Milton Esterow, an award-winning journalist who owned and edited ARTnews for 42 years, died on Friday at 97. His death was confirmed by his daughter Judith Esterow, who previously served as this magazine’s associate publisher. She did not state a cause.In a social media post, Robin Cembalest, who served as executive editor of ARTnews under Esterow, wrote, “Milton trained generations of editors and writers, published scoop after scoop that won prize after prize, and was justly proud of the impact of the magazine’s relentless investigative journalism—particularly when it came to the restitution of Holocaust war loot.”She added that “his passing marks the end of an era, for art magazines and for art journalism.”Esterow purchased ARTnews in 1972 from Newsweek, which at the time was a division of the Washington Post Company, and owned it until 2014, when ARTnews was sold in 2014 to Sergey Skaterschikov. (The publication was then acquired two years later by Peter Brant, who also owned Art in America; both publications have been owned by Penske Media Corporation since 2018.) During the time he owned ARTnews, Esterow transformed the magazine into a news-focused entity, infusing the publication with an energy it had lost in the years after its critics had helped define movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop during the postwar era.ARTnews went on to gain national recognition for some of its investigative reports, some of which were authored by Esterow himself. Under his leadership, the magazine also introduced the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list in 1990, which this fall will publish its 36th edition. The closely watched list is today a cornerstone of ARTnews’s coverage.One could easily enumerate Esterow’s many achievements. In a 2023 New York Times profile, at age 94, he claimed to have written more than 6,000 articles in his lifetime—and he continued writing even more articles via his 1950 Royal typewriter after the piece was published. Under his leadership, ARTnews won one National Magazine Awards (for general excellence in 1981) and two George Polk Awards (both for cultural reporting in 1980 and 1991).But Esterow went about his job with a modesty that did not go unnoticed by outside observers: the critic Ben Davis once wrote that he was “hardly a flashy guy.” Within his newsroom, he was known as both a nurturing presence, with a habit of providing incoming hires with inspiration in the form of a printed packet of articles published by ARTnews. (One recipient of such a packet was this writer when he was onboarded as an intern.) A staple of that packet was a 1957 essay on the avant-garde by the art historian Meyer Schapiro published by ARTnews. Esterow once said was “probably the only genius I’ve known.” After taking over, Esterow tried to convince Schapiro to agree to a profile, but always received the answer that he was too busy. “Esterow repeated the request every year or two, and the response was always the same,” according to a 2007 article on ARTnews’s top 10 articles. Schapiro finally agreed after nearly a decade, and Esterow published the article by journalist Helen Epstein in 1983.Milton Esterow was born in 1928 in New York and was raised in Brooklyn. He showed an early predilection for journalism and even made his own newspaper when he was a kid, writing the articles by hand. He attended Brooklyn College and, while he was a student there, got a job as a copy boy with the New York Times. His first task: going to Times Square to purchase horse betting sheets for the managing editor. Esterow went on to marry Jackie Esterow, with whom he had two daughters, Judith and Deborah. Milton and Jackie were together for 74 years; she died earlier this year.In 1948, Esterow was named a reporter by the Times, leading him to drop out of college. “The Times newsroom,” Esterow would go on to recall, “was my journalism school.” He initially focused on crime, then turned his attention to the arts. Esterow’s approach, an unusual one for its era, involved treating art stories as occasions for investigative journalism. While others at the Times looked on at his work with befuddlement, Esterow plugged away and proved himself quite adept. In 1964, he published a story on plundered art in Europe during the years after World War II. The report made the front page of the Times—a rarity for an art story both during its time and now.He was promoted to assistant to the director of cultural news at the Times in 1968, though he went on to head up the publishing division of the Kennedy art galleries soon afterward. Then, in 1972, he led an eight-person investor group in acquiring ARTnews. The magazine was at the time devoted mainly to criticism. It was central to the New York art world of the 1950s, but its readership had dwindled; Esterow, knowing it needed a new focus, let go of nearly everyone at the magazine and proceeded to bring on a team of fresh hires. “The art world is fascinating and mysterious,” Esterow told the Times on the occasion of the acquisition. “It is also underreported. There is a genuine thirst for art information that publications haven’t been satisfying.” (Not everyone was happy. Thomas B. Hess, then still the editor of ARTnews, said, “The loss of Art News is a loss to my alter ego.”)His leadership of ARTnews, with his daughter Judith, put the magazine on a new course, and his impact was most evident in the investigatory pieces it began to publish. One from 1984 began with a tip to Esterow: an Austrian monastery held many Nazi-looted masterworks, and no one could visit it. Andrew Decker was assigned to the piece, and the resultant article became one of many devoted to restitution.Esterow’s fascination with the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the art world was one reason he began the Top 200 Collectors list in 1990. The public knew that rich people were buying art, but there was little understanding of why, he recalled. Collectors “are of course big spenders, but at the same time there are so many different kinds of collections as there are collections,” Esterow told NPR in 2009. “Some collectors are happy, some are tormented. Some buy very little, while others can’t help themselves. Why do people collect?” He wanted to answer that question for himself and others.After ARTnews’s 2014 sale, Esterow kept writing for outlets such as the Art Newspaper and the New York Times, with the latter paper continuing to publish his articles as recently as this past spring. That he continued writing well after he relinquished control of ARTnews—well after he vowed to “take it a little easy,” as he put it—showed his devotion to his craft.He once said he had no regrets about spending a career investigating the art world, save for one: “It hasn’t helped my tennis game, but that’s another story.”