Chapter 6: Return from Paris and New Beginnings in America: The American Abstract Artists Association
After his wife died in August, 1930, Holty moved to Paris at the suggestion of Hans Reichel. He was associated with Reichel until 1933 when they both left (Reichel to Munich and Holty to America — after Nice and Budapest, with his second wife). Holty gave a vivid picture of that time (beginning with the decade before, when writing about his friend, the artist Hilaire Hiler):
The Paris Hiler first knew was that of the American expatriates, the Dadaists and Surrealists of the first creation, persons displaced by the ravages of the first World War and the endless supply of tourists and visitors that flocked to Europe and from the prohibition ridden United States in a flotilla of luxury ocean liners. It was the dawn of the 1920’s in which social life was, one might say, in a state of gestation and flux. Anything could have happened and those present at that time were in the proper mood to welcome it, ocean flyers and all.
I should hardly dare to write another word about the general picture of Paris then if for no other reason than that talented writers and reporters have covered the ground so well and so often. But no one, as far as I know, has given us a comprehensive idea about the state of the visual arts at that time. I suppose that if one were to put together all of what has been written about the Surrealists and the Dadaists and about Picasso and other figures of the time that have survived it some sort of time image or image of that time would emerge but not quite like it really was because the chaff would have been winnowed away and the chaff is quite important as are the false bloomings and the ideas that in and by themselves never got anywhere, the artists who didn’t quite make it and the flowers that bloomed brilliantly, or so some thought they did and then withered away.
When Hiler or any other of us students of art arrived in Paris in the 1920’s we were foreign greenhorns to begin with and couldn’t possibly know what the situation was really like. Most of the young Americans went to some art school to find out what was what, either to the Beaux Arts Academy where one was entirely removed from the present or to one of the private schools where one might or might not acquire some beneficial guidance but only by chance. Young visiting artists with a bias in favor of modern art might have been steered in the direction of Andre L’hote’s modern art school (the only one of its kind in Paris at the time) by enthusiastic former students or the newcomer might have heard of and enrolled in the more private classes of le Fauconnier, a sort of cubist a la Albert Gleizes or with some rather housebroken modern like Waroquier or landed at the Academie Ranson where the painter Bonnard and the sculptors Maillol and Despiau were teachers. (The chances are that the newcomer had never heard of this school.) However to find one’s way into such more or less active modern circles it was best to first get into the Cafe life of the city where the wisenheimers and the wiseruppers have hung out for more than a century. Here the newcomer could learn where to study and whether to study in a school or just keep his eyes open, visit the museums and enroll in a sketch or drawing school like the Grande Chaumiere or Colorasais just to keep his hand in while he was getting his bearings. One more thing of importance is to have known, and few people can know the present well, that the big bombs of modern art had exploded before the war and that the postwar period was one of consolidation of gains to such masters as Picasso, Braque and Matisse. The general consensus of informed opinions at that time and the informed were by no means foreigners was that these masters had become reactionary—had gone backwards, something many critics and art judges of the time hoped was so. Paul Jourdain, architect and president of one of the great salons had said that while the World War was horrible, it had at least brought about the end of Cubism for which he gave thanks. But Cubism was not dead; on the contrary it was about to enter its decorative and most influential phase, if not its greatest which is a matter for dispute but that was not immediately evident. Both Picasso and Braque were working with the recognizable figure and one critic wrote that Picasso in his Greek colossal nude period of the time had returned to Ingres which it turns out was not so. Matisse’s figure studies of nudes seated in hotel bedrooms appeared less daring and less extreme than the nudes of “la danse” and of the “Joy of Life” and were a long cry from the late and most abstract work he was to do thirty years later, when in his love of color and floral ornament he was to practically abandon the figure or so cut it up that only its movement and fragments of silhouette remained.
