Jennifer R. Gross
Jennifer R. Gross is the former Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Gross, Jennifer R.
Gross, Jennifer R.
United States of America
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Description: The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America
Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Robert Mangold were undergraduates at Yale in the decade that followed the Katherine S. Dreier Bequest and have been consistently active in the University’s art community...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.157-165
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00159.012
Description: The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America
The rich tapestry of the life of the Société Anonyme is woven into the correspondence of Katherine S. Dreier (fig. 2) with the numerous artists, dealers, museum directors, writers, and collectors who formed its ranks. Its woof comprised the lives of the people she and Marcel Duchamp knew, each with a distinct set of values and aesthetics that...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.123-141
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00159.010
Description: The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00159
This book highlights the unique history of The Société Anonyme, Inc., an organization founded in 1920 by the artists Katherine S. Dreier (1877–1952), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), and Man Ray (1890–1976). As America’s first “experimental museum” for modern art, the Société Anonyme provided a means for artists, rather than historians, to chronicle the rise of modernism. Led by Dreier and Duchamp, the group eventually assembled a collection of more than one thousand artworks, which it presented to the public in a variety of innovative programs, publications, and exhibitions.

The incredible collection of the Société Anonyme now belongs to the Yale University Art Gallery, a gift from the Société and Dreier. It features the work of more than one hundred artists, many of whom are among the century’s most renowned—including Jean Arp, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, El Lissitzky, Piet Mondrian, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Joseph Stella—as well as works by lesser-known artists whose contributions to modernism are substantial.

With new archival information, including personal correspondence between Dreier and the artists whose work she assembled, a host of previously unpublished images, essays by leading scholars, and an interview with artists Robert and Sylvia Mangold about the contemporary significance of this collection, this fascinating book is essential to our understanding of the reception and interpretation of modernism in America.
Author
Print publication date June 2006 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300109214
EISBN 9780300232516
Illustrations 62 b/w + 302 color illus.
Print Status in print