Scofield Thayer

Scofield Thayer was an American poet and publisher, best known for his role as co-owner of the literary magazine the Dial beginning in 1919 until his retirement from public life in 1926. During travels in Europe between 1921 and 1923, Thayer assembled a significant art collection spanning four centuries, including works by Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Albrecht Dürer, Juan Gris, Franz Marc, Edvard Munch, and Edouard Vuillard.

Born into a wealthy family of industrialists, Thayer attended Harvard University and the University of Oxford. In 1918 he settled in New York and began working as a contributing editor for the Dial, a literary publication founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840. He invested heavily in the magazine and, following disputes with the editor, purchased it outright in 1919 in partnership with his friend, James Sibley Watson Jr. The Dial, like other so-called little magazines of the period, aimed to promote the work of avant-garde writers and visual artists, rather than generate profits. It was the first journal in the United States to publish such now canonical texts as e. e. cummings’s “Buffalo Bill’s” (1920) T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922), ThomasMann’s Death in Venice (1924), Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1921), and William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1920).

From 1921 until August 1923 Thayer lived in Vienna, where he sought treatment with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud for what scholars today believe was schizophrenia. It was during this time that he acquired much of his art, while on trips to Berlin, London, and Paris. Thayer bought primarily figurative works from such dealers as Alfred Flechtheim, Paul Guillaume, and Paul Rosenberg. In addition to acquiring works on paper by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, who were little-known in the United States at the time, Thayer bought woodcuts by Oskar Kokoschka and Munch, watercolors by Marc Chagall, drawings and sculptures by Adolf Dehn and Gaston Lachaise, lithographs by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, and paintings by Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vuillard. Thayer amassed a noteworthy collection of more than six hundred artworks over two years. Upon his return to the United States, he continued his acquisitions, adding the work of American modernists such as William Gropper and James McNeill Whistler. Thayer frequently reproduced works from his collection in the Dial. In 1923, he also oversaw the creation of a portfolio of reproductions, Living Art, including works by Charles Demuth, John Marin, Matisse, and Picasso, which he then sold through his journal.

In 1922 Thayer lent a significant portion of his collection to the Worcester Art Museum, where it remained on long term loan for six decades. Today, Thayer’s collection is held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.