(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
("Many European countries have collections of native desig...)
"Many European countries have collections of native design sources, but until the Index was assembled, the United States had none. Painted in a special water color process, these beautiful pictures faithfully render the details, texture and appearance of objects in three-dimensional quality."
Holger Cahill was an American author, and national director of the Federal Art Project. His main contribution was organizing several important exhibitions, for which he prepared book-length catalogs. Cahill's imaginative leadership, the art project created a significant impact on the nation's culture.
Background
Holger Cahill was born on January 13, 1887, Sveinn Kristj n Bjarnarson in Snaefellsnessysla, Iceland; the son of Bjorn Jonsson and Vigdis Bjarnadottir. Shortly after his birth, the family immigrated to Canada. They later moved to North Dakota, where his father hoped to acquire land. Failing to do so, he worked at various jobs, with little success. Cahill's childhood memories were of dire poverty and domestic strife. When he was eleven, his father deserted the family and his mother became seriously ill. Unable to look after him, she placed him with an Icelandic family some fifty miles away. But his guardians treated him badly, and two years later Cahill ran away to Canada, where he found temporary work as a farmhand. Most of Cahill's adolescence was spent wandering from job to job, trying to snatch whatever schooling he could, and always searching for his mother. She, in her own desperate need to support herself and her young daughter, had also become a wanderer. Cahill finally found her working on a North Dakota farm but soon had to leave her to look for employment. He did not see her again until 1947, when she was ninety-three.
Education
Because of extreme poverty he had a lack of formal education.
Career
Cahill subsequently worked as a cowpuncher in Nebraska, a crewman on a Great Lakes ore boat, a dishwasher in several hotels, an office clerk for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and an insurance salesman. At one point he shipped out to the Orient as a coal passer on the Empress of China, and jumped ship in Shanghai. A cholera epidemic there made his visit a short one--he returned on another ship bound for Vancouver--yet the city made a profound impression on him. He learned Chinese and spent many years reading widely on all aspects of Chinese culture. In his late teens Cahill decided to pursue a writing career. With his savings sewn into his underwear, he hopped a series of freight cars until he reached New York City. While working at night as a short order cook, he attended courses in journalism at New York University. Having changed his name, he became a reporter for several suburban newspapers, then for about three years was editor of two weeklies, the Bronxville Review and the Scarsdale Inquirer. Returning to Manhattan, he became a free-lance magazine writer. He took courses at Columbia University (1915 - 1919), where he was impressed by John Dewey's definition of art as a mode of interaction between man and his environment. At the New School for Social Research (1921 - 1924) he became friends with Horace Kallen and Thorstein Veblen, from whom he learned to value handicraft as art.
Through his friendship with a number of artists who were his neighbors in Greenwich Village (among them John Sloan, Max Weber, George Bellows, and Robert Henri), Cahill developed a strong interest in modern art and began writing on the subject.
In 1922 he joined the Newark Museum to assist its director, John Cotton Dana, an advocate of making art more accessible to the general public. Dana's faith in art as a means of popular communication, which reflected Dewey's theories on the subject, deeply influenced Cahill. At the Newark Museum, Cahill became largely responsible for its collection of modern art and also organized two significant exhibitions that dealt with the relatively new field of American folk art, "American Primitives" (1930) and "American Folk Sculpture" (1931). By 1932, when Cahill moved to the Museum of Modern Art in New York as exhibitions director, he had achieved national eminence as an authority on American art. He served briefly as acting director, while the museum's director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. , was on leave.
One dealt with the folk art collection of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , now permanently installed in Colonial Williamsburg.
Another pioneering exhibition, in 1933, "American Sources of Modern Art" (Maya, Aztec, Inca), became a model for others. The following year he directed New York's First Municipal Art Exhibition. With Barr he edited Art in America in Modern Times (1934) and Art in America: A Complete Survey (1935), both standard texts for many years. In 1936 he published New Horizons in American Art. Cahill also published several books of a more literary nature. His first novel, Profane Earth (1927), was followed by monographs on two American artists, George O. "Pop" Hart (1928) and Max Weber (1930). A Yankee Adventurer (1930) was the biography of Frederick Townsend Ward who, in the nineteenth century, organized the first modern Chinese army. Cahill also contributed short stories to Scribner's Magazine and American Mercury (1931 - 1932), and wrote a play about Wall Street, "Mr. Thousand. " In 1935, when Cahill had begun to devote full time to writing fiction, he was appointed national director of the Federal Art Project, part of the New Deal program to provide jobs for some 40, 000 artists, writers, musicians, and theater people. A skillful administrator, Cahill understood how best to maintain and develop the talents of project workers while bringing art closer to the general public. Under
Under its aegis hundreds of public buildings were decorated with murals, sculpture, paintings, prints, and photographs; it established art centers in more than a hundred communities; and it produced the superb Index of American Design, an outgrowth of Cahill's early interest in crafts and the decorative arts. The project also nurtured a generation of native artists, including most of the major painters and sculptors of the 1940's and 1950's, who shifted the art center of the world from Paris to New York. While still director of the project, Cahill organized an exhibition, "American Artists Today, " for the 1939 New York World's Fair. When the Art Project became a casualty of World War II in May 1943, Cahill was finally able to devote most of his attention to writing fiction. His second novel, Look South to the Polar Star (1947), had a Chinese background; The Shadow of My Hand (1956) was set in the Midwest of his youth.
He died in Stockbridge, Massachussets, while working on another novel, The Stone Dreamer.
In 1919 he married Katherine Gridley; they had one daughter. The marriage ended in divorce in 1927. On August 17, 1938, Cahill married Dorothy Canning Miller, who became senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.