The Park Avenue Cubists

In 1937, when Albert Eugene Gallatin, George L. K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Charles G. Shaw exhibited together at the Paul Reinhardt Galleries in New York, not only was the unity of their aesthetic interests established, but also their identity as close friends consolidated. Within the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group, in which they became active members shortly after its formation in 1936, the foursome were anomalous, distinguished by their patrician backgrounds, affluence, and privilege. While similarly given to the cause of abstract art, to reversing its threatened and contested status during the Great Depression of the 1930s, they became known within the group as the "Park Avenue Cubists"—a description which would reinforce their class separateness. But whatever autonomy was implied by this tag was offset by their absolute conviction in art and by their ingenious refashioning of European modernist styles into a distinctly American look.

The show at the Reinhardt Galleries in 1937 was but one variation in a series largely orchestrated by Gallatin (1881-1952; figs. 1, 2, and 3) to proclaim their camaraderie and shared visual interests. The first such project in this progression of events took place in 1935, in the form of a one-person exhibition of Shaw's paintings at Gallatin's Gallery of Living Art (fig. 4), his Kunsthalle or exhibition space at New York University on Washington Square East. While the Gallery of Living Art had been conceived to highlight new acquisitions from Gallatin's ever-expanding collection of modern art, the quasi-permanence of this installation had never before been unsettled and displaced by a temporary display. Such was Gallatin's investment in providing an ongoing historic sketch of the origins and development of Cubist-type art to New York audiences. But Gallatin, who had reluctantly visited Shaw (1892—1974; figs. 5, 6, and 7) at his apartment in the Drake Hotel at the urging of a fellow Union Club member, was electrified by his findings, believing Shaw to be "doing the most important work in abstract painting in America today."¹ It was not only the singularity of Shaw's painting—his flattened, depopulated, block-like renditions of the New York skyline— which caught Gallatin's eye, but the way in which it extended and updated a tradition of Cubist art which had been previously associated primarily with Paris.

That his "concrete"² paintings, as Shaw came to refer to his work, were imbued by a certain purity and dispensed with extraneous figurative elements was a sign, at least to Gallatin, that America was poised to inherit the cultural legacy of France. Previously unknown within the New York art community, Shaw was a relatively late convert to painting, let alone to the process of pictorial experimentation required to lift art to an abstract plane. A writer of novels and a journalist whose work regularly appeared in the 1920s in Vanity Fair, Smart Set, and the New Yorker, Shaw endowed his many portrait sketches of New York literary figures and celebrities such as Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, F, Scott Fitzgerald, and George Gershwin—as well as his guides to the local nightclubs, dance halls, restaurants, and ballrooms—with a buoyant, entertaining, and upbeat flair. Confined to a string of seemingly random, terse observations of his subject's "most casual phases and subconscious leanings,"³ as he put it, these elegant yet light renditions of famous figures remained, for the most part, unrelated to Shaw's subsequent avocation as an artist. What with the Depression having stifled the good life, and the demand for reviews and inside accounts of the beau monde on the wane, in 1929 Shaw moved to Paris and London, where he remained for three years and took up the more serious, heady enterprise of painting full time, while styling a more hermetic, intellectual life.

But Gallatin also brought other considerations to bear on his instantaneous endorsement of Shaw's work. The attributes of his background— his independent means and social standing as the scion of a wealthy New York businessman, with easy access to the world of power and connections⁶—were familiar, advantages which Gallatin also enjoyed. Shaw's leisured existence at the Drake Hotel, protracted trips abroad, and memberships at New York's old, established clubs corresponded to the appurtenances and trappings of Gallatin's own life and upbringing. But unlike Shaw, who "declined ever to talk about himself,"⁷ as Morris remembered, Gallatin reveled in his breeding and heritage. Long before his acquaintance with Shaw, he had made much of his family lineage, noting in many of the press releases and articles that announced the opening of the Gallery of Living Art in 1927 and after, that his illustrious forebear, Albert Gallatin, had served as Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Presidents Jefferson and Madison, and that he later founded the National Bank of New York, New-York Historical Society, and New York University.⁸ Moreover, this pedigree, along with his status as one of New York's most "exclusive bachelors,"⁹ was frequently invoked to buttress his authority as a collector, to reinforce that the originality of his collection was the offspring or cumulative weight of centuries of accomplished ancestors. Shaw recalled that "taste, and taste in its perfection, was a quality possessed by Eugene Gallatin ... In all that most personally touched him taste par excellence played a leading role."¹⁰ And Gallatin linked his sense of refinement to his birthright, to his position as head of the Gallatin family, a legacy that became entwined in his commitment to modern art.