Mondrian, Van Doesburg and all those artists like them, devoted to pure abstract painting and constructivism along with their displaced Russian allies like Gabo were present but existed in a state of isolation. Indeed the organization Abstraction Creation like its predecessor Cercle and Carre came into being only at the beginning of the 1930’s to consolidate the forces within this movement and to break out of the loneliness and isolation of which I write. I am not here dwelling on the growing forces and the influence of Surrealism in the mid-twenties because the history of those artists is well known and that movement itself was foreign if not obnoxious to the purists and to that group of painters who had at least one foot loosely planted in impressionism and neo-impressionism, the other in expressionism. Curiously this group that had no positive direction though some of its artists, like Soutine and a slew of Frenchmen, Bompard, Alix and Favory knew what they were doing was known as the School of Paris i.e. the great moderns, was not so called or so known in France. There was then such a profusion of efforts that an outsider could be confused without being ashamed of it and it required time a plenty to find the way to oneself or one’s way to go and some never found it. (II, 53-55)
At one point, in discussing Hofmann in America, Holty contrasted the teaching methods of Andre L’hote and the Hans Hofmann with whom he studied in Munich:
I believe the more unruly and perhaps enthusiastic of his American students (on their more native soil) exerted a progressive influence on Hofmann which his visiting American students in Munich certainly did not do. One shouldn’t forget that the New York art student of 1930 had a far greater interest and knowledge about the whole modern movement than the pilgrims to Europe had in the 1920’s. Furthermore, in the 1920’s the American art students interested in Modern Art did not go to Munich. They went to Paris and studied with Andre L’hote, a far lesser teacher but he was a very involved and confused intellectual and an even more confused, not to say inept, master.
Nevertheless he had a huge following and was very popular with his students. He was very articulate and opinionated, took a stand for or against this or that modern artist and expressed himself in an outspoken way, and generally conducted himself in class (he had sessions in which he demonstrated how one should go at making a modern painting) in a way the beginning student could and did appreciate. L’hote also was given to teach some technical methods that approached the instructional level of the schools of arts and crafts. I can only call them gimmicks, and Hofmann never descended to that level at any time I can remember. He confined his teaching to dealing with principles only, though his corrections of the students’ work (and he corrected every student’s work every day) were often technically brilliant. (II, 88)
Holty’s second wife was Elizabeth Gerber, who had come to Paris from Hungary to study art. She gave up her studies when she married Holty in 1932 but always shared with him a deep interest in art and artists and retained her secondary interest in music (she played the piano). They lived for a while in Nice with Holty’s grandmother, who then accompanied them to Budapest. The three returned to America for economic reasons and lived together in Milwaukee for about a year until the grandmother died, whereupon Holty and his wife moved to Westport, Connecticut. Their only child, Antonia (Toni), was born on August 22, 1933.1 She was 11 months old when her parents came to America in 1934. They eventually moved into New York City.
After he had come under the influence of Cubism, Holty’s paintings became increasingly more abstract. His most lasting contacts in Paris were made in the organization Abstraction-Creation. There he had met Piet Mondrian whom he later befriended in America and who had a lasting influence on his mind and work. There, also, he met several artists who would form the core of the abstract movement in America. In fact, the artist’s first significant activity in this country was associated with the American Abstract Artists organization.
Since he had no need of the employment provided by the Art Project of the Federal Works Progress Administration, Holty was not in on the first meetings of the artists who formed the AAA. They came from the abstract section of the Project, a special niche that had been created for them by the Project’s director Burgoyne Diller, who was an abstract artist, himself. Although Diller labored to find abstract mural opportunities for them, this was very difficult in an endeavor dedicated mainly to thematic material. The man whom Diller had appointed as their director, his friend Harry Holtzman, soon realized that they felt isolated and proposed that the artists get together outside the Project to discuss their ideas.
