Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 50, 1-2, Spring 2011

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al

COLLECTORS

From the director

Endpapers: Sketch from collector Robert Scull’s appointment book.

I have recently accepted a new position as Director of The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design and will be leaving the Archives of American Art later this summer. It’s been an honor to lead this remarkable organization during a period of significant growth and transformation. One of the most gratifying accomplishments has been the redesign of the Journal.

For over fifty years, the Journal has published the work of many leading scholars in the field of American art history, and it is satisfying to now see the vibrancy and insight of their writing reflected in a brilliant, exciting new format. I am extremely grateful to the Henry Luce Foundation for providing the initial three years of funding to support this effort. Recently, the Raymond Horowitz Foundation pledged its support to help underwrite the Journal for the next four years. Without these donors, this work would simply not have been possible.

A confluence of editorial focus, insightful writing, and lively design is clearly apparent in the current issue of the Journal.

Inspired by our holdings on the subject of collectors and collecting, each essay examines the critical role that collectors play as patrons and connoisseurs. Between them, our contributors examine collectors and collecting in the United States from the late nineteenth century on. Flaminia Gennari-Santori looks at a deluxe Gilded Age publication; Wendy Jeffers takes on the important American collector Hamilton Easter Field; and Jorgelina Orfila sheds light on the Chester and Maud Dale collection. Gail Levin examines an unheralded collector and patron of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Alfonso Ossorio; Susan Morgan treats Hollywood director Billy Wilder’s collecting habit; and Mary Panzer tells us how curator-collector Sam Wagstaff changed the way we look at photographs.

I look forward to watching the Archives of American Art and the Journal continue to evolve over the coming years, and I’m proud to have been a part of their history.

ContributOrs

Gail Levin is Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women's Studies at The Graduate Center and Baruch College of The City University of New York. She is author of many books on American art including Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné and three biographies, the most recent of which is on Lee Krasner.

Susan Morgan is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader and, with MAK Center for Art and Architecture director Kimberli Meyer, the co-curator of “Sympathetic Seeing,” an exhibition about McCoy’s life and work.

Wendy Jeffers is at work on a biography of Dorothy C. Miller, the Museum of Modern Art curator who organized the series of new talent exhibitions called the “Americans.” Her previous contribution to the Archives of American Art Journal was on Holger Cahill, director of the WPA Federal Art Project.

Flaminia Gennari-Santori is the chief curator at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, Florida. She published The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America, 1900–1914 in 2004, and her most recent publications are two articles, both on John Pierpont Morgan’s collection, in the Journal of the History of Collections.

Cover: Collector Robert Scull's appointment book, 18 October 1973.

Jorgelina Orfila is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art at Texas Tech University. She earned undergraduate degrees in art history and museum studies in Argentina, and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Judith Goldman is a writer and curator. She most recently organized the exhibition “Robert and Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection” for the Acquavella Galleries in New York.

Mary Panzer writes on photography and American cultural history for Aperture and the Wall Street Journal. She is co-author of Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955, winner of the ICP/Infinity Award for best photography book.

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I n T h i s ISSUE

The Extraordinary Interventions of Alfonso Ossorio, Patron and Collector of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Gail Levin

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Billy Wilder Susan Morgan

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Hamilton Easter Field: The Benefactor from Brooklyn Wendy Jeffers

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A Monument to American Collecting: August Jaccaci and Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections Flaminia Gennari-Santori

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Art Collecting in America during the Interwar Period: The Chester Dale Collection of Modern French Art Jorgelina Orfila “My Sculpture in the Desert”: Robert C. Scull and Michael Heizer Judith Goldman

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Sam Wagstaff and the Mysterious Thing Mary Panzer

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Artists in the Landscape A Project by Pamela Golden

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The Extraordinary Interventions of Alfonso Ossorio, Patron and Collector of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner G ail Levin

The artist Alfonso Ossorio is best known for his colorful Abstract Expressionist paintings and his extravagant sculptures and assemblages, which he called “Congregations.” It is less well known that Ossorio became a friend and patron of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner at a time when they were both exhibiting their work and struggling to make ends meet. The three were introduced in 1949.

Ossorio, born in 1916 in Manila, was an heir to a Philippine sugar fortune. He attended prep schools in England and studied printing and wood engraving in London with associates of Eric Gill, a British wood engraver, sculptor, typographer, and draftsman. He attended Harvard and by graduation in 1938 had already pursued a variety of artistic activities. He made watercolors, drew, and tried sculpture.1 He took a course in the restoration and preservation department taught

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Opposite: Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1949.

Oil on composition board, 48 x 37 in. © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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in the laboratories of the Fogg Museum and in general found studying the methods and processes of painting “fascinating.”2 He spent the year after graduation at the Rhode Island School of Design working with Eric Gill’s disciple, the graphic artist, calligrapher, and stonecarver, John Howard Benson, whom he already knew; and Eugene Kingman, who taught him how to use egg tempera.

Wealthy, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan, as a teenager Ossorio also began collecting art. He focused on traditional Western art as an undergraduate and started buying prints after discovering the wood engravings of Gill and his circle, having seen a copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer at the New York Public Library. Ossorio showed part of his collection at Harvard in 1936 (at the request of his art history professor Edward Waldo Forbes),3 and quickly developed into a collector of wide-ranging tastes that included medieval, Asian, American religious folk art, and Native American work. He began to pay attention to modernism in 1939, just as Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica was being shown in the United States to raise money for refugees displaced by the Spanish Civil War.4 At the time, Ossorio was seeking his direction both as a collector and as an artist in his own right, two activities that claimed his attention for the rest of his life.

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Opposite: Alfonso Ossorio in 1952 at his home and studio, The Creeks, East Hampton, NY. Photograph © Estate of Hans Namuth.

Below: Poster for Alfonso Ossorio’s show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, 5–24 November 1951.

In the summer of 1940, Ossorio moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he came into direct contact with the Modernist painter Andrew Dasburg, among others. It was there that the art dealer Betty Parsons discovered Ossorio and offered to show his work in New York.5 From the moment Ossorio had the first of his two solo shows with Parsons at the Wakefield Gallery (in 1941 and 1943), he explored Modernist ideas. In one of the earliest reviews of his work, for instance, New York Times critic Howard Devree immediately associated Ossorio with “a certain morbidness all too common to Surrealism,” though he praised the beautiful execution and color of his watercolors.6 Ossorio served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War II and settled in New York only in 1948, after having had another show with Parsons in 1945, when she worked for Mortimer Brandt Gallery.

Given both Ossorio’s collecting and creative interest in Modernism, it was not surprising that when Parsons gave Pollock a solo show in January 1949 (she had opened her own gallery in 1946), Ossorio bought something. At the time he knew about Pollock’s work from reproductions and the painter’s first show with Parsons in 1948, but Ossorio hadn’t met him yet. Ossorio’s first encounters with Pollock’s works had made a strong impression on him, and as he later remembered “it was simply by going to Betty’s gallery. . . . I think it was as late as 1947 or ’48 that I suddenly realized the so-called drip panels had an intensity of organization, had a message that was expressed by its physical components, was a new iconography.”7 Seeing the 1949 show convinced him to buy a major painting.

“Here was a man who had pulled together— existentialized—all the traditions of the past, a man who had gone beyond Picasso,” Ossorio exclaimed. He bought Number 5, a canvas measuring eight by four feet.8 By 1949, after some years of negative press and few sales, the critical response to Pollock’s work was improving. The New York Times’ Sam Hunter equivocated somewhat but concluded that Pollock had come up with “a pure calligraphic metaphor for a ravaging, aggressive virility.”9 More positive was Clement Greenberg, writing in The Nation, who called Pollock’s show a continuation of his “astounding progress” and pronounced him “one of the major painters of our time.”10

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Number 5 arrived damaged, so in April 1949 Parsons took Pollock and Krasner to Ossorio’s new place at 9 MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village to have a look at the work’s condition. Pollock offered to repair it in his studio in the Springs hamlet of East Hampton on Long Island. The next month, Ossorio and his companion, Edward (Ted) Dragon, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, drove out with the painting, staying over with the Pollocks, becoming friends in the process. Years later, the painter Grace Hartigan, who had helped hang the show, told a revealing story about the damage and follow-up.

Home Sweet Home was [Pollock’s] shipper from Long Island. Home Sweet Home came in with a painting in one hand and a lump of paint from the center of the painting in the other hand. . . .

Pollock liked the painting, so what he did was, I think I loaned him some colors and he just patched it. Not as thick as it should have been, but he patched it so no one would know the difference.

Well, an artist named Alfonso Ossorio . . . went to the Pollock show and bought that painting. Pollock fumed about it for a while, he said, “He’ll never know, never know.”. . . [But Ossorio] called Pollock and said, “There’s something wrong with the center of that painting.” So Pollock said, “All right, get [it] to the studio and I’ll fix it.” So Pollock repainted the whole thing, again saying, “He’ll never know. No one knows how to look at my paintings; he won’t know the difference.” He sent it back to Ossorio, and Ossorio called him and told him [Pollock] every single thing he did, and said he liked it even better. What a relief.11

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Opposite: Lee Krasner, Clement Greenberg, and Jackson Pollock, ca. 1950.

Below: Lee Krasner, Mosaic Table, 1947, mixed media mosaic in cement, with wood and steel; 21 ¾ x 46 ¾ x 46 ¾ in., signed and dated. © 2011 The PollockKrasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

The visit affirmed Ossorio’s high estimation of Pollock’s work and introduced him to Krasner’s paintings and mosaic tables, which also interested him. Ossorio and Dragon decided to rent a place and spend the summer in East Hampton.

“I saw a good deal of Lee and Jackson” that summer, Ossorio recalled, and the new friends exchanged views on art.12 “With Jackson one didn’t sit and have a long connected conversation. He would show the work, he would make very perceptive comments. His vocabulary was psychoanalytical in the sense that he had been in analysis and his intellectual vocabulary was based on that rather than on aesthetics or art history or philosophy.”13 That fall, Ossorio went to Europe. Pollock and Krasner stayed on in Springs, but they kept in touch.

During their years of friendship, Ossorio was both a sophisticated influence on Pollock and Krasner and stimulated by them.

Ossorio’s grasp of Modernism in the broad context of international art, philosophy, and culture enabled him to respond to Pollock’s daring innovations; he later told an interviewer that after seeing the Parsons show in 1949, he “realized that Pollock was carrying on exactly in the tradition that I was interested in and in a way had bypassed the Renaissance and had gone back to a much earlier tradition of art in terms of dealing with forms and shapes dictated by the ideas rather than by appearance.”14 The new friends shared other artistic affinities. Studying fine arts and art history at Harvard, Ossorio had known such scholars of Asian art as Benjamin Rowland and the important Indian philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, who worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He also absorbed lessons from the anthropologist Frederick Pleasants at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where Ossorio recalled that “there was no sharp line drawn between fine arts and the primitive artifacts.”15 At the Peabody, Ossorio had studied objects from the Pacific Islands and exhibits on the history of indigenous peoples of North America. Pollock and Krasner shared Ossorio’s interest in non-Western art. Krasner had painted a mural for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1941 show, “Indian Art of the United States,”16 and Ossorio recalled that Pollock was very interested in Native American traditions. “I remember being very surprised to see some twenty volumes of the proceedings of the Smithsonian Reports [in Jackson’s possession], obviously a battered old set he’d picked up somewhere—which were full of nineteenth-century renditions of American Indian art, everything from buffalo hide paintings, tepees, the sand paintings.”17 As Krasner and Pollock discovered that Ossorio held their mutual interests in high regard, their friendship deepened, and the year following Pollock’s January 1949 solo show was an opportune time for them to develop a new patron-friend. Almost from their first meeting, Ossorio responded to the couple with both material support and friendship. During the winter of 1950, when Ossorio was away for ten months painting a mural in the Philippines, Krasner and Pollock stayed in Ossorio’s New York City townhouse. As Krasner wrote to

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Ossorio, the couple took advantage of the time in the city to visit lots of artists’ exhibitions.18 Their stay also coincided with the formation of The Club, a famous discussion group of contemporary artists that held meetings on East 8th Street. The couple attended, and the meetings exposed Pollock to fierce competition among his male peers and Krasner to their sexism. According to one of the Club’s founders, the sculptor Philip Pavia, the shy and inarticulate Pollock “would come and stand in the back—later sometimes drunk—then Bill [de Kooning] and Franz [Kline] would take care of him.” Pavia also admitted that “The women’s movement was born in the Club. They would get up there and tell us off—aggressive, and the joke was that we’d make monsters out of these women and got even the wives to talk. They did, too—like Lee, wanting to compete against Jackson.”19 It was in

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Alfonso Ossorio, Mirror Between, 1963, congregation of mixed media on panel, 31 x 28 ¾ x 3 in. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.

this charged atmosphere, stressful for Pollock and Krasner both, that Betty Parsons opened Pollock’s fourth solo show, which presented his now classic large-scale poured paintings.

Running from 28 November through 16 December 1950, the exhibition included thirty-two works, several of them now considered Pollock’s best: Autumn Rhythm, Lavender Mist, and One. Pollock’s brother Marvin Jay wrote from New York to their brother Frank in Los Angeles: “The big thing right now is Jack’s show. Alma and I were there and it was bigger than ever this year and many important people in the art world were present. Lee seemed very happy and greeted every one with a big smile.”20 Among those whom Krasner could not have been pleased to see was the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning, still married to Willem de Kooning, although by then estranged from him. According to Greenberg, “this was Jackson’s best show, and up came Elaine de Kooning, who said the show was no good except for one painting—the only weak picture in the show, the one he painted [on glass] when they were working on the [Hans Namuth] movie. The show was so good, it’s unbelievable.” 21 Ossorio purchased Lavender Mist for $1,500, but it was the only work in the show to sell.22 Reviews were mixed; Devree, writing in the New York Times, called Pollock one of two (with Mark Tobey) of “the most controversial figures in the field.”23 Parsons, who had crammed Pollock’s monumental paintings into an inadequate space that could not do justice to them, recalled: “The show was a disaster.

For me it was heartbreaking, those big paintings at a mere $1,200.

For Jackson it was ghastly; here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.”24 In spite of the setback, Pollock was becoming more famous. As his reputation grew, though, so did the pressure. His doctor, Edwin Heller, an East Hampton general practitioner who had somehow managed to get him to stop drinking, died suddenly. Six months later, Pollock reacted badly while his work was being shown in Venice, and Time magazine published an article on him in November 1950 titled “Chaos, Damn It!,” taking remarks by an Italian critic out of context and falsely claiming that he had “followed his canvases to Italy.”25 Pollock thought that the media took aim at him as a symbol and was so disturbed by this article that he told his friend Jeffrey Potter: “What they want is to stop modern art.”26 Next, after having endured Hans Namuth filming him from below as he painted on glass, Pollock must have felt that by recording it for all to see, the filmmaker had turned a private act in the studio into a psychic violation. He suddenly resumed

“The show was a disaster.