But Gallatin's preoccupation with modern art in general, and the launching of his exhibition hall at New York University in particular, represented a new identity and sense of purpose that resulted, like Shaw's lifestyle reversal, in downplaying his omnipresence and whirl on the social circuit. Where he had once been founding president of the Motor-Car Touring Society, and was active as a secretary of the Pilgrims Society and a director of the France-American Society, these organizations ceased to hold his exclusive attention after 1922, yielding to the more substantial pursuit of collecting abstract painting. A gradual but profound realization overcame Gallatin during and after World War I, when he observed that the individual was fast becoming eclipsed by a proliferation of government and corporate entities, and that the assertion of originality within these power structures was increasingly impossible. Gallatin, who prior to 1922 had collected prints and drawings by representational artists such as Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier, and by American figures such as John Twachtman, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn, and who had once railed against Cubism and its "half-baked beginners,"¹² became convinced that if pictorial expression were to remain "alive"¹³ it had to aspire to a state of purity. The Contained compositions of Cézanne, Picasso, and other modernist artists, then, came to serve as the mainstays of his collection. He retained only his holdings of works by Aubrey Beardsley and James McNeill Whistler, first edition books, and caricatures and manuscripts by Max Beerbohm, acquired early in his life and continuously prized for their "great originality and new treatment,"¹⁴ but these were kept separate from the Gallery of Living Art.

Along with his disavowal of most figurative painting and sculpture in the early 1920s, Gallatin became equally suspicious of mainstream, institutional showcases for art. Where he had once declared the Metropolitan Museum of Art "ever ready to welcome the really vital in contemporary painting,"¹⁵ he began to doubt the museum's ability to keep abreast of important new developments, writing in 1922, "The painter of originality and talent who turns for support to the State, to public museums or to organized art societies is doomed to disappointment. If it were not for the support of enlightened critics and of amateurs and collectors, the genius of many painters would never reach maturity."¹⁶ Only an individual, with an informed eye and "personal point of view," he was convinced, could amass an exemplary collection of contemporary art or formulate a project such as the one he eventually devised for New York University.¹⁷

But in 1935, the year of Shaw's exhibition at the Gallery of Living Art, Gallatin was overcome by the necessity, if not urgency, to become identified with a more contemporary direction in modernist art. What with serious competition posed by the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931, his stake in the art world was at risk of being overshadowed by institutions with more spacious quarters and larger budgets. That both museums dismissed American abstract art as derivative, too dependent on foreign innovation, gave him the renewed purpose and programmatic thrust he needed. Shaw's group of limpid reductions of the New York skyline— which were eventually reconfigured into his Plastic Polygons (pls. i and ii, figs. 8 and 32) or shaped canvases—served as the forerunner in a series of shows at the Gallery of Living Art aimed at re-establishing and consolidating Gallatin's aesthetic position, claiming American abstraction as the logical sequence to Parisian formalist developments. The exhibition was also an act of advocacy, intended to signal to the New York community that American art could hold its own in international company.

Gallatin had long shared this conviction with George L. K. Morris (1905—1975; fig. 10), a young artist with a similarly genteel background—his ancestors included General Lewis Morris, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador to France at the time of the French Revolution—whom he befriended in 1928¹⁸ and appointed curator of his Gallery in 1933. From the outset of his career as an artist in the late 1920s, Morris—who shared with Gallatin a cousin in Edith Wharton—had combined frequent references to Ñative American culture in his Cubist-derived compositions. Toy-like images of katsinas immersed in flat, quasi-geometric compartments of differing colors were a favored pictorial staple, recycled through numerous canvases into the early 1930s. While these images were eventually superseded around 1935 by abstractions such as Stockbridae Church, 1935 (pl. iii) and New England Church, 1935—46 (pl. iv) in which no figurative trace remains, the titles of Morris's work remained evocative, always tied to aspects of American culture and the landscape.

