Sidney Janis

Sidney Janis (born July 8, 1896 in Buffalo , † November 23, 1989 in New York ) was an American gallery owner and art dealer .

Career

Janis joined his older brother's company, who ran a chain of shoe stores in Buffalo , after high school . In 1925, on his frequent trips to New York, he met the art writer Harriet Grossman, whom he married in 1925. Under her knowledgeable guidance, he visited numerous art exhibitions and gained an appreciation for contemporary art. In the mid-1920s he founded his own textile company, the M'Lord Shirt Company . A short-sleeved shirt with two sewn-on pockets that he had designed turned out to be a source of revenue that led the young company to rapid success.

Art collection

At the same time Sidney and Harriet Janis began to develop a passion for collecting art. As a first work Janis bought an etching by the American painter James McNeill Whistler , which he exchanged a year later for the small painting Interior at nice by Henri Matisse . While traveling to Paris in the early 1930s, the couple bought works by Pablo Picasso , Henri Matisse, Giorgio de Chirico , Salvador Dalí , Piet Mondrian and Henri Rousseau .

In 1934 Janis became a member of the board of directors of the Museum of Modern Art , along with Alfred Barr and Meyer Schapiro . On loan, he made nineteen works from his private collection available to the museum, including compositions by Mondrian and Cubist paintings by Picasso. He later became chairman of the purchasing committee and played a key role in the purchase of Picasso's Guernica in 1939. In the same year he sold the shirt factory to devote himself entirely to art.

gallery

In 1942 Janis was involved in organizing the New York exhibition First Papers of Surrealism , which had been organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp , and for whose catalog he wrote the foreword. In 1946 Janis was a member of the jury of the Bel Ami art competition alongside Alfred H. Barr jun. and Marcel Duchamp, who was put out to tender for the American film The Private Affairs of Bel Ami by its producer. In 1948 he opened the Sidney Janis Gallery on West 57th Street with an exhibition by Fernand Léger . He then showed Piet Mondrian (1949 and 1951), the Fauves (1950), Von Brâncuși zu Duchamp (1951), The early Léger (1951), Henri Rousseau (1951), Josef Albers (1952) and Dada (1916–1923) (1953). Also in 1953 he juxtaposed contemporary European and American artists with Willem de Kooning , Alberto Giacometti , Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock in the exhibition 5 Years of Janis .

In 1962, under the title International Exhibition of the New Realists , he showed 54 artists, the young Americans Roy Lichtenstein , Wayne Thiebaud , Andy Warhol , Claes Oldenburg , Jim Dine , Robert Indiana , James Rosenquist , Tom Wesselmann and George Segal , the Europeans Arman , Daniel Spoerri , Christo , Jean Tinguely , Niki de Saint Phalle and Martial Raysse , Yves Klein , Enrico Baj , Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella , Mario Schifano, Peter Blake , Peter Phillips and Öyvind Fahlström . Sidney Janis, John Ashbery and Pierre Restany wrote catalog texts for the first major Pop Art exhibition , but Mark Rothko , Philip Guston , Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell severed their ties to Janis in protest. Willem de Kooning stayed.

Harriet Grossman-Janis died in 1963. In 1967 Janis donated a further 103 paintings and sculptures of American and European art, including works by Picasso, Mondrian, Klee and Umberto Boccioni, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1988 Sidney Janis established a foundation to which he contributed his fortune, including nearly 500 works of art. He appointed himself and his sons Conrad Janis (* 1928) and Carroll Janis as trustees. In January 1989 the Sidney Janis Gallery celebrated its 40th anniversary with an homage to its early years and showed major works by Léger, Mondrian, Hans Arp , Matisse and Giacometti. Sidney Janis died in New York in late 1989 at the age of 93. The gallery was continued under the direction of son Carroll Janis until 1998 and then closed because there were inheritance disputes between the brothers.

Exhibitions

• 1970: Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection , Kunsthalle Basel; Academy of Arts, Berlin; Nuremberg Art Gallery
• 1971: From Picasso to Warhol: 100 works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York (The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection) , Kunsthalle Köln; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart

literature

• Marian Burleigh-Motley: Seven decades of twentieth-century art: from the Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Sidney Janis Gallery collection , La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980. ISBN 0-89951034-5
• Three generations of twentieth-century art: the Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of the Museum of Modern Art , New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn., 1972, ISBN 0-87070400-1

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Excerpt from: Bruce Altshuler: The Avant-Garde in Exhibition . Abrams, New York 1994 ( August 16, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive )
2. ^ Obituary in the New York Times, November 24, 1989