Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America - Hardcover

Gaddis, Eugene R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394587774 ISBN 13: 9780394587776

Publisher: Knopf, 2000

Synopsis

The story of Chick Austin is the story, in Virgil Thomson's words, of "a whole cultural movement in one man." Becoming director of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum at the age of twenty-six, Austin immediately set about to introduce modern art to America and to transform this conservative insurance capital into a cultural mecca that would become the talk of the art world during the yeasty years between the two world wars.

The first in the United States to mount a major Picasso retrospective, Austin was soon acquiring works by Dalí, Mondrian, Miró, Balthus, Max Ernst, and Alexander Calder. In the museum's new theater (which he designed), he staged the premiere of the revolutionary Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts (with an all-black cast). At Lincoln Kirstein's instigation, he brought Balanchine to America. And he embraced all the new art forms, making film, photography, architecture, and contemporary music part of the life of his museum. For his own family he built a Palladian villa (now a recently restored national historic landmark), filling it with the baroque and the Bauhaus and inviting all the locals in to see how it felt to be modern.

Austin's instinct for quality proved infallible. Whether acquiring a matchless Caravaggio or a startling Dalí, he balanced the old masters with the modern. Mounting provocative shows that linked the past to the present, he created dramatic installations--and he threw himself into everything, hanging fabrics, creating backdrops, stitching up costumes. He loved to teach, to paint, to act, to give lavish costume balls, and to dazzle audiences of all ages with his performances as a magician, the Great Osram.

Brilliant at using his magician's sleight of hand, he could manipulate his conservative trustees to get what he wanted--but only up to a point. One more purchase of an incomprehensible abstract canvas, one outrageous party too many, one more shocking theatrical role, eventually led to a crisis. Never one to be idle for long, Austin left Hartford and took on a new challenge--to make an artistic triumph of the pink-and-white palace in Sarasota, Florida, known as the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, which housed the circus king's moldering but magnificent collection.
Here is the colorful life of Chick Austin, and as we relish his audacious career--the risks he took, the successes he enjoyed along with the inevitable setbacks--we understand what a far-reaching influence he had on the way Americans look at and think about art. Not only a brilliant portrait of an extraordinary man, this wonderfully American story gives us a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the art world as it was then--and in many ways still is today.

About this title

About the Author

Eugene R. Gaddis is the William G. DeLana Archivist and Curator of the Austin House at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the editor and co-author of Avery Memorial: The First Modern Museum and lectures frequently on American cultural history. A graduate of Amherst College, he holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.

From the Inside Flap

Chick Austin is the story, in Virgil Thomson's words, of "a whole cultural movement in one man." Becoming director of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum at the age of twenty-six, Austin immediately set about to introduce modern art to America and to transform this conservative insurance capital into a cultural mecca that would become the talk of the art world during the yeasty years between the two world wars.

The first in the United States to mount a major Picasso retrospective, Austin was soon acquiring works by Dalí, Mondrian, Miró, Balthus, Max Ernst, and Alexander Calder. In the museum's new theater (which he designed), he staged the premiere of the revolutionary Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts (with an all-black cast). At Lincoln Kirstein's instigation, he brought Balanchine to America. And he embraced all the new art forms, making film, photography, architecture, and contemporary music part of the life of his museum. Fo

Reviews

Transcending the usual dusty confines of museum curatorships with unusual artistic range, grasp, ambition and flair, Austin (1900-1957) shone as director of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum and Florida's Ringling Museum. Born to a rich family, Austin married for social position, despite a flamboyant bisexual life (apparently reported matter-of-factly to his wife). By his late 20s he was already running the Atheneum, burning old paintings he disliked in the museum furnace and going on buying binges in Europe, usually snagging rare masterworks at bargain basement prices. In a typical case, he facilitated the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (recently thrice-revived) at the Atheneum, and helped arrange George Balanchine's arrival in America to found what became the New York City Ballet. (The choreographer took one look at Hartford in the 1930s and fled to Manhattan.) Gaddis (Austin Memorial: The First Modern Museum), who currently curates the Austin House museum at the Atheneum, points out that many of Austin's artistic friends, from architect Philip Johnson to historian H. Russell Hitchcock, were gay, but fails to detail whether Austin's work and sexuality were related. A pioneer in the appreciation of film as art, baroque painting and the links between 19th-century kitsch and modern art, Austin seems here an ever open-minded intelligence, unique in his time and even more valuable today, when his like would languish in the bureaucratic, hype-obsessed art world. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Wadsworth Atheneum of Hartford, Connecticut, America's oldest public art museum, was transformed into an avant-garde landmark by Arthur Averett "Chick" Austin Jr., director from 1927 to 1945. He was known to the art world as a passionate modernist with the solid underpinnings of an Old World connoisseur. Austin was trained in Europe in Italian Renaissance painting, but his keen and adventurous aesthetic was inspired by Egyptian and Mexican archaeological digs. Boasting movie-star looks and a flair for the bold and original, this chain-smoking, debonair, bisexual champion of the avant-garde mounted America's first major Picasso exhibit, and staged the world premiere of Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts in his personally designed Bauhaus-inspired addition to the museum, the Avery Memorial, welcoming such opening-night guests as Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, and Buckminster Fuller. Austin also oversaw the nation's first surrealist exhibit, featuring Persistence of Memory by a young Spaniard named Dali. Gaddis' scholarly research in this title, complemented by extensive endnotes and a bibliography, does justice to this pioneer of modernism in America. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE
"Boy Dear"

