page_title: Arthur Everett Austin Jr.
section_title: Hartford
hierarchical_section_title: Arthur Everett Austin Jr. / Hartford
caption_attribution_description: English: Wadsworth Atheneum Avery Memorial wing This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 70000709
context_page_description: Arthur Everett "Chick" Austin Jr. was the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 through 1944. Austin persisted in the introduction of then-modern theater and modern design and especially contemporaneous art. Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, and Gertrude Stein benefited from his advocacy.
  Chick Austin helped alter the way Americans looked at and thought about modern art. For starters, he organized the first Picasso retrospective in the United States, put on the first show of Surrealist art and, with Kirstein, helped engineer the immigration of choreographer George Balanchine and sow the seeds for Balanchine's School of American Ballet.
  — Michael Z. Wise, "The Man Who Pushed Picasso"
context_section_description: Austin was appointed director of the Wadsworth Atheneum at the age of 26, and simultaneously joined the staff of Trinity College, Hartford, where he founded the fine arts department and taught throughout his tenure while director of the Wadsworth. In 1929, Austin married Helen Goodwin in Paris. The Goodwins were among the founders of Hartford, and related to and closely allied with the family of Hartford-born J. Pierpont Morgan, one of the Wadsworth Atheneum's great benefactors.
  Austin produced America's first comprehensive exhibitions of Italian Baroque painting (1930), surrealism (1931), and Pablo Picasso's works (1934).  The Picasso show formed part of the opening of a new wing, the Avery Memorial, largely designed by Austin himself (with Morris & O'Connor of New York City) and which boasted the first International style museum interior in the United States. At that time, Austin also inaugurated the Avery Theater (now Aetna Theater), one of the first theaters in an American art museum, with the premiere of the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson.
  In 1928 Austin founded The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, a society that sponsored premieres or early performances of works by composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Erik Satie, and Virgil Thomson, as well as Vivaldi, Scarlatti, and Couperin (played on period instruments). The 1936 American premiere of Satie's symphonic drama Socrate, for example, featured one of Alexander Calder's early mobiles. An innovation begun in 1929 was the showing of motion pictures (foreign, experimental, and Hollywood) seven years before films were shown at the Museum of Modern Art. The most far-reaching of Austin's theatrical ventures was the Wadsworth Atheneum's sponsorship, at Lincoln Kirstein's request, of choreographer George Balanchine's immigration to the United States in 1933, originally to found the School of American Ballet in Hartford.
caption: Avery Memorial
exif: {"Image Make": "Apple", "Image Model": "iPhone 5", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Aperture 3.4.5", "Image DateTime": "2013:06:12 15:55:21", "Image ExifOffset": "202", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[41, 45, 252/5]", "GPS GPSLongitudeRef": "W", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[72, 40, 2221/100]", "GPS GPSAltitudeRef": "0", "GPS GPSAltitude": "13985/641", "GPS GPSTimeStamp": "[19, 55, 20]", "GPS GPSImgDirectionRef": "T", "GPS GPSImgDirection": "9919/92", "GPS GPSDate": "2013:06:12", "Image GPSInfo": "592", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/1869", "EXIF FNumber": "12/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "50", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:06:12 15:55:21", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:06:12 15:55:21", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5771/531", "EXIF ApertureValue": "4845/1918", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "1873/185", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "413/100", "EXIF SubjectArea": "[1631, 1223, 881, 881]", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1055", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1583", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "33", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}