Abstract Descendant

A famed U. S. Secretary of the Treasury was James Madison's Swiss-born Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), who helped draft the treaty that ended the War of 1812. Last week Albert Gallatin's wealthy, socialite great-grandson gave an art exhibition at Manhattan's Paul Reinhardt Galleries. Assisting him were the equally social Charles G. Shaw, Susie Frelinghuysen and her husband George L. K. Morris, who attracted a modicum of attention last summer by inserting the name of their snub-nosed Pekingese, Rose, in the New York Social Register. Artists Gallatin, Shaw, Frelinghuysen & Morris hung up some 20 canvases on which numerous arrangements of angular and circular planes had been soberly defined and painted, in some cases pasted and cut from odd bits of paper and cloth--all very meticulously worked out, all very interesting to those believing that exercises in pure form are significant.

Oldest, ablest, most interesting of these abstractionists is Artist Albert Eugene Gallatin, Eugene to his friends, though art critics know him better as a patron than a producer of art. Always free from the necessity of earning a living. Eugene Gallatin was definitely one of the lads in the days of pearl-button reefers and horse-headed canes. A member of the swank Union Club for many years, he was founder, remains president of the moribund Motor-Car Touring Society, whose object was to bring a tone of dashing sportsmanship to the horseless carriage.

Eugene Gallatin was one of the first men in the U. S. to own five automobiles. Today he has none. "So many people have cars," he explained last week, "and they have gone so far and so fast that the whole business has been rather run into the ground." Eugene Gallatin's interest in art is older than his interest in automobiles as a sport. Aubrey Beardsley and Whistler were his first passions. He collected, studied, and finally wrote a sheaf of books on the elegant Jimmy, but gradually his taste grew more & more advanced, more & more abstract.

Among the many good works of Secretary Albert Gallatin was the founding of New York University. In 1927 Connoisseur Albert Eugene Gallatin announced that he was presenting to his great-grandfather's college a collection to be known as the Museum of Living Art. Few museums are more autocratically administered. All the pictures are chosen and paid for by Donor Gallatin. They are hung in the main study halls of N. Y. U.'s Washington Square branch, because of his belief that pictures should be lived with, not visited on pilgrimage.

Confusing to visitors is Eugene Gallatin's own apartment, one room of which he uses as his studio. On the walls of the living room hang Gallatin ancestors back to the 16th Century. Two doors beyond, the studio is devoted entirely to easels, paint brushes, and 20th Century "nonfigurative" sculpture and paintings, including some of Artist Gallatin's recent works. Surrounded by this welter of modern art, there appears a strange blob of fused glass, carefully mounted on a square pedestal of lustrous black stone. "They're saucers," explains Artist Gallatin, "melted in a fire. I found them in the ruins of a summer hotel in Lenox, Mass. The form is most suggestive."

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