Arthur Jerome Eddy (November 5, 1859 - July 21, 1920 in New York City, New York) was an American lawyer, author, art collector, and a prominent member of the first generation of American Modern art collectors. His book Cubists and Post-Impressionism was the first American book promoting these new art movements and the work of Wassily Kandinsky. [1] Eddy's collection was distinguished by the inclusion of German expressionists and Wassily Kandinsky.
Eddy was known for his support of the Armory Show, purchasing work from the show in New York and Chicago and lecturing on the art during the Chicago show. [2] In 1931, a portion of Eddy's collection was donated by his widow and son to the Art Institute of Chicago as the "Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection" which is an important core of the Museum's collection of Modern art. [3]
Eddy was born in Flint, Michigan, to Jerome Eddy, the city's mayor. His father purchased the Flint Michigan paper, the Genesee Democrat. After running the paper himself, Jerome Eddy turned over management of the paper to Arthur Jerome Eddy. [4] [ when? ]
One source says that Eddy graduated from the "literary department" of Harvard University. [4] A second source indicates that he "entered Harvard Law School in 1877 but in 1879 returned to be publisher of the Genesee Democrat newspaper. He continued studying law with a local expert. In 1888 he moved to Chicago to begin his legal career, passing the Illinois Bar in 1890." [1]
Arthur J. Eddy married Lulu Crapo Orrell, a granddaughter of Michigan Governor Henry H. Crapo [4] and cousin of the founder of General Motors, William Crapo Durant. [5] His son, Jerome Orrell Eddy was born May 12, 1891, and died December 28, 1951. [6]
Eddy practiced corporate law with Wetten, Matthews & Pegler, [1] which later became the firm of Eddy, Wetten & Pegler. [7] Mr. Eddy was one of the driving forces in creating the National Carbon Company which combined multiple carbon companies into one company that controlled approximately 75% of the US carbon market in the world. [8] Carbon was used to make numerous products related to the use of electricity. [9] He helped organize American Steel Foundry Corporation, National Turbine Company, and American Linseed Oil Company. [10] He helped established the Bridge Builder's Society. [11]
Eddy wrote on a variety of subjects and in various formats. These included "2000 Miles on an Automobile" (Travelog), "Law of Combinations" (economics), "Tales of a Small Town" (short stories), "Ganton & Co." (a novel) and "The Warning" (a play). [10] He wrote several very important books on art including "Delight, the Soul of Art", "Recollections of James McNeill Whistler", and "Cubists and Post Impressionism."
He wrote an article on tile roofs that appeared in Gustav Stickley's magazine, The Craftsman . He contributed poetry and edited a Chicago literary magazine, Contributors' Magazine, which was the self-published work of the Contributor's Club. Members of the club included Eugene Field, Harriet Monroe, George P. Upton, Potter Palmer, and John J. Glessner. [12]
Eddy resided in Chicago but maintained a second home, designed by Frederick Roehrig in Pasadena. The house was cited as "the most complete example of the California (Southern Californian!) interpretation of Arts and Crafts principles." [13] William Le Baron Jenney wrote an article, "A Remarkable Dwelling," about the Eddy House in the May 1906 Inland Architect and News Record. [13] An article about the house was published in The Craftsman magazine. [14] The house was "one of the most important bungalow designs of the period, strongly influencing later ranch style houses throughout California and later the United States." [15] The Pasadena house was torn down in 1973. [16]
Michigan roads are all bad, but some are worse than others.