Holtzman prepared his own loft as a place where the group could gather, but conflict developed between him and the others who attended the first few meetings (Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Ibram Lassaw, and George McNeil). These artists not only felt isolated within the Project but neglected outside of it. This was because American abstract art had been left out of both the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of American art in 1935 and the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of cubist and abstract art in 1936. Thus, they wanted not so much, as Holtzman did, to theorize about their art as to get it before the public. Holtzman stayed with them, but to avoid further misunderstanding, the artists changed their meeting place to Greene’s studio and then to Albert Swinden’s. Swinden came into the group early in 1937, as did Vaclav Vytlacil and Carl Holty. The latter two had renewed their acquaintance when they moved into the city the previous year. Holty’s experience with the abstract movement in Paris had made him anxious to join with his own countrymen when Vytlacil told him of some abstract artists in New York who needed their support. An item in their first set of minutes (for the group’s fourth meeting on January 29, 1937) indicates that the artists were already planning definitely for an exhibition, as well as having difficulty in acquiring participants: “McNeil was authorized to first approach those to be invited to join the group, for permission to use their names to make up the forty necessary for getting the use of the entire Municipal Gallery, and that failing the necessary number of names, he be authorized to use fictitious names.”2
As their plans progressed, Holty’s name began to appear frequently in the minutes, indicating that he was taking an ever more active role in the group’s activities, which were always troubled by economics. He reported for the Publicity Committee on the high price of ads in the leading Sunday papers, the smallest insertion in the New York Times being $16 or $17. Eventually, he reported on finding an agency that would do the advertising without cost, “as they get their rake-off from the newspapers.” The possibility of respectable attention meant the group could forego its plan of “carrying a portable abstraction about the streets.”
Since the catalogue with cuts or reproductions was prohibitive, Vytlacil proposed that each artist produce a lithograph, to be printed at Cane School, for a portfolio that would be sold during the exhibition. Holty contributed along with the others—some by now “old” members, and some new—to the thirty lithographs that made up the portfolio. The response was so good that the first nine artists produced 4500 prints. After much discussion as to whether the portfolio should be split, the decision was finally made to sell the whole for $.50 and the excess copies to members for $.25 each.
Decisions were also wrung out of their discussions that the artists pay a $5 exhibition fee or be omitted from the portfolio catalogue; that they keep their prices reasonable, between $100 and $200, and turn over 10% of their sales to the group funds to “be reserved for use to aid those who, at present members of the group, shall find themselves in need of funds in the future.” By this time, the painters included Josef Albers, George Cavallon, Werner Drewes, George L. K. Morris (to become one of AAA’s leading spokesmen). Burgoyne Diller (invited without the usual screening, out of deference to his position on the Project), and A. E. Gallatin (required to undergo the screening, even though he had contributed precedents”) even though he had contributed $100 toward expenses, “to avoid setting bad Sculptors were so rare that the entry deadline of five weeks ahead did not apply to them; they could join and exhibit without restriction, provided their work was seen and passed on by the group.
Increasing the membership apparently increased the difficulty of making decisions, accounting for an item in the minutes, that the “Hanging Committee be given complete control as to where and how everything is to be hung, without anyone else offering advice or criticism.” Holty was proposed as a possible speaker for opening night, but it was then decided that there be “no speeches or talks the night of the show.” Finally arranged to everyone’s satisfaction, the exhibition opened on April 3, 1937. One of its few reviewers, Charmion von Wiegand, probably overestimated attendance during the two weeks the show was hung, but she wrote seriously about the works included:
Thirty-nine artists in search of new forms have opened an exhibition in the Squibb Galleries in New York. Judged by the hundreds of people who thronged the preview, abstract art has become a vital issue in the USA. The first works of cubism imported from France over twenty years ago left no impress on the main current of American art. Yet· steadily for the last ten years, applied arts and interior decoration derived from that movement have been popularized, due, no doubt, to their close relationship to American skyscraper architecture. It now remains to be seen if abstract art will more deeply affect our painting. Certainly the recent and belated importation of surrealism exhausted its drive in the dressing of department store windows.
But no one can deny that the whole movement in plastic art since the turn of- the century has been consistently away from representational painting. For all practical purposes, the pictorial conquest of the visual world begun in the Renaissance was accomplished in the time of Cezanne.