Morris was similarly struck by the invention, as well as the idiosyncratic and American character, of Shaw's abstract transformation of the New York landscape, in addition to being taken by his "perfect manners," noting that he stood out as "a different type from other artists."23 He readily endorsed Shaw's solo show at the Gallery of Living Art and encouraged a subsequent lineup of exhibitions devoted exclusively to American artists, which included his own painting and sculpture as well as the work of Ilya Bolotowsky, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Esphyr Slobodkina. Both Morris and Gallatin knew that the cause of American abstraction—its diminished status, misunderstood re-workings of European stylistic models and blunting by conservative aesthetic revivals, such as the Regionalist painting of Thomas Hart Benton and Social Realism of Reginald Marsh—made for the uniqueness and ongoing reinvigoration of the Gallery of Living Art. This cause also prompted Gallatin to try his hand at painting, which he took up with seriousness in 1936,²⁴ linking, like Shaw and Morris, his spartan, controlled geometric forms, such as those in May Composition, 1936 (pl. v) to what he perceived as the new American phase of post-Cubist art. Where there was nothing unprecedented in Gallatin's statement, "I am trying to strip painting down to the essentials of art,"²⁵ it was fortified by and drew upon Morris's axiomatic belief that all art exists in "relationship to what it has built upon,"²⁶ that the use of pre-existing sources was a recurring cultural practice and entirely the license of the artist. According to Morris, therein lay the unique traits of American art. Its originality, he deemed, stemmed primarily—at least at this historic juncture—in maintaining the internal, compositional dynamics of art and in perpetuating a modernist tradition that was on the verge of being overtaken by the forces of populism and representational art.

Morris, who never made any claims to being an iconoclast, was forthright in stating that his style "was entirely the influence of others."²⁷ This synthetic stance allowed for the wholesale plundering of shapes and lines, such as those embedded in Nautical Composition, 1937—42 (pl. vi), a painting that despite its obvious debt to Léger, Arp, Gris, and Picasso emerges as an elegant and unconventional reconstitution of divergent visual sources. This work, like Indian Composition, 1942—45 (pl. vii), unwittingly trades on a certain irony: that with enough skill and confidence even tried compositional formulas can be re-conceptualized and given a second life.

In 1936 Morris and Shaw became founding members, along with Byron Browne, Burgoyne Diller, Harry Holtzman, Ibram Lassaw, Albert Swinden, and others, of the American Abstract Artists group, the association that banded together to seek exhibition opportunities and to oppose the exclusionary exhibition practices of the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Shortly thereafter, Gallatin, and Morris's new bride Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911—1988; figs. 11 and 12), joined the AAA, and however out of place they might have seemed in their fashionable attire and with their dignified manners at the

frequently contentious evening-long meetings— earning them the sobriquet the "Park Avenue Cubists"—they remained equal, respected, and ardent champions of American abstraction, even silently financing a few of the AAA's first exhibitions and purchasing the work of their fellow members. In fact, Bolotowsky recalled of Gallatin, in particular, "he absolutely took the side of the modern artists and became one... He had moral courage and knew his taste and he was a gentleman in the sense of being cultured."²⁸

In 1936 Morris and Shaw also became members of the Advisory Committee of the Museum of Modern Art, positions they held until 1941, when their convictions were tested and became overly compromised by the continuous rejection of the work of the AAA. While Gallatin had declined an earlier invitation to sit on the museum's Board of Trustees—even withholding a membership, such was the intensity of his feelings of rivalry with the museum's director, Alfred Barr—Morris and Shaw looked upon the committee as an opportunity to lobby, in part, for the aesthetic crossovers between European and American art. When Barr's landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art opened in 1936, though, they were deflated to find that Calder was the sole American abstract artist featured, and they worked with Gallatin to stage a rejoinder, which took the form of Five Contemporary American Concretwmsts, an assemblage of work by Morris, Shaw, Calder, Charles Biederman, and John Ferren that was mounted at the Paul Reinhardt Galleries.

Barr had been forthright in stating that he "was not interested in American artists"²⁹ for Cubism and Abstract Art, delineating a decidedly one-sided view or script of modernist art history which was predicated on the assumption that Paris would always remain the epicenter of art. Gallatin's more modest yet pointed endeavor at the Reinhardt Galleries was intended as a corrective, to counter the perception, as Morris recapitulated, that "abstract art had to be European."³⁰ Morris, who would quickly emerge as the spokesman for the AAA, writing numerous tracts and essays which outlined and advocated their theoretical investment in and elaborations of modernism, retaliated against Barr's dismissal, declaring that American abstraction possessed "enduring,"³¹ formalist values which derived from a concentration on "shape and color and line, which had been the basic properties of art through every important plastic tradition since the first scratchings of the cave-men."³² By 1940 he would picket the Museum of Modern Art, along with other members of the AAA such as Joseph Albers and Ad Reinhardt (who spearheaded the protest), and subsequently he resigned, along with Shaw, from the Advisory Committee.

