7/15/2023 0 Comments Living art store8 West Eighth Street, the Whitney Studio (renamed the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931) was exhibiting works by Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and the members of the Eight, along with other contemporary American artists. It was not without competition in the field. At the time of its inauguration, the Gallery of Living Art was the only institution in the country that provided continuous public access to the latest international developments in modern art. He soon found a more permanent venue: On December 13, 1927, at the age of 46, he opened the Gallery of Living Art in three specially-constructed alcoves in the South Study Hall in NYU’s Main Building, overlooking Washington Square. In the spring of 1927 he organized a show of art works at the Library of the School of Commerce at NYU. Meanwhile he sought a space in New York in which to publicly exhibit his growing collection. Often accompanied by Morris, Gallatin made frequent trips to Paris, where he visited Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and other avant-garde artists in their studios and purchased works directly from them. Like Gallatin, they were independently wealthy, well-read, and urbane with him, they were nicknamed the “Park Avenue Cubists.” Morris, his wife Suzy Frelinghuysen Morris, and Charles G. His neighbors and closest friends were the artists George L.K. He gradually arrived at a stripped-down Synthetic Cubist style much indebted to Picasso, in which he rendered objects as flattened, abstracted forms in a restricted palette of mostly tonal colors. In the early 1920s Gallatin also began to paint. He found moral support and practical guidance on his new path in the formalist art criticism of the Englishman Clive Bell and the German Julius Meier-Graefe as well as in essays on contemporary art by the Americans Forbes Watson and Henry McBride. Gallatin’s visits to the landmark exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1921, his involvement for a brief time in Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme, and his consultations with Alfred Steiglitz of Gallery 291 all helped to spark his conversion to modernist abstraction. By 1922 he discovered his true direction: He acquired two watercolors by Cézanne and a painting by Picasso. Gallatin soon came to consider the Impressionist and Ash Can pictures in his collection corrupted by sensuous facture and emotional appeal, and he sold them. As co-organizer of the Allied War Salon to benefit American War Relief he worked closely with Duncan Phillips (founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.), who was one of the most adventurous and prescient connoisseurs of the time. The deep vein of formalism in Gallatin’s temperament was already revealed in his early attraction to the aestheticizing art of James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley, and Max Beerbohm, with its emphasis on decorative beauty, refinement, and art-for-art’s-sake at the expense of subject matter.Īround the time of the First World War, Gallatin’s taste in art changed dramatically. Among his first purchases were works by American and French Impressionists and by members of the Ash Can School. Gallatin began his career as an art collector at the age of 17. His father taught analytical chemistry at NYU, and he himself was an NYU trustee. Portraits of him by Gilbert Stuart and Rembrandt Peale passed by descent to Albert Eugene. His great-grandfather, Albert Gallatin, was one of the founders of NYU and served as Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Jefferson and Madison as well as US Minister to France. His ties to NYU, to art, and to France extended back several generations. Among the best-known works in the collection were Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), Fernand Léger’s The City (1919), Joan Miró’s Dog Barking at the Moon (1926), and Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Blue and Yellow (1932).īorn in 1881 in Villanova, Pennsylvania, to a patrician family of Swiss descent, Albert Eugene Gallatin was heir to a large banking fortune. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art-renamed the Museum of Living Art in 1936-which was restricted to “fresh and individual” works by living artists. Between 19, New York University was home to A.E. Contrary to popular belief, New York’s Museum of Modern Art was not the first institution in the United States exclusively devoted to contemporary art.
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