For this reason, the appearance of so many young, capable, and articulate artists in the abstract field is significant. The exhibition reveals that within the formula of abstract art, there are as many personal variations as in realistic art. In fact, there is everything from design verging on commercial illustration to serious analysis of form. For the most part, these new painters derive from the latter aspects of abstract art and not from early cubism. There is no dividing line between this type of abstract art and abstract surrealism.
The tradition comes through Picasso’s later phases, from Mondrian, Helion, and even from Kandinsky. Among the well-known abstract painters exhibiting are Balcomb Greene, Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Albert Swinden, George L. K. Morris, Paul Kelpe, Vaclav Vytlacil, George McNeil, Frederick J. Whiteman, and Carl Holty. Whether they speak in the fluent idiom of Picasso or in the vivid color of the Expressionists, these artists are seriously concerned with the aesthetic problems of painting. 3
In the spring meetings following the exhibition members had the satisfaction of learning that the sales of portfolios had more than covered expenses and they were already planning a more ambitious showing for the following year. Vytlacil was authorized to arrange for shows in Chicago, San Francisco, or “anywhere else,” and Holty was unanimously elected chairman.
The election marked a growing purposefulness that was formalized by fall with the creation of several committees. Holty was named as chairman of the executive and constitution committees. The group’s new-found confidence was obvious in a request from Holty to Alfred H. Barr Jr. that the Museum of Modern Art, of which he was director, present AAA’s 1938 Annual Exhibition. Holty stated the group’s rationale in a letter to Barr, dated November 23, 1937: “American Abstract Artists is the only group of its kind in the United States, and is representative of the most active painters and sculptors working in this direction. It is natural that the group looks upon the Museum of Modern Art as the authentic place where contemporary thought and effort is clearly identified.”
Barr replied that, although he was in personal sympathy with the work he had seen the spring before in the Squibb Building, as a matter of policy the Museum did not give exhibitions to artists’ groups unless given full jury power to select or omit, a condition to which most were not willing to agree. The members were discouraged and many suspected that Barr’s demurral was more selective than general, but the temporary downturn in their spirits soon passed with the news that some “western” museums had shown an interest over the summer in a traveling exhibition (duly sent in the spring of 1938 to museums in Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, and Los Angeles).4 Columbia University asked for an exhibition and lecture, for which Carl Holty accepted the responsibility and promised that his honorarium would go to the group’s treasury. Holty was also named to the committee in charge of selection, no mean task, for the gallery was so cramped as to limit the number of paintings and to exclude sculpture entirely—to the distress of a small, but growing body of sculptors that was soon to include David Smith.
During their first year, the members had been so preoccupied with problems of showing their work, they had given little notice to how they were received. Now, as they grew stronger, they also reacted more vigorously to what they believed to be deliberate neglect, not only to abstract art, but art in general. In a letter sent by Holty to the Honorable F. H. LaGuardia on February 9, 1938, the group expressed surprise that the New York World’s Fair Committee, on the excuse that there are “plenty of galleries and museums around town,” had made no provisions for exhibitions of the fine arts. Pointing out that the Marine Building should also be excluded on the motto that, “Let whosoever wants to see a boat, go to the Battery,” they continued:
The Fair Committee may or may not accept its traditional responsibility of presenting the artist as a factor in the making of progress. It may or may not shift the burden to “museums around town” which are notably negligent of the contemporary and notably reverent of the past. The significant point is that this committee has struck an ultramodern attitude in its publicity, in its decorations, and perhaps in its architecture. In all of these functions, the Movement of Modern Art (as exemplified in Leger, Mondrian, and Picasso) has provided the leadership—up to this moment, at which point the Fair Committee assumes all honors to itself.
The committee’s anxiety to protect and promote industry and the applied arts, while allowing the “fine arts” to look after themselves, cannot properly be estimated without mention of the indebtedness of industry to art. If the debt were negotiable, Mssrs. Leger, Mondrian, and Picasso might cancel the Fair Committee’s lease and invite the cows back.
