barbara Rose (q.v.).

HCountry:  United States

HBiography:  Sandler, Irving. A Sweeper-up After Artists: a Memoir.  London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, pp. 242.

HBibliography:  The Life and Times of the New York School.  ; [published the following year as:] The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. New York: Viking Press, 1973;