When Chick Austin first saw the palace of Gustav III, near Stockholm, he was so enchanted that he said he must have been conceived in Sweden. It was not surprising that Drottningholm, the baroque residence of the eighteenth century's most captivating king--who fostered the arts at his court, performed on his own stage, and was murdered at a masked ball--made him feel at home. Chick was in his element in any palace fitted out with gilded rococo rooms, formal gardens, fountains, pools, and the private theaters of princes. He reveled in the settings, props, and costumes of Europe's most ornamental era.

Yet he embraced the twentieth century as it unfolded. Fast cars and cocktails, cigarettes, the Ballets Russes, Picasso, Stravinsky, Erik Satie, movies, mobiles, and modern dance, Bauhaus buildings, machines for living, Balanchine, Dalí, and Gertrude Stein--if it was new, if it had quality and style, it was for Chick, first to experience and enjoy, then to share with the widest possible audience.

His arrival, coinciding almost exactly with that of the new century, occurred on December 18, 1900, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Coming into the world seven days before Christmas had a definite effect. As a child, he thought that evergreens and tinsel were hung up to celebrate his birth--a belief he never entirely outgrew.

He was christened Arthur Everett Austin, Jr. To his family he was known as Everett, but throughout his life, his mother, Laura Etnier Austin, addressed him, more often than not, as "Boy Dear." He was her only child, the center of her universe. Just before he was born, she made a will, leaving the bulk of her large estate to him and his descendants, naming her brother as guardian and her late uncle's business partner as sole executor, though the other contributor to his conception, Dr. Arthur Everett Austin--surgeon, professor of medicine, and expert on poisons--was in good health and living with her at the same address.

Laura Austin was an independent and inventive woman. As she charted Everett's future, she magnified their mutual past. Obsessively, and for decades, she delved into her ancestry, discovering in triumph that her mother's forebears, the Morrisons, could be traced to Scottish chieftains and Norse kings, and that the Etniers, on her father's side, were descended from at least one errant pope and several royal lines of France. But one of Laura's brothers, constructing a rival version of the family tree, reached a different conclusion based on overwhelming evidence: the Morrisons were solid Scottish immigrants, and the Etniers came from honest German peasant stock.

Johannes Eideneier, patriarch of the family in America, arrived in Philadelphia from one of the Protestant German states in 1751, and by 1785 a branch of the family, spelling the name "Etnier," had moved north to the fertile wilderness of Pennsylvania and put down roots in Germany Valley, along the Juniata River. Laura's father, David Etnier, was born on his family's farm outside Mount Union, Pennsylvania, in 1835. After working as a schoolteacher and bookkeeper, he helped establish a company in Mount Union that shipped grain down the Pennsylvania Canal to Baltimore and Philadelphia, and in the early 1870s, he bought a sawmill and a flour mill. He was tall, handsome, and commanding, his dark hair swept back above a reverse widow's peak, his eyes penetrating under graceful brows. Long after his death, beside his photograph in a family album, Laura mounted a picture of her son. The resemblance between the two, even to the hairline, was uncanny, as though Everett had descended exclusively from his mother's line.

In 1862 David Etnier married Hannah Jane (Jennie) Morrison, the daughter of John Morrison, a prominent Pennsylvania state legislator. Like the Etniers, the Morrisons were among the original settlers of Mount Union, having come from Virginia in the eighteenth century. They were well-to-do landowners, and Jennie's father bought the couple a new brick house in Mount Union. There Laura Ann, the second of their seven children, was born on March 14, 1864. Her only sister, Virginia Catharine (Virgie), ten years younger, was the last.

Although stern and self-righteous Methodism defined the Etnier men, they were not immune to the lure of gain. In 1849 Laura's grandfather, Oliver Etnier, left his wife and seven children to look for gold in California, but he returned empty-handed. Twenty-eight years later, when gold was found in California again, David Etnier left his own wife and seven children to go off on a similarly unprofitable quest. Laura may have inherited her powerful wanderlust from them.

