Background

Katherine Sophie Dreier was born in 1877 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Theodor and Dorothea Aldelheid Dreier.  Her father was a well-to-do businessman.  Her mother participated in settlement-house work, and two of her three sisters were active in the woman suffrage movement.  

Education

From an early age Dreier was interested in art, and between 1895 and 1897 she attended the New York Art Students League.  Beginning in 1904 she studied drawing and painting with Walter Shirlaw for three years.  In 1907 Dreier went to Paris to continue her studies and from there moved to London in 1909.

Career

In 1911 Dreier exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and she was soon invited to exhibit in London at the Dore Gallery and in Frankfurt-am-Main and Leipzig, as well as in group shows in Dresden, Munich, and Bremen.  Her early symbolist and decorative panels were described by London critics as "Whistlerian. " Her first one-woman show in New York was at the Macbeth Gallery from October 14 to October 27, 1913; her paintings attracted favorable attention because of their decorative art nouveau qualities and because of the atmospheric effects of her landscapes.  

Dreier's work was also included in the historic 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modernism to the United States.  The exhibition was originally planned as a showcase for new trends in American art, but the American paintings, by contrast with the European work, today seem dated and provincial (though not without interest).  In 1913 the Europeans got all the attention.  Marcel Duchamp's famous Nude Descending a Staircase, the sensation of the show, opened Dreier's eyes to the merits of creative abstraction in painting. Her own style began to change, and for many years she worked in what her contemporaries called "an abstract geometric style" that today seems influenced greatly by Kandinsky's later work.  

In 1920 she, aided by Duchamp and Man Ray, the American dadaist painter and photographer, founded the Societe Anonyme, a "limited-liability or joint-stock company, " which a little later they incorporated, humorously making it an "incorporated incorporated. " Societe Anonyme, Inc. , was intended originally as a modest center with a reference library where people could come and seriously study good examples of the new forms of art.  It purchased works by such pioneers in modern art as Constantin Brancusi, Vasily Kandinsky, Casimir Malevitch, Piet Mondrian, Kurt Schwitters, and others at a time when all were unknown in the United States.  

Societe Anonyme, which always presented itself as an organization of modern artists rather than as a collection, also sponsored lectures and discussions and published pamphlets while it circulated its possessions.  In 1935 Dreier refused to lend works from the collection to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of surrealism when she discovered that the museum planned to show them with pictures by the insane and by children.  A museum spokesman answered that although the intent of the surrealists did not coincide with that of the mentally disturbed and children, the end product might be similar.  In the same year Dreier also wrote a letter in protest to the New York Times for having published an article by a Dr. Lloyd Mills, a Los Angeles eye specialist who claimed that "some of the vagaries which puzzle the ordinary viewers of modern art" are a result of rather common defects of the eye.  Mills was referring to works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and others.  

In 1941 Dreier and Duchamp presented the entire collection to Yale University.  It included works by 130 artists and, beginning with Kandinsky's early abstract paintings done in 1910, contained examples of every phase of twentieth-century art up to that time.  The most recent acquisition was a painting by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta Echaurren (usually known as Matta).  The Societe Anonyme had by then been on exhibition eighty-four times in various parts of the United States.  

Although occupied with the affairs of the Societe Anonyme, Dreier continued her own painting.  Her "Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp" (1918) has been frequently exhibited; it belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Her last one-woman show was at the Delphic Studios in New York in 1936. She is represented in several museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Memorial Art Gallery in Chicago.

Dreier delivered the Trowbridge Lectures at Yale University in 1948, speaking on "The Intrinsic Significance in Modern Art"; they were published in 1949.  She was also the author of several books published by the Society Anonyme, including an appreciation of her sister Dorothea A. Dreier, a painter who died early, issued in 1921, and Nicholas Burliuk and Color and Rhythm and Duchamp's Glass: An Analytical Reflection (jointly with Matta Echaurren), both published in 1944. She wrote Western Art and the New Era (1923), and translated Elizabeth Du Quesne Van Gogh's Personal Recollections of Van Gogh (with a foreword by Arthur B. Davies) in 1913. In 1945 she bought Laurel Manor, a house in Milford, Connecticut, where she died.

Achievements

• Katherine Dreier is best remembered as co-founder of the Society of Independent Artists and the Societe Anonyme, which had the first permanent collection of modern art, representing 175 artists and more than 800 works of art. She organized traveling exhibitions throughout the country in order to publicize the new art, almost completely unknown in America at this time.  She began this promotion a full decade before the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Western Art and the New Era: An Introduction to Modern Art (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Western Art and the New Era: An Introduction...)

  • Five Months In The Argentine From A Woman's Point Of View, 1918 To 1919

    (Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)

  • SHAWN THE DANCER.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "I have admired Katherine Dreier not only as an artist, but as one who has devoted a crowded and very unselfish life to art in the interests of both the public and of her fellow-artists. " - William Henry Fox

Connections

Father:

Theodor Dreier

Mother:

Dorothea (Aldelheid) Dreier

Sister:

Mary Elisabeth Dreier

Sister:

Dorothea Adelheid Dreier

References

• A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts (Facts on File Library of American History)
• Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (Notable American Women) (Volume 4)