Still Life (1947),

1942–47

Painter, collector, and critic Albert Eugene Gallatin began his varied and influential career as a champion of representational art. Following exposure to European abstraction, however, he began to acquire modernist art, amassing an important collection that was displayed in his Gallery of Living Art at New York University. Gallatin himself took up painting seriously in 1936, evolving a style informed by the Suprematism and especially the Synthetic Cubism of artists he collected. He often spent years developing a composition, recording the dates of his encounters with a work on the back of the canvas. Still Life (1947), a typically austere image in the subtle and refined palette Gallatin favored, was begun in December 1942, the year he made his debut as a painter in his renamed Museum of Living Art, along with other members of the New York–based American Abstract Artists.