In 1878, when Jennie Etnier died unexpectedly, still in her forties, the Morrisons swooped down on the children, persuading their father that life for the young Etniers would be better with them. Laura, then fourteen, and the four younger children were taken in by Jennie's unmarried sister, Mary Morrison, who owned a large house in Mount Union. Their rich bachelor uncle, John Morrison, founder of the Roaring Spring Paper Mill, became their legal guardian. Laura and Virgie eventually went to live with Uncle John in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and they adored him. Unlike David Etnier, he was jovial and tolerant of everything but what he called "professional Christians." He encouraged the girls to broaden their view of the world, sending them off on holidays at the New Jersey shore. Having paid for Laura's education at Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, he sent Virgie to Wellesley Academy in Philadelphia. When he died at fifty-two in 1890, he left his two sisters and his twelve nieces and nephews the considerable sum of $10,000 each. Shrewdly invested for them by his lawyer, these legacies rapidly grew.

Laura and Virgie, now financially independent, remained in Tyrone. Their brothers had moved on to careers that would scatter most of them far from Pennsylvania. As Virgie was only sixteen, Uncle John had appointed a close business associate, rather than David Etnier, to succeed him as her guardian. The girls had little to do with their father, who still lived in their childhood home. They did not make the twenty-five-mile trip from Tyrone to Mount Union to see him at Christmas in 1891, nor did they come to nurse him when he contracted pneumonia and died early the next year.


Laura, at twenty-eight, was almost on the verge of spinsterhood, but she had grown into a gregarious, determined woman with a sense of humor. Her soft, girlish face and luxuriant dark red hair made her look younger than her age. A carte de visite taken at the time shows her perched on the arm of a wicker bench in the studio of a fancy Philadelphia photographer. In her frothy white summer frock, she seems the picture of innocence, but her keen gaze and the hint of a wry smile suggest a certain calculation. She began to call herself an "heiress" and had little use for her old Mount Union friends. She had had enough of small-town life.

She and Virgie traveled, first in the United States and then, beginning in August 1895, to Europe. Their year-long trip took them throughout the Continent and to North Africa. Box camera in hand, Laura recorded palaces, parks, gardens, cathedrals, and cemeteries from Amsterdam to Potsdam, Munich to Milan. Her well-composed snapshots documented picturesque "types"--street urchins, well-starched nannies, and any members of European royalty who happened to come within range. She aimed her lens at Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin and at Princess Victoria Louise in Postdam. In Corfu, she snapped the huge steam yacht of the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph II.

The Etnier sisters spent the winter of 1895-96 in Berlin, making excursions to Dresden, Nuremberg, and Munich. Among the Americans living in the German capital was Arthur Everett Austin, a thirty-four-year-old physician, a widower, on leave from the faculty of Tufts Medical School in Boston and now teaching at the University of Berlin. A man of solid build, reserved and unassuming, he had a handsome square face and a dark mustache that drooped at the corners very much like Uncle John's.
Laura, Virgie, and Arthur Austin struck up a friendship and traveled together that spring to Athens to attend the first Olympic Games since ancient times. On April 6, 1896, they were among the fifty thousand spectators who watched King George I of Greece open the games. When the unofficial American team won nine out of the twelve track-and-field events, Laura managed to round up three of the gold-medal winners for another snapshot. After the games, she and Virgie continued on their tour, arriving back in Tyrone by the end of August. Arthur returned to his medical work in Berlin and obtained permission from Tufts to extend his leave for a year. Laura kept in touch. As a doctor and a professor of medicine in Boston, Arthur was decidedly a cut above her Pennsylvania relatives and looked promising as the father of a child.

Like Laura, Arthur had risen from a modest rural background. The Austins had come to America from England, migrating from New Hampshire to Belgrade, Maine, by the end of the eighteenth century. Arthur's father, David Farnum Austin, moved to Bos-ton in 1840 at twenty-one, and married Mary Josephine Weaver in 1859. Arthur Everett, the first of their
six children, was born on April 11, 1861. Eight  years later, David Austin moved his family from Bos-ton to Readfield, Maine, near his childhood home, where he became one of the region's most prosperous farmers, living to a vigorous ninety-three.

Arthur attended high school in Augusta and in 1883 graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where he was an exceptional student and a track-and-field champion. After a year as principal of Somerset Academy in Athens, Maine, he entered Harvard Medical School, earned his M.D. in 1887, took an advanced degree at the University of Berlin, and then had further training in Heidelberg and Vienna. In 1891, soon after returning to Boston, he married Louise ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394587774
• ISBN 13: 9780394587776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512