Albert Eugene Gallatin Popular Books

Albert Eugene Gallatin Biography & Facts

Albert Eugene Gallatin (July 23, 1881 – June 15, 1952) was an American artist. He wrote about, collected, exhibited, and created works of art. Called "one of the great figures in early 20th-century American culture," he was a leading proponent of nonobjective and later abstract and particularly Cubist art whose "visionary approach" in both collecting and painting left "an enduring impact on the world of modern art." Early life and education Gallatin was born in 1881 into a wealthy and socially prominent family. Showing a youthful interest in art and literature, he began to collect works by Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, and James McNeill Whistler while still in his teens. The common element in these purchases was a preference for works that he saw as possessing a harmonious, refined, and decorative nature, rather than a naturalistic or literal one. He appreciated their aesthetic over their narrative content and their intrinsic over their didactic or utilitarian value. As he collected art, he also began to write about it. For the two decades following the turn of the century, Gallatin produced a constant stream of articles, small monographs, and books of engraved plates. Between 1900 and 1910 most of these concerned Beardsley and Whistler. In examining their drawings and paintings he sought to find out what gave these works enduring value as opposed to superficial and temporary popularity. To him, their excellence showed in elegance of line and quality of design. He also drew attention to what he called a "decorative feeling" in works by these two artists in contrast to what he considered to be the less aesthetic realism of Degas and Millet. He maintained that modern art did not become popular because it was good, but because it scandalized. For example, in 1902 he wrote that Beardsley's drawings attracted notice by their shocking distortion of perspective and proportion and their escape from artistic conventions. Because their true value was not readily apparent, he believed that only connoisseurs along with Beardsley's fellow artists could fully appreciate them. In another article, he called Whistler an artist "whose work must remain more or less incomprehensible to the general public." He also wrote that the best art was created solely for its own sake. He wrote of Whistler's "unflinching devotion to beauty" and freedom from "commercialism, vulgarity, and the spirit of gain." Gallatin said Whistler's subjects were never ugly or lacking taste. In his view, Whistler was not a realist because he never descended to the obvious or commonplace. When his father died in 1902, Gallatin became head of a family consisting of himself, two sisters, and their mother. As a member of New York's social elite he gave and attended high-profile dinners, dances, weddings, and benefits. His name appeared frequently in the press as a result these activities and also as a result of his pioneering affection for automobiles and motor sport. His inheritance made it unnecessary for him to work for a living and he chose not to follow the lead of other members of his class by engaging in banking, stock brokerage, or other professional occupation. Instead, he continued to collect art and to enhance his reputation as an art connoisseur by his writings. During the years leading up to the First World War he became increasingly interested in American artists such as illustrator Otho Cushing, pleinair painter Frederick Frieseke, and painter of interiors Walter Gay. He also acquired and wrote about artists associated with the Ashcan School—Everett Shinn, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, and John Sloan as well as other young American artists, including John Marin and Boardman Robinson. While the drawings, paintings, and prints of these artists appear to have little in common with the work of Beardsley and Whistler, he saw in them a similar feeling for form, elegance of line, and "entire freedom from all taint of the academic." Glackens, he wrote, was like Whistler in his originality, his great color sense, and his ability to bring subjects to life. Shinn's paintings revealed to him a "personal expression of the artist's genius" and he also saw in them a "decorative instinct" that he admired in virtually all the art he collected. He was pessimistic about the capacity of museums and government agencies to support young American artists and believed they would be best served by individual art lovers, collectors, and "enlightened" critics. Gallatin served in World War I as a member of a naval reserve unit and directed two civilian groups: a federal government committee on exhibitions of art propaganda and a municipal committee that encouraged artists to make posters supporting the war effort. This involvement led to a book, Art and the Great War, (1919) in which Gallatin discussed war-related art in the allied nations, giving many examples of paintings, drawings, posters, caricatures, and prints that he admired. In 1918, with Duncan Phillips and Augustus Vincent Tack, he organized an exhibition, the Allied War Salon of New York. The works in this show were almost all traditionally representational. The exceptions were paintings by a British artist, C.R.W. Nevinson, whose work at this time could be described as a cubist version of futurism. Nevinson's French Troops Resting of 1916, was exhibited at the Keppel & Co. galleries in 1919 and was probably included in the 1918 show. It and similar works of his are said to have been Gallatin's first introduction to this aspect of modernism. Art collecting: 1920s In 1916, Gallatin had dismissed modernists in general and cubists in particular as immature. He thought their work to be half-baked, mediocre, and depressing. By the middle of the 1920s, through the influence of Nevinson, of the critic, Clive Bell, and of the authors of articles in The Arts magazine, he had thoroughly revised his opinions. Nevinson showed that cubism was not a gimmick, but a technique that emerged naturally from the art of its time. Bell articulated a formalist aesthetic that coincided with Gallatin's belief that art was not good because of its realism, but because the two-dimensional space of the painting, drawing, or print possessed a satisfying composition, line, shape, color, and texture. Pictorial representation, trueness to life, and the illusion of depth were secondary concerns. Bell also voiced an opinion that seems to have been latent in Gallatin's thought as well: good art is well-ordered rather than chaotic and it proceeds from the artist's thought processes and intuitive sense of rightness more than his emotions. William Zorach and other authors of articles in The Arts discussed an art of "purely abstract forms and colors" that, through an elimination "of everything not vitally necessary," produced a true art. The difficulty of judging what is a "masterpiece" and what is an "abortion" is no different for abstract than it is for representational art: it take.... Discover the Albert Eugene Gallatin popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Albert Eugene Gallatin books.