KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
" T HE NEXT ISSUE IS ATRIBUTE TO WILLIAM," Edith Kurzweil said.
At the time, I couldn't imagine how "At the Galleries" could
be made into a proper homage to the awe-inspiring Mr.
Phillips, but by what can only be called serendipity, two exhibitions this
winter turned out to have special connections with the history of
Parti–
san Review
and its now-legendary, uncompromising editor and founder.
The first, "The Park Avenue Cubists," at New York University's Grey
Gallery, presented the work of A. E. Gallatin, Charles G. Shaw, and the
husband and wife team of Suzy Frelinghuysen and George
L.
K. Morris,
a fascinating quartet of sophisticated, patrician New Yorkers who used
their considerable inherited fortunes to further the cause of modernism.
All four were, with different degrees of emphasis, patrons, collectors, and
proselytizers, as well as serious, ambitious painters. Gallatin, for exam–
ple, played an important role in introducing New Yorkers to European
vanguard painting when he exhibited his collection as the Gallery of Liv–
ing Art (later the Museum of Living Art) at NYU, on the site of the uni–
versity's present Grey Gallery-in
1927,
two years before the Museum of
Modern Art was inaugurated. All four exhibited with American Abstract
Artists, a group that Morris helped found, dedicated to fostering geo–
metric, "non-objective" abstraction, so elevated in its thinking that the
exacting Piet Mondrian joined when he came to New York.
The connection with
Partisan Review?
Morris was the magazine's
first art critic, an editor, and an important backer in its early years, after
it severed its connections with the American Communist Party to
become a forward-looking, anti-Stalinist, independent literary journal
dedicated to supporting modernism in the arts . Morris's funding, which
allowed the magazine to break with its origins and reject the Party line,
was crucial
to
the newly reconceived
Partisan Review's
existence. (He
also served as curator of the Gallery of Living Art.)
Just as directly linked with
Partisan Review's
history was "Clement
Greenberg: A Critic's Collection," at the art gallery of Syracuse Univer–
sity (Greenberg's alma mater). This touring show, circulated by the Port-
The Gonzalo Fonseca exhibition, with catalogue text by Karen Wilkin,
opened at Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, in Valencia, Spain, in March.
