Robert S. LubarDebra Bricker Balken - The PARK AVENUE CUBISTS: gallatin, morris, frelinghuysen and shaw

The Park Avenue Cubists

Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw

With essays by Debra Bricker Balken
and Robert S. Lubar

Grey Art Gallery, New York University

This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition The Park Avenue Cubists:
Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw, organized by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University,
and curated by Debra Bricker Balken.

Grey Art Gallery, New York University
January 14-March 29, 2003

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
April 22July 31, 2003

Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville
September 2November 30, 2003

Both the exhibition and this publication are made possible in part by support from
The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., and the Abby Weed Grey Trust.

First published 2002 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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Copyright 2002 Grey Art Gallery, New York University

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Typeset in Spectrum by Hilite Design, Southampton

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 2002066633

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-71929-3 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19543-8 (ebk)

Edward Albee

David and Lynne Anderson

The Art Institute of Chicago

The Baltimore Museum of Art

The Berkshire Museum

Berry-Hill Galleries, New York

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Bryn Mawr College

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Charles H. Carpenter

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Judith-Ann Corrente

Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis

Dallas Museum of Art

Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma

Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio, Lenox, Massachusetts

Grey Art Gallery, New York University

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution

Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee

The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Naples Museum of Art

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York

The Newark Museum

New Jersey State Museum, Trenton

J. Donald Nichols, Nashville

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Phoenix Art Museum

Robert and Jane Rosenblum, New York

Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Joan T. Washburn Gallery, New York

Weatherspoon Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Amy Wolf Fine Arts, New York

Virginia Zabriskie, New York

Private collection

The art shown at the Gallery of Living Art, Professor Robert Rosenblum has reminisced, was astounding. Albert Eugene Gallatin's Museum of Living Art, as it was later renamed, had opened in December 1927 in the southwest corner of New York University's Main Building on Washington Square. Professor Rosenblum's assessment derives from his early memories of a visit to the Gallatin Collection long before he, a self-described "precocious New York child," ventured further north to see the Museum of Modern Art, which was inaugurated two years after Gallatin's Gallery. "Like the Art Deco apartment houses then going up in New York, with their zigzagging decorative motifs and floating corner windows, the paintings of the Gallatin Collection looked startlingly, triumphantly modern," Professor Rosenblum recalls.

Here was the future in flat planes and clean colors, with lucid arcs and angles replacing old-fashioned realist imagery, and all laws of gravity repealed in favor of the aerial freedom appropriate to the new century of speed and flight. Whether intention or accident brought a twelve-year-old boy to the Museum of Living Art, it was as exhilarating to me as a kind of science fiction.

The Museum of Living Art housed major works by European artistssuch as Pablo Picasso's The Three Musicians, Fernand Lger's The City, Joan Mir's Dog Barking at the Moon, Piet Mondrian's Composition in Blue and Yellow, and Georges Braque's Still Life: The Courier as well as paintings by American artists, including Charles G. Shaw, George L. K. Morris, and Suzy Frelinghuysen. As Debra Bricker Balken, the guest curator and instigator of the present exhibition, notes in her essay on the Park Avenue Cubists included here, Gallatin not only acquired works by Morris, Frelinghuysen, and Shaw, but the four of them also exhibited together. Close friends and passionate patrons as well as committed artists, they shared privileged and pampered backgrounds, providing fodder for their insouciant sobriquet. Defenders of a vanguard American art that flew in the face of a public reared on realism, they considered themselves the legitimate aesthetic heirs to then-dominant French culture. Erudite and cosmopolitan, they also simultaneously collected.

The Park Avenue Cubists is the first substantial museum exhibition to examine this salient and long-overlooked aspect of American art and includes approximately fifteen works per artist, each of whom, in their own way, updated and purified the formalist vision emanating from Paris. Also on view in the exhibition is a selection of artifacts and artworks from the artists' collections as well as articles by and portraits of them. Shown alongside their paintings, these documents and ephemera shed light both on the artists' glamorous lifestyles and on their ardent commitment to perpetuating the European origins of modernism while formulating one of the first reductivist abstract languages of art in the United States. Indeed, in their quest to create a truly American strain of modern art, they melded the stylistic lessons of Cubism and its derivations (Purism, Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Surrealist Biomorphism) with indigenous American subject matter, from Hopi katsinas to Manhattan cityscapes. Appropriating popular imagery from billboards and advertising logos, they not only looked back to Analytic Cubism's incorporation of printed-paper ephemera, but also ahead to the work of Pop artists.

It is especially fitting that New York University's Grey Art Gallery organize and present this exhibition. Not only was A. E. Gallatin a direct descendant of Albert Gallatin, who founded New York University in 1831, but the Grey Art Gallery occupies the very same space as the Museum of Living Art, which was disbanded in 1942. During its colorful if quirky existence, it functioned as a magnet for artists such as Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Arshile Gorky, as well as for intellectuals and Greenwich Village residents. Long before the Greywhich was founded in 1975it provided a space where students and faculty could interact with Villagers. "Open late every night of the week, very small and very casual, the Museum drew browsers from all over New York but remained distinctly a neighborhood establishment. Beyond its function as a meeting place ... [the Museum] was under Gallatin also a study center of serious purpose," William Hutchinson has observed. "NYU students used the space as any other study hall; artists used it to puzzle through the myriad and complex lessons of Cubism, or to keep abreast of new developments in abstraction."