Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Walter Percy Chrysler, Jr., heir to the Chrysler Corporation, was an American businessman and important collector of art. From the 1930s to the 1980s, he amassed a diverse collection of ancient art, sixteenth- to nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture, European and American modernism, and photography. He gifted the majority of his collection to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.

Chrysler’s father was Walter Chrysler, Sr., the American automotive industrialist and founder of the Chrysler Corporation. In 1923, when the older Chrysler’s responsibilities shifted from automotive production in Detroit to corporate administration in New York City, the family moved to Kings Point, Long Island. While attending the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, Chrysler acquired his first work of art, a watercolor by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He later attended Dartmouth College and founded a campus publishing company, Cheshire House, and Five Arts magazine with friend and fellow student Nelson A. Rockefeller. Chrysler left school in 1931 and spent several months traveling through Europe. While abroad, he met Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, and purchased small works on paper from each of them. Chrysler joined the family business upon his return to New York later that year. In 1934, he established the Airtemp branch of the Chrysler Corporation, bringing air-conditioning systems to automobiles for the first time. He became president of the Chrysler Corporation the following year.

Around this same time, Chrysler began frequenting New York galleries to purchase works of European and American modernism for the small art collection he had been building since boarding school. He favored the artists he had met in Paris, opting for early examples of their work that were indicative of each painter’s characteristic style. Key works of Cubism included Picasso’s Bust of a Man (1908; The Metropolitan Museum of Art), purchased from Pierre Loeb in 1936, Study of a Standing Nude (1906–7; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk), and a study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon acquired from the Weyhe Gallery in the mid-1930s. He also acquired Léger’s Houses Under Trees (1913; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift from Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection) from the Rains Galleries in 1936 and Braque’s Port in Normandy (1909; Art Institute of Chicago) from the Buchholz Gallery in 1939. Chrysler also remained in close contact with the artists he had met in Paris during his 1931 Grand Tour. From Braque, he commissioned Painter and Model (1939; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), and purchased The Charnel House (1944–45; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) directly from Picasso. Chrysler also collected Cubist works by Lyonel Feininger, Albert Gleizes, Roger de la Fresnaye, and Louis Marcoussis. Other notable modern holdings were Matisse’s Dance I (1909; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), purchased from Valentine Gallery in 1939; an extensive collection of photographs by Mathew Brady, Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Henry Fox Talbot, László Moholy-Nagy, and Alfred Stieglitz; and one of the largest collections of glass in the United States, with exemplary modern works by William Morris, Tiffany Glass Studios, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Chrysler also proved instrumental in the early stages of The Museum of Modern Art; he served as the museum’s first library chairman, contributing resources on Dada and Surrealism, and lent generously to exhibitions throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

Upon America’s entry into World War II, Chrysler joined the U.S. Navy, working in Naval Avionics in Quonset Point, Long Island. Following the war, he used his inheritance to focus on his activities as a collector and cultural patron: he financed the production of two Broadway shows (The Strong Art Lonely and New Faces) in 1952; a movie (The Joe Lewis Story) in 1953; and purchased the empty Center Methodist Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts to house the Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown, which opened in 1958.

In 1962 his collection was exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada; contemporary reports published in the New York Times, Life, and TIME stated that about half of the 187 works from his collection on view were deemed forgeries by The Art Dealers Association of America. Chrysler began searching for new venues to house his growing collection in the late 1960s, as the nineteenth-century church had gradually become too small. What was then the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences agreed to become the Chrysler Museum of Art as long as Chrysler’s collection was gifted to the institution upon his death. The new museum opened in 1971, and Chrysler served as director until 1976. He remained an active member of the Board of Trustees until his death in 1988.