page_title: Albert Eugene Gallatin
section_title: Art collecting: 1920s
hierarchical_section_title: Albert Eugene Gallatin / Art collecting: 1920s
caption_attribution_description: English: Albert Eugene Gallatin, Untitled, Untitled, 1938, oil on canvas, 20 X 24 inches
context_page_description: Albert Eugene Gallatin wrote about, collected, exhibited, and created works of art. Called "one of the great figures in early 20th-century American culture," he was a leading proponent of nonobjective and later abstract and particularly Cubist
  art whose "visionary approach" in both collecting and painting left "an enduring impact on the world of modern art."
context_section_description: In 1916, Gallatin had dismissed modernists in general and cubists in particular as immature. He thought their work to be half-baked, mediocre, and depressing. By the middle of the 1920s, through the influence of Nevinson, of the critic, Clive Bell, and of the authors of articles in The Arts magazine, he had thoroughly revised his opinions. Nevinson showed that cubism was not a gimmick, but a technique that emerged naturally from the art of its time. Bell articulated a formalist aesthetic that coincided with Gallatin's belief that art was not good because of its realism, but because the two-dimensional space of the painting, drawing, or print possessed a satisfying composition, line, shape, color, and texture. Pictorial representation, trueness to life, and the illusion of depth were secondary concerns. Bell also voiced an opinion that seems to have been latent in Gallatin's thought as well: good art is well-ordered rather than chaotic and it proceeds from the artist's  thought processes and intuitive sense of rightness more than his emotions. William Zorach and other authors of articles in The Arts discussed an art of "purely abstract forms and colors" that, through an elimination "of everything not vitally necessary," produced a true art. The difficulty of judging what is a "masterpiece" and what is an "abortion" is no different for abstract than it is for representational art: it takes experience, careful study, and "listening to one's inner response."
  In the years between 1920 and 1926 Gallatin became a member of the modernist Société Anonyme and was introduced to the influential artist-critic Jacques Mauny who soon became his friend and advisor. Mauny introduced him to Pablo Picasso and other painters and to the dealer and author, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. These men helped further to shape his growing appreciation for cubism and Mauny, in particular, helped him revamp his collection by adding paintings by artists such as Cézanne and Picasso and selling ones that no longer suited his taste. In the mid-1920s Gallatin studied art with the artist and teacher, Robert Henri, and in 1926 produced some small still lifes and mythology-themed paintings which have been described as having "broad areas of open space broken up by clusters of oddly shaped forms." His interest in cubism deepened and he added works to his collection by Georges Braque and Juan Gris.
  At least partly in response to articles by Forbes Watson in The Arts and Henry McBride in The Dial, Gallatin began planning for a public gallery based on his collection of modern art. Early in 1927, as a result of a family connection with New York University, he was able first to organize a small show and, in December of that year, to open his Gallery of Living Art in the south study hall of that university's main building on Washington Square. The gallery has been called the first museum devoted exclusively to modern art. (The Phillips Memorial Collection, opened in 1920, might also lay claim to that distinction but for the fact that it was not exclusively modernist.) Consisting almost entirely of works from Gallatin's collection and assembled with help from the critic, Henry McBride, there were, at its opening, paintings and works on paper by twenty-four artists, both American and French. In addition to the forty-three of his own, Gallatin included fifteen borrowed works. There was no entry fee and from the beginning it was seen as place for artists to use as well as the general public.
caption: Albert Eugene Gallatin, Untitled, Untitled, 1938, oil on canvas, 20 X 24 inches
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