Walter Conrad Arensberg

Walter Conrad Arensberg (born April 4, 1878 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † January 29, 1954 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American literary scholar , cryptanalyst and art collector .

Together with his wife Louise (* 1879 as Mary Louise Stevens in Dresden ; † November 25, 1953 ) he was one of the most important collectors of pre-Columbian and modern art in the United States . The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art , Philadelphia , resulting from their estate , comprises numerous important works of modern art, including some of the most significant works by Marcel Duchamp .

Life

Walter Conrad Arensberg was the eldest son of the industrialist couple Conrad Christian Arensberg and Flora Belle Covert. The father was a partner and president of a steel forge in Pittsburgh. Walter Arensberg studied English literature and philosophy at Harvard University in Cambridge , Massachusetts from 1896 to 1900 . After graduation, he traveled to Europe, where he stayed for two years. In 1903 he returned to Harvard. He then moved to New York City , where he worked as a junior reporter from 1904 to 1906. In 1907 Walter and Louise married. The two had met through Louise Arensberg's brother Sidney, a classmate of Walter's at Harvard.

Start as an art collector

The Arensbergs first settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they moved into the former home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , where university professor Charles Eliot Norton had previously lived. At this point, Walter Arensberg began to pursue a career as a poet; In 1914 he published his first volume of poetry. In 1913, the Arensbergs visited the epoch-making art exhibition Armory Show in New York, where Walter Arensberg acquired some lithographs by Édouard Vuillard . At the Armory Show in Boston, Arensberg exchanged the prints for lithographs by Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin and a small painting by Jacques Villon . From this point on, the Arensbergs devoted themselves continuously to building up their art collection with a focus on art of the 20th century; their advisor was the painter and art critic Walter Pach .

New York, friendship with Marcel Duchamp

From the circle of friends of the Arensbergs: Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Beatrice Wood, 1917

In 1914 the Arensbergs rented an apartment in New York. Between 1915 and 1921 they collected nearly 70 works of art, primarily by French and American artists with whom they were friends. The friendship with Marcel Duchamp , who lived in the Arensberg apartment in New York during the summer of 1915 , became particularly close . The Arensbergs saw themselves as patrons of the artist and collected significant parts of his work, including the act of going down a flight of stairs .

Over the years, the apartment of Arens Mountain in the 67 was ^th Street into a popular night haunt of New York intellectuals; Well-known artists, musicians, actors and writers such as Constantin Brâncuși , John Covert , Arthur Cravan , Jean and Yvonne Crotti , Charles Demuth , Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes , Mina Loy , Allen and Louise Norton, Francis Picabia , Henri-Pierre Roché , Pitts Sanborn , Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler , Joseph Stella , Wallace Stevens , Elmer Ernst Southard, Carl van Vechten , Edgar Varèse , William Carlos Williams and Beatrice Wood met here. The exchange of these artists contributed to important art movements such as the New York Dada or the Society of Independent Artists (SIA).

In December 1916, Arensberg was together with Duchamp, Pach and others a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists, which was based on the French model, the Société des Artistes Indépendants . Arensberg acted briefly as managing director of the artists' association. However, he already resigned in April 1917 when Duchamp's controversial urinal object Fountain , which he sold under the pseudonym “R. Mutt ”(Richard Mutt) had submitted, was excluded from the SIA's big annual exhibition, the Big Show at New York's Grand Central Palace. Only Arensberg and Beatrice Wood were privy to the art scandal allegedly launched by Duchamp , who published the "Richard Mutt case" in the following month, including a photograph of the "anti-work of art" by Alfred Stieglitz , in the second and final issue of the Dada magazine The Blind One published.

Cryptography, Shakespeare-Bacon Controversy

In addition to his interest in the fine arts, Walter Arensberg continued to devote himself to literature and primarily to cryptography . In 1921 he published The Cryptography of Dante , the following year The Cryptography of Shakespeare . In his cryptanalysis publications, Arensberg examined the authors' work for acrostics , anagrams and puns and looked for connections to Rosicrucianism . Arensberg followed the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy his entire life and hoped with the help of cryptography to be able to prove that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's plays, poems and writings. Arensberg's theories were refuted by later analyzes by cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman .

California, building the private museum, patronage

At the urging of Louise Arensberg, the couple moved to Hollywood in 1921 . Although the move was only planned as a temporary move, the Arensbergs would spend the rest of their lives in California , interrupted only by a brief return to New York between 1925 and 1926. In California, the Arensbergs managed to reactivate their influence in the art world. From 1922 they made loans to the galleries and museums of the west coast. Firmly convinced that the general public should benefit from their collection, they did not limit their generous loans until some of the works were damaged. They temporarily converted their own house at 7065 Hillside Avenue in Hollywood into a private museum that anyone could visit on request. The architect Richard Neutra designed a fully glazed room for her house to house Brâncuși's L'Oiseau dans l'espace (The Bird in Space) from 1940. Walter Arensberg was a board member of the "Los Angeles Art Association" (1937), the Los Angeles County Museum (1938-1939) and the Southwest Museum (1944-1954), he was also a founding member of the short-lived American Arts in Action (1943) and the Modern Institute of Art, Beverly Hills (1947–1949), which he sponsored.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Arensbergs continuously expanded their collection and preferred to buy modern art, but also non-Western artifacts, oriental carpets , Byzantine art and Renaissance paintings, as well as American folk art . There were also works by the surrealists Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst as well as the contemporary Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo . Whenever possible, the Arensbergs acquired works from Marcel Duchamp. They also bought pre-Columbian ceramics and sculptures from their neighbor, the collector Earl Stendahl.

Francis Bacon Foundation, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection

In 1937 Walter Arensberg organized the Francis Bacon Foundation , a non-profit educational and research institution dedicated to the work of Francis Bacon. In 1939 the Francis Bacon Foundation became the official owner of the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection for financial and ideological reasons.

In the 1940s, the Arensbergs started looking for a suitable permanent place for their art collection. In 1944 they made an extensive donation to the University of California at Los Angeles with the contractual stipulation that a suitable museum should be built for the collection within a certain period of time. In the fall of 1947 it became apparent that this order would not be fulfilled, so the contract was annulled. In the period that followed, the Arensbergs began to negotiate with various institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago , the Denver Art Museum , Harvard University , the National Gallery of Art , the Philadelphia Museum of Art , the San Francisco Museum of Art and further. In the end, the Arensbergs rejected their condition that the Francis Bacon Foundation should be continued with the takeover of their collection. After numerous discussions and negotiations, in which Constantin Brâncuși stood up for the Arensbergs - the collection also contained 19 works by the Romanian sculptor - the Arensberg collection, consisting of over 1000 objects, was handed over to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on December 27, 1950 . The Arensberg couple did not live to see the opening of their art collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art on October 16, 1954: Louise Arensberg died on November 25, 1953 of complications from cancer ; Walter Arensberg only survived his wife by two months and died on January 29, 1954 of a heart attack .

The Francis Bacon Foundation Library (13,000 volumes) was added to the Huntington Library in San Marino , California in 1995 .

Fonts

• Poems. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1914.
• Idols. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1916. Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing , 2007, ISBN 978-0-548-47043-5 .
• The Cryptography of Dante. AA button, 1921.
• The Cryptography of Shakespeare . H. Bowen, 1922. Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7661-2814-8 .
• The Burial of Francis Bacon and Its Rosicrucian Significance . Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-4179-7126-6 .
• The Compound Anagrammatic Acrostic of Shakespeare . Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-4253-5653-2 .
• The Simple Anagrammatic Acrostic of Shakespeare . Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-4253-5652-4 .
• Poems by Walter Conrad Arensberg . Kessinger Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-548-47033-6 .

literature

• George Kubler : The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection: Pre-Columbian Sculpture. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia 1954.
• The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection: 20 ^th Century Section. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia 1954.
• Francis Naumann: Walter Conrad Arensberg - Poet, Patron and Participant in the New York Avant-Garde 1915-20 . In: Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 328, Spring 1980, pp. 2-32.
• Molly Nesbit, Naomi Sawlson-Gorse: Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg. In: Martha Buskirk, Mignon Nixon (Ed.): The Duchamp Effect. MIT Press, 1996, pp. 131-176.

Web links

• Arensberg Archives: Historical note (English)
• Walter and Louise Arensberg papers, 1912–1982 in the Smithsonian Institution (English)
• The Francis Bacon Foundation (English)
• Literature by and about Walter Conrad Arensberg in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pontus Hulten, Natalia Dumitresco, Alexandre Istrati: Brancusi . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1986, p. 268; therein note 6, 1949–1957
2. ^ Arensberg Archives: Historical Note. Philadelphia Museum of Art, accessed March 28, 2009 . 

Illustrations

1. ^ Fountain by R. Mutt - The exhibit refused by the independents . Photography by Alfred Stieglitz ( The Blind Man No 2 , 1917)