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Albert Eugene Gallatin

Date: 1937–38

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.56

Text Entries: Albert E. Gallatin began his career as a patron of the arts. Born into a prominent and wealthy family in Philadelphia, Gallatin became a philanthropist, collector and critic, and his early writings on artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, James McNeill Whistler, Paul Cézanne and Charles Sheeler still stand as landmarks. In 1927, Gallatin opened the Gallery of Living Art (later known as the Museum of Living Art) on the ground floor of the main building of New York University. Considered the first American collection devoted exclusively to modern art open for public view, the Gallery of Living Art served as an important forum for the exhibition of Synthetic Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Dutch De Stijl painting, Surrealism and other major movements of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1942, forced to remove his gallery from New York University, Gallatin transferred his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it still resides today. Around the time of the Gallery of Living Art's inception, Gallatin began to paint idiosyncratic color abstractions such as Room Space. The painting's carefully constructed composition perfectly illustrates Gallatin's preference for work that expresses formalist ideas of structure over symbolic or expressive content. These abstract works have also increasingly earned Gallatin recognition as one of the "little masters" of geometric painting.