The art shown at the Gallery of Living Art, Professor Robert Rosenblum has reminisced, was astounding. Albert Eugene Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, as it was later renamed, had opened in December 1927 in the southwest corner of New York University's Main Building on Washington Square. Professor Rosenblum's assessment derives from his early memories of a visit to the Gallatin Collection long before he, a self-described "precocious New York child," ventured further north to see the Museum of Modern Art, which was inaugurated two years after Gallatin's Gallery. "Like the Art Deco apartment houses then going up in New York, with their zigzagging decorative motifs and floating corner windows, the paintings of the Gallatin Collection looked startlingly, triumphantly modern," Professor Rosenblum recalls.
Here was the future in flat planes and clean colors, with lucid arcs and angles replacing old-fashioned realist imagery, and all laws of gravity repealed in favor of the aerial freedom appropriate to the new century of speed and flight. Whether intention or accident brought a twelve-year-old boy to the Museum of Living Art, it was as exhilarating to me as a kind of science fiction.1
The Museum of Living Art housed major works by European artists—such as Pablo Picasso's The Three Musicians, Fernand Léger's The City, Joan Miró's Dog Barking at the Moon, Piet Mondrian's Composition in Blue and Yellow, and Georges Braque's Still Life: The Courier—as well as paintings by American artists, including Charles G. Shaw, George L. K. Morris, and Suzy Frelinghuysen. As Debra Bricker Balken, the guest curator and instigator of the present exhibition, notes in her essay on the Park Avenue Cubists included here, Gallatin not only acquired works by Morris, Frelinghuysen, and Shaw, but the four of them also exhibited together. Close friends and passionate patrons as well as committed artists, they shared privileged and pampered backgrounds, providing fodder for their insouciant sobriquet. Defenders of a vanguard American art that flew in the face of a public reared on realism, they considered themselves the legitimate aesthetic heirs to then-dominant French culture. Erudite and cosmopolitan, they also simultaneously collected.
The Park Avenue Cubists is the first substantial museum exhibition to examine this salient and long-overlooked aspect of American art and includes approximately fifteen works per artist, each of whom, in their own way, updated and purified the formalist vision emanating from Paris. Also on view in the exhibition is a selection of artifacts and artworks from the artists' collections as well as articles by and portraits of them. Shown alongside their paintings, these documents and ephemera shed light both on the artists' glamorous lifestyles and on their ardent commitment to perpetuating the European origins of modernism while formulating one of the first reductivist abstract languages of art in the United States. Indeed, in their quest to create a truly American strain of modern art, they melded the stylistic lessons of Cubism and its derivations (Purism, Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Surrealist Biomorphism) with indigenous American subject matter, from Hopi katsinas to Manhattan cityscapes. Appropriating popular imagery from billboards and advertising logos, they not only looked back to Analytic Cubism's incorporation of printed-paper ephemera, but also ahead to the work of Pop artists.
It is especially fitting that New York University's Grey Art Gallery organize and present this exhibition. Not only was A. E. Gallatin a direct descendant of Albert Gallatin, who founded New York University in 1831, but the Grey Art Gallery occupies the very same space as the Museum of Living Art, which was disbanded in 1942. During its colorful if quirky existence, it functioned as a magnet for artists such as Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Arshile Gorky, as well as for intellectuals and Greenwich Village residents. Long before the Grey—which was founded in 1975—it provided a space where students and faculty could interact with Villagers. "Open late every night of the week, very small and very casual, the Museum drew browsers from all over New York but remained distinctly a neighborhood establishment. Beyond its function as a meeting place ... [the Museum] was under Gallatin also a study center of serious purpose," William Hutchinson has observed. "NYU students used the space as any other study hall; artists used it to puzzle through the myriad and complex lessons of Cubism, or to keep abreast of new developments in abstraction."2
Professor Rosenblum now teaches art history in this same building—often showing slides of the same paintings he first saw as a youth at the Museum of Living Art. Another New York University (NYU) art historian has played an essential role in the afterlife of the Park Avenue Cubists. Robert Lubar, a professor at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, cotaught a seminar on the group with Debra Bricker Balken and contributed an essay to this book. He looks at the conflicted arena of criticism in which debates on the social and political implications of realism and abstraction were staged in the mid-to-late 1930s. Examining how Clement Greenberg came to supplant Morris as a dominant voice in American art criticism, Professor Lubar considers the complex reasons for the subsequent marginalization of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group, including the Park Avenue Cubists, and the ways in which a new political and social identity was forged for American painting. Debra, in her introduction and essay, lends great insight into both the work and the lives of Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen, and Shaw—detailing the numerous careers they all juggled. She also discusses the group's complicated relationships both with their fellow members of AAA and with the fledgling Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, which entered the scene in 1931. In so doing, she lucidly charts their success and notoriety at the time as well as their subsequent decline into obscurity. Lubar and Balken's seminar participants—Marcelle Polednik-Kammerman, Leah Rosenblatt, Kelly Sidley, and Tiffany H. Sprague, who contributed biographical essays, and Gregory Galligan, April Richon Jacobs, Cristin Tierney, and Allison Unruh, who wrote analyses of the artists' work—follow in the long tradition of NYU students who have helped retrieve the history of American abstract art.
