Microcosm of Modernism
March 2008
Because Gross was indifferent to art-world taste, he could collect realist images by Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer and Guglielmi and daringly hang them next to cutting-edge modernist abstraction by Graham, Gorky and de Kooning, expressionists works by Grosz and Hartley and unsettling surrealist images by Ernst and Castellon. And Gross did not just acquire signature works. In addition to a classic surrealist frottage by Ernst, for example, he bought a beautiful 1916 synthetic Cubist painting, the kind of image that most collectors would never consider because it pre-dates Ernst’s mature work. Also in his collection is an early Stuart Davis oil from 1922, a Cubist work that Gross described by saying in a 1985 Connoisseur magazine article, "I love the beautiful design, the subdued colors and harmony." Many of Gross’s pictures are portraits of Gross himself, by Soyer and Avery, for example, and a large number of works are inscribed to him. Minor artists hang next to the famous, while prints and drawings thrive alongside paintings and sculpture. For Gross there was no hierarchy of style, artist, or medium. Collecting was about quality, and it was an addiction. "I get high on the feeling when I buy a good piece," Gross said in the Connoisseur article.
Symbolic of Gross’s daring and independence was his early collecting of African art. It is not known when he first acquired in this field, but most likely it was in the late 1920s or the 1930s. By the late 1920s, Gross was making sculptures of "Negresses," as he titled them, and while the works do not look African, some of his pieces from a few years earlier do. Hardly anyone in America was seriously collecting this material by 1930, the few exceptions including Albert C. Barnes of Merion, Pennsylvania, and Frank Crowninshield, the editorial director of Condé Nast. John Graham, one of Gross’s closest friends, put together Crowninshield’s collection, traveling regularly to Paris on buying trips. It may have been Graham who got Gross interested in tribal art, although Max Weber, another close friend, who brought the first African pieces to New York from Paris in 1909, is another possible catalyst. Gross’s interest also could have stemmed from his visits to the Weyhe Gallery, a Lexington Avenue bookshop that had African art in the back room. Regardless of the source, by the 1940s Gross had acquired many of the major pieces in his collection, some of which he bought from Crowninshield when he dissolved his collection in the 1940s, including a great Ngbaka guardian figure, one of his two great Fang reliquary figures, two Kongo mirror fetish figures, a Teke fetish figure, a Dan mask and several Kota reliquary figures. From Weyhe he bought a Yaka mask that had been in the famous Himmelheber collection in Heidelberg. In the 1950s he bought the first of his three Benin bronzes. Overall he bought over a thousand African works, not counting the thousands of Ashanti gold weights—small bronze or brass sculptures illustrating African parables and used to weigh gold dust.
At first it may seem that the African material has nothing to do with the rest of Gross’s art collection, until we remember the important role that tribal art played in the evolution of Modernism, beginning with Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, among others. African art was a major influence on Modernism, and its practitioners thought of African artists as kindred spirits because of their emphasis on abstraction.
Here in Gross’s home we get a representation of the real New York art world, not the one found in the art history survey books. On its walls are the artists of the period as well as their sources and influences. Gross’s collection reminds us that the art world was not just Gorky, de Kooning and David Smith (whom Graham hired to make the bases for Crowninshield’s African art), but it also consisted of the Soyers, Guglielmi, Burliuk, Graham, Joe Solman, Castellon, Ben-Zion, Jacob Lawrence and Milton Avery, to mention but a few of the hundreds of artists represented in Gross’s collection. We are reminded that Léger was in New York during the war and that Ernst, Grosz, Archipenko and Lipschitz were refugees as well. We are reminded that all of these seemingly diverse artists were in each other’s studios, hanging out in bars and cafés, or in the case of Gross, sitting around a dining room table, which was a weekend ritual for the artist and his family. We are reminded that the art world was small in 1960, these artists were in constant dialogue with one another and they talked about and looked at African art as well as that by great European masters such as Picasso and Matisse.
Lastly, we are reminded that the art world was infinitely more layered and interesting than history has led us to believe, and that in order to create a complete and accurate picture of the period, one that fully takes into account all of the historical, social and political forces molding American art, scholars are going to have to look at all of these artists, many of whom are forgotten or overlooked. Such a thorough perusal of the period would reveal such art-historical nuggets as a two-person exhibition of Chaim Gross and Arshile Gorky at the now-forgotten midtown Guild Art Gallery in 1936.
Today’s art history would seem to make Gorky and Gross strange bedfellows, despite the fact they were friends. But the truth is their aesthetic interests and social background overlap considerably. Both were Modernists, dedicated to abstracting and emphasizing a formalist vocabulary, and both received major commissions from the WPA. Both were refugees from a harsh Europe—Gorky fleeing from the Ottomon Empire’s genocide of the Armenians during World War I, Gross escaping the brutal savagery of the Russian Cossacks during that same war. And both brought their European experience to bear on their art, in Gorky’s case a nostalgia for Armenia and the powerful emotions stemming from the genocide (his mother died in his arms in a Russian refugee camp), in Gross’s an art that attempts to correct the evils of the world by showing humans supporting one another, often in the form of acrobats who heavily rely on one another to achieve their magical performances. Many of the artists in Gross’s collection were, like Gross and Gorky, immigrants who worked for the WPA and struggled, like most New York artists, to eke out a living during the Depression.
