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(b London, Dec 8, 1904; d New York, Nov 25, 1979).

American publisher and collector. He trained at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York before working in publishing. In 1950 he set up his own publishing company, Harry N. Abrams Inc., one of the first American companies to specialize in art books. In 1968 he founded Abbeville Books. His collecting, which began in the mid-1930s, went through three distinct phases: his first interest was in such contemporary American painters as Milton Avery and Raphael Soyer. He continued to purchase such works into the 1950s, but from the mid-1940s his collecting began to be dominated by works by major 20th-century artists; he acquired, among other works, Marc Chagall’s Clock (1948), Pablo Picasso’s Motherhood (1921) and Georges Rouault’s Miserere (1939).

Abrams’s most notable period as a collector was the 1960s, when he became known as a major collector of new American art. His interest in this area was fuelled by the ...

(b Maple, Ont., May 25, 1879; d Cherkley, nr Leatherhead, June 9, 1964).

British publisher, financier, politician, collector and patron, of Canadian birth. As Minister of Information during World War I, he was responsible for the War Records Office in London, through which Wyndham Lewis, Muirhead Bone, William Orpen, Christopher Nevinson, Augustus John and six Canadian artists, J. W. Beatty (1869–1941), Maurice Cullen, C. W. Simpson (1878–1942), Fred Varley, David Milne and A. Y. Jackson, received commissions to record Canada’s military contribution to the war effort. The Canadian War Memorials were deposited at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1921, and since then all but the major canvases have been transferred to the Canadian War Museum, also in Ottawa.

Beaverbrook was instrumental in developing the National Gallery of Canada’s collection of historical pictures; he was directly responsible for the gift of Benjamin West’s The Death of Wolfe by the Duke of Westminster in 1918, and the acquisition of ...

American photography foundation and publisher. Aperture magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1952 by American photographers Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan, Minor White, Ernest Louie, Melton Ferris, and Dody Warren, with writer–curators Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall. They intended the organization to serve as a forum for discussing photography, to exhibit photographers’ work, and to raise the profile of art photography in the United States.

The journal Aperture, which began publication in 1952, dedicated itself to the practice of photography as a fine art and thus distinguished itself from popular and commercial photographic periodicals. In this way the journal emulated Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1903–17). Photographer Minor White was the journal’s first editor and, under his tenure, it became concerned with the capacity of photography to deal with spirituality and profound human experiences. The first issue included the work of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and French photographer Lisette Model. All contributors were urged to write about their own work. In ...

Art journal published from 1934 to 1937. In 1934, the Artists’ Union joined with the Artists’ Committee of Action, which had been organized to protest against the destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in Rockefeller Center, New York, to publish Art Front, a journal of news and opinion for artists. The first issue appeared in November 1934 with an editorial committee consisting of eight members of the Artists’ Committee of Action (Hugo Gellert (1892–1985), Stuart Davis , Zoltan Hecht (1890–1968), Abraham Harriton (1893–1986), Rosa Pringle, Hilda Abel, Jennings Tofel (1891–1959) and Harold Baumbach (1903–2002)) and eight from the Artists’ Union (Ethel Olenikov, Boris Gorelick (1912–84), Robert Jonas (b 1907), Max Spivak (1906–81), Michael Loew (1907–85), Katherine Gridley (1898–1940), Herbert Kruckman (1904–98) and C. Mactarian)). Herman Baron served as the Managing Editor. The opening statement announced: ...

(b New York, March 17, 1822; d New York, Aug 11, 1904)

American wood-engraver, art dealer, collector and philanthropist. Avery’s career as a wood-engraver and his involvement with the New York publishing trade began in the early 1840s. He worked for, among others, Appleton’s, the New York Herald and Harper’s and produced illustrations for trade cards, religious tracts, adventure stories and children’s books. By the early 1850s Avery had begun compiling humorous books and commissioning drawings from such artist-illustrators as Felix Octavius Carr Darley, John Whetten Ehninger, Augustus Hoppin (1827–96), Tompkins Harrison Matteson and John McLenan (1827–66). His business contacts led to close relationships with such artists as Frederick Church, John F. Kensett and William Trost Richards.

By the late 1850s Avery had begun to collect drawings and small cabinet pictures by local artists. Other art collectors, notably William T. Walters, asked Avery’s advice when commissioning works of art. In 1864 he turned his engraving practice over to ...

