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Fifty Years Ago, Two Men Began a Partnership That Was Pivotal in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Building an Acclaimed Abstract Art Collection
When Gordon M. Smith (director, 1955-1973) arrived in Buffalo 50 years ago to helm the Albright Art Gallery, as it was then known, he found a museum with a highly regarded collection of modern paintings and sculpture.
Smith also found a tremendously generous museum patron, Seymour H. Knox Jr., whose vision and eye for art were equal to Smith's.
Together, the two men would take the Albright-Knox to new heights, securing countless soon-to-be masterpieces that would leave the museum with a world-renowned collection of abstract paintings and sculpture.
In the early decades of the 20th century, the Albright-Knox had been one of the first museums to collect and exhibit abstract art. By the time Smith arrived in 1955, the collection featured many important prequels to pure abstraction, works by Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and others. Abstractions by Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky were purchased in the 1940s.
Knox, whose family had sold a chain of retail stores to Woolworth's, began his patronage of the museum in the 1930s. Another great patron who helped build the Albright-Knox's modern collection was A. Conger Goodyear, who in 1929 became the first board president of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
Since its inception as The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy in 1862, the Albright-Knox had focused on the artists of the day – adding contemporary works to the collection that would become tomorrow's masterworks. In the mid-1950s, that primarily meant the American abstract expressionism movement.
Smith and Knox wasted no time in collaborating to build the museum's contemporary collection with abstract masterworks. In the first year after Smith's arrival, the Albright-Knox added works by Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Sam Francis – the giants of the first generation of American abstract expressionism.
Two significant masterpieces, Pollock's Convergence, 1952; and Gorky's The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944; entered the collection on the same day in 1956. In subsequent years, Smith and Knox would add many other noted abstract works by Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and others. Clyfford Still gave 31 of his paintings to the Albright-Knox because of his relationship with Smith and Knox, who earlier had purchased two of the artist's dramatic abstractions.
Their method for building the collection was simple, yet ingenious. Smith and Knox would often venture to New York City together – yet make separate visits to the same galleries. If they gravitated to the same work, Mr. Knox would purchase the piece for the museum.
"Acting on their own joint initiative, they brought off coup after coup that were the envy of the museum profession," The New York Times said of Knox and Smith at the time of Smith's death in 1979.
In 1962, the museum was renamed the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and a new building, funded by the Knox family, was built to accommodate the growing modern and abstract collection.
Then, in 1965, Knox and Smith organized the first Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today – the second was in 1968.
The festivals celebrated the latest trends in contemporary music, dance, theater, and, of course, art. Crowds filled the museum, including the galleries of the new international-style building, to see what may have been the most significant collection of abstract art in the United States outside of MoMA.
The Albright-Knox’s renowned collection of abstract art was also the subject of two other major exhibitions of mid-century abstraction: Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments in 1987 and Abstraction. Geometry. Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting in America since 1945 in 1989. Since those exhibitions, the Albright-Knox has remained committed to collecting the best available examples of contemporary abstraction.
Now, 50 years after Gordon Smith and Seymour Knox began their productive collaboration and focused the Gallery’s attention on abstraction--a legacy that has built a collection that is approximately 60 per cent abstract--the Albright-Knox is again set to celebrate abstract art with this summer's exhibition, Extreme Abstraction.