Description
The visionary museum director who brought modern art to America. Magician of the Modern is Eugene R. Gaddis’s captivating biography of Chick Austin, who as head of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, turned a quiet New England museum into a stage for the avant-garde.
In the 1930s, Austin pulled off a string of legendary firsts: the first Picasso retrospective in America, the premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and performances by Balanchine’s ballet company — all in Hartford. He championed Dalí, Mondrian, and the Surrealists when few American museums dared, and his flair for theatrical presentation made modernism thrilling to a curious public.
Gaddis captures Austin’s magic touch: the Harvard-educated showman whose taste, daring, and personal charm transformed not just a museum but the cultural life of a nation — the story of how one man’s vision helped America embrace the modern.
Magician of the Modern is Eugene R. Gaddis’s captivating biography of Chick Austin, the visionary museum director who brought modern art to America. As head of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, Austin turned a quiet New England museum into a stage for the avant-garde.
In the 1930s, Austin pulled off a string of legendary firsts: the first Picasso retrospective in America, the premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and performances by Balanchine’s ballet company — all in Hartford. He championed Dalí, Mondrian, and the Surrealists when few American museums dared, and his flair for theatrical presentation made modernism thrilling to a curious public.
Gaddis captures Austin’s magic touch: the Harvard-educated showman whose taste, daring, and personal charm transformed not just a museum but the cultural life of a nation. This is the story of how one man’s vision helped America embrace the modern.
Essential for art lovers and history buffs, Magician of the Modern reveals the man behind the museum — and the moment American art came of age.
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