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Surrealism and Modernism: From the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art by Eric Zafran
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It's hard to pinpoint the exact location of the center of the art world. It has resided most famously at one time in Paris and then New York, with other major cities making claim to the title at different times throughout the years. However fleeting this title may be, it still seems surprising that once upon a time Hartford, Connecticut, a town most known for its insurance companies, served as the unofficial gateway and capital of modern art in America. Beginning in the late 1920s, a young and somewhat rebellious Harvard graduate began a career at Hartford's Wadworth Atheneum that would make waves throughout the country and help shape the American artistic climate for years to come. Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America is the biography of this creative museum director (and amateur actor) whose energy and romantic visions inspired so many. The story is one of a charmed life full of upper-class indulgences like transatlantic trips, short-lived college suspensions, lavish parties, and country houses.
Underneath the shiny surface was a real-life soap opera, from an overbearing mother and distant father to a blissful marriage that very slowly crumbled under the pressures of an ever-changing lifestyle--and through it all Austin remained steadfast in his commitment to art and theater. Not every endeavor was successful: a failed collaboration with arts patron Lincoln Kirstein to bring George Balanchine to Hartford was a crushing blow, and his mounting of a Picasso show brought much neighborly criticism. Yet, whatever the project, Austin was always way ahead of the cultural curve, and in Hartford that meant that much of the community was playing a constant game of catch-up. Austin's life is a complex story of travel, art, family, romance, and an ever important group of friends. --J.P. Cohen
From Publishers Weekly
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.
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