A longtime editor of Art + Auction, Bruce Wolmer, a staunch defender of Israel, died last Friday at 59 from complications related to diabetes.

In his editor’s photo in the magazine, taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Wolmer appeared fierce and rather imperious. Friends and colleagues said he was deeply intellectual — he was ABD in the history of ideas from the John Hopkins University — but also had an appetite for gossip and enjoyed the flash of the art world. Wolmer shepherded the magazine through many changes of ownership; in 2003, it was purchased by Louise MacBain. Since then, it has undergone a redesign — to a large, W Magazine-style format — and has become profitable.

“There were four different publishers at the magazine during the time he worked there, and at various times the magazine was in critical condition,” an editor-at-large at Art + Auction who was a friend of Wolmer’s, Judd Tully, said. “Bruce really kept the thing alive.”

A staff writer at Art + Auction, Sarah Douglas, said part of what made Wolmer great as an editor was that “he had a kind of conspiratorial attitude” that made writers “want to find out the truth about any given situation. He was a walking library on the art world and a kind of aesthete in the Paterian mold.”

“It was a joy to work with him,” Ms. MacBain said in an interview. “We’re all going to miss him.”

In 2003, Wolmer tangled with a competitor, the editor of the Art Newspaper, Anna Somers Cocks, over that publication’s account of the destruction of Muslim religious sites by the Israeli Defense Forces during their anti-terrorist actions in Nablus in April 2002. The Art Newspaper argued that this destruction violated the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. After the article provoked charges of anti-Semitism, Ms. Somers Cocks published an editorial in the New Statesman under the headline “Fascisme doux,” accusing her critics of political correctness. The Art Newspaper did a second article on the subject in November 2002, repeating the charges about the damage to the al-Khadra mosque, among other sites.

In an Editor’s Notebook in 2003 titled “Stones of Menace,” Wolmer offered a considered but strongly worded response. He condemned the Art Newspaper’s reporting, saying of the author of the second article that he “toured Nablus like a conclusion with shoes, going in search of evidence, any evidence, that would exculpate the Art Newspaper’s initial recklessness and Ms. Somers Cocks’s posturing.” If the reporter were objective, Wolmer continued, he “would have given greater credence to Israeli claims that the city’s Ottomon souk, the undoubted damage to which is at the heart of his complaint, is also at the heart of Hamas and Fatah terror.”

Wolmer was a friend and editor of Steven Vincent, an art-journalist-turned-political-journalist who was kidnapped and killed in Basra in 2005. In a tribute to Vincent on ArtInfo.com, Wolmer said Vincent felt compelled to go to the Middle East after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to report on Islamic radicalism, or “Islamic fascism, [as] he would have put it.” Wolmer continued: “He was a patriot, of the best sort: someone who believed that the freedom, experimentation, and imaginative reach that he treasured in life and in works of art depended on the vigorous defense of a liberal, democratic political order, not only at home but abroad.”

Wolmer is survived by his wife, Colleen Babington.