Holty’ s letter to Mr. Grover Whelan, dispatched on on the same day, challenged the Fair Committee by claiming that AAA “supports an exhibition of fine arts at the World’s Fair, will cooperate in the arrangement of such a showing, and, in the event of this showing, expects to be represented.” The letter ended with, “Our membership includes fifty artists.”
The AAA’s second exhibition was held from February 14-28, 1938, in the galleries of the American Fine Arts Society, and their third was held throughout March, 1939, in Riverside Museum. With the latter exhibition, the artists finally attracted some attention from leading reviewers, although the title of Edwin Alden Jewell’s column, “Our Annual Non-Objective Field-Day” (New York Times, March 12, 1939), indicates the tenor of the write-ups, further summed-up by his opinion that abstract art amounted to a concern with pattern alone, “a view of art and or the creative function of the artist [that] strikes one as much too narrow.” He also asserted that artists of this “all-or-nothing persuasion” had not “cut loose from, abstractly speaking, the progenitorial apron strings.” The attitude that they were too dependent on Europe, was to plague the abstract artists, who claimed on the one hand that there should be no nationality to art and on the other hand that the color and rhythm of their work “resounded with . . . an accent which could have originated in America alone.”5
The fourth and fifth exhibitions of AAA were held, respectively, in the galleries of the American Fine Arts Society from June 3-16, 1940, and the Riverside Museum from February 9-23, 1941. AAA’s fourth exhibition was airily said to have “less sensational or crazy work than one would think” (Art News, June 8, 1940) but the presence in the fifth exhibition of works by Mondrian and Leger brought somewhat more gingerly treatment. Both of these artists, who had immigrated to this country during the year before and had soon afterwards joined AAA, were presenting their works to an American audience for the first time. While dismissing AAA’s distinguished new members with grudging respect, Jewell subjected the old ones to a pejorative comparison when he wrote that “these leaders of Ecole de Paris abstract expression contribute typical examples, and it is a relief to find that these particular canvases are by Leger and Mondrian themselves rather than by their admirers” (New York Times, February, 1941).
Critical problems, notwithstanding, the group continued to gain members; Fritz Glarner, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and Ad Reinhardt were now among them. Exhibitions had expanded to include a traveling show organized by the Project; finances were by then much more stable.6 Carl Holty left office in the spring of 1939, but he continued to serve an active role in AAA. His name came up in connection with every event and committee endeavor, including “militant action,” to be undertaken to force the Museum of Modern Art to exhibit American artists.
In the spring of 1940, AAA members picketed the Museum and handed out broadsides under the heading, “How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art? Let’s look at the record.” Their text contained these excerpts: “In 1939 the Museum professed to show Art in Our Time— Whose time, Sargent, Homer, LaFarge, and Harnett: Or Picasso, Leger, and Mondrian? Which time? If the descendants of Sargent and Homer, what about the descendants of Picasso and Mondrian? What about American abstract art?”
