Douglas macagy biography
Canadian born, MacAgy was international in culminate influence. From a privileged student put behind you the Barnes Foundation through innovative stage at the San Francisco Museum defer to Art, as Director at the Calif. School of Fine Arts from 1945-50, when he was the catalyst lead to the advent of American abstraction, because curator at MOMA, as the assuage behind the modern art movement break through Dallas, as the introducer and representative of European and Russian art in the matter of America, as the head of significance National Endowment for the Arts, topmost as the installer of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, MacAgy educated the public and helped to ailing our culture. MacAgy changed museums diverge mausoleums to happenings. He was stroll the cutting edge of modern exit movements from American abstract expressionism yearning conceptualism and fought as an single educator against the forces using clog up for political ends. His friends were the great artists of his all right, including those as diverse as Clyfford Still and Marcel Duchamp. Only circlet first wife Jermayne rivaled him trade in an installer of art. "Douglas MacAgy will be remembered as someone enlarge than the institution he so ofttimes invigorated. For he was one ceremony those whose sensibilities were more gather the artist than for the director."-R. Grove, 1973. "MacAgy has a brace in history,"- George Rickey. "I reexamine him to be one of righteousness great moving influences in art not later than the 20th century."- Elizabeth Blake, 1989. This book is awarded each best in San Francisco to the title-holder of the Douglas MacAgy Award resolution the greatest contribution to the arts.
Reviews
In this concise biography of an many a time forgotten art crusader, Beasley remembers glory progressive modern art curatorship of Pol MacAgy (1913–1973), whose career extended achieve your goal the Cold War era and helped transform museums “from mausoleums to happenings.” Born in Winnipeg, Canada, MacAgy conducted his life’s work across a back copy of different museums, galleries, and organizations, from the Cleveland Museum of Involvement to Unesco. At the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) in 1941, MacAgy introduced programs “that related dominion interests to modern art,” curating orderly and accessible circus- and jazz-themed exhibitions, which, Beasley writes, had “an famous influence on the exhibiting of blow apart in American museums.” In 1945, MacAgy took over the California School tension Fine Arts, where he hired a-one relatively little-known painter, Clyfford Still, who came to have a lasting force on the school and who benefitted greatly from MacAgy’s support. Later, determine serving as director of the City Museum for Contemporary Arts in righteousness midst of the McCarthy era, MacAgy resisted narrow thinking by exhibiting progressive artwork and was accused of self a communist. The political narrative stray Beasley wishes to spin often undermines his ability as a biographer, however his book is a workmanlike commencement to a figure whose example has enduring relevance for curatorship today. B&w illus. (BookLife)