—Arthur Jerome Eddy, 1902 [17]
Mr. Eddy was an early automobile enthusiast. The New York Times reported that he set a record in automobile travel by traveling 2900 miles in two months. The trip started in Chicago on August 1, 1901. He traveled to Boston and returned to Chicago on September 30, 1901. [18] He wrote about this trip in his 1902 book, "Two thousand miles on an automobile; being a desultory narrative of a trip through New England, New York, Canada, and the West" [19] under the pseudonym of "A. Chauffeur." He drove a Winton Motor Carriage Company automobile in the 1901 trip. In 1902, he drove a Panhard to Flint Michigan to visit family and gave Margery Durant, the daughter of William Crapo Durant, her first automobile ride. [20] Her father, the future founder of General Motors, responded: “Margery, how could you, how could you, be so foolish as to risk your life in one of those things.” [21]
His interest in art did not awaken until he saw the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he was most taken with the work of James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin. Eddy, who traveled to Paris in the middle of the 1890s, was portrayed by Whistler in the painting Arrangement in Flesh Color and Brown: Portrait of Arthur Jerome Eddy. Around the same time Rodin also sculpted a portrait bust of Eddy, bronze casts of which are in the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. In 1902 his first book about art, titled Delight, the Soul of Art, was published. In the following year he published Recollections and impressions of James A. McNeill Whistler. Thus through 1912 he focused on the art of the late 19th century.
For Eddy, as for many Americans, the 1913 Armory Show proved a revelation of Modern art. Fascinated by the efforts of these artists, he immediately began his collection of Avant-garde art with the purchase of a Brâncuși sculpture and 25 paintings. "In New York, Eddy purchased 15 of the most radical works on display, including Marcel Duchamp's Portrait of Chess Players (1911) and The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912), Albert Gleizes's Man on a Balcony (1912), and Francis Picabia's Dances at the Spring (1912). In Chicago, he purchased three additional paintings by the Portuguese artist Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, as well as three lithographs by Maurice Denis and four by Édouard Vuillard." On two occasions during the show, Mr. Eddy lectured on "Cubism" at the Art Institute of Chicago. [22]
On trips to London and Germany he came to know of Wassily Kandinsky and by 1920 had bought four of his paintings. Kandinsky introduced Eddy to another artist in working in Munich at the time, Albert Bloch. Eddy would become Bloch's most important collector, owning over forty paintings and etchings. [23] Eddy's collection in modern art would grow to over 100 works of art.
1914 saw the publication of perhaps his most important writing, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, [24] a large portion of which was based on information that Eddy obtained from the artists themselves. It is considered to be the first work published in the United States in which Modern Art was presented and explained sympathetically. Additionally it was the first adequate account of Kandinsky in America; the artist had been represented by only one painting in the Armory Show the year before.
In his last years of life Eddy shifted the focus of his collecting to the American moderns, including some paintings by artists such as Arthur Dove.
He died after surgery for acute appendicitis at Post Graduate Hospital in New York City. [10]
In 1921, Louis Sullivan designed a "family memorial enclosure" with the "Dimensions: ca: 51' (diameter)" in Glenwood Cemetery in Flint Michigan which was not built. [25]
After his death in 1920, some of the collection was dispersed. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibited his collection September 19 to October 22, 1922. In 1931, his widow and son donated 20 paintings and 3 sculptures to the Art Institute of Chicago to form the Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection. as described below. [3]
The collection includes 19th Century works:
The collection is noted for containing members of the German Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) movement:
Further artists represented in the Art Institute's Eddy collection:
The sculpture in the collection are:
Jacques Villon, also known as Gaston Duchamp, was a French Cubist and abstract painter and printmaker.
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907, Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.
Robert Delaunay was a French artist of the School of Paris movement; who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.
The 1913 Armory Show, also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It was the first large exhibition of modern art in America, as well as one of the many exhibitions that have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories.
William Crapo Durant was a leading pioneer of the United States automobile industry and co-founder of General Motors and Chevrolet. He created a system in which a company held multiple marques – each seemingly independent, with different automobile lines – bound under a unified corporate holding company. Durant, along with Frederic L. Smith, co-founded General Motors, as well as Chevrolet with Louis Chevrolet. He also founded Frigidaire.
Orphism or Orphic Cubism, a term coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, was an offshoot of Cubism that focused on pure abstraction and bright colors, influenced by Fauvism, the theoretical writings of Paul Signac, Charles Henry and the dye chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. This movement, perceived as key in the transition from Cubism to Abstract art, was pioneered by František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay, who relaunched the use of color during the monochromatic phase of Cubism. The meaning of the term Orphism was elusive when it first appeared and remains to some extent vague.