For me it was heartbreaking, those big paintings at a mere $1,200. For Jackson it was ghastly; here was beauty, but instead of admiration it brought contempt.”

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drinking, and Krasner’s life came under considerable stress as well.

She later reflected: “As Jackson’s fame grew, he became more and more tortured. My help, assistance, and encouragement seemed insufficient. His feelings towards me became somewhat ambiguous. Of course, he had many other supporters.”27 Pollock began to deteriorate rapidly, and nothing seemed to go right for him. He wrote Ossorio and Dragon in early 1951 that he “found New York terribly depressing after my show—nearly impossible—but I am coming out of it.”28 In late January 1951, Ossorio offered Pollock $200 a month “towards the next painting of yours that we acquire,”29 but no other sales materialized. A few weeks later, Pollock wrote Ossorio that he had “really hit an all time low—with depression and drinking—NYC is brutal.”30 Ossorio again lent Pollock and Krasner his New York townhouse so that Jackson could visit a new therapist, Dr. Ruth Fox, a psychiatrist who treated alcoholism through psychoanalytic therapy combined with participation in Alcoholics Anonymous, which meant maintaining sobriety through total abstinence.31 When Pollock signed his will on 9 March 1951 he asked that in the event Krasner predeceased him, his brother Sande McCoy and Clement Greenberg act as first and second executors. Pollock designated

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Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950. © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Lee Krasner. Photograph

by Harry Bowden.

Ossorio as a third alternative executor to Krasner, a clear sign that he considered him a close friend, something Krasner and Pollock reaffirmed in the summer of 1951 when they learned that a fabulous East Hampton seventy-acre estate was on the market. They wrote to Ossorio in Paris recommending that he buy it and move out to Eastern Long Island.32 Ossorio took their advice, visiting East Hampton briefly in August, when he saw for the first time the large mansion overlooking Georgica Pond and the sprawling grounds. He called the place, which he took title to in January 1952, The Creeks, and starting the following summer received many weekend visitors, among them Parsons and Abstract Expressionist painters Clyfford Still and Grace Hartigan, who each lived and worked for a time in the barn studio.

In November 1951 Ossorio, who was still spending time abroad collecting, traveled from Paris to New York for an exhibition of his drawings at Betty Parsons Gallery. He stayed in the city for the winter and took part in a number of art activities that helped further Pollock’s reputation. He wrote the catalogue introduction for Pollock’s “blackand-white” show, held immediately after Ossorio’s at Betty Parsons, opening on 26 November 1951. He also made plans for Pollock’s show to appear at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris, in March 1952, whose owners used his essay, translated as “Mon ami, Jackson Pollock.” Ossorio’s good efforts notwithstanding, very little went smoothly for Pollock and Krasner.

Disappointed with sales, Pollock made a decision to leave Betty Parsons, a move that affected Krasner’s career as well. Pollock moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery in spring 1952, and Parsons soon told Krasner that she could not continue to show her work because the association with Pollock was “too painful.”33 Ossorio stayed with Parsons, but his belief in Pollock remained strong. As for Pollock, despite his personal problems, he continued to attract attention, especially from Greenberg, who organized his “first retrospective show” (consisting only of eight paintings) at Bennington College in Vermont from 17 to 30 November 1952. For that occasion, Ossorio lent Krasner and Pollock his station wagon to drive up to the show.

Greenberg and the painter Helen Frankenthaler were also in the car, but in the face of Pollock’s uncontrollable drinking, they returned home by train. Pollock and Krasner made it home safely, but many of their relationships deteriorated under the pressure of Pollock’s antisocial behavior.

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Pollock’s growing dysfunction led to economic problems. Ossorio recalled: “Their financial plight was very serious. Pollock suggested that perhaps he and Krasner might move to The Creeks, live here. Well, I didn’t know how to put it but finally said, ‘I love you both very much, but . . .’ I’m afraid it may have changed our relationship.”34 When Pollock began a rather public affair with Ruth Kligman and Krasner fled to Europe to think things over, Ossorio was loyal to Krasner. He recalled: “Lee and I crossed each other on the Atlantic, she bound for Europe and I returning. I didn’t call Jackson because you know, I thought, ‘Let’s wait and see what happens.’ . . . I thought ‘I don’t want to get involved now. Let him find himself and then call.’ It was always Lee and Jackson that Ted and I knew; it was not Jackson alone, and there were enough complications without my pushing into a new relationship.”35 Pollock’s death in a car crash in August 1956 did not end Ossorio’s close relationship with Krasner. He declared himself to be “devoted to Lee” and several times asked her to marry him, but always when he was “very drunk,” according to the poet Richard Howard.36 Another friend recalled that Ossorio was sort of “appealing,” but Lee said that she found Ossorio “revolting”37 and refused to marry him. Krasner saw Ossorio often after Pollock’s death and she was friendly with Dragon, which some were not.

Ossorio also supported Krasner’s work and continued to act as her patron. In 1957, Ossorio joined the ranks of dealers when, together with artists John Little and Elizabeth Parker, he opened the Signa Gallery in East Hampton at 53 Main Street, a space that was formerly a small market. Financed by Ossorio, this was the first commercial gallery in the area devoted to contemporary vanguard work. The gallery’s profile was high, and its openings became popular social events, attracting enthusiastic crowds of five hundred people.38 Krasner showed regularly at the Signa Gallery, which lasted for four years.

For Krasner, being able to show her paintings meant continuing to exist in the art world in a meaningful way even after Pollock’s death caused many to define her as an artist’s widow rather than as an artist. During the summer of 1958, Krasner participated in the second season’s first show called “The Artists’ Vision: 1948–1958,” in which she showed Continuum (1949, a canvas on loan from Ossorio and not for sale), a collage called The City (1953, not for sale), and Four, a canvas of 1957, for which she asked $1,000. She also participated in the Signa’s third show that season, which was called “The Human Image” and, thanks to Ossorio, projected an international perspective by including, among others, the work of Jean Dubuffet, the Dutch artist Karel Appel, as well as sculpture by David Smith and James Rosati, in addition to pictures by Pollock, Hartigan, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and the gallery’s founders.39 Krasner also showed Prophecy (1956, misdated in the catalogue as 1951), which was the canvas she had left on her easel when she left Pollock to go to Europe in 1956, just before his death. Since Ossorio already had purchased the work for $720 from the Martha Jackson Gallery, it was not for sale,

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but Krasner’s agreement to have it in this particular show marks her public acknowledgment of the work’s “human” or figurative image.40 Ossorio’s role as dealer and financial backer of the Signa Gallery did not disrupt his friendship with Krasner. It was at a dinner party at Ossorio’s home, for instance, during the summer of 1959, that Krasner met the English art dealer David Gibbs, who was visiting along with Parsons.

Krasner soon passed over an eager Clement Greenberg and hired the sly and flirtatious Gibbs to manage the Pollock estate, including marketing it in Europe. Later, in 1961, when she prepared to go to London for the opening of a selection of Pollock’s work to be shown at Marlborough Fine Art, it was Ossorio who convinced her to have the designer Charles James, known for his romantic “architectural clothes,” create a wardrobe for her trip. Ossorio’s desire to influence Krasner’s appearance might be viewed more as empathetic concern for the significance of his friend’s public debut in England than as any kind of a sexist put-down.

Most important to Krasner personally was Ossorio’s direct support of her painting. When she needed money, he purchased several of what she referred to as her “Little Image” paintings made from 1947 to 1949. One, a 1949 canvas, Untitled, he gave to the Museum of Modern Art in 1969, where it was shown in “The New American Painting and Sculpture: The First Generation.”41 Krasner’s art can also be seen as having influenced Ossorio. Her mosaic table with its bold combination of bright colored shapes of broken tesserae and glass, keys, pebbles, shells, jewelry, and coins must have appealed to Ossorio’s eclectic taste and preference for color. His admiration for the tables and their diverse materials is surely reflected in his own work, especially his “Congregations” of the 1960s. Several of these are, like her tables, even in round format.42 After Pollock’s death, Krasner continued to show her own work in East Hampton even as she promoted Pollock’s work around the world. Beginning in 1968, she showed her work together with Ossorio and other local artists at Ashawagh Hall, an unpretentious community center not far from her home in the Springs. Krasner continued to see Ossorio socially, and he was among the many friends whom she enlisted to read aloud to her, probably because she was what is now called dyslexic.43 Ossorio’s relationship to Krasner and Pollock was a friendship with constant engagement and exchange. He functioned as a friend, a colleague, and a patron. He collected and was influenced by both of their work and he offered them intellectual stimulation, financial support, and access to European artists and critics from Dubuffet to Michel Tapié. They in turn introduced him to the East Hampton artist colony, which they helped to found and where he became a fixture.

“It was always Lee and Jackson that Ted and I knew; it was not Jackson alone, and there were enough complications without my pushing into a new relationship.”

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1 See B. H. Friedman, Alfonso Ossorio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1973), 17.

2 Alfonso A. Ossorio, interview conducted by Forrest Selvig, 19 November 1968, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/alfonso-ossoriointerview-5517 (hereafter cited as Ossorio interview, 19 November 1968).

3 See Loan Exhibition of Work of Five Contemporary English Artists: Engravings, Drawings, Water Colours, Illustrated Books, & Small Carvings, Introduction by A. Graham Carey; catalogued by Alfonso Ossorio (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). Ossorio, who lent wood engravings and copper engravings, was one of eleven lenders.

4 Picasso’s Guernica was shown at the Valentine Gallery in New York for three weeks in May 1939. From that November, it was at the Museum of Modern Art in a Picasso retrospective exhibition.

5 Ossorio interview, 19 November 1968. Parsons was at the time still working at the Wakefield Gallery in New York.

6 Howard Devree, “A Reviewer’s Notebook,” New York Times, 23 November 1941.

7 Ossorio interview, 19 November 1968.

10 Clement Greenberg, “Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers,” The Nation, 19 February 1949, reprinted in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:285–286.

23 Howard Devree, “Artists of Today: One-Man Shows Include Recent Paintings by Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey,” New York Times, 3 December 1950.

32 Helen A. Harrison and Constance A. Denne, Hamptons Bohemia: Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), 76. The estate had once been owned by the painter-designers Albert and Adele Herter.

11 Grace Hartigan, interview conducted by Julia Link Haifley, 10 May 1979, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-gracehartigan-12326.

24 Betty Parsons quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 134.

33 Betty Parsons quoted in Gruen, Party’s Over Now, 238.

25 “Chaos, Damn It!,” Time, 20 November 1950.

34 Potter, To a Violent Grave, 207.

26 Quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 130.

35 Ossorio quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 236.

12 Ossorio interview, 19 November 1968.

27 Krasner quoted in John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), 232–233.

36 Richard Howard, interview conducted by Gail Levin, 18 January 2007.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Alfonso Ossorio, interview conducted by Judith Wolfe, in Alfonso Ossorio: 1940–1980 (East Hampton, N.Y.: Guild Hall Museum, 1980), 7.

16 See Gail Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 157.

17 Ossorio interview, 19 November 1968.

18 Lee Krasner to Alfonso Ossorio, 1950, quoted in Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene V. Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 4:247.

8 Friedman, Ossorio, 32.

9 Sam Hunter, “Among the New Shows,” New York Times, 30 January 1949.

21 Clement Greenberg quoted in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 134.

19 Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 121–122.

20 Marvin Jay Pollock to Frank Pollock, 3 December 1950, quoted in Pollock: Catalogue Raisonné, 4:255.

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22 Friedman, Ossorio, 42.

28 Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon, 6 January 1951, Pollock: Catalogue Raisonné, 4:257, D93.

29 Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio, late January 1951, Pollock: Catalogue Raisonné, 4:257, D94.

30 Jackson Pollock to Alfonso Ossorio, later January 1951, Pollock: Catalogue Raisonné, 4:257, D94.

31 Ellen G. Landau, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), chronology, 310, erroneously reports that Pollock was already seeing the “Sullivanian” therapist Ralph Klein, but in fact that treatment began several years later.

Robert Hobbs, in Lee Krasner (New York: Independent Curators International in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 116, repeats this error. On Fox’s approach see, Eva Maria Blum and Richard H. Blum, Alcoholism: Modern Psychological Approaches to Treatment (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1974), 174–175 and 245.

17

37 Cile Downs, interview conducted by Gail Levin, 21 August 2007.

38 “Signa Gallery Opens with Distinguished Guests,” East Hampton Star, 25 July 1957.

39 Signa Gallery press release for “The Human Image,” 25 July– August 1958, East Hampton, NY, microfilm reel 3984, frame 94, Signa Gallery Records, AAA. 40 Martha Jackson to Lee Krasner, 8 August 1960, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, AAA, apologizing for the delay in payment to her for Prophecy, of which $120 went to Signa Gallery for its commission.

41 See Landau, Krasner: Catalogue Raisonné, numbers 217, 231, 236, 237, 265, 302, 307, and 418.

42 See Friedman, Ossorio, plate 128 (Wreath of Eyes, 1963), and plate 130 (Halcyon, 1963).

43 On Krasner, dyslexia, and her desire to be read to, see Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography, 52–53 and 377.

Alfonso Ossorio and Zen The extent and direction of artistic influence among Alfonso Ossorio, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner has not been sufficiently studied.

Scholars have credited artists Robert Motherwell and others with introducing Zen ideas to the artists of the New York School, but it is likely that Ossorio also had some part in disseminating Zen concepts in East Hampton in spring 1952, when he began to see Pollock and Krasner regularly. Their discussions of Zen may have influenced Harold Rosenberg’s famous essay “The American Action Painters,” published at the end of the year.1 We know that among the books Ossorio acquired in that year, possibly as early as that spring, was Langdon Warner’s just published The Enduring Art of Japan.2 Warner, a Harvard professor, Asian art expert, and one-time student of Okakura Tenshin,3 had taught art history at Harvard when Ossorio was a student there.

Warner’s book (and probably his teachings) contained an introduction to Zen, and his bibliography listed Daisetz T. Suzuki’s 1934 Introduction to Zen Buddhism, a book much read in art circles in New York during the 1950s, and most probably read by Ossorio while still at Harvard.4 Warner’s introduction notes how “in the practice of putting down their paintings in ink on paper, Zen artists discovered that the principle of muga (it is not I who is doing this) opens the gate for the necessary, essential truth to flow in. When the self does not control the drawing, meaning must. The principle runs all through Zen teachings, especially where action is involved.”5 Suzuki had written in his earlier book that in a state of muga “the unconscious is realized” and described “a state of ecstasy in which there is no sense of ‘I am doing it.’”6 In muga, he explained, “your natural faculties [are] set in a consciousness free from thoughts, reflections, or affectations of any kind.”7 Buying his old professor’s new book made Ossorio focus on Zen concepts, with which he was already familiar from Suzuki’s book. It is extremely likely that he discussed such things with Pollock and Krasner when they carried on their wideranging discussions of art.

