American modernism and the Addison Gallery of American Art.(Cover story)

Stuart Davis's 1932 painting Red Cart (Fig. 2) expresses so well the period in American art known as modernism. Its color key is jauntily high and its palette rich, marking Davis as an edgy colorist on the order of Henri Matisse (1869-1954). His geometric treatment of form is clearly indebted to French cubism. His theme is a bustling slice of life, here the working port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Planes jostle each other and colors collide with a beat that evokes the sounds of the contemporary jazz that he loved so much. For Davis, and for American art, the picture was something new and different.

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Red Cart is one of many works of art that makes the Addison Gallery of American Art a treasure house. When it opened in 1931 on the grounds of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the Addison Gallery was the only academic museum serving a secondary school, a distinction it holds to this day. Its collection of more than sixteen thousand objects is encyclopedic, ranging from colonial era furniture and silver to the art of today and including iconic paintings by John Singleton Copley, James McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins. The holdings are especially strong in photography and in American modernism, and this essay examines some highlights of these aspects of the collection, describing how they have grown and telling the story of an energetic and influential period of American art.

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First, some history of the Addison Gallery is in order. (1) It was founded by the wealthy financier Thomas Cochran (1871-1936), a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company who had a new vision for the campus of Phillips Academy, of which he was an alumnus. With his ample checkbook he helped pay for the demolition, renovation, and construction of almost twenty buildings during the twenties and early thirties, in itself an extraordinary feat. In 1928 he decided to establish an art museum in order to instill in the boys of the then all-male Phillips Academy a "love of the beautiful" through the study of American art.