Albert Eugene Gallatin

Albert Eugene Gallatin was a painter, collector, art critic, writer, and museum director. Born into a wealthy and respected family, he initially studied law at the New York Law School. In 1902, his father’s inheritance enabled him to live a life without professional ties and he developed a passion for automobiles and motorsports. He then worked occasionally as an art writer, authoring essays on James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1903) and Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), amongst others. He also collected works of American Impressionism. During World War I, he served as a member of a naval reserve unit.

In 1921-38, Gallatin frequently stayed in Paris, where he met representatives of the European avant-garde and bought works from them for his collection. In 1927, he founded the Gallery of Living Art in rooms at New York University, the first museum to show exclusively contemporary art. In 1936, the institution was renamed the Museum of Living Art, of which he was director until the collection was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1943.

In 1936, Gallatin resumed painting, which he had begun self-taught in the early 1920s. From the end of the 1920s, his art was characterized by the style of Cubism. In 1937, he was a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists and from then on collected increasingly works by American painters. Influenced by numerous friendships with European artists, he increasingly turned to Cubist abstraction, which earned him and his American friends the name “Park Avenue Cubists” due to an exhibition there. His paintings, done in muted colors, show structural analyses of objects isolated from the real world, often citing specifically American icons such as billboards. In the late 1930s, Constructivist elements increased in his paintings.