In summer 1952, the critic Harold Rosenberg sometimes joined his East Hampton friends Pollock, Krasner, and Ossorio when they talked about art.8 It appears that hearing about muga influenced him as he wrote his essay, which appeared in Art News in December.

Rosenberg wrote, for example: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.”9 Furthermore, when Rosenberg observed that “The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material

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1 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, December 1952, 22–23, 48–50.

6 See William Barrett, ed. Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 349.

2 Langdon Warner, The Enduring Art of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), copy inscribed on the half-title page in the artist’s hand: “Alfonso Ossorio ’52 East Hampton,” collection of the author.

7 Ibid.

3 Tenshin was a Japanese scholar who was invited to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1904. See Constance J. S. Chen, “Transnational Orientals: Scholars of Art, Nationalist Discourses, and the Question of Intellectual Authority,” Journal of Asian American Studies 9, no.

3 (2006), 215–242.

4 Daisetz T. Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Kyoto: The Eastern Buddhist Society, 1934). New York artists were more likely to have read the 1949 edition published by the New York Philosophical Library.

5 Warner, The Enduring Art of Japan, 101.

in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would result from this encounter,” he again evoked the Zen action that is “consciousness free from thoughts.”10 Eleven years later Rosenberg described the state of painting in 1952 more specifically: “Art in the service of politics declined after the war, but ideology has by no means relaxed its hold on American painting. Zen, psychoanalysis, Action art, purism, anti-art—and their dogmas and programs—have replaced the Marxism and regionalism of the thirties. It is still the rare artist who trusts his work to the intuitions that arise in the course of creating it.”11 Recent interviews with Ossorio’s longtime assistant, artist Mike Solomon, suggest that Ossorio’s ideas about art carried weight.

Solomon told me that Ossorio complained that during conversations with both Rosenberg and Greenberg he felt that he intimidated them.12 Ossorio’s contributions to theories of postwar painting have not yet received their due.

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8 Mike Solomon, interview conducted by Gail Levin, 16 February 2011 (hereafter cited as Solomon interview, 16 February 2011). Solomon, founding director of the Ossario Foundation, met Ossorio through his father, artist Syd Solomon.

9 Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 22.

10 Ibid.

11 Harold Rosenberg, “Painting Is a Way of Living,” New Yorker, 1 February 1963; reprinted as “De Kooning: 1.

Painting Is a Way of Living,” in Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1966), 90.

12 Solomon interview, 16 February 2011.

SUSAN MOR G AN

A curious eye, wide and glistening, floats across the cover of a 1966 exhibition catalogue for “A Selection of Paintings, Drawings, Collages, and Sculptures from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Billy Wilder,” a show of ninety diverse works, an invigorating array that glides confidently through centuries and styles.1 Although the lustrous eyeball, captured in extreme close-up, is an eighteenth-century French painting by an unknown artist, the dark orb inscribed within a finely drawn ellipse manages to look both familiar and startling, an iconic image delivered in an unexpected way. As Billy Wilder, the urbane and sharp-witted writer-director remarked, it’s an eyeball that could easily be mistaken for a work by Magritte or called upon to stand in for the all-seeing CBS logo. “A Selection of Paintings” presents a highly inquisitive miscellany—an Eskimo grave marker, a Calder stabile, a still life by Giorgio Morandi, a faux diploma by Saul Steinberg are just a sampling—which provides an enticing glimpse into another Wilder, the indefatigable art collector.

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Opposite: Billy Wilder. Photograph © John Bryson/Sygma/Corbis.

Anonymous, The Right Eye, French, 18th century.

Billy Wilder was born in 1906, in the Austro-Hungarian railway town of Sucha, now part of Poland. He grew up in Vienna during the innovative design era of the Wiener Werkstätte; later, in recounting the art and style influences of his youth, he often recalled his grandmother’s Thonet bentwood rocking chair2 and a contraband reproduction of an Egon Schiele drawing.

“It started, actually, in Vienna, when I was going to the Lycée, a high school,” explained Wilder when quizzed about his fervent interest in art. “Somebody brought a copy of a Schiele drawing, rather pornographic for its day. That kind of made its rounds under the desks, and they caught one guy and he was expelled, for about a week or so, until the parents came. I started inquiring about Schiele, and he began my undying interest in art.”3 It’s a distinctly Wilderian response, a smart admixture of romance and cynicism unconcerned with the whiff of myth-making.

By the time he was nineteen, Wilder had dropped out of university, found work as a newspaper journalist, and claimed to have interviewed Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, and Sigmund Freud in a single day.4 While writing about Paul Whiteman, the American jazz orchestra leader who’d recently commissioned George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Wilder joined the band’s European tour and moved on with them to Berlin. The young writer quickly settled in the new city, frequenting avantgarde–endorsed coffee houses, composing screenplays, and buying art for the first time. He also met the Perls family: Kaethe Perls, an established gallerist who worked closely with Picasso and Edvard Munch, and her husband, historian Hugo Perls. The Perls lived in one of the first houses designed by Mies van der Rohe, and their sons, Frank and Klaus, were Wilder’s contemporaries and both students of art history.5 In 1933, following the rise of Hitler and the burning of the Reichstag, Wilder fled Berlin for Paris and, soon, America. He sold all his new Bauhaus furniture and his Graham-Paige cabriolet, a stylish American automobile famed for its rapid acceleration. With his money purportedly hidden beneath his hat band and a dozen Toulouse-Lautrec posters rolled up under his arm, Wilder was catapulted into a new life. He landed in Hollywood and, by 1934, was at work on the Columbia Pictures lot.

Wilder also began to buy art seriously and later wisecracked to at least one interviewer that he’d started to “collect art before he started to collect money.”6 In 1939, when his Berlin friend and fellow émigré Frank Perls arrived in Los Angeles and opened a gallery, the two joined up in a vigorous art quest; for thirty-five years, until

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Above: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, 1894. Digital image © 2009 Museum Associates LACMA/Art Resource, NY. Left: Billy Wilder telegram to Los Angeles gallery owner Frank Perls, 3 October 1950.

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Perls’s death in 1975, they pursued art together—hunting, buying, selling, and rallying against frauds while taking considerable delight all along the way.

In 1963, Wilder celebrated the success of Some Like It Hot with a spending spree: he bought one of the taboo Schiele drawings he’d coveted as a teenager, a painting by Paul Klee, a Braque still life, and Balthus’s 1957 La Toilette, an astonishing portrait of the artist’s teenage niece stripped bare save for her high white socks and red slippers. The following year, when Kiss Me, Stupid failed at the box office, he consoled himself by buying Aristide Maillol sculptures, Picasso drawings, and paintings by Paul Klee and Joan Miró.7 According to Vincent Price, the actor famous for both his hauteur and talent for horror and democratic attitude toward art-historical erudition, Wilder was a “really avaricious collector.”8 With art conservator Richard Saar, who restored everything in the director’s collection from Pre-Columbian ceramics to the Balthus oil painting, Wilder liked to joke that he’d picked it all up during the war, trading packs of cigarettes for works of art.9“ I don’t have a collection,” Wilder explained, Alexej von Jawlensky, Blue Mouth, 1917. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Image Christie's/Superstock.

I have accumulations, like a squirrel. . . . I never collected paintings, sculptures African or Oceanic art to protect me against inflation. When I’m crazy about a canvas, I could never envision selling it. Nor would I separate myself from a dog I love. It’s a sickness, I don’t know how to stop myself. Call it bulimia, if you want—or curiosity, or passion, I have some Impressionists, some Picassos from every period, some mobiles by Calder. I also collect tiny Japanese trees, glass paperweights, and Chinese vases. Name an object, and I collect it.10

In 1989, Wilder decided to place part of his collection up for auction at Christie’s in New York. The reasons given for his decision were lively, convincing, and characteristically irreverent: insurance fees were overwhelming; Audrey, his beloved “widow-to-be” would be strapped with enormous taxes in the future; and he didn’t want to miss the fun of attending the auction and the thrill of being able to see and hear the buyers. The Wilder collection sold for $32.6 million, more than Wilder had ever earned during his long and invigoratingly varied Hollywood career.

“You know, I am all over the place—every category of pictures I have made, good, bad, or indifferent,” observed Wilder at ninety-two in a conversation with young writer-director Cameron Crowe. “I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. . . .

I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did Witness for the Prosecution [1957]. Then I was bored with it, so I moved on. As a matter of fact, whenever I am very miserable, I do a comedy. And whenever I’m in a wonderful mood, then I make a serious picture. I make a serious picture, a film noir, but then it gets boring, so I go back to a comedy.”

Curiosity, admitted Wilder, was the very thing that kept him alive.11

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1 David Gebhard and Henry J. Seldis, A Selection of Paintings, Drawings, Collages, and Sculptures from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Billy Wilder (Santa Barbara: The Art Gallery of the University of California at Santa Barbara, 1966), box 20, folder 25, the Frank Perls Papers and Frank Perls Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (AAA).

2 Charlotte Chandler, Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 23.

3 Billy Wilder, interview conducted by Paul Karlstrom, 14 February 1995, AAA, www. aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories-interview-billywilder-13330.

4 James Linville, “Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1,” in The Paris Review Interviews (New York: Picador USA, 2006), 411.

5 Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York: Hyperion, 1998), 103.

6 Axel Madsen, Billy Wilder (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), 13.

7 Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard, 497.

8 Vincent Price, interview conducted by Paul Karlstrom, 6–14 August 1992, AAA, www. aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/oral-historyinterview-vincent-price-13227.

9 Author’s conversation with Saar’s daughter, Alison Saar, 27 March 2011.

10 Michel Ciment, “Interview with Billy Wilder,” Positif, July/ August 1983, 15¬28.

11 Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder, ed.

Karen Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 19, 210.

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Hamilton Easter The Benefactor from Brooklyn W e n dy J e ff e r s “What you fundamentally have to understand about Hamilton Easter Field,” the aging Lloyd Goodrich shouted into the telephone in 1986, “was that he was a homosexual. The townsfolk of Ogunquit [Maine] didn’t understand him, and his behavior occasionally scandalized them.”1 I had telephoned Goodrich because I was writing about Niles Spencer, an artist who was part of the circle around Field (1873– 1922) in Ogunquit, where in 1911 Field had established a summer school and colony dedicated to experimental art and expression.2 Invited by Field, a number of progressive American artists descended on the small New England fishing village each summer to live and work in refurbished houses and fishing shacks, owned by Field, scattered about Perkins Cove. “Field hosted drunken costume parties that lasted well into the night, and by day, he gave lectures on Cézanne and organized plein-air drawing classes with nude models.

But he was terribly, terribly important,” Goodrich insisted, “and he died much too young.” 3 A collector, patron, educator, artist, and critic, Field was only forty-nine years old when he died of pneumonia in 1922. Today, he is largely remembered for introducing the Ogunquit artists to American folk art. Edith Halpert, owner of the American Folk Art Gallery, called him “undeniably the pioneer,” 4 and her partner, Holger Cahill, wrote that “from Field, such artists as the Zorachs

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Claes Oldenburg, Three-Way Plug (Cube Tap), 1970.

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“ FIELD hoste d dru n ke n costume parties that l aste d we ll into th e nig ht, an d by day, h e gave lec tu r es on Céz an n e an d organize d plein air dr awing cl asses with n u de mode ls .

But h e was te r ribly, te r ribly important, an d h e die d much too you ng .”

[Marguerite and William], Robert Laurent, [Yasuo] Kuniyoshi, and others around the Ogunquit, Maine, summer colony, got the folk art fever . . . [this was also] my first contact.” 5 While Field was not the first American collector of folk art, he influenced scores of artists who attended the summer colony to take an interest in it. Through Field, the artists discovered the spare, simple aesthetics of these indigenous American art forms. Handmade, from a not-too-distant past, folk art embodied a tradition of unembellished clarity and honesty.

After my conversation with Goodrich, I began to collect everything I could find about Field, discovering only one or two published essays and a single roll of microfilm at the Archives of American Art of now-lost material.6 Fortunately, in 1920 Field founded a magazine of criticism called The Arts, in which he was forthcoming about his artistic experiences and his philosophy.7 For two years Field wrote in a breezy, conversational style about a wide variety of topics, but his underlying goals as editor, publisher, and principal contributor were more far-reaching. The Arts actively sought to build an American audience for contemporary art, promoting connoisseurship, a broad cultural education, and an enthusiasm for all of the arts.

Field threw himself into the new enterprise with some success.

In 1921 he noted that although he spent $2000 to launch the magazine, six months later his audience was expanding and he was able to attract enough advertisers to offset his expenses.8 The magazine reflected not only his taste but also his zeal, his intelligence, and his cultural ambitions.

Who was Hamilton Easter Field? Both of Field’s parents were Havilands, related to the American family who founded Haviland China in 1839,9 and part of a closely knit progressive community of Quakers in Brooklyn, New York. Hamilton’s father, Aaron Field (1829–1897), was a partner of Field, Chapman, and Fenner, one of the country’s largest dry goods wholesalers. The firm occupied a large double building in Manhattan at 364–366 Broadway, just across the East River from the Field home in Brooklyn Heights. Aaron was a skilled auctioneer who imported goods like Japanese silk, Belgium linen, and Irish lace, which he sold to the highest bidder across the country and Canada. About 1855, Aaron built a house at 136 Hicks Street10 and married Charlotte Cromwell. When Charlotte died seven years later, she left three small children.11 In 1865, Aaron married Lydia Seaman Haviland (1838–1917), Hamilton’s mother. Before her marriage, Lydia purchased the 1845 house built by her father at 106 Columbia Heights. It was the house where she was born, and because Quakers recognized the property rights of both sexes, it remained in her name. Built on the waterside of the street, 106 Columbia Heights was one of a series of townhouses once known as “Quaker’s Row.”12 It was in this house with sweeping views of the East River and Manhattan that Hamilton Easter Field was born in 1873.

In addition to his stepbrothers and stepsister, Hamilton had an older brother, Herbert, and a younger sister. John A. Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, lived next door at 110 Columbia

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Heights, where he watched the progress of his work’s construction from his windows.

Hamilton’s mother, Lydia, was a forward-thinking Quaker who valued intelligence and individuality. As a president of the Brooklyn Woman’s Club and a trustee of the Brooklyn Industrial School and Home for Destitute Children, she hosted discussions on ethics, suffrage, abolition, education, and domesticity. She was also an inveterate collector, something she passed down to her son Hamilton. In addition to art and antiques, she gathered an array of ancestral painted furniture and clothing, including a family wedding dress dating from 1750.

Hamilton Easter Field attended school at the Schermerhorn Street Meeting House (now Brooklyn Friends), where, in addition to the general curriculum, he studied French and drawing through the sixth grade. Field continued his education at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He enrolled at both Columbia (1893) and Harvard (1894) Universities with the intention of becoming an architect, but left each institution after only a brief stay, citing exhaustion.

