Barbara Goldsmith - Early Biography

Early Biography

Barbara Goldsmith—-whose books, noted professor Joan Hendrick of Trinity College, are “thoroughly researched and beautifully written...a brilliant synthesis and masterful biographical writing” —-was born in New York City. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, after which she took art courses at Columbia University. Her first assignments as a journalist were in the art field, where she simultaneously amassed an art collection comprising mostly contemporary American painting and sculpture. In her early twenties, she wrote a series of prize-winning profiles of such Hollywood luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn. In the late 1960s she initiated the “The Creative Environment” series, interviewing in-depth Marcel Breuer, I.M. Pei, George Balanchine and Pablo Picasso, among others, about their creative process.

Goldsmith’s “The Creative Environment” caught the eye of Clay Felker, editor of the Sunday magazine supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. After the Tribune failed in 1967, Goldsmith provided Felker with the money to purchase the name “New York” and in 1968 became a founding editor and writer of New York Magazine, where she wrote not only about art, but also about the colorful characters in the art world. In the third issue of New York, she wrote a landmark article on Viva, a “superstar” in Andy Warhol films, with accompanying photographs by Diane Arbus. At the time, the article was praised and reviled. Tom Wolfe called it “Too good not to print” and honored her with inclusion in his anthology The New Journalism. When Wolfe called her one of the originators of this movement, Goldsmith said, “I think good journalism is all that counts, not a so-called group.” Other notable New York articles included her profiles of the Centennial of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator Henry Geldzhaler’s emerging artists exhibit, Thomas Hoving, Jamie Wyeth and Andy Warhol.

Goldsmith wrote “Bacall and the Boys” in 1968, a television special about Lauren Bacall in Paris with the then young, unproven avant-garde designers Yves St. Laurent and Giorgio Armani as well as Pierre Cardin and Marc Bohan of Dior. This earned her an Emmy award.

In 1974 Barbara Goldsmith became an adviser to the Hearst Corporation and then Senior Editor of Harper’s Bazaar, attracting top writers to the publication.