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) and Morgan Russell (1886–1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Though it was short-lived and did not attract many adherents, Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention. One of the difficulties inherent in describing Synchromism as a coherent style is connected to the fact that some Synchromist works are purely abstract while others include representational imagery.
Arthur Bowen Davies was an avant-garde American artist and influential advocate of modern art in the United States c. 1910–1928.
John Quinn was an Irish-American cognoscente of the art world and a lawyer in New York City who fought to overturn censorship laws restricting modern literature and art from entering the United States.
Henry Howland Crapo was a businessman and politician who was the 14th governor of Michigan from 1865 to 1869, during the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction.
Manierre Dawson was an abstract American painter and sculptor.
Edward Middleton Manigault was a Canadian-born American Modernist painter.
Jerome Eddy was a Michigan businessman, politician and diplomat. He served on the Democratic Michigan State Central Committee and was a delegate to many Democratic State Conventions. During the Grover Cleveland Presidency, he served as a United States Consul in Canada.
Cubist sculpture developed in parallel with Cubist painting, beginning in Paris around 1909 with its proto-Cubist phase, and evolving through the early 1920s. Just as Cubist painting, Cubist sculpture is rooted in Paul Cézanne's reduction of painted objects into component planes and geometric solids; cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones. Presenting fragments and facets of objects that could be visually interpreted in different ways had the effect of 'revealing the structure' of the object. Cubist sculpture essentially is the dynamic rendering of three-dimensional objects in the language of non-Euclidean geometry by shifting viewpoints of volume or mass in terms of spherical, flat and hyperbolic surfaces.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
Man on a Balcony, is a large oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). The painting was exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne of 1912. The Cubist contribution to the salon created a controversy in the French Parliament about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric art'. Gleizes was a founder of Cubism, and demonstrates the principles of the movement in this monumental painting with its projecting planes and fragmented lines. The large size of the painting reflects Gleizes's ambition to show it in the large annual salon exhibitions in Paris, where he was able with others of his entourage to bring Cubism to wider audiences.
Woman with Phlox is an oil painting created in 1910 by the French artist Albert Gleizes. The painting was exhibited in Room 41 at the Salon des Indépendants in the Spring of 1911 ; the exhibition that introduced Cubism as a group manifestation to the general public for the first time. The complex collection of geometric masses in restrained colors exhibited in Room 41 created a scandal from which Cubism spread throughout Paris, France, Europe and the rest of the world. It was from the preview of the works by Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger at the 1911 Indépendants that the term 'Cubism' can be dated. La Femme aux Phlox was again exhibited the following year at the Salon de la Section d'Or, Galerie La Boétie, 1912. La Femme aux Phlox was reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations by Guillaume Apollinaire, published in 1913. The same year, the painting was again revealed to the general public, this time in the United States, at the International Exhibition of Modern Art, New York, Chicago, and Boston. The work is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of the Esther Florence Whinery Goodrich Foundation in 1965.
Groupe de femmes, also called Groupe de trois femmes, or Groupe de trois personnages, is an early Cubist sculpture created circa 1911 by the Hungarian avant-garde, sculptor, and graphic artist Joseph Csaky (1888–1971). This sculpture formerly known from a black and white photograph had been erroneously entitled Deux Femmes , as the image captured on an angle showed only two figures. An additional photograph found in the Csaky family archives shows a frontal view of the work, revealing three figures rather than two. Csaky's sculpture was exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, and the 1913 Salon des Indépendants, Paris. A photograph taken of Salle XI in sitiu at the 1912 Salon d'Automne and published in L'Illustration, 12 October 1912, p. 47, shows Groupe de femmes exhibited alongside the works of Jean Metzinger, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, Amedeo Modigliani and Henri Le Fauconnier.
Henrietta (Letta) Crapo Smith was a painter, known as a color specialist and granddaughter of the former Michigan Governor, Henry H. Crapo.
Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) is an oil painting executed between 1911 and 1913 by the abstract painter Vasily Kandinsky. The work was donated by the Chicago lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy to the Art Institute of Chicago, in whose permanent collection it still remains.