• Abstract and Figures
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David A. Smith History/College of Arts & Sciences Henry Geldzahler Biography This project is a full-length biography of Henry Geldzahler. Geldzahler came to prominence in the early 1960s as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of modern and contemporary art. From this position, Geldzahler championed the new emerging style of Pop Art, and his endorsement of it did much to cement its reputation as serious art and the official successor to abstract expressionism that was regnant in the late 1940s into the 1950s. Pop Art needed the backing of the traditional art world in order to be a candidate for inclusion into the American art canon and Geldzahler provided that backing. His tenure at the Met culminated with his organizing a huge and wildly controversial show of recent and contemporary art celebrating the Met’s 100th anniversary. Geldzhaler went on to be involved with the National Endowment for the Arts in its early formative years. He was later tapped to be the first Cultural Commissioner of New York City, in the process developing the connection between art and politics that was emerging in the 1960s and ‘70s. In the 1980s he championed a crop of new artists who began to reshape the trajectory of American art and culture, albeit in a way that contributed to the explosion of the “Cultural Wars” of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. He died in 1994. Geldzahler is intimately entwined with American art and culture in the last 40 years of the 20th century. Indeed these years were tumultuous from a cultural standpoint as well as from the political, and Geldzahler’s story is crucially illuminating of the way in which American culture evolved in these decades. He has never been the focus of a scholarly full-length biography. .

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