Marius de Zayas

Alfred Stieglitz : Marius de Zayas (1913)

Marius de Zayas Enriquez y Calmet (born March 13, 1880 in Veracruz , Mexico , † January 10, 1961 in Stamford , Connecticut ) was a Mexican caricaturist , painter , author and gallery owner . He was one of the most influential figures in the New York art world in the 1910s and 1920s .

Life

De Zayas came from a wealthy aristocratic family from Veracruz, Mexico. His father, Rafael de Zayas (1848–1932), was a renowned poet lawyer , playwright and journalist . He founded and published two newspapers in Veracruz, which gave the two sons Marius and the younger George (1898–1967) the opportunity to use their drawing talent in newspaper illustrations.

In 1906 the brothers contributed caricatures for El Diario , one of the leading newspapers in Mexico City at the time , which had been founded by the American journalist Benjamin De Casseres (1873–1945). When the de Zayas newspapers took a critical stance against incumbent President Porfirio Díaz , the family came under pressure and had to leave Mexico for New York.

In New York de Zayas began drawing caricatures for the New York Evening World . His witty parodies of prominent people quickly found popularity. Through his contact with the New York art world, he became acquainted with the gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz , who in 1909 presented 291 caricatures by de Zayas in his gallery . Soon de Zayas acted as the gallery owner's “right hand”. On his behalf, he traveled to Paris in October 1910 , where he looked for new artists and styles of art. He joined the circle around Apollinaire , where he made the acquaintance of Pablo Picasso , whom he was able to win for an exhibition in Stieglitz 'gallery - Picasso's first ever exhibition in the United States. Since both spoke Spanish, Zayas was able to conduct one of the first extensive interviews with the artist. De Zayas' subsequent article detailed Picasso's own thoughts on his work for the first time.

In 1911 de Zayas returned to New York. He began to abstract his caricatures and thus provided a template for the “mechanomorphic portraits” of his friend Francis Picabia . The works were presented in 1913 in Galerie 291. In the spring of 1914, de Zayas traveled to Paris again to act as curator for Stieglitz again. He organized African art objects , which in 1914 led to the first exhibition of African artifacts in the context of an art gallery in New York.

With the outbreak of World War I , de Zayas went back to the USA. Together with the photographer and art critic Paul Haviland , the art patron and journalist Agnes E. Meyer and Picabia, he brought out the art magazine 291 , named after the gallery, in 1915 , which served as a forum for the New York avant-garde . De Zayas also contributed to Stieglitz's Camera Work magazine . In the same year, he and Haviland and Meyer opened the Modern Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue , which, as a "decoupling" from Stieglitz '291, was supposed to serve the commercial aspect of the rapidly growing New York art market. Stieglitz soon saw competition in it, which broke up the cooperation and friendship with de Zayas. In 1916 de Zayas brought out the book A Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression with Haviland . In 1919 de Zayas changed the name of his gallery to De Zayas Gallery . The gallery existed until 1921. After the closure, de Zayas went to Europe, where he spent the next twenty years. In 1930 he married Virginia Harrison, a descendant of the railroad magnate Charles Crocker.

At the request of Alfred Barr , the director of the Museum of Modern Art , de Zayas wrote the history of the development of modern art in America from 1940 . For this purpose, De Zayas collected numerous contemporary documents, photographs, manuscripts and notes. However, de Zayas did not see the publication, the book was not published until 1996.

After the end of the Second World War , de Zayas returned to the USA, where he first settled in Stamford, then in Greenwich , Connecticut. Marius de Zayas died at Stamford Hospital in 1961 at the age of 81.

literature

• Marius de Zayas, Francis M. Naumann (Eds.): How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York . MIT Press, New York 1998, ISBN 0-262-54096-7 (English). Excerpts from Google Books
• Charles Brock: Marius de Zayas, 1909-1915, A Commerce of Ideas ; in: Sarah Greenough et al .: Modern art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York galleries . Little, Brown and Company, 2001, ISBN 0-8212-2728-9 , pp. 145–155 (English)

Web links

• Marius de Zayas at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art