(b Richmond, VA, Feb 24, 1883; d Glen Head, Long Island, NY, Feb 1, 1951).

American architect, preservationist, author, and editor. His wealthy patrician family provided the opportunity for a fine education and connections to future clients. In 1906 he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Columbia University. His education continued in Rome at the American Academy through receipt of the McKim Fellowship in Architecture in 1907. In 1908 he passed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and remained in Paris until 1909.

Best known for his residential work, Bottomley combined his extensive knowledge of architectural history with his own observations to produce personal interpretations of past styles. Of his approximately 186 commissions, 90 were located in New York and 51 in Virginia. His most recognized residential commissions are found on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. Produced during the 1920s and 1930s, these residences, like many of his other projects, have exteriors inspired by nearby 18th-century James River Georgian mansions. Their interiors deviate from the Georgian models with creatively arranged plans that display a particular delight in the use of curving stairs within a variety of different shaped foyers....

(Richard)

(b Croydon, London, March 31, 1888; d Toronto, March 21, 1955).

Canadian painter, critic and writer of English birth. He emigrated in 1905 to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. In 1921 he moved to Toronto to work as an editor and publisher. He is best known as a pioneer of abstract painting in Canada. His show (1927) at Toronto’s Arts & Letters Club was the first solo exhibition of abstract art by a Canadian artist. His early work is characterized by the bold non-objective imagery seen in the complex Sounds Assembling (1928; Winnipeg, A.G.). After 1930 he reassessed his artistic direction: he turned first to figurative imagery (e.g. Torso, 1937; Ottawa, N.G.) and then looking to Cubism he re-examined the nature of abstraction in his painting, without returning to the non-objectivity of his earlier work. Between 1926 and 1930 Brooker wrote ‘The Seven Arts’, a syndicated column of art criticism for the Southam Press. In addition, he edited The Yearbook of the Arts in Canada...

Journal devoted to photography that was published from 1903 to 1917. Camera Work evolved from a quarterly journal of photography to become one of the most ground-breaking and influential periodicals in American cultural history. Founded in January 1903 by photographer Alfred Stieglitz as the official publication of the Photo-Secession, the journal originally promoted the cause of photography as a fine art. As Stieglitz, its editor and publisher, expanded the journal’s scope to include essays on aesthetics, literature, criticism and modern art, Camera Work fueled intellectual discourse in early 20th-century America.

Camera Work mirrored the aesthetic philosophy of its founder Alfred Stieglitz. The journal resulted from his decade-long campaign to broaden and professionalize American photography. Serving for three years as editor of American Amateur Photographer (1893–6), Stieglitz championed the expressive potential of photography and advocated expanded exhibition opportunities comparable to those available in European photographic salons. In 1897, when the Society of Amateur Photographers merged with the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz convinced the enlarged organization to replace their modest leaflet with a more substantial quarterly journal, Camera Notes, which he edited until ...

(b Nashville, TN, Nov 30, 1945).

American graphic designer. Carson studied fine art and art history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, graduating in 1966. She started her career as a graphic designer in 1967 working for United Methodist Publishing House, Nashville, TN, designing magazines and educational materials. Working with limited budgets and for readers ranging from children in kindergarten to adults, she learnt to communicate with varying age groups. Drawing on her magazine design skills, she began work for Color Productions in 1968. Producing international magazines gave her exposure to the full-spectrum of design production, illustration, and final press production. When the company resources diminished in 1970, Carson took a position at Design Graphics, a Nashville art studio.

In 1973 she landed a job at Scholastic Publishing House designing their early childhood magazine Let’s Find Out. Teaming up with editor Jean Marzollo, she worked with nationally known illustrators and photographers to make the children’s stories and educational material easy for children to relate to. This partnership lasted far beyond her tenure there, leading to collaboration on the ...

(b Portland, ME, March 4, 1832; d New York, March 26, 1920).

