Arthur Everett Austin, Jr. (called Chick)

Arthur Everett Austin, better known as “Chick,” was director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut from 1927 to 1944. He was not only instrumental in founding the modern and contemporary collections of the museum, but also organized the first Pablo Picasso retrospective in the United States in 1934 and transformed the Wadsworth into a center for avant-garde film, theater, performance, and art.

Austin grew up in the outskirts of Boston and traveled to Dresden, Paris, and Switzerland as a child. He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. and, later, Harvard College as a member of the class of 1922. He took a year off from his studies in 1922 to join a Harvard-led archaeological expedition to Egypt and Sudan, under the supervision of archaeologist George Reisner. Austin’s experiences abroad and close contact with Harvard art historian Paul J. Sachs led him to pursue a master’s degree in art history upon his return to Cambridge. While studying for his master’s, he began working closely with art historian Edward Forbes, director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, who recommended Austin for the position at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

In 1927 Austin joined the Wadsworth as museum director at the age of twenty-six. He immediately began developing the museum’s European paintings collection, with a specific focus on Baroque painting. Austin’s preference for contemporary art and performance, however, quickly manifested itself in his museum programming. In just two years, he had given Edward Hopper his first solo exhibition, founded the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music Society to sponsor concerts and performances by little-known European musicians, like Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, and made plans to co-design and build a museum wing dedicated to the exhibition of modern art.

Despite resistance from museum colleagues and board members, Austin turned the Wadsworth Atheneum into one of the most cutting-edge centers of modern art and performance in the United States. Although he did not assemble a substantial personal collection, he organized the first American exhibition of Surrealist art in 1931 and acquired Salvador Dalí’s Solitude (1931)—the first acquisition of Dalí by any museum. That same year he also purchased Picasso’s The Bather (1922). In 1933, under Austin’s urging, the Wadsworth sponsored the immigration of the Russian choreographer George Balanchine to New York. Balanchine’s first ballet in the United States premiered at the Wadsworth the next year, before he went on to found the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet. At the same time, Austin purchased the Serge Lifar Collection of set designs from the Ballets Russes. He was the first to acquire works by Joan Miró (Painting; 1933) and Piet Mondrian (Composition in Blue and White; 1935) for an American museum. In 1938 Austin also purchased Joseph Cornell’s Soap Bubble Set (1938) and one of the earliest collections of mobiles by Alexander Calder. Although dealer Julian Levy and the Wildenstein Gallery in New York sometimes advised Austin on museum acquisitions, he made most purchases on his own.

Perhaps most remarkably, Austin organized the first American retrospective of Picasso’s work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1934. The exhibition included 137 works—seventy-seven of which were oil paintings spanning the artist’s career. Notable works in the show included Self-Portrait with Palette (1906; Philadelphia Museum of Art); Playing Cards, Glasses, Bottle of Rum: “Vive la France” (1915; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection); and Girl before a Mirror (1932; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The opening of the exhibition on February 6, 1934 also marked the opening of the museum’s new Avery Memorial Wing for Modern Art, the first example of International Style architecture in the United States. To celebrate the opening of the new wing, Austin arranged for a performance of Four Saints in Three Acts, the avant-garde opera written by collector and writer Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thomson, to take place on February 7. The event launched a national tour of the opera and inaugurated the dedicated theater space of the Avery Memorial Wing, making the Wadsworth one of the earliest U.S. museums to house a performance center.

Arts and performance programming at the Wadsworth continued to draw crowds throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Austin often hosted well-known theatergoers and cultural figures at his home, the Austin House, in Hartford. Austin’s guests included the likes of Calder, Cornell, Dalí, modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, architect and Bauhaus School founder Walter Gropius, architect Le Corbusier, and Stein. In 1940 Austin began taking on lead roles in the performances staged at the museum. He starred in an adaptation of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in 1943; the themes of murder and incest caused controversy in the Hartford community, leading to Austin’s dismissal from the museum the following year.

Again, with help from his mentor Forbes, in 1946 Austin became the first director of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, where he stayed until 1957. He was responsible for important acquisitions of Baroque paintings to the collection, like Peter Paul Rubens’s Portrait of Archduke Ferdinand (1634); Bernardo Strozzi’s An Act of Mercy: Giving Drink to the Thirsty (1620s); and Nicolas Poussin’s The Ecstasy of Saint Paul (1649–50).

During his tenure at the Ringling, Austin also oversaw the addition of the Circus Museum (1948) and the Asolo Theater (1952).