A Place at the Table

.... When “The Dinner Party” opened in March 1979 at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the critical response was mixed. (Hilton Kramer, then the chief art critic of The New York Times, called it “kitsch” and “very bad art ... mired in the pieties of a political cause.”) But it attracted huge crowds all over North America and Western Europe. In Houston, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago and Atlanta, where museums had turned it down, women raised money to show “The Dinner Party” in other settings. When I first saw it at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980, I was overwhelmed by its ambition. Any reservations about Chicago’s imagery or her choice of dinner-party guests were swept away. It was exhilarating to see so many women — the women who had created “The Dinner Party” and the women honored by it, and all the women who came to see it. With the opening of the Sackler Center, it will now be possible to visit and revisit this powerful expression of feminist art and the women’s movement of the ’70s. Those who cannot make the trip to Brooklyn will find the next best thing in Chicago’s book “The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation” (Merrell, $49.95), with an essay by Chicago and hundreds of color photographs by her husband, Donald Woodman....

   -excerpt from Sunday Book News and Reviews, The New York Times