The Field family traveled often to Europe, and Hamilton was reportedly conversant in five languages. On his twenty-first birthday, in 1894, he sailed for France to study art,13 enrolling in the Académie Colarossi, studying under Raphaël Collin (1850–1916) and Gustave Claude Étienne Courtois (1852–1923). Later in his life, Field cited a wide variety of early French influences from this time, including the artists Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), and Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904). Despite being an excellent draftsman, Field failed to evolve as a mature artist. “His restless energy and wide versatility of interests,” according to Elsa Rogo, may have prevented him from becoming a dedicated painter.14 His work in the studio did, however, enable him to understand art on a much deeper level, something that undoubtedly sharpened his critical faculties. Field later wrote: Those were the days when men were avid of new sensations, when everywhere French youth rejoiced in the fact that the decadence had set in and that . . . all moral obligations to the state were at an end. . . . We who lived in France during that epoch which was called “Fin-de-Siècle” do not need to be told that the ultimate effect of the movement has proved wholesome.15

Field took to life in Paris quickly, and he later reminisced, As an art student in the Parisian Latin Quarter, I had a studio on the Rue de Seine. It was larger than I needed so I asked Yevgeny Lanceray [1875–1946], the son of the Russian sculptor, to share it with me. There we lived and thrived for three years.

Our studio became a rendezvous for the radicals in Russian art—[Konstantin] Somoff [1869–1939], [Léon] Bakst [1867–1942], Alexandre Benois [1870–1960], the poet [Konstantin] Balmont [1867–1942] were our daily guests and the talk was ever of painting, music, and the dance. 16

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Hamilton Easter Field’s The Arts, 1921–1922.

“When I visited Benois in Petrograd in 1899, the review known as Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) had just been founded.” 17 Like the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau in Paris, and the Aesthetic Movement in Britain, Mir Iskusstva, under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), embraced all of the arts: music, theater, graphic design, interior decoration, fashion, literature, and the visual arts. The ideas Field absorbed in Paris and Russia became the underpinnings of his philosophy not only as an artist and intellectual but also as an individual.

What a remarkable time for a young man of independent means to be living in Paris! Field wrote: When, in 1894, I went to Paris to study art, the first meal I took in the city was at the home of a cousin in the Avenue de Villiers. As I came into the living room, I was struck by a landscape with jockeys and horses and a flag-pole which cut the picture vertically into two sections. The years have gone by but the impression I then received has remained and that landscape by Degas has been one of the strongest influences in my art life.18

Edgar Degas, Jockeys before the Race, 1878–1879. © The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Opposite: Kitagawa Utamaro, “Kaiyoikomachi”: A Geisha in Her Lover’s Room, from Futaba gusa Nanakomachi, Edo period, ca. 1803.

In Paris, Field was introduced to many of the French modernists by his cousin Charles, the son of David Haviland, founder of the Haviland China Company.

Charles had married the daughter of the leading French art critic and an early champion of the Impressionists, Philippe Burty (1830–1890), who coined the term “Japonisme,” and Burty’s sons, Frank and Paul, were Hamilton’s contemporaries. It was at Charles’ apartment that Field was introduced to the sophisticated Parisian artistic milieu that he later sought to emulate in Brooklyn Heights.

Field’s new connections had an almost immediate effect on the young man. Encouraged by Burty and Collin, Field began to collect Japanese prints avidly. Utamaro’s Geisha in Her Lover’s Room was part his print collection, which ultimately numbered well over a thousand.The Brooklyn Museum now owns more than 140 Japanese prints once owned by Field; assembling the group was his first foray into encyclopedic collecting, something he later repeated in other fields.

In April 1897, on the eve of departing for Europe, Field’s father died suddenly in New York. Field returned to the United States for the funeral, but after three years in Paris, Brooklyn held little appeal.

His inheritance from his father’s business and real estate holdings allowed Field a small income, and with it came the freedom to return to Europe to live.19 In 1898, Field discovered a thriving summer artists’ colony in Concarneau, Brittany, where he spent several seasons. In 1900 Field met the Laurent family, who managed a lodging house in Concarneau for artists. Madame Laurent was an excellent cook, and their precocious young son, Robert, reportedly approached Field one

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day when he was painting, asking many questions. Robert was seventeen years younger than Field but this encounter marked the beginning of a relationship that continued until Field’s death. In the spring of 1899, Field exhibited his work for the first time at the Paris Salon and included several of the paintings he had made in Concarneau.The time he spent in Brittany taught him that an artistic community in a seaside village could be an important educational as well as social phenomenon and it influenced the colony he later created in Ogunquit.

Lydia Field spent the first several years of her widowhood in Zurich, with Hamilton’s brother Herbert, not yet ready to return to an empty house in Brooklyn. About 1901 she moved to Paris to be close to her youngest son, and they lived together in different locales for the rest of her life. In 1902, Field invited the Laurent family to the United States to help his mother open her house in Brooklyn Heights.

That summer, Hamilton and Robert traveled up the New England coastline to Ogunquit, Maine, where they discovered Perkins Cove.

In 1902, Ogunquit was already a thriving arts colony—Charles Woodbury had established a summer art school there in 189820—but Field and Laurent envisioned an American equivalent of Concarneau, and Field began to buy property in the area. For several summers, the Field and Laurent families lived together in Ogunquit, but in 1904, when Robert was obliged to matriculate, the Laurent family returned to France. Through Field, Robert found employment in Paris as an assistant to Ernest Le Véel, a noted dealer in Japanese prints. For several years, Field and his companions moved back and forth between Europe and the United States and spent summers in Ogunquit.

In 1907, Laurent, Field, and Lydia decamped to the Hotel Russie in Rome. Field established a studio on the nearby Via Margutta, and Laurent found employment with a frame maker who taught him to carve. Field, who had a remarkable ability to meet and collect friends, sought out the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson in nearby Florence. In this 1909 photograph taken in Florence, Field appears confident and jaunty. His checkered pants and formal shirt are a marked change from the plain Quaker attire of his upbringing.21 Even though Field still identified himself primarily as an artist, collecting was beginning to take more of his attention and time.

He bought widely—acquiring sixteenth-century French tapestries; Egyptian and antique Greek sculpture; eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Japanese prints; Chinese porcelains; Japanese and Chinese screens and paintings; Old Master prints by Rembrandt, Dürer, Tiepolo, and Goya; fourteenth-century painted panels from Siena; English paintings by William Hogarth; prints, drawings, and etchings by such French painters as Fantin-Latour, Daumier, Géricault, Delacroix, and members of the Barbizon School. He also acquired works by Degas and Picasso. Field and his entourage continued

FIELD might have BECOME a

dedicated painter, WERE IT NOT FOR HIS restless energy and ve r satilit y of inte rests .

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to move back and forth between Europe and the United States for several years, but the bulk of his collection was housed in Brooklyn.

Field followed his passions as a collector, and once he had exhausted one interest, he turned his attention to something else. The artist Maurice Sterne wrote that Field was an “amateur in the truest sense—he painted, taught, criticized, collected for the sheer joy it gave him and because he loved art in all its manifest expressions.” 22 Purging his holdings to finance his next collecting interest was something Field did periodically throughout his life, beginning in 1907. That year he sold 200 Japanese prints at auction. As one of the first Americans to acquire this type of work, Field’s collection attracted much interest. The New York auction drew the major buyers, including the architect Edward Colonna (1862–1948), who traveled from Montreal; the artist Samuel Isham (1855–1914); and Field’s cousin Paul Haviland. The sale realized $1,617 (today’s equivalent of about $30,000), and Field turned his attention to contemporary American art.

In November 1908, only months after the infamous Macbeth Gallery exhibition of “The Eight” in New York, Field bought The Recall of Spring by Arthur B. Davies. He paid Macbeth in installments, citing the financial panic of the previous month, and his final check for $100 was mailed from London, where he had traveled to exhibit an illuminated manuscript from his collection at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. Later that year Burlington Magazine ran his first published essay, which was on the eighteenth-century Japanese printmaker Torii Kiyonaga.23 In 1910, no doubt prompted by his mother, who was now seventytwo-years old, Field decided to return to the United States. Hoping to recreate the milieu he had found so stimulating during his years in Europe, Field settled in the house on Columbia Heights and began to issue invitations to friends and acquaintances. His mother became the admired hostess to Hamilton’s wide circle of friends and presided over a weekly Sunday evening salon where musical, intellectual, and artistic talents gathered.24 William H. Fox (1858–1952), director of the Brooklyn Museum, was a frequent visitor and wrote: “To this house came many persons including distinguished strangers from overseas.

Society folks, artists, actors, musicians, writers, and many of those with whom he had battled in controversy, enjoyed Mr. Field’s hospitality and on one occasion, I saw in his parlors an East Indian princess.”25 From this time on, Field began the various artistic activities for which he is best known today. In 1911, Field paid the second highest price at auction for a large painting by John La Farge.26 That summer, he opened the Ogunquit School of Painting, with classes and residences from May through September. In 1912, Field purchased 104 Columbia Heights, next door, where he founded what he called Ardsley House, which offered “room and board for persons of refinement and culture.” 27 On the ground floor he opened the Ardsley School of Modern Art and Studios, offering courses in life drawing, painting, and carving. An art gallery with changing exhibitions was open during the winter months.

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In 1916, Field purchased the Roebling house at 110 Columbia Heights, effectively reuniting Quaker Row and enlarging the Ardsley Studio program. Wood Gaylor (1883–1957), a frequent guest both in Ogunquit and Brooklyn, recalled that the Columbia Heights houses were really built on wharves that went down to the riverfront and had deep cellars. The lowest of these was the wine cellar. . . .

Field [had a] private [indoor] swimming pool . . . about two flights down below street level . . . [with] a marble rubbing slab . . . a [sort of] Turkish harem effect [with] a . . . raised platform with drapes around it and . . . an Oriental feeling [to] the whole room.28

Another visitor, dealer-collector Martin Birnbaum, paid homage to Field and his collection: He was at his best while showing the beautiful possessions that he had collected . . . he loved to draw aside the curtains of the rear windows and reveal to the astonished visitor the remarkable panorama of the East River waterfront, with its bridges and the innumerable gleaming lights of Manhattan beyond. [H]e hung his Winslow Homer, [John] La Farge, Arthur B. Davies, Max Weber, or [Alphonse] Legros beside Chinese silks or above Greek marbles and Javanese bronzes, but a false note was rarely struck.29

Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman, 1910. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Opposite: Winslow Homer, The Turtle Pound, 1898.

Every collector has a story about the one that got away, but for Hamilton Easter Field it was not one work but an important commission. In 1909, Field asked Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) to paint eleven paintings for his library, which housed a collection of first edition books in many languages.30 Picasso executed the commission, but Field never took possession for reasons that are not known, although the war may have played a role. Former Museum of Modern Art curators William Rubin and Judith Cousins identified eight of the eleven paintings made for the Field library.31 Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson wrote: “Had the decorations materialized, they would have constituted the most ambitious project of [Picasso’s] career—nothing less than an apotheosis of analytical Cubism—in which case, Field’s Brooklyn house would have rivaled Shchukin’s Moscow palace as a monument of modernism.” 32 Field had never commissioned anything on this scale before— but given his artistic ambitions, it was not out of character. The two men first met at the turn of the century in the Paris studio of Fantin-Latour.33 Laurent recalled that Picasso’s paintings at this time were selling for about 200 francs—well within what Field could afford.34 In 1911, Alfred Stieglitz wrote to Field from Paris that he had seen the “panels started” in Picasso’s studio and that they “promise[d] much.” 35 Field bought a drawing by Picasso that year from Stieglitz, but confided to his friend, the art critic Henry McBride (1867–1962), that he was afraid to hang them in his house

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for fear of upsetting his mother. McBride (who was also a Quaker and gay) doubted this explanation, knowing that Field’s mother had lived in Europe and was familiar with radical art.36 Whatever the explanation for the failed commission, Field’s admiration of Picasso never dimmed. Had it gone through, Hamilton Easter Field would have been remembered as Picasso’s most important early patron. Installed in Field’s library, observed by his steady stream of visitors, the paintings would likely have changed the course of modern art in this country.37 Writing about Picasso many years later Field recalled, “It would be difficult for an artist not to feel the charm of Picasso, whose eyes alone suggest a full, rich, emotional and intellectual nature. He looked like a genius just as Walt Whitman looks like a genius. You could not remain unmoved in his presence.”38 In the early teens, Field expanded the scope of his artistic programs in Brooklyn. He was very excited about the Armory Show of 1913—he knew all the principle organizers, many of whom had visited his house—and he bought at least one painting from the exhibition, a study of Puteaux by Jacques Villon. Field became president of the Brooklyn Artists Association, corresponding secretary of the Society of Independent Artists, and a founder of the Salons of America. In addition to developing the Ardsley Studio programs he

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Marsden Hartley, The Aero, 1914.

organized the exhibitions there, which he described as having rooms scaled to a house and not a modern gallery. In 1916, he organized an exhibition called “Impressionism, Post Impressionism, and Cubism” that included work by Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Man Ray, Abraham Walkowitz, Maurice Prendergast, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and William and Marguerite Zorach.

The exhibitions frequently garnered notice in the press, but sales were sparse. Bernard Karfiol recalled that after one of his shows at Ardsley Studios, nothing had sold, so Field bought everything.39 World War One brought unexpected changes in Field’s life. Laurent, now a U.S. citizen, enlisted in the Navy and was sent to France as an interpreter. Hartley spent most of 1917 living with Field, first at the Ogunquit Art Colony and then at Ardsley House in Brooklyn.40 That year (1917) Field’s mother died in the home where she had presided over a steady stream of visitors and guests. In addition to Jules Pascin, who spent the war years exiled in New York, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Hart Crane, Katherine Schmidt, Elsa Rogo, and Stefan Hirsch lived for extended periods at Ardsley House during these years. Field was fortunate to have been surrounded by so many friends at this time; when Laurent returned after the war, he brought with him a wife, and the dynamic of the Field household was further altered.

In 1919, Field became art editor and associate editor at Arts and Decoration and art editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, to which he contributed weekly columns.