Providing essential support and encouragement from the earliest days of this project has been The Henry Luce Foundation. The Luce Foundation not only helped fund the exhibition, but also made possible the seminar, the first course on this subject ever taught at the Institute of Fine Arts. In particular, I want to thank both Ellen Holtzman, Program Director for the Arts, and Hank Luce, Chairman and C.E.O., whose continued commitment has made an enormous difference for, and contributed significantly to, the scholarship and study of American art. Abby Weed Grey, after whom the Grey Art Gallery is named, shared Gallatin's conviction that art should be made available for students to study, and we are very grateful, as always, to acknowledge a contribution from the Abby Weed Grey Trust.
The Park Avenue Cubists is an exceedingly ambitious exhibition with over forty lenders, all of whom agreed to part with treasured works. I join Debra in expressing special gratitude to the following individuals and institutions among them whose cooperation has been absolutely essential: Kinney Frelinghuysen of the Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio; Philip Carpenter of the Charles G. Shaw Estate; Gary Snyder of Snyder Fine Art; Edith Carpenter of Edith Carpenter Fine Arts; Amy Wolf for her help with the Gallatin Estate; and Leigh Morse of Salander-O'Reilly for assistance with loans of works by Morris and Frelinghuysen. Of enormous help in providing assistance with research were Daniel Schulman, Curator of Collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Christian Derouet of the Centre Georges Pompidou.
The Grey Art Gallery is very pleased that The Park Avenue Cubists will travel to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Adam Weinberg, director of the Addison, immediately recognized the importance of the exhibition and has provided encouragement throughout this project's lengthy genesis. We likewise thank Jeanette M. Toohey, formerly curator of painting and sculpture at the Harn, and Dulce Ramon, interim curator there.
We are also happy to have had the opportunity to initiate a relationship with Ashgate Publishing in London, who have copublished this volume with us. Both Pamela Edwardes and Lucy Myers have been sympathetic collaborators and consummate professionals. Hilite Design and Reprographics Limited designed the handsome layout of the book and Jan B. Cutler assiduously copyedited it.
Absolutely key to the project at the Grey were Lucy Oakley, Frank Poueymirou, and Michèle Wong. Lucy coordinated, assembled, and edited the first draft of the book, working closely with both of the essayists and all the student contributors, and, once again, lined up an impressive roster of educational programs. Frank initiated conversations with Ashgate and oversaw the budget and funding for the show, while Michèle took on the Herculean task of keeping track of all the lenders, making shipping arrangements, and managing the exhibition tour. Gwen Stolyarov stalwartly provided crucial assistance at all stages, serving as media contact and also compiling illustration captions and managing photograph requests. Jennifer Bakal pitched in, lending her capable organizational skills. Christopher Skura and David Colosi, once again, did an extraordinary job of installing the show. Institute of Fine Arts students Katherine Smith, Karen Kurcyznski, and, most recently, Bragan Thomas all helped greatly during their respective tenures as graduate research assistants at the Grey.
In an interesting aside, Debra Ralken quotes another IFA art historian, Professor Robert Goldwater, who, in 1947, characterized all the work of AAA artists as "bravura technical performances and nothing more."3 Reflecting on Andy Warhol's oft-repeated prediction of fifteen minutes of fame for everyone, we can, I think, safely assume that this second go-around in the spotlight for A. E. Gallatin, George L. K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Charles G. Shaw will last a little longer.
Lynn Gumpert
Director
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
1. Robert Rosenblum, "First Love," New York University Magazine, Spring 1986, 51.
2. William Hutchinson, "The Gallatin Collection: Souvenirs from a Life in Art," New York University Magazine, Spring 1986, 57.
3. Debra Bricker Balken, "Introduction," in this volume.