American painter, interior designer and writer. Colman grew up in New York, where his father, Samuel Colman, ran a successful publishing business. The family bookstore on Broadway, a popular meeting place for artists, offered Colman early introductions to such Hudson River school painters as Asher B(rown) Durand, with whom he is said to have studied briefly around 1850. Having won early recognition for his paintings of popular Hudson River school locations (see Storm King on the Hudson), he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1854. Most of Colman’s landscapes of the 1850s, for example Meadows and Wildflowers at Conway (1856; Poughkeepsie, NY, Vassar Coll., Frances Lehman Loeb A. Cent.), reveal the influence of the Hudson River school. An avid traveller, he embarked on his first European tour in 1860, visiting France, Italy, Switzerland and the more exotic locales of southern Spain and Morocco. His reputation was secured in the 1860s by his numerous paintings of romantic Spanish sites, notably the large ...

(b New York, Jan 24, 1919; d Key West, FL, May 7, 1996).

American dealer, patron, and painter. Born into a newspaper-publishing family, he responded to his upper-class establishment upbringing by seeking out ambivalence in art and life. Copley established the Copley Galleries in Los Angeles in 1948 with John Ployardt as partner and showed Magritte, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Joseph Cornell, as well as younger local artists. He regularly purchased a work from each show and built up his collection. Self-taught as a painter, in 1951 he closed the gallery to paint and moved to Paris, where he bought directly from the Surrealists. He returned to the USA in 1963, living and working in Roxbury, CT. He regularly exhibited at the Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, and elsewhere in the USA and Europe. He used Magritte’s method of ‘assembling images’ in his own narrative figurative paintings. As in some Surrealist works, eroticism is the guiding force in brightly coloured and witty paintings. He compared ...

(b Philadelphia, Dec 7, 1892; d New York, June 24, 1964).

American painter and printmaker (see fig.). He was born into an artistic family: his parents studied with Thomas Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and his father was the art editor at the Philadelphia Press, a newspaper that included among its employees the Robert Henri circle of artist–reporters. Davis studied art under Henri in New York between 1909 and 1912. His earliest works, which chronicle urban life in the streets, saloons and theatres, are painted with the dark palette and thickly applied brushstrokes typical of the Ashcan school style inspired by Henri. Davis also published illustrations in the left-wing magazine The Masses between 1913 and 1916, and in The Liberator, which succeeded it in the 1920s.

With his contribution of five watercolours Davis was one of the youngest exhibitors at the Armory Show, the international exhibition of modern art that opened in New York in 1913...

(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).

Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.

In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...

(b New York, March 2, 1904; d South Pasadena, CA, Oct 5, 1972).

American industrial designer and writer. Dreyfuss was a member of the generation of American consultant designers—which also included Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Dorwin Teague—who emerged in the 1920s from both theatrical and commercial backgrounds and who, in the 1930s and beyond, applied their visualizing skills to a wide range of industrially manufactured goods.

Dreyfuss came from a Brooklyn-based family that supplied theatrical materials, and he moved naturally to the world of theatre as a designer of sets; he was apprenticed to Bel Geddes until 1924. Three years later he was asked by the department store Macy’s to work as a consultant, but his real breakthrough came when he won a ‘phone of the future’ competition in 1929, the year in which he set up his own design office in New York. His design creatively combined the receiver and transmitter in a single handset, thereby establishing a new format for the object which was to remain in place for decades. Dreyfuss worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories for many years, creating, among others, his Princess telephone in ...

American art journal founded in 1972 by Cindy Nemser, Pat Mainardi and Irene Moss. The journal was published quarterly until 1978, with Nemser becoming the sole editor in 1973 and her husband joining her as co-editor in 1975. The goals of the original editors, stated in the first issue, were to be the voice of women artists, to improve the status of women artists and to expose sexist exploitation and discrimination. In the editorial statement in that same issue, Nemser dramatically quoted the British suffragist Christabel Pankhurst: “Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.” In her own words, Nemser further exhorted her readers: “Women artists, we now have our own place to be our own selves in print. The battle has begun.” As these statements indicate, Feminist Art Journal was one of the first journals devoted to women artists and it was intent on carving out a place for them in the early years of the feminist movement....

(Stevenson)

(b New York, Aug 19, 1919; d Feb 24, 1990).