The appointments marked the beginning of his career as a critic, the apotheosis of a lifetime of study and observation, of knowledge and discovery. Unfortunately, Field’s life was cut short tragically four years later, when, still running the thriving Arts, he died. At his death, Henry McBride wrote, Hamilton Field was a strange compound of contrasts. He was a Quaker and never let your forget it . . . and yet he lived in a house that might fairly be called palatial; he was laughably parsimonious about trifling matters, yet kept an excellent cellar and frequently dispensed good cheer; he had travelled much in foreign lands with access to the best society both here and abroad. . . . [H]e was well-grounded in the classics, both in literature and the arts, yet he was sensitively receptive to what was significant in all the latest forms of expression. This constant divergence in tendency made him frequently misunderstood, even by his associates . . . it was however, the wideness of his interests that peculiarly fitted him to be a writer . . . and gained for him the chief successes of his career. His residence . . . took on the aspects of a museum. . . . From top to bottom the house was filled with the fruits of travel and the spoils of collectorship­—for Field began collecting even as a student, and with uncanny precision.41

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Several individuals helped me assemble the information for this essay: Barbara Stern Shapiro, Rona Roob, Nancy Flentje, Marge Laurent, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, Leila Mattson of the Great Neck Library, Benjamin Gocker at the Brooklyn Collection of the Brooklyn Public Library, and of course, the remarkable staff of the Archives of American Art. 1 Lloyd Goodrich, interview conducted by Wendy Jeffers, August 1986. Goodrich was the former director of the Whitney Museum.

2 There are several different dates used for the beginning of the Ogunquit School; it was not until 1916 that either Lloyd Goodrich or Niles Spencer participated.

3 Goodrich began his career as an artist and attended Field’s Ogunquit School of Painting and Sculpture In addition to the students, Field invited such artists as Marsden Hartley, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Sterne and Walt Kuhn to Ogunquit, LLoyd Goodrich interview, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution.

4 Edith Halpert , [American Folk Art], typescript (lecture, Colonial Williamsburg, 2 February 1951), 7, microfilm 5636, frame 584, Downtown Gallery Records, AAA. 5 S. Holger Cahill, document, box 20, folder 17, Dorothy C. Miller papers, AAA.

6 Doreen Bolger, “Hamilton Easter Field and His Contribution to American Modernism,” American Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1988), 78–106; and Doreen Bolger, “Hamilton Easter Field and The Rise of Modern Art in America” (MA thesis, University of Delaware, 1973). Bolger’s essays are the basis for most subsequent writing on Field. Elsa Rogo, Foreword to Hamilton Easter Field Art Foundation Collection of Paintings and Sculpture, unpaginated, sponsored by the College Art Association, 1934–1935; Robert Laurent, The Hamilton Easter Field Art Foundation Collection [established in 1929],(Barn Gallery Associates, 1966); Edgar Allen Beem, “Summer Haunt: Hamilton Easter Field and the Ogunquit Art Colony,” Antiques and Fine Art (September/ October 1991), 77–81; and Hamilton Easter Field Papers, microfilm reel N/68-2, (AAA).

7 The Arts ceased publication after Field’s death in 1922. In January 1923, with underwriting from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, The Arts reappeared with Forbes Watson as editor.

8 “The Editor,” The Arts 1, no. 7, August–September 1921, he noted that in December 1920 he sold 1,400 issues and gave away 1,000. By August of 1921, he had sold 6,600 issues.

9 They were not, as has been stated elsewhere, related to Cyrus Field who installed the first transatlantic cable. They were second cousins, descended from John Haviland.

10 Surrogates Proceedings, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 July 1897.

11 Josephine Frost, The Havilands (privately published, 1913), courtesy of the Brooklyn Historical Society.

12 These houses were demolished in the late 1940s as part of Robert Moses’ planned Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

There is now a park where the houses once stood. The family spent their summers in nearby Great Neck, New York, at a working farm called Ardsley.

13 Field’s entry in the TwentyFifth Anniversary Report for Harvard Class of 1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1922), which was published after his death.

14 Rogo, Foreword to Hamilton Easter Field.

23 Hamilton Easter Field, “The Art of Kiyonaga as Illustrated in an American Collection,” Burlington Magazine 13, no. 64, July 1908, 237, 240, 243, 246–248.

24 Roger Fry, J. Alden Weir, and Arthur B. Davies always referred to Lydia with great affection.

Other guests included Elie Nadelman, Ernest Fenollosa, Elliot Daingerfield, Max Weber, Robert Henri, Paul Dougherty, Bryson Burroughs, Walt Kuhn, Alfred Stieglitz, Maurice Sterne, Henry McBride, and Gaston Lachaise.

31 William Stanley Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), “Appendix, The Library of Hamilton Easter Field,” 63–69. Rubin’s final comment on the subject was “Assuming that the Musée Picasso will allow me to publish Field’s letter and plans, now in its archives, and that there are no unresolvable [sic] problems with access to the documentation held by the Field family, I plan to pursue these and other aspects of the commission in a fuller study.”

Unfortunately, Rubin’s fuller study was never published.

15 Hamilton Easter Field, Arts and Decoration 11, no. 6, December 1919, 82–83.

25 “Men High in Art World Pay Tribute to Memory of Hamilton Easter Field, Artist and Art Critic,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 April 1922.

16 Hamilton Easter Field, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 17 March 1918.

26 “La Farge Sale Brings $17,738,” New York Times, 31 March 1911.

33 The Arts 3, no. 1, January 1921, 58.

17 Hamilton Easter Field, “Adolph Bolm and The Birthday of the Infanta,” Arts and Decoration 20, February 1919, 250.

27 Advertisement, Brooklyn Life, 22 November 1913.

34 Calculating 5 francs to the dollar, this would be about $450.

28 Wood Gaylor, “Reminiscences on an Art Career,” microfilm reel D160, frames 275–276, Samuel Wood Gaylor Papers, AAA.

35 Alfred Stieglitz to Hamilton Easter Field, 21 October 1911, Alfred Stieglitz Papers, box 19, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

29 Martin Birnbaum, The Last Romantic: The Story of More than a Half-Century in the World of Art (New York: Twayne, 1960), 48.

36 Henry McBride, “Hamilton Easter Field’s Career,” The Arts 3, no. 1, January 1923, 3.

18 Hamilton Easter Field, “Edgar Degas, Painter-Graver,” The Arts 1 no. 1, 4 December 1920, 8.

19 Aaron Field’s Great Neck estate was worth $15,000 in 1897, or about $600,000 today.

When he died, his financial assets were not listed. The family home on Columbia Heights, owned by Lydia Field, was not part of Aaron’s estate.

20 Joan Loria and Warren Seamans, Earth, Sea and Sky: Charles H. Woodbury, Artist and Teacher 1864–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 1988).

21 Hamilton Easter Field, “The Study and Criticism of Italian Art by Bernard Berenson” The Arts 1, no. 8, October 1921, 54.

22 Maurice Stern, “Field, The True Amateur,” The Arts 3, no. 1, January 1923, 7.

30 In 1922, Laurent auctioned the entire contents of Field’s library in Brooklyn. Complete editions of Shakespeare, Ruskin, Byron, William Morris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Brontë sisters, collected volumes of French poetry, Thomas Macaulay, Dante, Robert Browning, Fenollosa, George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, Giovanni Boccaccio, a seventeen-volume history of France from 1855, and an eighty-six volume collection of William D. Howells as well as an extensive collection of sheet music offer a glimpse of Field’s range of interests.

32 John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907– 1916 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2007), 164.

37 The archives and library of the Musée Picasso in Paris (closed for renovation, hence not available for study at this time) have correspondence between Field and Picasso. The Laurent family sold a letter from Picasso addressed to Field to an autograph dealer.

38 Hamilton Easter Field, “Frank Burty,” The Arts 1, no. 9, November 1921.

39 Carrie Boyd, Kathryn Ryan, Betty and William Willis, eds., The Cove: Perkins Cove at Ogunquit Maine (Lewiston, Me., 1976).

40 Aero was purchased in 1921 from an auction of Hartley’s work organized by Alfred Stieglitz.

41 McBride, “Hamilton Easter Field’s Career,” The Arts 3, no.1, January 1923, 3.

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A Monument to A merican Collecting

Flaminia GennariSa n t o r i

August Jaccaci a n d Not e wort h y Pa i n t i ngs i n A m e r ica n Pr i vat e Col l e ct ions

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Above and previous spread: John La Farge and August Floriano Jaccaci, Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections, New York, 1907, National Gallery of Art Library, Gift of Joseph E. Widener.

Opposite: Raphael and workshop, Portrait of Count Tommaso Inghirami, ca. 1516. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

In the winter of 1903, August Floriano Jaccaci (1856–1930), a European editor living in New York, conceived a fifteen-volume series that would praise and document, in the most lavish way, American art collectors and their paintings. The work, Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections, turned out to be one of the most extravagant publishing ventures ever attempted in the United States. Jaccaci engaged famous art critics to introduce the collections and an array of European art historians to assess the quality of the old and modern pictures selected.

The paintings were to be impeccably illustrated by photogravures and their provenances painstakingly researched; he planned to sell the series by subscription for $15,000 a set, or $1,000 a volume. Alas, the ambitious plan resulted in a monumental failure: in January 1905 the publisher went bankrupt, and only in 1907 was Jaccaci able to publish the first volume. Against all odds, he continued working on Noteworthy Paintings until 1913.

The making and unraveling of this extraordinary enterprise is told in thousands of letters, documents, and photographs found in Jaccaci’s papers at the Archives of American Art. The collection tells the story of an émigré who, together with a publisher of encyclopedia, a famous artist, and a journalist, hoped to make a million dollars out of the sudden fancy among rich Americans for Old Masters and Impressionists paintings. Ironically, it is precisely the absurdity of the enterprise that makes it reveal so clearly the social dynamics of American collecting during the first decade of twentieth century,1 when the market for fine arts in this country was taken over by professional art dealers, many of them from Europe.

By 1903, wealthy Americans had been buying contemporary European paintings for decades, but collecting Old Masters or French Impressionists was still a fairly new phenomenon. That year, Isabella Stewart Gardner completed Fenway Court, the housemuseum she had designed to display her collection, largely acquired with the advice of Bernard Berenson. The Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson was already a passionate collector of early Renaissance paintings, but his most important acquisitions were made after 1904. P. A. B. Widener, also from Philadelphia, followed the lead of

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his friend Johnson, but his collection began to be “important” only a few years later, when Berenson and Joseph Duveen took charge of it. John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Walters, another duo of friend-collectors, were interested in a wide variety of things, and paintings were just a facet of their omnivorous collecting. Benjamin Altman, Henry C. Frick, Louisine Havemeyer, Arabella Huntington, and many others had not come on the stage yet, nor had Duveen, the pre-eminent dealer in the field, or his competitor Roland Knoedler.

Early in the century, Jaccaci, like many others, sensed that art collecting was becoming a phenomenon that could generate a demand not only for the objects themselves, but also stir interest in the immaterial allure that went with them, especially the exclusive social rituals of collecting. He therefore conceived Noteworthy Paintings as both a vehicle to chronicle and legitimize American art collecting and the means for subscribers to acquire, for only $15,000, something of the social prestige and cultural distinction that went with it. For the émigré, the series had another objective: to consolidate his social status in New York high society.

When he began his project, Jaccaci was an influential player in the flourishing magazine industry, but for the so-called “smart set,” of which he yearned to be a part, he was still a newcomer.2 Very little is known of his origins. He was French, probably Corsican, and before arriving in New York in the early 1890s he had traveled widely.

He had published successful travel books about Spain, Sicily, and North Africa, and in 1903 he had just stepped down, after almost a decade, from his position as art director of the weekly McClure’s Magazine, the most successful periodical of the time.

To set his grandiose new project in motion, Jaccacci needed a recognized artworld personality whom collectors would trust. The ideal candidate was John La Farge (1835–1910), and in early 1903 Jaccaci successfully engaged him as co-editor of Noteworthy Paintings. La Farge was both an artist and a famous art critic, who had just published two popular collections of articles on Old Master paintings that had appeared in McClure’s. A close friend of Henry Adams, with whom he travelled in Japan and the South Seas, and an inspiring figure both for Adams and Henry James, La Farge had decorated some of the most lavish New York residences and was an acknowledged arbiter of taste for the American upper class.3

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41

In spring 1903 Jaccaci signed a contract with a successful publishing company of subscription books, Merrill and Baker, for at least ten volumes. The publishers enthusiastically embraced Jaccaci’s vision and embarked on a project unlike anything they had previously done; Noteworthy Paintings was planned as an ambitious scholarly enterprise, an example of fine printing, and a collectible object for millionaires. Clearly, the principals had no idea what they were getting into, as their eventual bankruptcy in early 1905 demonstrates.4 Having secured an investor, Jaccaci and La Farge began their quest for collectors. They identified about forty scattered throughout the country, including quite a few who owned just a few paintings of no particular importance. They wrote to each collector asking permission to photograph and study their paintings in order to include a selection of them in Noteworthy Paintings. Notwithstanding the breadth of their list, there are some glaring absences, namely,

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Benjamin Altman, Henry Walters, and most importantly, Morgan.

(In 1903 Altman had not yet began to seriously acquire Old Master paintings, and Walters and Morgan were more renowned for their collections of objets d’art than for their paintings.) Jaccaci tried in every possible way to induce Morgan to subscribe to the series as a buyer, but the collector never showed any interest in the project.

Thankfully, several of the country’s most famous collectors accepted. Isabella Stewart Gardner, at the time the most important collector of Old Master paintings in the country, agreed enthusiastically, but only because of La Farge’s involvement in the enterprise.

Charles Freer and John G. Johnson were both extremely supportive.

Johnson gave Jaccaci letters of introduction to European dealers and experts, and conversations with the Philadelphia collector shaped Jaccaci’s opinions about Old Master paintings and their connoisseurship and market. Understandably, with Gardner participating

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Opposite: Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) , Rape of Europa, 1560–1562. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Below: Piermatteo d’Amelia, The Annunciation, 1450–1503. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Sandro Botticelli, Virgin and Child with an Angel, early 1470s. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA/The Bridgeman Art Library.

and the offer of a free catalogue raisonné, produced in the most lavish way, most collectors accepted Jaccaci’s invitation to have their collections included in Noteworthy Paintings. Oddly, though, they were not expected to subscribe to the entire series, and, as it turned out, they rarely did.

Once the collectors agreed to take part in the project, their paintings were photographed. It was an immense task (five thousand was the estimated number of photographs needed for the entire undertaking), but photographs were indispensable, both to select the paintings and to give to the American critics and European experts hired to write about them.

At least three different experts were lined up to appraise and comment on each painting. This was the most innovative aspect of Noteworthy Paintings, and the amount of work Jaccaci and his collaborators did in order to enroll art historians in the project was tremendous. As a result of their efforts, most of the scholars who were at the time transforming the discipline of art history contributed to Noteworthy Paintings. The most difficult task—hiring the experts—Jaccaci entrusted to a journalist, Carl Snyder.

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Snyder (1868–1946) was an investigative journalist who specialized in scientific topics. Before he was hired, he probably had never seen an Old Master painting or met an art expert, but he dived enthusiastically into the world of connoisseurship and attributions. After a year he became convinced that the key to success for Noteworthy Paintings was to make it a monument to the latest scholarship.

