Albert Eugene Gallatin (1881–1952)

 

In 1902, upon his father’s death, Albert Eugene Gallatin inherited a family fortune developed by his great-grandfather and namesake, Albert Gallatin (1761–1849), who served as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Jefferson and Madison before founding the New-York Historical Society and New York University. Taking up residence on Park Avenue at the age of twenty-one, A.E. Gallatin was regarded as one of the most eligible bachelors in Manhattan. A regular at the opera, he was a trustee of New York University and belonged to numerous exclusive clubs.

In the early 1920s Gallatin began collecting modern art. Capitalizing on criticism that New York—unlike other major international cities—lacked a museum of modern art, Gallatin offered New York University the opportunity to exhibit his important holdings of work by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger, among many others. Opening its doors late in 1927, the Gallery of Living Art (later renamed the Museum of Living Art)—situated in the space that is now home to the Grey Art Gallery—was the first museum of contemporary art in the United States, predating the Museum of Modern Art by two years and the Whitney Museum of American Art by four years.

During the museum’s fifteen-year existence, Gallatin regularly added to the collection, amplifying his interest in artists associated with Cubism and its offshoots, such as Russian Constructivism and De Stijl as well as the art of Jean Mirò, Jean Arp, and Kurt Schwitters. On the American front, Gallatin acquired works by Alexander Calder, Ad Reinhardt, and his fellow Park Avenue Cubists. With its unparalleled quality—and its location on Washington Square near many artists’ studios—Gallatin’s collection served painters such as Pollock, De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hoffman as an indispensable laboratory for study.

By the mid 1930s Gallatin himself was mining the collection, incorporating Cubist  hallmarks into his own painting. Prizing compositional invention over subject matter, Gallatin distilled the raw material of the observed world, uncovering its underlying structure. His abstract forms cohere like the scraps of a Cubist collage, while his muted palette recalls the subdued tones of his own conservative wardrobe. With his fellow members of the Abstract American Artists, Gallatin regarded such recastings not as derivative, but rather as refashioning a pre-existing language into a distinctly American idiom.

 

Top:
Ferdinand Leger, Portrait of A. E. Gallatin, 1931

ink on paper, image:  7 3/8 x 5 3/4 inches

sheet:  8 15/16 x 6 3/16 inches

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution