Volume 48, Number 13 · August 9, 2001
The Muse of Hartford
By James Fenton
Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America
by Eugene R. Gaddis
Knopf, 494 pp., $35.00
Throughout the museums and galleries of the world, we come upon pockets of interest that owe their existence not to some general group effort but to the achievements of exceptional, sometimes peculiar, individuals. They have left us their houses as shrines—the Herbert Horne in Florence, the Poldi-Pezzoli in Milan, the Grobet-Labadié in Marseille—or their collections as the basis for distinguished museums. They have bequeathed us the fruits of their connoisseurship—the objects they bought for themselves and those they purchased on behalf of others. They appear to us both as figures of their time and—for they were often of modest means, and went against the grain in their collecting and their tastes—as figures out of time: prophets, loners, contrarians.
Review, 3530 words
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