|
|
|
|
|
|
In 1952, the Albright Art Gallery organized the exhibition Expressionism in American Painting, one of the earliest exhibitions in an American museum and the first at the Albright Art Gallery to explore abstract expressionism—an emerging, and at the time a not yet fully defined art form, in the United States.
In 1954, the Albright Art Gallery hosted a symposium titled “The Artist, the Critic, and the Scholar” in conjunction with the exhibition Painters' Painters. Panelists included artist David Smith, art professor George Heard Hamilton, and critic Clement Greenberg.
In September 1955, Gordon M. Smith was appointed the eighth director of the Albright Art Gallery. Within a year of his arrival and with the support of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., then-President of The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, he set a bold new course for the Albright Art Gallery, shifting its focus to the contemporary art world and turning into an institution that still stands today in the forefront of modern and contemporary art museums in the United States.
On March 13, 1956, at a meeting of the Room of Contemporary Art Committee, the Albright Art Gallery acquired a gift of eight paintings from Seymour H. Knox, Jr. that included six seminal works which would form part of the museum’s outstanding collection of abstract expressionist art: Arshile Gorky’s The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944); Jackson Pollock’s Convergence (1952); Franz Kline’s New York, N.Y. (1953); Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow (1956); Adolph Gottlieb’s Frozen Sounds II (1952); and Sam Francis’s Blue-Black (1952).
In an article published in the May 1957 issue of Artnews, titled “The Brave Buffalo”, Gallery Director Gordon M. Smith wrote about the Albright’s bold and forward-looking collecting practices of the time stating: “The museum of today has more than ever before a duty to act as a patron of these artists [the work of the Abstract Expressionists] –who are making history–not after they have made it, but while they are making it.”
An exhibition of major acquisitions, Contemporary Art: Acquisitions 1954-1957, held at the Albright Art Gallery in May and June 1957, the Buffalo-born New York art dealer Martha Jackson wrote to Gordon M. Smith about the exhibition: “This important event should assure your success in Buffalo and should make a great difference in the point of view in the Buffalo people towards art of today. It is time that Buffalo developed some good contemporary collections. You couldn’t have given a better send-off to stimulate new interest in painting.”
Artist Clyfford Still had a unique relationship with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, former Director Gordon M. Smith, and former Chairman of the Board Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Inherently distrustful of museums and commercial galleries, Still came to believe in Smith and Knox after they cavalierly decided, without the consent of the Art Committee of the Board, to purchase a major painting, 1954, directly from Still’s studio in New York in 1957. Eventually, this association led the artist to confer a gift of thirty-one paintings to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 1964, creating the single largest public collection of Still’s work any where.
Smith and Knox continued to make daring acquisitions, oversaw and funded the construction of a new wing, and in 1965, under the foresight and guidance of Gallery Director Gordon Smith, presented the first Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today. An interdisciplinary celebration of contemporary avant-garde art, dance, music, and literature, a highlight was the "Tomorrow?" symposium with participants John Cage, Morton Feldman, Gregory Corso, Lukas Foss, Harold Rosenberg, and Richard Casey. In response to the festival, Life magazine published an article titled, “Can This Be Buffalo?,” which described the city-wide events as “an avant-garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York.”