Snyder spent the winter of 1903–1904 in Europe traveling between London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Florence, commissioning the essays for more than 150 paintings, both Old Master and modern. After a few weeks in Europe, he realized that the area of connoisseurship that was most exciting to him was that of Italian Renaissance painting. Snyder was well aware too that thanks to the research carried out in this domain, modern connoisseurship had attained wide public recognition. Experts on Renaissance art such as Bernard Berenson or Wilhelm von Bode were well known in the United States because of coverage in periodicals like the Nation and important metropolitan newspapers like New York Times. Rapidly, Snyder came to the conclusion that such brand-name experts in Renaissance art, rather than critics specializing in modern art, would endow Noteworthy Paintings with scholarly prestige.5 Snyder wrote daily to Jaccaci, and their correspondence constitutes an unplanned and often hilarious chronicle of the professional and social dynamics of expertise. Snyder sided with the experts and advocated a more prominent role for them, while Jaccaci stubbornly maintained that the goal of the book was to please the collectors at any cost and that expertise was only an instrument for the attainment of that goal. Rejecting expertise, which he considered a highly questionable intellectual enterprise, Jaccaci instead trusted the assessment of the provenance of a painting, an investigative procedure for which he had a sacred respect and a sincere passion.

In their dialogue, the editor and the journalist argued over the “scientific” status of expertise, the durability of the experts’ opinions, the relevance of the history and provenance of the objects to their current value, and the establishment and permanence of value itself. Snyder suddenly disappeared at the end of 1904 after he and Jaccaci had a heated argument over Berenson, whom Snyder considered indispensable for the success of the series, but Jaccaci not only failed to hire, but had entirely alienated.

In January 1905, Merrill and Baker declared bankruptcy. By the end of that year Jaccaci secured the ownership of the preparatory material for the series, and in early 1906 he founded another company, by himself, devoted to its publication. The first and only volume of Noteworthy Paintings finally saw the light in 1907, and it was the most sumptuous book yet published in the United States.

Everything about its physical appearance was monumental. The book came in three parts: a volume of text of about five hundred pages, an unbound portfolio of photogravures, and an unbound volume of bibliography, all in imperial folio size (52 x 39cm). The text, set in typefaces based on Renaissance models, and the photogravures were packaged in separate mahogany boxes lined with silk velvet.

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Volume I featured the collections of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Alfred Atmore Pope, John Hay, Herbert Terrell, and Albert A. Sprague, each selection carefully planned to complement the others and serve a specific marketing purpose.The Gardner collection, which at the time of the preparation of the book had just been opened to the public, was recognized as the best in the country; Pope’s collection of very significant group of Impressionist paintings balanced the Old Masters at Fenway Court. The paintings of John Hay, the former Secretary of State and Abraham Lincoln’s biographer, were chosen in the hope that his public stature as a politician would help to promote the book, and the Sprague collection was chosen mainly because it was located in Chicago. In the end, one hundred and twenty-six copies of the first volume were printed, but only a few were sold.

Jaccaci, and even more La Farge, sought in every possible way to conceal the fact that Noteworthy Paintings was a business enterprise, for they believed strongly that the success of the project depended on being perceived as a disinterested “cultural mission.” As a marketing strategy, this proved to be a failure; the confusion between profit and “service” was in fact a central contradiction of purpose and method that dissuaded the projected audience of Noteworthy Paintings, collectors and millionaires, from subscribing to it. The failure can be explained in several ways, but two factors were particularly significant. First, Jaccaci was projecting his own ideal of “taste” and “cultivation” onto an audience that clearly had different aspirations and that, most importantly, could use $15,000 to buy a real Old Master or Impressionist painting rather than a book about them. Secondly, the timing of the publication could not have been worse.

By 1907, when the volume appeared, Jaccaci’s project was already obsolete. The firm of Duveen was making its aggressive debut and, along with Knoedler, quickly gaining control of the market for Old Master paintings in the United States. The winning strategy of both dealers was to operate on both sides of the Atlantic, either by having various branches or by establishing strong alliances with European dealers. This allowed them to control both ends of the market: the demand as well as the supply. As a consequence, American collecting entered a new phase of development at this time. It no longer needed to be legitimized through the expertise of “European connoisseurs,” because quite a few of them were already active participants in the market, providing the attributions and pedigrees for the “important” paintings American collectors sought. In this new climate, no collector was willing to have his paintings selected by an editorial board, appraised by experts not chosen by himself, and published side by side with paintings belonging to someone else, possibly a competitor. The collegial expertise Noteworthy Paintings promoted was not only unnecessary, but potentially disruptive for dealers, collectors, and experts—in other words, the entire system that sustained the art market.

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1 For a more extensive analysis of Noteworthy Paintings in Private American Collection and its interdependence with the wider phenomenon of American collecting, see Flaminia Gennari-Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Masters in America 1900–1914, (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003).

2 Gennari-Santori, Melancholy of Masterpieces, 151–158.

3 On La Farge, see Henry Adams, John La Farge: Essays

by Henry Adams (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987).

4 Gennari-Santori, Melancholy of Masterpieces, 198–209.

5 Ibid., 227–265.

6 Ibid., 210–222.

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Art Collecting in America during the Interwar Period

Th e Ch este r Dale Collec tion of Mode r n Fr e nch Art

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IN 1937

Jorgelina Orfila

, on the occasion of the opening of the Jules Bache art collection to the public, Time magazine ran an article detailing the many venues to see historic and modern art in New York City. European art at the Frick Collection and the Bache Museum complemented works at the Metropolitan Museum. Since the late 1920s, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) kept the public abreast of the latest European and American art movements; after 1931, the Whitney Museum specialized in modern American art. Time also mentioned that New Yorkers could visit the Chester Dale Collection, “the great collection of French moderns assembled by knowing, tawny-haired Mrs. Chester Dale,” a display that “[u]nlike the Frick and Bache collections, is not yet a public museum.” 1 The core of the renowned Dale Collection of modern French art was assembled between 1926 and 1936 by Chester Dale (1883–1962) and his wife Maud Murray Dale (1876–1953). Unlike Gallatin, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (a driving force behind MoMA), and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, neither of the Dales had been born into wealthy families. Like Bache, Chester Dale was a successful Wall Street stockbroker whose business acumen financed the acquisition of art works. As did many other American collectors who were keen to obtain good prices and be privy to insider information about works available for sale, Chester, as everyone called him, became interested in the inner workings of the art trade. He, however, took his passion further by acquiring a share of the French Galerie Georges Petit around 1929.2 Chester took pride in his modest origins and daring approach to business, both on Wall Street and in the art market. In contrast, Maud, who had been trained as an artist at the New York’s Art Students League, built her public persona around her cultivated artistic taste and art-historical knowledge.3 As the Time article indicated, Maud managed the collection. It noted too that the Dale collection held masterpieces—mostly paintings, although the collection comprised some sculptures and a remarkable selection of works on paper—by the “French moderns,” that is, French artists since the Impressionists.4 In the late 1920s the collection had been hailed as one of the best American collections of modern art, but the language used in the 1937 article was much less definite in attributing the collection’s greatness specifically to the modern French artists represented in it.5 This subtle but important change reflected a radical transformation in the critical-historical interpretation of modern art that took place in the mid-thirties. This paradigm shift obscured the aesthetic principles by which the Dale collection had been formed just a few years earlier.

Based on an exhaustive analysis of the main primary and secondary sources on the Dales and their collection, the recent work of Maygene Daniels, head of the Archives at the National Gallery of Art, has shed much-needed light on the subject, permitting a new reading of the history of the collection.6 With Daniels’ account in mind, Time’s 1937 article provides a springboard from which to

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examine the place the Dales and their collection occupied in New York’s art world at the height of their careers as collectors.

In the interwar period the definition of modern art was in flux. Faced with decisive transformations in the modern art scene brought about by World War I, artists and scholars were forced to come to terms with a new artistic climate.

French artists who had been at the forefront of the pre-war avant-garde movements and younger artists moved away from radical experimentation and turned to more restrained, classicizing, and realist styles.

Even members of the Surrealist movement, who by and large reacted against the interwar rehabilitation of tradition, were noticeably less radical and more interested in establishing the group’s place in history than their direct precursors, the Dadaists, had ever been.

This interest in the development of the pre-war artistic movements and the desire to place them in a historical context highlighted the critical distance that separated pre- and inter-war artistic practice and promoted the eventual institutionalization of modern avant-garde art. On both sides of the Atlantic, the darkening political horizon in the late1930s gave even greater urgency to this push to categorize and define modern art, which allowed advocates to enlist it in the service of competing political-cultural ideologies.

As Susan Noyes Platt has demonstrated, at the beginning of the 1930s, Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s first director, had argued against the possibility of defining or categorizing modern art.7 Consequently, in the early years of its existence the museum typically presented overviews of contemporary art and retrospectives of the work of seminal modern artists. In 1936, Barr, who was keenly interested in the German and Russian avant-gardes, reacted to the persecution of modern art in those countries, switched course, and offered for the first time an interpretation of modern art.

In his 1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art,” Barr linked true modern art with the art of the early avant-gardes and framed its history as a process of continuous evolution toward abstraction, which he equated to democratic freedom and liberty. Even though Barr conceived this paradigm as provisional and subject to revisions, it quickly became gospel. One of the consequences of its success was that, in line with the tendency to oversimplification that animates and strengthens sweeping ideological accounts, in many quarters

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Previous spread: Guy Pène du Bois, Mr. and Mrs. Chester Dale Dine Out, 1924. Oil on canvas 30 x 40 in.

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY. Above: Cover of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

The Dales’ guiding principle was to showcase French works of art from the nineteenth and t wentieth centuries not as points in the development of abstr ac tion but as examples of the resilience of the Western artistic tr adition Against upheavals and superficial change.

the kind of classicist and realist styles practiced during the interwar years became identified with totalitarian regimes and reactionary beliefs and ideals. “Cubism and Abstract Art” secured MoMA’s centrality in the art world and advanced its position as the preeminent American institution interpreting and exhibiting modern art.

Its growing reputation and clout, in turn, transformed the system of promotion and distribution of modern art, which had until then been controlled through the dealer-critic system.8 In Europe, where until the outbreak of the war the Dales (and most American collectors) purchased art, scholars were postulating other theories of the development of modern art. In 1935, for example, French art historian René Huyghe argued that, because contemporary artists considered the early avant-garde’s struggles and achievements as both givens and departure points, “modern” art was a historical, finished phenomenon. Huyghe, at the time adjunct curator at the Musée du Louvre and editor in chief of the art magazine L’amour de l’art, used the term “contemporary” to differentiate new artistic manifestations from their pre-war antecedents.9 Maud’s taste, which determined the core of the Dales’ collection between 1926 and 1936, illustrated one of the many alternative interpretations of modern art that thrived at this time. Extant documentation does not permit scholars to pinpoint the exact sources behind her approach to modern art, but Maud’s writings are the best starting point to understanding the collection.

The Dales’ guiding principle was to showcase French works of art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not as points in the development of abstraction but as examples of the resilience of the Western artistic tradition against upheavals and superficial change.

In hindsight it is arguable that there is a strong correlation between the critical fortunes of the Dales’ collection and the shift in the contemporary art scene advanced by the “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition. After World War II, as MoMA strengthened its influence and Barr’s paradigm became the dominant interpretation of modern art, the Dales and their collection, formed according to Maud’s ideas, became less well received critically or, simply, misunderstood.

The Dales lived in New York during their adult lives and although for a decade they concentrated mostly on collecting modern French works, they started out informally collecting American art. In the early 1920s, the couple had begun to haunt art galleries in their free time. According to Chester’s later account, in 1926 Maud, impressed by his enthusiasm for collecting, suggested that they concentrate their efforts on forming a paradigmatic collection of “French art for the last 150 years with ancestors.” 10 By this she meant works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art that emphasized the strength and unbroken continuity of the Western artistic tradition, plus a small selection of paintings by those Old Masters whom she believed had paved the way for modern art.

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Collection records confirm that at this time the volume of their purchases increased in such a way that by 1928 the collection had grown to more than three hundred paintings.11 Concurrently, the Dales established a pattern of annual buying trips to France and became habitués of the most prestigious French and American art galleries. Chester increased the frequency of his visits to art auction houses, especially New York’s American Art Association and the Hôtel Drouot in Paris.12 As the collection grew and achieved greater public visibility, the couple was forced to move to bigger premises to house it. They changed domiciles several times before settling in the townhouse mentioned by the Time article, at 20 East 79th Street.

In 1929 Maud wrote an illustrated volume titled Before Manet to Modigliani from the Chester Dale Collection. Its twelve-page introduction is the longest of Maud’s texts and the best source for understanding her aesthetics. Maud’s interpretation of modern art did not hinge on the historical succession of particular artistic movements or on the lives of a series of eminent artists. She thought the radical artistic movements of the nineteenth- and the early twentiethcentury avant-gardes had been necessary revolutions, which had helped to renew and thus reinforce the perennial artistic tradition.

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Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862.

the Dales ac tively pursued social rel ationships with American art critics to bolster the critical fortunes of their artistic endeavors.

Maud considered that Cubism, for example, had been “a painful but very necessary operation, from which [the public] is being permitted today to recover, in the hope that it is cured.” 13 Maud argued that, at the time she was writing, French art, which she judged to be the epitome of modern art, had “now returned to a new classicism that is entirely modern.” 14 Indeed, the most important French artistic trends of the 1920s reflected Maud’s preference for order, harmony, and the classic tradition, which she associated with artistic quality. Thus, Maud reasoned that: “Art may change its form as many times in a century as man the style of his hat, but these changes are only fashions—art and man are more eternal.” 15 These aesthetic predilections largely determined the Dales’ taste for contemporary works of art.

To Maud, and by extension the Dale Collection, artists’ worth depended on their sensibilities and talent to reflect their own time, although she did not speculate on who would establish the essential characteristics of a given period. Moreover, she did not conceive of modern artists as revolutionaries, ethically engaged in political causes, but as bohemians, outcast geniuses living on the fringes of society, sacrificing their lives for a public that did not understand their greatness.

Written at the height of the Dales’ purchasing activities, Maud’s texts may explain their taste for uncharacteristic paintings by famous artists. Although the Dales purchased masterpieces from the most renowned Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and artists from the first French avant-gardes, they eschewed these artists’ most well-known periods or radical styles and favored works from earlier or later phases. Of the nine Matisses the Dales acquired in the interwar period, for example, none was in the Fauve style or belonged to that period. They bought no works by Pablo Picasso from the Cubist phase but preferred earlier works like his Family of Saltimbanques (1905), which depicts the artist as an outcast of society. In the same spirit, they amassed an outstanding selection of works by the prototypical bohemian artist, Amadeo Modigliani.

During these years of intense collecting activity, the Dales actively pursued social relationships with American art critics to bolster the critical fortunes of their artistic endeavors.16 Chester immersed himself in the intricacies of the art market, and Maud devoted her energies to art writing and to organizing exhibitions for the benefit of philanthropic causes, such as the support of the French Hospital in New York.

