John Quinn, Art Advocate
John Quinn, Art Advocate Introduction Today I’m going to talk briefly about John Quinn (fig. 1), a New York lawyer who, in his spare time and with income derived from a highly-successful law practice, became “the twentieth century’s most important patron of living literature and art.”1 Nicknamed “The Noble Buyer” for his solicitude for artists as much as for the depth of his pocketbook, Quinn would amass an unsurpassed collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European art. At its zenith, the collection con- tained more than 2,500 works of art, including works by Con- stantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Marcel Du- champ, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Paul Gaugin, Juan Gris, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh.2 More than a collector, Quinn represented artists and art associa- tions in all types of legal matters. The most far-reaching of these en- gagements was Quinn’s successful fight for repeal of a tariff on im- 1 ALINE B. SAARINEN, THE PROUD POSSESSORS: THE LIVES, TIMES AND TASTES OF SOME ADVENTUROUS AMERICAN ART COLLECTORS 206 (1958) [hereinafter PROUD POSSESSORS]. 2 Avis Berman, “Creating a New Epoch”: American Collectors and Dealers and the Armory Show [hereinafter American Collectors], in THE ARMORY SHOW AT 100: MODERNISM AND REVOLUTION 413, 415 (Marilyn Satin Kushner & Kimberly Orcutt eds., 2013) [hereinafter KUSHNER & ORCUTT, ARMORY SHOW] (footnote omitted). ported contemporary art3 – an accomplishment that resulted in him being elected an Honorary Fellow for Life by the Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art.4 This work, like much Quinn did for the arts, was un- dertaken pro bono.5 Quinn was also instrumental in organizing two groundbreaking art exhibitions: the May 1921 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of “Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings” (that museum’s first exhibition of modern art),6 and the landmark 1913 “International Exhibition of Modern Art”7 – otherwise known as the Armory Show.
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