Renowned critic and commentator Christopher Knight is retiring after writing about art for some 45 years, including 36 years at the Los Angeles Times. Knight is among the few remaining full-time critics at magazines and newspapers. Friday is his final day.
“It’s impossible to overstate the loss Knight’s departure represents for the paper and Los Angeles, or what a tireless, generous, inspiring colleague he is,” said staff writer Jessica Gelt in a column announcing Knight’s retirement. “He possesses a quiet, encyclopedic knowledge of art, and in column after column he connected the dots of culture, history, folklore, civics and psychology in razor-sharp assessments of what a piece of art really means, or how a particular exhibition is poised to change the narrative around a longstanding or misguided idea. In short, he is everything a truly excellent critic should be.”
Knight won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2020, becoming one of the only art critics ever to win the prize, which included a $15,000 award; he was a three-time finalist (in 1991, 2001, and 2007). The Pulitzer organization listed ten articles as his winning work, including seven focused on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); five of them harshly criticized the institution’s new Peter Zumthor-designed building. One was titled “An open letter to LACMA architect Peter Zumthor: Stop dissing L.A.’s art,” another “Dear L.A. County: Reject the LACMA redesign plan and go back to the drawing board.”
In its citation, the Pulitzer committee recognized Knight “for work demonstrating extraordinary community service by a critic, applying his expertise and enterprise to critique a proposed overhaul of the L.A. County Museum of Art and its effect on the institution’s mission.”
That same year, he won a lifetime achievement award from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, which carried a $50,000 purse. Rabkin Foundation executive director Susan C. Larsen called Knight “forthright, honest, informed, and embedded,” saying, “I don’t know what the art world would do without him.”
The College Art Association awarded him the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1997. It was the first time a journalist won the prize in more than twenty-five years.
Knight also published an anthology of his art criticism, titled Last Chance for Eden: Selected Art Criticism, 1979-1994, and Art of the Sixties and Seventies: the Panza Collection, on the art trove amassed by Italian industrialist Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo.
A frequent presence in the national broadcast media, Knight has appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” PBS’s “NewsHour,” NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” and CNN. He was featured in the 2009 documentary about the controversial relocation of the Barnes Foundation’s art collection, “The Art of the Steal,” and in “Art For Everybody,” a 2025 documentary on the artist Thomas Kinkade.
Previous to his time as a critic, Knight worked as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in the late 1970s, and consulted with the Lannan Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