Between January of 1931 and March of 1932, Maud organized six exhibitions for the Museum of French Art at the New York French Institute—whose refurbishing had been financed by Chester—that were based on works of the Dale Collection.17 “Degas and His Tradition” and “Renoir and His Tradition”—both presented in 1931—especially underscored Maud’s conception of modern art as an unbroken geneaology. In both shows she included Old Master paintings to argue visually that these Impressionist artists had been, respectively, the modern representatives of the traditions of line and

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color in Western painting. She later commented that it had been her intention “to make these exhibitions a history of painting. Exactly that—one of painting, not of dates nor men. With Degas, it was the history of line, with Renoir the history of color and with Cézanne [an exhibition planned but not realized] it will be the history of form.” 18 In 1933, the Dales acquired the townhouse at 20 East 79th Street, which they opened as a semi-private gallery in December 1935. For the first time Maud could install the fine examples of modern and historic art they had acquired to illustrate their aesthetic ideas, but the permanent installation in fact undermined the public visibility of the Dales and their collection, which had hinged heavily on press coverage of their numerous loans.19 At this time, too, the Dales may have considered donating their collection, and even house, to the city,

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Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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but in the aftermath of Barr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art” it turned out that their taste and interpretation of modern art were increasingly called into question.

The view of the development of modern art Barr expounded in his 1936 exhibition hinged on the pre-war avant-gardes and opposed the Dales’ ideas and taste in significant ways. Unlike Maud, Barr found dates and men to be of utmost interest. He explained that he had chosen works of art from “earlier [with respect to the interwar period] and more creative years of a movement or individual . . . at the expense of later work which may be fine in quality but comparatively unimportant historically.” 20 By identifying “modern art” with radical, experimental art and by characterizing it as intrinsically different from —and much better than— the rest of a period’s artistic production, he effectively marginalized most contemporary art of the type that the Dales collected.

Other aspects of Barr’s vision put him in conflict with the Dales.

Since the beginning of his tenure as director, Barr’s ambition had been to transform MoMA into one of the most influential institutions for the interpretation and promotion of modern art. To achieve this goal MoMA had to challenge the overwhelming influence wielded by powerful French art dealers, precisely the men with whom Chester was associated. Chester had been a member of MoMA’s first board of trustees, but his involvement with the Galerie Georges Petit—whose activities had hindered Barr’s projects—created an insurmountable rift between the collector and MoMA’s authorities. Chester had to resign in the early 1930s.21 Barr was a professional art historian who championed the cause of modern art with a fervent sense of mission.22 MoMA’s success during his tenure accelerated the professionalization of museum personnel, which in turn hastened the decline of women’s philanthropic organizations, which had shaped the reception of modern art in the United States earlier in the century.23 The influence of women such as Maud, who had based her authority as art writer and curator on her artistry and had settled confidently into the role of art-world patroness and mentor, was weakened.

Other factors outside the Dales’ control also affected their collecting. Europe’s political upheaval forced American collectors to suspend their buying trips to Europe, and Maud and Chester shifted their attention back to American art. Toward the end of the decade, Maud’s health began to deteriorate, and between 1944 and 1946 the Dales anonymously sold approximately one-fourth of the almost eight-hundred works in their possession and distributed the rest of the collection as extended loans among several American museums. As a result, references to the collection thereafter concentrated on specific masterpieces more than on the character of the collection as a whole.

In the early 1950s, Chester, who had been one of the National Gallery of Art’s founder-trustees, consolidated all the works they had on loan there, perhaps hoping to be in Washington the bold representative of modern art he had been in New York in the 1930s.

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Opposite: Edgar Degas, Mademoiselle Malo, ca. 1877.

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The Chester Dale residence and collection, 20 East 79th Street, New York.

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Maud and Chester Dale, ca. 1950.

Through his patronage, this institution, with almost no modern French art and bylaws that did not allow exhibition of the work of artists who had been deceased less than twenty years, stood to advance its holdings significantly.24 When Chester died in 1962 he bequeathed to the National Gallery the works of art still in his possession.

When the Time story was published in 1937, the ideas that had shaped the Dales’ collection were still easily understood, and its character and uniqueness were apparent. By the time of Chester’s death, however, the new orthodoxy initiated by Barr in 1936 had effectively shifted attention away from the couple’s interpretation of modern art, and their aesthetic preferences had lost clout. Once merged into the Gallery’s permanent collection, the Dale works of art ceased to have any meaningful connection to the Dales’ taste, and, instead, they provided highlights to the institution’s historicized display of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art. In their new museum home, the works came to support an interpretation of modern art quite different from the vision that had moved Maud and Chester to acquire them in the interwar period.

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1 “Bache Museum,” Time, 10 May 1937, 32.

2 The Dales did not move in the same social circles as the old money families and most influential millionaires of their time. The Chester Dale Papers at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) contain a wealth of press clippings, carefully organized in notebooks, that trace the Dales’ social life.

3 On Chester’s character, see his 1953 autobiography, Chester Dale, “Book by Chester Dale,” Chester Dale Papers, Archives of American Art, (hereafter AAA); Murdock Pemberton, “Ambassador to Art,” Esquire, [February 1938], 65, 181–185; and Henry McBride, “Chester Dale’s Way,” Artnews, December 1952, 19-21, 53. On Maud Dale, see “The Woman of the Day” [probably 1926], Scrapbook 6, 6; Cholly Knickerbocker, “These Fascinating Ladies,” New York Journal-American, 12 April 1939. Scrapbook 3, 27. All periodicals found in boxes 12– 18, Record Group 28, Chester Dale Papers, Gallery Archives, NGA. For a brief analysis of the couple’s particular approach to collecting, see Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects. American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800– 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 151.

4 Though it was famous for its modern masterpieces, in the interwar period the collection also included work by such academic artists as William-Alphonse Bouguereau and official artists.

5 For a contemporary analysis of the problem of the Dale collection’s modernism, see Henry McBride, “Pictures from the Chester Dale Collection Frequently Shown at Manhattan Exhibitions,” Washington Post, 16 February 1936.

6 Maygene Daniels, “A Shared Legacy: The Chester Dale Collection” and “Chronology” in Kimberly A. Jones and Maygene Daniels, The Chester Dale Collection (Washington D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 2009).

7 Susan Noyes Platt, “Modernism, Formalism, and Politics: The ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ exhibition of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art,” Art Journal 47, Winter 1988, 284–295.

8 On the development of the dealer-critic system in the nineteenth century, see Harrison C. White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (1965; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For a general study of the impact of MoMA in the art world, see Jesús Pedro Lorente, Cathedrals of Modernity: The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800– 1930 (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998). The scholarship on the early years of MoMA’s history is immense. For more information on this specific aspect, see Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art,” Studies in Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change 5 (1995), 12–72; and Michael C Fitzgerald, Making Modernism. Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), chapter 5.

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9 René Huyghe, “Les origines de la peinture contemporaine,” in Histoire de l’art contemporaine. La peinture (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1935), 8.

10 Chester Dale, “Book,” 9.

11 Daniels, “Chronology,” 137.

Although Chester sustained substantial losses during the Depression, he acquired a record 123 works of art in 1929 and continued investing in the collection. He understood that the economic crisis afforded a collector the opportunity to acquire important masterpieces at good prices.

12 Around 1929 Etienne Bignou, a French dealer with perfect command of the English language, became the art dealer closest to Chester.

Bignou was the visible face of the Galerie Georges Petit.

13 Maud Dale, Before Manet to Modigliani from the Chester Dale Collection (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), 7.

19 The number of works in the collection, and in certain cases their dimensions, prevented the Dales from installing a cohesive display in their previous domiciles. At this time Chester officially retired from business to devote more time to the collection.

20 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 9.

21 The documentation on this rift is in the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 12.XII.1 The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. See also Fitzgerald, Making Modernism, chapter 5.

22 On Barr’s character, sense of mission, and education, see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 5–11.

23 See Sacko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, chapter 4, especially, 166–168.

14 Ibid., 1.

15 Ibid., 11.

16 For information concerning the Dales’ relationship with McBride and other art critics see McBride’s correspondence with Max Milzlaff and Malcom MacAdam in the Henry McBride Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. AAA microfilmed the papers before they were processed by the Beinecke Library. See Henry McBride papers, AAA. 17 The French Institute’s mission was to promote and showcase French culture and arts in the United States.

18 “Mrs. Dale to Finish Schedule of Art Exhibitions,” Paris Herald Sunday, 12 June 1932, box 13, Record Group 28, Chester Dale Papers, Archives, NGA.

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24 These bylaws were changed in 1965, just before the exhibition of the Chester Dale bequest.

“My Sculpture

i n t h e D e s e r t ”

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RO b e r t C . S c u l l a n d M i c h a e l H e i z e r Robert and Ethel Scull were the quintessential collectors of Pop Art, and although others built important collections, no one acquired Pop with the determination and sheer abandon of Robert C. Scull.

Known as “Bob and Spike,” the Sculls personified the adventurous, rule-breaking, drug-laced spirit of the 1960s. She was the fashion plate; he was the taxi baron with an insatiable taste for art. As the Pop couple, they were much photographed and commissioned portraits from everyone. George Segal cast them in plaster; in his 1963 Portrait of the Scull Family. James Rosenquist depicted the family as a reflection on the side of a New York taxi; and Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963, was Andy Warhol’s first commissioned portrait.

Pop Art was not Bob Scull’s first or last collection; earlier he had assembled a group of Abstract Expressionist paintings that were as impressive as the Pop works for which he is remembered. His later role as a patron of Conceptual art and Earth art was of crucial importance to Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer, and to this day remains largely unknown.

It was Scull who suggested to De Maria that he work in metal and provided the financial backing for the sculptures he made from 1965 to 1967, among them, Cage II, now in the Museum of Modern

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Opposite: Robert Scull at Michael Heizer’s Dissipate, 1968. Photograph courtesy of Janet Sirmon Fine Art and the Yale Joel estate.

Above: Aerial shot of Michael Heizer’s #1 of Nine Nevada Depressions, 1968.

Photograph courtesy of Janet Sirmon Fine Art and the Yale Joel estate.

Judith Goldman

Heizer’s first commission wa s a n e q u a l ly i m p o r ta n t m o m e n t for Scull, whose at t e n t i o n h a d c o i n c i d e n ta l ly s ta r t e d t o s h i f t f r o m a r t t h at s at o n t h e f l o o r or hung on the wa l l t o a r t t h at could not be b o u g h t, s o l d , o r e ve n m ove d.

Art’s collection. “He understood the relationship between the excitement of art and the excitement of the times,” De Maria told an interviewer, and “he could certainly talk to artists about art. I don’t know that there are many patrons that want to talk to artists about art.” 1 And it was Scull who agreed to finance Michael Heizer’s monumental Nine Nevada Depressions.

Scull had close and important relationships with artists. They viewed him as a godsend, but eventually, given his excessive and often unbridled enthusiasm, many artists found him overbearing— but not Michael Heizer. Scull’s friendship with him changed the course of the artist’s career and had an equally profound effect on Scull. That friendship began in 1968, with a letter. “I am an artist engaged in an idea which you might find of interest. I am digging holes in the earth” was how Heizer’s letter to Scull requesting an appointment began.2 Artists do what they must. The twenty-three-year-old Heizer was broke, in debt, married, and barely getting by when he wrote his letter. He was working part-time as an electrician and had another job trapping Norwegian ship rats, big as dogs, in the third basement of a Soho building. He had arrived in New York in 1966 and for two years he made paintings that no one wanted to see. By 1968, his focus had started to shift from painting to the desert landscape he’d known as a child. It wasn’t in Heizer’s nature to write a letter to a stranger, but he was desperate and had nothing to lose. What’s surprising isn’t that Heizer wrote the letter—what’s surprising is that Robert Scull answered it.

Scull’s reaction to Heizer’s letter was that “he was absolutely crazy,” but he went to see him anyway.3 When they met, Heizer showed Scull a large map of Nevada and explained his plans for Nine Nevada Depressions, a series of 9 sculptures covering 540 miles that would stretch from the top of the state down to Las Vegas. Heizer planned to use all kinds of equipment—from a pick axe and shovel to heavy earth-moving machinery—to carve the sculptures into the desert floor. When Scull asked Heizer what the point was and who would see them, Heizer replied: “Well, if you ever want to go to see them, they’ll be there,” and explained, as he often would in years to come, that it was no different than the Mona Lisa. In order to see her, one had to take a plane to Paris, a taxi to the Louvre, climb the stairs, and make a turn. The difference, Heizer explained, was that the location of three of the sculptures was so inaccessible that even a small plane couldn’t land there—a helicopter would be required.

As Scull listened to Heizer, he realized that he “was talking about the purest kind of art there is, an art that I can’t sell, that I could own, that would even be a hardship for me to see, but nevertheless owning it would give me some kinship to having it, that I would have it even if it’s not in my house on the wall.”4 It was Heizer’s first commission, and an equally important moment for Scull, whose attention had coincidentally started to shift from art that sat on the floor or hung on the wall to art that could not be bought, sold, or even moved.

Heizer told me that he thinks Scull was attracted by the radicalism

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of his art. Scull must also have been impressed by the vaulting ambition of an artist whose medium was the earth and its monuments, and who drew his inspiration from Peruvian rocks, Meso-American monuments, and the great ruins of the ancient world. What the two men shared was a taste for risk and a desire to do something that had not been done before.

Nine Nevada Depressions was a daunting project, subject to chance, weather, and natural disasters, but Scull said yes immediately. “Go ahead and do it,” he told Heizer. “‘I’ll pay for it.’ I thought it would come to a couple of thousand dollars and he would make a few little things.”5 Later when the bills started to come in, Scull thought, “What the hell is that man doing out there?” and flew to Las Vegas to find out. He did not travel alone; a master of stagecraft, Scull brought along Yale Joel, a Life magazine photographer, and within the year articles began to appear. “Groundbreakers in an Art the Ancients Dug” was the Life headline.6 Heizer had arranged for a small plane to take them to the zig-zags, rifts, and elegant loops that he’d cut into the surface of the desert. Scull hired the helicopter to fly them to the inaccessible sites. When Scull first saw what he called “My sculpture in the desert,” he was overwhelmed. “When you land on one of those dry lakes thirty miles outside of Vegas, there’s no more city, there’s nothing but miles and miles of desert. And when I saw this piece of sculpture in the ground . . . surrounded by a world of nature, I began to realize that this is some of the most important

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Michael Heizer's postcard to Robert Scull, 1971.

