President Bush today will honor Hilton Kramer, one of the most influential art critics in America and the founding editor of the New Criterion, with a 2004 National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House.

Mr. Kramer, 76, has been a towering and controversial figure in the art world for more than five decades. He is known for his uncompromising and erudite essays championing modern art and our sustained aesthetic values as well as for his critiques of the politicization of art since the social upheavals of the 1960s.

The chairman of the Williams College art department, Michael J. Lewis, described Mr. Kramer as “America’s most distinguished and certainly its most literate critic of art,” and Newsweek’s retired art critic, Peter Plagens, said he is the critic the art world reads “like crazy, even if it’s by flashlight, under the blankets.”

A child of Russian immigrants, Mr. Kramer made a name for himself in the New York intellectual world in 1953, five years after graduating from Syracuse University, when the Partisan Review journal published his essay “The New American Painting,” in which he exalted the rise of Abstract Expressionism and refuted Harold Rosenberg’s idea of “Action Painting.”

He was soon asked to write for other journals and worked as an editor at Arts magazine. In 1965, the New York Times hired him as a staff art critic, and he was promoted him to chief art critic eight years later. He established a more refined standard for art criticism at the Times and was in turn attacked by some who viewed him as elitist and overly critical. He called Roy Lichtenstein the “most vacuous of our Pop painters.”

In 1982, Mr. Kramer left the Times to start a monthly arts journal, the New Criterion, with the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. The founding grant for the magazine came from the John M. Olin Foundation.

The executive director of the Olin Foundation, James Pierson, said of Mr. Kramer, “He has taken a firm stance upholding the highest standards of art. He’s been a strong critic of contemporary movements, which claim there are no standards for judging art and which confuse art with politics.”

In his political writings, Mr. Kramer, who gravitated toward neo-conservatism in the 1960s, staunchly defended liberal democracy and denounced left-wing intellectuals for their sympathies toward Communism and the Soviet Union.

In one of his most famous essays, “The Blacklist & the Cold War,” Mr. Kramer, writing in the Times in 1976,attacked Hollywood’s revisionist history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. “The point, it seems, is to acquit ’60s radicalism of all of its malevolent consequence, and to do so by portraying ’30s radicalism as similarly innocent, a phenomenon wholly benign,” he wrote.

Mr. Kramer has also called for the abolishment of the National Council for the Arts, which he viewed as contributing to the politicization of art and the reduction of standards.

Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion, said Mr. Kramer promoted the idea of a “distinction between good and bad art.”

Mr. Kramer, a resident of Manhattan and Damariscotta, Maine, is also a member of the board of trustees of the New York Studio School and has served as an art critic for the New York Observer since 1987.

The National Humanities Medal was created in 1997 and is annually presented to up 12 winners recognized by the president for their achievement in the humanities. The president selects winners from a list submitted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Recent winners of the medal include Joseph Epstein, Donald Kagan, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, and Midge Decter.