American publisher and collector. In his position as Chairman and Editor-in-chief of the fortnightly American business magazine Forbes, he established one of the oldest corporate art collections in America in the 1950s when he began to acquire objets d’art created by Peter Carl Fabergé: the collection contains over 300 pieces, including 12 Imperial Easter eggs. A man of eclectic tastes, and spurred by fond childhood memories, Forbes assembled a collection of 100,000 lead soldiers and over 500 tin clockwork toy boats. The Fabergé works and selected toys are displayed at the Forbes Magazine Galleries in New York with American presidential manuscripts and related historical memorabilia that Forbes believed ‘better depict each [president] than the likenesses that abounded in their time’. Numbering over 3000 pieces, the collection is the finest of its kind in private hands.

The Forbes picture collection, predominantly conservative in flavour, features works by French 19th-century military painters, Victorian artists, Kinetic artists, American Realists and 19th- and 20th-century photographers. Forbes established the ...

(bapt Dorchester, MA, Dec 10, 1648; d Dorchester, Sept 9, 1681).

American printer and printmaker. He was the son of early settlers in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard College in 1667; he then taught in Dorchester (now South Boston) and about 1670 began making the earliest pictorial woodcuts in English-speaking North America. In 1675 he became the first letterpress printer in Boston and the second in New England. Foster’s woodcut Richard Mather (c. 1670; Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) is among the earliest of American portraits and perhaps the first in any medium by an artist born in English-speaking America. His Map of New-England, ‘White Hills’ version (1677; Boston, MA Hist. Soc.), which he adapted from a manuscript source (untraced), was the first map to be cut, printed and published north of Mexico. Despite their primitive quality, Foster’s prints are strongly designed and show a keen awareness of Baroque style in the graphic arts. In addition to his work as a printer and printmaker, Foster took an interest in medicine, music, astronomy, meteorology, mathematics and possibly painting....

(b Bloomington, IL, March 8, 1865; d Marlboro-on-Hudson, NY, May 11, 1947).

American typographer, printer and graphic designer. He demonstrated his interest in letter forms when a child, cutting out 3000 in paper. While working as a clerk in Boston, he discovered the Kelmscott Press. In 1895 Goudy founded the Booklet Press, a small printing shop, later renamed the Camelot Press. In 1896 he designed his first type, called Camelot, and in 1899 set up as a freelance designer, producing book designs and advertising lettering. His Village Press printed two books before 1904 when he moved to Hingham, MA, where a further nine books were produced over the next two years. The establishment of the press in New York was followed by a fire (January 1908) in which all Goudy’s property was lost. From this point he abandoned general printing in favour of type design. A trip to Europe in 1909 enabled him to study inscriptions. His first two types to achieve serious recognition and success were ...

(Bissell)

(b San Francisco, CA, June 29, 1911; d San Francisco, CA, Oct 1, 1973).

American typographer, bookbinder and printer. As a child Grabhorn received a good education in France, and as a teenager she attended private schools in San Francisco, where she developed a great love of literature and books. In France she learnt the art of bookbinding and was subsequently a student of one of California’s premiere binders: Belle McMurtry Young. Grabhorn would later bind many of the Grabhorn Press titles. Much of her typographic and printing education came while working at the Grabhorn Press (1920–65), which had been founded by her husband Robert Grabhorn and his brother Edwin. She created inventive typographical works under her own imprint, Jumbo Press. Her treatise, A Typografic Discourse for the Distaff Side of Printing, a Book by Ladies (San Francisco, Jumbo Press, 1937), displays her inventive use of typography.

Grabhorn was co-founder of the Colt Press in San Francisco in 1938. Her partners were businessman William M. Roth and Jane Swinerton. The Colt Press (...

(b Rye, NY, July 14, 1920; d New York, July 13, 1978).

American writer and art critic. After graduating from Yale University, New Haven, CT, and starting a career as a writer, he worked as an associate editor of ARTnews (1946–50). He also acted as a managing editor from 1950 to 1965 and as an executive editor from 1965 to 1972. From 1972 until his death he was art critic of the newly founded New York Magazine, also writing freelance for other magazines and journals, including Saturday Review, Encounter, New York Times and Museum Journal.

Hess served as a major critic and tastemaker, with particular interest in and impact on the acceptance of Abstract Expressionism; he wrote books and catalogues for MOMA, New York. He was a major supporter of Willem de Kooning, the subject of his first monograph and of a major exhibition organized by Hess at MOMA in 1968. Hess was also active in several arts organizations and was president of the Longview Foundation in Longview, Texas....