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Description: The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America
For more than sixty years the Yale University Art Gallery has had the good fortune of housing the Société Anonyme Collection of modern art as part of its permanent collection. Generations of Yale students, scholars, and members of our public audience have been fascinated by this unique assemblage of more than one thousand works. Canonical...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00159.002
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Director's Foreword
For more than sixty years the Yale University Art Gallery has had the good fortune of housing the Société Anonyme Collection of modern art as part of its permanent collection. Generations of Yale students, scholars, and members of our public audience have been fascinated by this unique assemblage of more than one thousand works. Canonical paintings and sculpture by such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Arthur Dove, and Joseph Stella have long played a key role in our permanent collection display. Important drawings, prints, and photographs by Man Ray, El Lissitzky, and a host of others have drawn twentieth-century art scholars and students to Yale for decades. The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America marks the first time since the donation of the collection to the Gallery in 1941 that a selection from this stellar group of objects will travel outside New Haven. The present exhibition and scholarly catalogue not only feature the most celebrated artists and objects in this collection but also probe the work of such lesser-known but equally compelling artists as the Futurist painter Erika Giovanna Klien, the Belgian cubist Marthe Donas, and the Hungarian artist Béla Kádár. Through what has been a wonderfully stimulating endeavor, both for myself and for my colleagues here at the Gallery, we hope to share with a broader audience the impressive history of the Société Anonyme and its artworks that have long been an admired part of the university’s cultural holdings.
It was the Société Anonyme’s founders, artists Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp, who chose the Yale University Art Gallery as the home for the extraordinary collection they assembled. The Société Anonyme gift established the modern art collection at Yale, and it compares in importance to the university’s Mabel Brady Garvan Collection of American art and the James Jackson Jarves Collection of early Italian paintings. Dreier’s commitment to the Société Anonyme Collection did not end with the initial gift, for throughout the 1940s and early 1950s she supplemented the collection with more than one hundred new works, many of them gifts to the Collection from the artists themselves. The full scope of Dreier’s generosity was made evident after her death, in 1953, when more than three hundred additional works, including many modern masterpieces such as Constantin Brancusi’s Yellow Bird (1919), came from her estate to the Gallery. Dreier and Duchamp’s devotion to living artists of all nationalities presciently anticipated the global conditions of artistic practice extant today. The two friends also pioneered a form of patronage that valued artistic commitment over critical and commercial popularity as their standard for collecting, one that remains as a challenge to today’s impulse toward scholarly categorization and commercial success. Their dedication — especially that of Dreier — to the progressive value that art and artists offer to society has, we hope, continued in our active use of the collection as a means to help students, faculty, and our public understand new approaches to art making and creativity in the twenty-first century.
To introduce this wonderfully varied collection of modern art to audiences beyond Yale University is the goal of this exhibition, which has been very thoughtfully organized by Jennifer R. Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Dreier and Duchamp have a devoted contemporary champion of the artist in Jennifer, a curator dedicated to broadening the modernist narrative to include artists of all approaches and backgrounds. The project could not have come to such gratifying fruition without the enthusiasm, scholarship, and hard work of Susan Greenberg, the Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, who not only worked closely with Jennifer on the development of the project but was instrumental in coordinating the complex publication that accompanies the exhibition. Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, has generously supported the exhibition by enabling the inclusion of some her department’s major American paintings by Société Anonyme artists. The similarly enthusiastic support of Suzanne Boorsch, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, which enabled the presentation of so many works on paper in the exhibition, was also greatly appreciated.
This exhibition was made possible by an endowment created with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. We are also extremely grateful to John Walsh, B.A. 1961, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum and chairman of the Gallery’s Governing Board Education Committee, who was immediately supportive of our efforts to make this exhibition available to other institutions throughout America while Yale renovated its three historic art buildings in downtown New Haven. John and his wife, Jill, also provided the first leadership gift of funds to become principal sponsors of the exhibition, and have been joined by other principal sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. James H. Clark, Jr., B.A. 1958; Mr. and Mrs. James Howard Cullum Clark, B.A. 1989; Ms. Helen Runnells DuBois, B.A. 1978, and Mr. Raymond F. DuBois, Jr.; Mr. Leonard F. Hill, B.A. 1969; Mr. and Mrs. George T. Lee, Jr., B.A. 1957; Dr. and Mrs. Edmund P. Pillsbury, B.A. 1965; Mr. Mark H. Resnick, B.A. 1978; Ms. Cathy R. Siegel and Mr. Kenneth Weiss; Mr. and Mrs. Joseph B. Smith, B.A. 1950; and Mr. Michael Sullivan, B.A 1973. The four museums hosting the tour of the exhibition have also been wonderfully supportive of our project, and I warmly thank Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum; Jay Gates, director of The Phillips Collection; John R. Lane, the Eugene McDermott Director, Dallas Museum of Art; and Susan Edwards, director of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, for their enthusiastic commitment to the fascinating history of the Société Anonyme. Their many highly capable and cooperative museum colleagues have also been a great pleasure to work with on this cultural endeavor. In addition, we are greatly indebted to the institutions whose generous loans were essential to the realization of this exhibition: The Cleveland Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Arts Library at Yale.
The life of the Société Anonyme Collection at Yale began under the precocious and enlightened advisement of Dr. George Heard Hamilton (1910–2004), a longstanding professor of the history of art at Yale (1936–66) and curator of modern art at the Yale University Art Gallery (1940–66). Professor Hamilton’s collaboration with Dreier and Duchamp after their first gift in 1941 and his efforts to document the Collection, which resulted in the first catalogue in 1950, are the foundations supporting the curatorial efforts of the subsequent generation of scholars who have further illuminated this Collection. Of these scholars, Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney, authors of the essential 1984 Société Anonyme catalogue raisonné, must be mentioned. Professor Hamilton’s passing in March 2004 prevented him from sharing our pleasure in realizing this ambitious exhibition of the history of the Société Anonyme Collection. We fondly dedicate this book to him. We also would like to recognize Theodore Sizer, former director of the Yale University Art Gallery (1928–47), whose prescience in recognizing the value of these modernist artworks confirmed the importance of following up on Katherine Dreier’s offer of the Société Anonyme Collection. In turn, the diplomacy of Charles Seymour, former president of Yale University (1917–56), was instrumental in securing this fabled collection for our university. It was through their efforts that modernism came to the Yale University Art Gallery, where it continues to enrich the central mission of this dedicated teaching museum.
Jock Reynolds
The Henry J. Heinz II DirectorYale University Art Gallery
Director's Foreword
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