During this period Gallatin not only accelerated his temporary exhibition schedule of work by American artists, but in 1936 changed the name of his gallery to the Museum of Living Art, a designation intended to convey, like other cultural institutions, its nonprofit status, as well as its dignity and competitive edge (fig. 13). The following year, both Morris and Gallatin cofounded Plastique, a publication edited by Jean Arp and Sophie Taueber-Arp, which provided an additional platform to promulgate the intersections and stylistic correspondences between American and European art. In late 1937, Morris also became an editor, art critic, and hidden financial backer for the newly restructured Partisan Review, the once-Communist organ of the John Reed Club, which at the instigation of William Phillips and Philip Rahv had adopted a more liberal, pro-Trotsky political stance. Although Morris never engaged in their "acrimonious discussions,"³³ opting instead for the passive and neutral role of bystander, his "Art Column" became—until 1942 when he ceded his position to Clement Greenberg— a powerful agency for the dissemination of his formalist theories and, specifically, the American permutations of modernism. Responding to the frequent and relentless charges from journalists and the museum community that American abstract art was enfeebled, a pale iteration of Cubist prototypes, Morris mounted a consistent and impassioned defense: "Can it be imagined that Raphael was derided for imitating Perugino? Durer, Rubens, or Poussin for incorporating the art of Italy into their own? On the contrary, it is natural and beneficial that you [the AAA] should assimilate at the start whatever implements are available."³⁴

Morris discerned, like Gallatin, a "geographical shift" underway that augured the collapse of the School of Paris, the evidence of which could be read, in the late 1930s, in "the political and social instability [that] has decimated the number of artists possessed of sufficient energy for the manipulation of new expression."³⁵ A certain historic inevitability informed this outlook. But as New York readied itself for cultural leadership, Morris feared that "accepted standards," that is, the conventions of Regionalist and Social Realist painting, would emerge as the ascendent national artistic identity rather than more "resurgent"³⁶ forms of expression which provided its stylistic renewal and continuing vitality. Through his cogent and eloquent pleas for recognition of the authenticity and "quality"37 of American abstraction and its place in a larger historic continuum, Morris would become in the mid-to-late 1930s one of the New York art community's most respected and convincing champions. Where Gallatin would continue to tout the Museum of Living Art and his own painting as the most recent incarnations of his illustrious ancestry—his own personal Manifest Destiny!— Morris's evolutionary, formalist scheme of art provided the intellectual context and formal credibility needed to historically situate the work of the AAA.

Outside of the AAA, however, Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw remained close, tight-knit friends, bound through their mutual interests in abstract art—a commitment that mystified many of their relatives—as well as, of course, by their backgrounds and class. Gallatin and Shaw were frequent visitors to Morris and Frelinghuysen's International Style summer home in the Berkshires (figs. 14 and 15), on the design of which Morris collaborated with a local architect, John Butler Swann. Shaw and Morris each traveled with Gallatin to Europe on numerous occasions. Shaw recalled that Gallatin "loved Paris most—a city whose beauty never failed to delight him and in whose cafes, restaurants, galleries, theaters ... he found everlasting joy."³⁸ Morris, in his ongoing admiration for the man who introduced him to Cubism and to avant-garde developments in art, would remember the birth date of Gallatin's namesake and family patriarch, Albert Gallatin, a gesture that bespeaks their fondness, intimacy, and solidarity.³⁹

Gallatin acquired works by each of his Park Avenue Cubist friends for the Museum of Living Art, in addition to his European and American "selections." On the occasion of the purchase of Carmen, 1937 (fig. 16), by Suzy Frelinghuysen, he issued a special press release, noting "it was the first painting by an American woman to be included in the permanent collection,"⁴⁰ while elaborating on aspects of Frelinghuysen's social position as a member of the family which included Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, who served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Chester A. Arthur, and Theo Frelinghuysen, the second chancellor of New York University. Suzy Frelinghuysen, who was also prominent as a diva for the New York City Opera (fig. 18), earning from Virgil Thomson the accolade that her voice was one of the "most outstanding for sheer vocal beauty,"⁴¹ was scheduled, like Shaw and Morris, to exhibit her "compositions"—as she neutrally titled most of her painted collage constructions—at the Museum of Living Art in 1943. Gallatin believed that the structural clarity of her luminous works, such as Printemps, 1938 (pl. viii) and Composition—Toreador Drinking, 1940 (fig. 17), both replete with fragments of sheet music, opera programs, cardboard, and miscellaneous bits of newspaper that pertained to incidents in her life, was a significant contribution to the American continuity of post-Cubist art.

But the show never took place. On the eve of its opening in late 1942, Gallatin was forced to disband the Museum of Living Art: the authorities at New York University had determined, without notice, that the space his project occupied was better put to use as a library processing center. The Museum of Modern Art made an initial bid for the collection. Gallatin bristled, refusing to give in to his opponent. Although he had long since declared that "the choicest collections were made by individuals and not by museums,"⁴² his trove was bestowed on the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it in large part currently still hangs.

When Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen, and Shaw exhibited together as a foursome in 1937, much

But other reviewers would focus more assiduously on the pictorial attributes of their work.⁴⁴ While one writer for the New York Times initially passed off their painting as too "rarified ... reshaping, restating, adapting ideas first communicated by the Ecole de Paris,"⁴⁵ he subsequently reversed his position, noting of the annual AAA exhibition in 1938, in which Morris and Frelinghuysen took part, a new "assurance" and "technical adeptness."⁴⁶

The ubiquitous question of originality was, of course, one which Morris would constantly address in his writing, rehearsing the perennial value of building on the known parameters of abstract art. Within these fixed standards, which reinforced the immutability and purity of art, each artist proved there was ample room to imprint their individuality. When Gallatin, Morris, and Shaw teamed up to show at Jacques Seligmann and Co., New York, in 1939—an exhibition that subsequently traveled to the Arts Club of Chicago—a statement in the accompanying brochure made their aesthetic credo perfectly clear: "No pretense is made at a completely independent evolution. Rather these artists have expanded upon various currents of tradition."⁴⁷ Even long after the demise of the Museum of Living Art, and in the face of growing opposition from the rapidly ascending New York School, or Abstract Expressionism—with its highly emotive, gestural canvases that dispensed with the morphology of Cubism—the four remained stalwart, re-working their models of pictorial harmony and continuing to operate on the assumption that "civilizations," as Morris said, "degenerate when art loses structural control."⁴⁸

1. "Charles G. Shaw Has One Man Exhibition at New York University's Gallery of Living Art," New York University press release, April 27, 1935. Charles G. Shaw Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

2. Charles G. Shaw, "A Word to the Objector," in American Abstract Artists, exh. cat. (New York, 1938), 11.

3. Charles G. Shaw, The Low-Down (New York; Henry Holt and Co., 1928), vi.

4. A. E. Gallatin, "The Museum of Living Art," New York University Alumnus 18 (March 1938), 81.

5. A. E. Gallatin, "The Plan of the Museum of Living Art," Museum of Living Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection (New York: New York University, 1940), n.p.

6. For a sketch of Shaw's life, see Buck Pennington, "The 'Floating World' in the Twenties: The Jazz Age and Charles Green Shaw," Archives of American Art Journal 20, no. 4 (1980), 17—24,

7. George L. K. Morris, "Charles Green Shaw," Century Association Annual (New York: Century Association, 1972), 281.

8. For copies of press releases drafted by Gallatin, see Albert Eugene Gallatin, Scrapbooks, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Articles such as "Art Vivant," New Yorker, January 13, 1931, 16, and Geoffrey T. Hellman, "The Medici on Washington Square," New Yorker, January 18, 1941, 25—31, dwell on Gallatin's family lineage.

9. Cholly Knickerbocker, "Albert Gallatin Lavishes Time and Fortune on Gifts to N.Y.U.," New York American, March 4, 1934, M1.

10. Charles G. Shaw, "Albert Eugene Gallatin: A Reminiscence," Princeton University Library Chronicle 14, no. 3 (Spring 1953), 135.

11. A. E. Gallatin, Gallatin Iconography (New York: Privately printed, 1934).

12. A. E. Gallatin, Certain Contemporaries, A Set of Notes in Art Criticism (New York: John Lane Company, 1916), 15.

13. A. E. Gallatin, "Abstract Painting and the Museum of Living Art," Plastique no. 3 (Spring 1938), 10.

14. A. E. Gallatin, Aubrey Beardsley's Drawings, A Catalogue and List of Criticisms (New York: Godfrey A. S. Weiners, 1903), 5.