Andy Warhol with his Ethel Scull 36 Times, n.d. Photograph by Ellen Hulda Johnson.

sculpture in the world; and that it’s not necessary that I be able to take it home to Fifth Avenue.”7 “He was my patron and career manager and coproducer,” Heizer said in a recent conversation. “He was always cooking up a story, sending a reporter around, telling me I should go to an opening at the Metropolitan Museum. He was a generous guy, the true essence of what a collector should be. He made everything possible. He didn’t back down, that’s why people didn’t like him. Nobody was making money. We were just covering costs.” 8 The nature of Scull and Heizer’s friendship is evident in the correspondence between them, now in Scull’s papers at the Archives of American Art. Heizer sent Scull funny notes. On a postcard that showed three bears foraging through garbage, Heizer wrote, obviously alluding to Scull’s collecting: “Bob—how’s N.Y. Find any good work lately?

Well, keep looking.” 9 In lengthy letters, Heizer described his plans and detailed the progress of his work. Writing about Displaced/ Replaced sculptures, 1969, that Scull financed, Heizer described the huge granite mass that was blasted out of the top of the Sierras that he had his eye on and planned to transport to the desert floor. “It is about 35–40 ft. long, 20 ft. at one end, and tapers to a small point at the other end. It weighs 20–25 tons and is really one of the most beautiful blocks I’ve ever seen. It is also one of the largest.” Later in the same letter, Heizer explained his intentions: Long after all the canvas painting and the synthetics and fragile works have deteriorated, long after the civilizations as we know them have evolved or been annihilated by wars, germs, pollutants, or political regimes, the rock-mass piece will remain intact, and should never show signs of change or wear. . . . I have distaste for dreams and would like to state the cold intent behind the work. It could never be construed as romantic. . . . This work will never be a physical legacy to you either. All that could really happen would be that the value of the land will increase.” 10

Heizer’s sculpture, epic in scale and radical in concept, demanded that viewers give up preconceived ideas about what art is and see it in a new way. Enraptured by the breath and ambition of Heizer’s vision, Scull had no trouble making the transition. The whole desert became part of his experience. His involvement with Heizer changed the nature of his collecting. His focus shifted. His desire to amass art remained, but his main motivation now was to be part of, and essential to, the artist’s process.The patron had replaced the collector. Scull wanted to make things happen for artists, and he did.

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“My Sculpture in the Desert” is an edited excerpt from Robert & Ethel Scull, Portrait of a Collection, by Judith Goldman, published by the Acquavella Galleries on the occasion of the exhibition “Robert & Ethel Scull, Portrait of a Collection,” 12 April 2010– 27 May 2010.

1 Walter De Maria, interview conducted by Paul Cummings, 4 October 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oralhistory-interview-walter-demaria-12362.

2 Michael Heizer to Robert C. Scull, 21 June 1968, Robert C. Scull Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter cited as Scull papers).

3 Robert C. Scull, interview conducted by Paul Cummings, 15–28 June 1972, (hereafter cited as Scull interview, AAA), 42.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 “What on Earth?,” Life Magazine, 25 April 1969, 80–86.

7 Scull interview, AAA, 42; Michael Heizer, conversation with the author, 2010.

8 Michael Heizer to Robert C. Scull, n.d., Scull papers.

9 Michael Heizer to Robert C. Scull, 1971, Scull papers.

10 Michael Heizer to Robert C. Scull, n.d., Scull papers.

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M a ry Pa n z e r

The Sam Wagstaff collection at the Archives of American Art preserves an important record of Wagstaff and the art world from the 1960s through the 1980s.The papers are rich in documentation on Wagstaff’s most well-known role as a collector of photography, a phase that began only after he abandoned his brilliant career as a curator of contemporary art, first at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and then the Detroit Institute of Arts. The papers also preserve a collection of ephemeral photography periodicals, gallery announcements, auction catalogues, and correspondence from dealers and artists, forming a rare snapshot of the vanished photography world of the 1970s.

According to Wagstaff’s own account, before 1973 he hated photography, or ignored it. The hallowed MoMA 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man” bored him; he had no use for “Concerned Photography.” By the late seventies, though, he was collecting aggressively, and in a much-cited bit of film shot in 1978 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (now available on YouTube), Wagstaff compared his sudden interest to the discovery of “a well of pleasure which it seemed worthwhile investigating . . . and then worthwhile greedily having.” He credited the change of heart to photographer friends and the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “The Painterly Photograph: 1890–1914,” where in 1973 he first saw images from the Stieglitz Collection by Heinrich Kühn, Frank Eugene, and Gertrude Käsebier. He said the photographs he saw in the show were “like art . . . seemed to ape art in many instances . . . but were never art, thank God, they were something else. And this mysterious thing which we don’t yet seem to be able to define, the more one gets into it, the broader it becomes and the more mysterious it becomes.” As a good modernist, Wagstaff defined photography in terms of its materials and then looked at everything that met the definition, regardless of how much, or how little, it cost. Best of all, he ignored all received wisdom and trusted his own judgment. Unlike Edward Weston, he didn’t disdain Pictorialism; unlike contemporary art photographers and curators, he liked commercial work. He reveled in stereographs, once loved only by antiquarians.

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In 1984 Wagstaff sold his collection of 30,000 images to the Getty Museum for a reported $5 million. His collection provided enormous inspiration for Robert Mapplethorpe and other photographers to build on. More broadly, it lifted the history of the medium from the nearly exclusive stewardship of the Museum of Modern Art and George Eastman House, institutions that shaped most perceptions through exhibitions and publications which very few other American institutions offered. His collection also enlarged our sense of what could be collected and studied by expanding on the work of Beaumont Newhall, author of what remains the single most authoritative book on photographic history. Most important, Wagstaff made photography popular with collectors and audiences, because he brought pleasure to the art of its appreciation. Thanks to Sam Wagstaff, photography left the small world of photographers and advocates (for humanistic values, for photography-as-art) and became interesting to people who simply liked to look. If Newhall is the medium’s first modern historian, Wagstaff can be called photography’s first important twentieth-century connoisseur.

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Sam Wagstaff at home. Photograph

by Arnold Newman/ Arnold Newman Collection/Getty Images.

EditorIAL

Darcy Tell, Editor Jenifer Dismukes Managing Editor Design

Winterhouse Subscriptions & single issues

Individuals may receive the Journal with a gift of $100 or more to the Fund for the Archives.

Institutional rate: $75 for 1 year Back issues: $15 a copy All inquiries regarding subscriptions, back issues, and manuscript submissions should be sent to: Editor Archives of American Art Journal P.O. Box 37012 MRC 937 Washington, DC 20013 T. 202.633.7971 Manuscripts submitted for publication should be based in part on materials in the Archives.

Full text of volumes 2–45 (1962–2005) available online through JSTOR. Articles published in the Journal are abstracted and indexed in the Art Index and in Historical Abstracts America: History and Life.

Opinions expressed in the Archives of American Art Journal are those of the authors and not necessarily of the editors or the Archives of American Art. ©2011 Smithsonian Institution.

Watch for Craft, the theme of the next Journal, in December 2011. Ceramic artist Peter Voulkos at a kiln, ca. 1960. Photograph by Frans Wildenhain.

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Archives of american art

THE ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART , founded in 1954

and a unit of the Smithsonian Institution since 1970, provides researchers with access to the largest collection of documents on the history of the visual arts in the United States. The collection, which now totals more than sixteen million items of original source material, consists of the papers of art-world figures and the records of art dealers, museums, and other art-related businesses, institutions, and organizations. Original material can be consulted, by appointment, in Washington, DC; the most actively used holdings are available on microfilm through Interlibrary Loan or at Archives offices in Washington and New York, and at affiliated research centers in Boston, Fort Worth, San Francisco, and San Marino, California.

The Archives is part of one of the world’s great research centers for the arts and sciences. In addition to its federal funding, the Archives raises a portion of its annual budget from private sources, including contributions from individuals and organizations.

Mission statement: The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art enlivens the extraordinary human stories behind America’s most significant art and artists. It is the world’s largest and most widely used resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America. Constantly growing in range and depth, and ever increasing in accessibility to its many audiences, it is a vibrant, unparalleled, and essential resource for the appreciation, enjoyment, and understanding of art in America.

Re f erenc e s erv ic e s: The catalogue of the Archives’

holdings is available nationwide and internationally through the Smithsonian Institution Research Information Service (SIRIS). Reference requests can be sent by fax or mail to Reference Services at the Washington office or via e-mail at: http://www.aaa. si.edu/askus. Unrestricted microfilms and transcripts of oral history interviews are available through interlibrary loan. Requests can be sent to the Washington office by mail, fax, or through our website, where an online order form is available at: www.aaa.si.edu/interlibraryloan.

Publication of the archives of American Art Journal is underwritten in part by the William E. Woolfenden Fund, an endowment established in honor of the Archives’ second director.

Washington DC

Trustees

Headquarters & Reference Center P.O. Box 37012 The Victor Building Suite 2200, MRC 937 Washington, DC 20013 T. 202.633.7940 Research. 202.633.7950

Executive Committee

Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery at Reynolds Center 8th and F Streets NW, 1st Floor, Washington, DC Hours: 11:30-7 daily.

Admission is free.

New York CITY

Reference Center 1285 Avenue of the Americas, Lobby Level New York, NY 10019 Hours: Mon-Fri 9:30-5 T. 212.399.5015 Events. 212.399.5030 Affiliated Research Centers for the Use of Unrestricted Microfilm

Boston Public Library Copley Square Boston, MA 02117 T. 617.536.5400 x 2275 Hours: Mon, Thurs-Sat 9-5 Sun 1-5 (October-May); No appointment necessary.

Amon Carter Museum 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd.

Fort Worth, TX 76107 T. 817.738.1933 library@cartermuseum.org Hours: Wed and Fri 11-4 Thurs 11-7. de Young American Art Study Center 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr. San Francisco, CA 94118 T. 415.750.7637 Hours: Mon-Fri 10-5.

Huntington Library 1151 Oxford Rd. San Marino, CA 91108 Appointments: archivesofamericanart@ huntington.org

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Suzanne D. Jaffe Chair Barbara Mathes President Arthur Cohen Vice President Lynn Dixon Johnston Secretary Barbara G. Fleischman Frank Martucci Janice C. Oresman Members at Large Warren Adelson Ann E. Berman Gerald E. Buck Edward O. Cabot Helen W. Drutt English Ruth Feder Martha J. Fleischman Diane A. Fogg Leslie K. S. Fogg John K. Howat Wendy Jeffers Judith Jones Gilbert H. Kinney Nicholas Lowry Ellen Phelan Marla Prather John R. Robinson Rona Roob Eli Wilner

Trustee Council Dr. Helen I. Jessup Samuel C. Miller Theodore J. Slavin

Trustees Emeriti

Nancy Brown Negley Chair Max N. Berry, Esq. Dona Kendall Richard A. Manoogian Marilyn Schlain Alan E. Schwartz A. Alfred Taubman

Founding Trustees

Lawrence A. Fleischman Mrs. Edsel B. Ford Edgar P. Richardson

Ex Officio

Dr. G. Wayne Clough Secretary, Smithsonian Institution Dr. Richard Kurin Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, Smithsonian Institution

Director

John W. Smith

credits

Cover and End Papers: Robert C. Scull Appointment Books, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Table of Contents: (detail) Alfonso Ossorio Papers, Archives of American Art, Smtihsonian Institution; (detail) Photograph © John Bryson / Sygma / Corbis; (detail) watercolor over pencil, 14 15/16 x 21 3/8 in., Brooklyn Museum 23.98, Sustaining Membership Fund, Alfred T. White Memorial Fund, and the A. August Healy Fund; (detail) National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC; (detail) Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 100.6 cm.), Gift of Chester Dale, 1963 (63.138.1).

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY; (detail) Robert Scull Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; (detail) Photograph by Arnold Newman, Arnold Newman Collection/Getty Images.

Page 4: © ARS, NY. Oil on composition board, 48, x 37 in. Gift of Alfonso A. Ossorio. (500.1969). Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed

by SCALA/Art Resource, NY, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.; © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ Artists Rights Society; Page 5: Alfonso Ossorio Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 6: Photograph © Estate of Hans Namuth; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Page 7: Alfonso Ossorio Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 8: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 9: Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY, © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society: Page 11: Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; Page 13: Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1950, oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas, 2.210 x 2.997 cm.

(87 x 118 in.); framed: 2.235 x 3.023 x .038 cm. (88 x 119 x 1½ in.), © 2011 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society; Page 14: Harry Bowden papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Pages 18–19: Images courtesy of Gail Levin.

Page 20: Photograph © John Bryson / Sygma / Corbis; Page 23: Print, lithograph in four colors: yellow, green, red, and blue (23 5/8 x 31 ½ in.; 60 x 80.01 cm.); Page 23: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Billy Wilder (59.80.10, Prints and Drawings Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Digital Image © 2009 Museum Associates / LACMA / Art Resource, NY; Frank Perls Papers and Frank Perls Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 24: © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Image courtesy Christie’s Images/SuperStock.

Page 27: Photograph courtesy Nancy Flentje; Page 29: Smithsonian Institution Libraries; Page 30: ©The Barber Insitute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham/ The Bridgeman Art Library; Page 31: woodblock color print on Japanese mulberry paper, 15 x 9 15/16 in., Brooklyn Museum 20.930, Museum Collection Fund. Page 34: Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund, Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1910, oil on canvas, 1.873 x .610 (73 ¾ x 24 in.), framed: 2.153 x .889 x .069 (84 ¾ x 35 x 2 ¾ in.) © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Page 35: watercolor over pencil, 14 15/16 x 21 3/8 in., Brooklyn Museum 23.98, Sustaining Membership Fund, Alfred T. White Memorial Fund, and the A. August Healy Fund; Page 36: Andrew W. Mellon Fund, Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1914, oil on canvas, 1.003 x .812 (39 ½ x 32 in.), framed: 1.067 x .877 (42 x 34 ½ in.).

Pages 46–47: Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

(76.2 x 100.6 cm.), Gift of Chester Dale, 1963 (63.138.1). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource NY; Page 51: Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY; Page 53: Chester Dale Collection, Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1862, oil on canvas, 1.874 x 2.482 (73 ¾ x 98 in.), framed: 2.305 x 2.896 (94 5/8 x 100 7/8 in.); Page 55: Chester Dale Collection, Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1905, oil on canvas, 2.128 x 2.296 (83 ¾ x 90 3/8 in.), framed: 2.404 x 2.563 (94 5/8 x 100 7/8 in.) © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Page 56: Chester Dale Collection, Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, ca. 1877, oil on canvas, 811 x 651 (31 7/8 x 25 5/8 in.), framed: 1.060 x .908 (41 ¾ x 35 ¾ in.); Pages 55–57: Chester Dale Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Pages 62–63: Photographs courtesy of Janet Sirmon Fine Art and the Yale Joel Estate; Page 65: Robert Scull Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 66: Ellen Hulda Johnson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Page 69: Photograph by Arnold Newman, Arnold Newman Collection/Getty Images.

Pages 38–40, 47: National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC; Pages 41–44: © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library.

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