Gross’s walls are filled with fascinating stories that beg to be told, stories that will flesh out our understanding of the period, making us realize how rich and complex it really was.
Symbolic of Gross’s daring and independence was his early collecting of African art. It is not known when he first acquired in this field, but most likely it was in the late 1920s or the 1930s. By the late 1920s, Gross was making sculptures of "Negresses," as he titled them, and while the works do not look African, some of his pieces from a few years earlier do. Hardly anyone in America was seriously collecting this material by 1930, the few exceptions including Albert C. Barnes of Merion, Pennsylvania, and Frank Crowninshield, the editorial director of Condé Nast. John Graham, one of Gross’s closest friends, put together Crowninshield’s collection, traveling regularly to Paris on buying trips. It may have been Graham who got Gross interested in tribal art, although Max Weber, another close friend, who brought the first African pieces to New York from Paris in 1909, is another possible catalyst. Gross’s interest also could have stemmed from his visits to the Weyhe Gallery, a Lexington Avenue bookshop that had African art in the back room. Regardless of the source, by the 1940s Gross had acquired many of the major pieces in his collection, some of which he bought from Crowninshield when he dissolved his collection in the 1940s, including a great Ngbaka guardian figure, one of his two great Fang reliquary figures, two Kongo mirror fetish figures, a Teke fetish figure, a Dan mask and several Kota reliquary figures. From Weyhe he bought a Yaka mask that had been in the famous Himmelheber collection in Heidelberg. In the 1950s he bought the first of his three Benin bronzes. Overall he bought over a thousand African works, not counting the thousands of Ashanti gold weights—small bronze or brass sculptures illustrating African parables and used to weigh gold dust.
At first it may seem that the African material has nothing to do with the rest of Gross’s art collection, until we remember the important role that tribal art played in the evolution of Modernism, beginning with Picasso, Matisse, Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, among others. African art was a major influence on Modernism, and its practitioners thought of African artists as kindred spirits because of their emphasis on abstraction.
Here in Gross’s home we get a representation of the real New York art world, not the one found in the art history survey books. On its walls are the artists of the period as well as their sources and influences. Gross’s collection reminds us that the art world was not just Gorky, de Kooning and David Smith (whom Graham hired to make the bases for Crowninshield’s African art), but it also consisted of the Soyers, Guglielmi, Burliuk, Graham, Joe Solman, Castellon, Ben-Zion, Jacob Lawrence and Milton Avery, to mention but a few of the hundreds of artists represented in Gross’s collection. We are reminded that Léger was in New York during the war and that Ernst, Grosz, Archipenko and Lipschitz were refugees as well. We are reminded that all of these seemingly diverse artists were in each other’s studios, hanging out in bars and cafés, or in the case of Gross, sitting around a dining room table, which was a weekend ritual for the artist and his family. We are reminded that the art world was small in 1960, these artists were in constant dialogue with one another and they talked about and looked at African art as well as that by great European masters such as Picasso and Matisse.
Lastly, we are reminded that the art world was infinitely more layered and interesting than history has led us to believe, and that in order to create a complete and accurate picture of the period, one that fully takes into account all of the historical, social and political forces molding American art, scholars are going to have to look at all of these artists, many of whom are forgotten or overlooked. Such a thorough perusal of the period would reveal such art-historical nuggets as a two-person exhibition of Chaim Gross and Arshile Gorky at the now-forgotten midtown Guild Art Gallery in 1936.
Today’s art history would seem to make Gorky and Gross strange bedfellows, despite the fact they were friends. But the truth is their aesthetic interests and social background overlap considerably. Both were Modernists, dedicated to abstracting and emphasizing a formalist vocabulary, and both received major commissions from the WPA. Both were refugees from a harsh Europe—Gorky fleeing from the Ottomon Empire’s genocide of the Armenians during World War I, Gross escaping the brutal savagery of the Russian Cossacks during that same war. And both brought their European experience to bear on their art, in Gorky’s case a nostalgia for Armenia and the powerful emotions stemming from the genocide (his mother died in his arms in a Russian refugee camp), in Gross’s an art that attempts to correct the evils of the world by showing humans supporting one another, often in the form of acrobats who heavily rely on one another to achieve their magical performances. Many of the artists in Gross’s collection were, like Gross and Gorky, immigrants who worked for the WPA and struggled, like most New York artists, to eke out a living during the Depression.
Gross’s walls are filled with fascinating stories that beg to be told, stories that will flesh out our understanding of the period, making us realize how rich and complex it really was.
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