Holty was elected chairman of AAA again in 1941 and remained in office until 1944. These were the war years, a fact noted in a few gestures that were recorded in the minutes. For instance, Holty listed AAA among several organizations that formed a Society for Artists in Defense, patterned after a similar one in Great Britain. The Society seemed to have no definite function except to pass resolutions, i.e., a belated denunciation of Facism. Judging from a motion made on February 2, 1941, that the Refugee Committee look into the matter of securing an affidavit of support and a visa for Kurt Schwitters who “is at present located on the Isle of Man and is attempting to reach the U.S,” AAA took an active part in helping refugees leave Europe and come to America (Schwitters eventually went to England). Both as a group and individually, the members befriended them once they were here. They gave a reception for Leger and Mondrian and were very gratified when these artists joined the organization and exhibited with them. Mondrian also read a paper in one of a series of informal evening sessions held by AAA in the winter of 1941.7
Harry Holtzman had brought Mondrian to this country from England, where he had moved two years before (1938) to escape the war in France. Holtzman supported the artist, who was 68 when he arrived here in October, 1940, until he was on his own. Carl Holty and Fritz and Lucy Glarner were also among his closest friends. Lee Krasner (who called herself Leonore then), other women artists, and wives of artists in the group delighted in asking Mondrian to go dancing, a hobby he had cultivated in Europe, and to hear the American jazz he loved so much. When Mondrian died on February 5, 1944, AAA members were among the more than 200 artists who attended his funeral; some of them accompanied his body to the cemetery in Brooklyn. George L. K. Morris wrote for a later publication of AAA that this event was “perhaps the last turnout of the original AAA membership.”8
In March, 1944, Holty resigned as chairman because of dissatisfaction with the way that spring’s exhibition was hung. He felt that by emphasizing prices (“tastelessly placed beside each work”), the members had “failed in expressing the meaning of Abstract Art and had put [themselves] in the position usually assumed by genre painters.” When asked to clarify, Bolty argued that they had not fulfilled their function by exhibiting solely. They could have hung the works in a more meaningful way to distinguish the types of abstract art, including those not entirely “non-representational.” In the discussion that followed on whether they had fulfilled their original charge “to establish abstract art and present it with elucidation and education” (Holtzman), “to preserve the tradition of abstract art” (Wolff), or whether they had been too lenient, Holty recalled that the organization had never put pressure on members who wanted to drop out because they felt their works were not abstract enough. It had also invited into membership several semi-abstract artists such as Stuart Davis (who declined). Holty did not feel that AAA’s lenient policy was the problem but he felt the group needed a permanent place in which to show, with a more concerted effort from the entire group, stating: “If we continue to leave all the work in the hands of a few, the group will fall apart.”
When Holty’s resignation was not accepted, he asked that the decision of an earlier meeting to freeze the officers and membership “for the duration” be reconsidered. He felt that the group should move once more, in anticipation of the greater activity he foresaw as a “reaction toward culture” at the end of the War, and called for new elections.
As a result of Holty’s request new officers were named the following fall. This meant that he was replaced as chairman, but his stance was apparent in a questionnaire asking the members to take stock of AAA’s position after eight years of operation and to help determine on what basis the majority would like to continue. The choices were between being an exhibition group only, with one annual New York show and a simple catalogue, or a full cultural program with lectures, publications, additional New York exhibitions in permanent headquarters, and renewed traveling exhibitions.
The results were not recorded, but the artists must have accepted the latter option even though they were cautioned that this would mean increased dues and additional effort. Not for two years, however, was there any significant renewal of activity. In the minutes of May 27th, 1946, the secretary noted a request by Morris, speaking on behalf of “others,” to discuss whether the activities of the group, while being “quite satisfactory,” could not have “a much more far-reaching influence, if properly cultivated.” He invited the new members “to become as active as possible and replace the old members on whom the work of the group rested for many years.”
The new spirit was exemplified when AAA stationery was printed in 1947 listing all. the members on the letterhead page. Additions were Nell Blaine, Perle Fine, Fannie Hillsmith, Karl Knaths, I. Rice Pereira, Charmion von Wiegand, and Jean Xceron. The names of Mondrian and Moholy-Nagy were placed at bottom, “in memoriam.”
Holty was still on the 1947 roll, but his name had been dropped when the stationery was reprinted in 1949. His name had not appeared in the minutes between these dates, but his desire for increased activity and recognition had come true. There was a statement in the minutes of April 12, 1949, that the spring “annual” held at the Riverside Museum, was “one of the most successful exhibitions in the history of the AAA, in as much as the press was highly complimentary, attendance extremely large, and the Museum authorities very pleased.” An enthusiastic report had come in about the show traveling throughout the year to universities and associations from the Midwest to Canada.
The very next year, the group would make plans to send its traveling exhibition to museums in Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, Munich, Amsterdam, London, and Dublin. In each city, the works would receive serious and complete press coverage. Some old members such as Bolotowsky, Lassaw, Mason, and Morris would remain in the group, but most would be replaced in the 1950s by newcomers (among them, Lewin Alcopley, Herbert Ferber, Richard Lippold, Seymore Lipton, Michael Loew, Louise Nevelson, and Hyde Solomon).
