From fry to cy

ROBERT ROSENBLUM ON THE BURLINGTON AT 100

HALF A CENTURY AGO, AMBITIOUS YOUNG ART HISTORIANS ON THIS SIDE OF THE ATLANTIC WOULD EAGERLY AWAIT EACH MONTH THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, AND MANY, LIKE ME, WOULD HOPE SOMEDAY TO BE PUBLISHED IN ITS elite and elegant pages, which, in the best British empirical tradition, stuck to the facts and the visuals and avoided intellectual pretension. Compared with such scholarly American journals as the Art Bulletin, on whose grimly serious, heavily footnoted articles most budding academics cut their teeth, it looked far from gray and stodgy, its front matter loaded with glossy reproductions of expensive wares-Rococo mirrors, Chinese …