15. Gallatin, Certain Contemporaries, 13.

16. A. E. Gallatin, American Water-Colorists (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1922), ix-x.

17. A. E. Gallatin, quoted in Yearbook, Division of Art Exhibitions, Department of Fine Art Exhibitions, New York University. Collected in Albert Eugene Gallatin, Scrapbooks.

18. On Gallatin's relationship with Morris, see Debra Bricker Balken, "Interactions in the Lives and Work of Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris," in Debra Bricker Balken and Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris, American Abstract Artists: Aspects of Their Work and Collection, exh. cat. (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1992).

19. Paul Cummings, interview with George L. K. Morris, December 11, 1968, 7. George L. K. Morris Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

20. Ibid., 9.

21. Ibid., 7.

22. Ibid.

23. Morris, "Charles Green Shaw," 283—84.

24. Gallatin had briefly attempted to become a painter in 1926 on the eve of founding the Gallery of Living Art. Whatever this early foray, it was forsaken until 1936 due to the demands of being a museum director.

25. "Albert Eugene Gallatin's Great-Grandson Sponsors A Museum of Abstract Art," Life, May 2, 1938, 42.

26. George L. K. Morris, "On Fernand Léger and Others," The Miscellany 1, no. 6 (March 1931), 1.

27. Morris, in Cummings, interview with George L. K. Morris, 9.

28. Susan C. Larsen, "Going Abstract in the '30s: An Interview with Ilya Bolotowsky," Art in America 64, no. 5 (September/October 1976), 74.

29. Alfred Barr, quoted in John Ferren to A. E. Gallatin, March 29, 1936, in which Ferren recounts that Kandinsky, Hélion, Domela, and Léger all recommended his work to Barr for the Museum of Modern Art's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, but to no avail. Albert Eugene Gallatin, in Correspondence of Prominent People, Arp—Whitney, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

30. Susan C. Larsen, "An Interview with George L. K. Morris," in "The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation of Its Impact Upon American Art," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1975, 480.

31. George L. K. Morris, "Art Chronicle: Some Personal Letters to American Artists Recently Exhibiting in New York," Partisan Review 4, no. 4 (March 1938), 37.

32. George L. K. Morris, "The American Abstract Artists," American Abstract Artists, exh. cat. (New York, 1939), n.p. Reprinted in this volume.

33. Cummings, interview with George L. K. Morris, 24.

34. Morris, "Art Chronicle: Some Personal Letters to American Artists Recently Exhibiting in New York," 39.

35. Morris, "The American Abstract Artists," n.p.

36. George L. K. Morris, "On America and a Living Art," Museum of Living Art: A, E. Gallatin Collection (New York: George Grady, 1936), n.p.

37. George L. K. Morris, "The Quest for an Abstract Tradition," American Abstract Artists Yearbook, 1938, in American Abstract Artists, Three Yearbooks: 1938, 1939, 1946 (New York: Arno Press, 1969, 111).

38. Shaw, "Albert Eugene Gallatin: A Reminiscence," 135.

39. A. E. Gallatin to George L. K. Morris, August 1, 193[?]. George L. K. Morris Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

40. "Museum Shows First Picture by Woman Artist," New York Herald Tribune, November 19, 1938, 27, and "Art Exhibit at N.Y.U.," New York Times, November 19, 1938, 23.

41. Virgil Thomson, "Music," New York Herald Tribune, October 29, 1948, 22.

42. A. E. Gallatin to Geoffrey Hellman, December 19, 1942, Correspondence of Prominent People, Arp—Whitney, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

43. "Abstract Descendent," Time, April 5, 1937, 46.

44. See for example Henry McBride, "Attractions in the Galleries," New York Sun, April 3, 1937, 15.

45. Edward Alden Jewell, "American Abstractions," New York Times, April 11, 1937, sec. 10, p. 10.

46. Edward Alden Jewell, "Fine Arts Building Scene of Three Shows," New York Times, February 15, 1938, 23.

47. Recent Paintings by Gallatin, Morris, Shaw, exh. brochure (New York: Jacques Seligmann and Co., 1939), n.p.

48. Morris, "On Fernand Léger and Others," 1.