In that decade, AAA’s fourth publication, a book entitled The World of Abstract Art, would present abstract art implicitly as a world-wide phenomenon, in articles on abstract genres from American regional varieties to English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Latin American, and Russian.
Carl Holty’s constitution of 1937 had summarized AAA’s credo with this statement:
We believe that a new art-form has been established which is different enough in character to demand this unified effort. We recognize, however, the need for individuals to experiment and deviate at times from what may seem established directions. For this reason, we place a liberal interpretation upon the work “abstract,” a word which is long recognized as neither adequate nor accurate.
What we desire is a broad inclusive organization of all artists in this country who have produced work which is sufficiently in character with this liberal conception of the work “abstract.” We invite into our membership the best-known “abstract” artists in America, as well as those who are totally unknown. We invite also the members of any other similar groups, assuring them that to join with us does not conflict with their own group relationships.
In 1949, the constitution was reaffirmed in slightly amended form, including this modestly stated addition, “ . . . the so-called abstract movement has now grown to far greater proportions than most of us had foreseen.”
- Although Mrs. Holty worked ceaselessly to teach her, their daughter suffered from insuperable learning disabilities. She did learn to write somewhat, even to type, and to appreciate music, especially opera, which she listened to by recording. Holty, who never referred to his daughter’s difficulties in his journals, sometimes wrote of her music filling the apartment or of the cacophonous sounds when his wife’s music was playing on one side of his study and his daughter’s on the other. From her teen years, Toni lived in a private institution—later, in a public one. Her situation constituted one of the tragedies that Holty referred to as having plagued his life. Another was his financial plight, which became acute when he ceased to receive money from his grandfather’s estate (to be explained later).
- This and all succeeding quotations and information concerning the American Abstract Artists, unless otherwise stated, was extracted from “Papers relating to the organization American Abstract Artists (founded 1936), lent by A. T. Mason, George L. K. Morris, and M. B. Coucirey” to the Archives of American Art, 5299 Woodward Avenue, Detroit; recorded on microfilm (59#11) by the Archives of American Art, 44 East 65th Street, New York City, quoted by written permission to V. Rembert of Alice Trumbull Mason (now deceased).
- Charmion von Wiegand, who painted but not in an abstract mode at the time, would join the group in the 1940s and serve as its president in the 1950s. Articles from magazines and newspapers were also found in the above named source material.
- Of no small consequence was the fee of $75 paid to AAA for each showing, as group assets were still modest at $99.14 cash on hand, and $4.50 in back dues. This amount at least allowed for cards of notification to be printed for meetings that alternated between the 5th Avenue Cafeteria and Swinden’s studio (he was paid $2.00 each time). These lasted until the building, also containing Greene’s studio, burned, whereupon the AAA members contributed works for a lottery for which tickets were sold for $.50 each to raise money to replace Swinden’s and Greene’s tools.
- George L. K. Morris, The American Abstract Artists (New York, 1939), IV. Without public support, the members had to promote their own showings by prorating all expenditures. In order to increase understanding, as well as to provide themselves with a forum, they edited a booklet to serve as the catalogue of their second exhibition. The statement by Morris is from this, AAA’s first publication.
- Income amounting to $956.19, from sales of the catalogue booklets and their advertisements and fees remitted for the shows, in addition to the regular dues, was entered in the business report of the year beginning May 1, 1938, and ending April 30, 1939.
- Holty gave the opening lecture of this series. Hans Richter, a member now, showed his abstract film “Rhythm” and others by Leger, Duchamp, and Eggeling. Glarner showed color slides he had made of members’ works. As guest speakers, Paul Nelson and Eric Mendelsohn surveyed modern architecture, Frederick Kiesler spoke on “Space Theater,” and Stephen Volpe on modern music.
- George L. K. Morris, “The American Abstract Artists: A chronicle, 1936-56,” The World of Abstract Art, ed. the American Abstract Artists (New York, 1957), 140–41.