William Chapin Seitz

Background

He was born on June 19, 1914 in Buffalo, New York, United States, the second of two sons of George William Seitz, a physician, and Cora Elizabeth Chapin, a teacher.

Education

After completing high school in Buffalo, he began formal study of art at that city's Albright Art School (1932 - 1933) and continued his studies at the Art Institute of Buffalo (1933 - 1935).

In 1945, after a ten-year hiatus, Seitz resumed his formal education at the University of Buffalo, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1946. After a year of independent study in Europe, he entered Princeton University in 1950, earned a master of fine arts degree in 1952, and a Ph. D. in art history in 1955.

In 1957, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship for a year's study in France.

Career

In 1935 he moved to New York City to work on the Federal Art Project.

Seitz's first one-man show was held in the spring of 1938 at the Arista Gallery in New York. He soon moved to Buffalo where worked for the Hewitt Rubber Company as chief draftsman (1941 - 1943) and project engineer (1943 - 1945) and invented a self-sealing fuel tank used by the military during World War II.

He taught art history from 1946 to 1948 at the University of Buffalo. Abstract Expressionist Painting in America was the title of his doctoral thesis. Seitz's work on Claude Monet appeared in the early 1960's.

While still a graduate student at Princeton, Seitz was appointed lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology. After receiving his Ph. D. , he held a variety of Princeton appointments: critic-in-residence (1952 - 1953), assistant professor (1955 - 1956), and bicentennial preceptor (1957 - 1960).

In 1960, he left Princeton to become associate curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Although promoted to curator in 1965, Seitz left the Museum of Modern Art to return to academia at Brandeis University, where between 1965 and 1970 he was a full professor in the Department of Fine Arts.

He served as director of the Rose Art Museum and Poses Institute of Art, where organized exhibitions of the works of several artists, including Philip Guston (1966) and James Rosati (1969). During this period he also organized the United States exhibition at the Ninth Biennial of the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sa030 Paulo, Brazil (1967), and the Seventh Biennial of Canadian Painting (1968) at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. In the 1970-1971 academic year he was a visiting professor at Harvard University. From 1971 until his death in 1974, he was William R. Kenan, Jr. , Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

After Seitz died of cancer at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, many of his friends, both artists and art collectors, began donating works of art to the Art Museum of Princeton University in his memory.

Achievements

• William Chapin Seitz gained an international reputation by organizing and writing catalogs for a number of major exhibitions, including Monet: Seasons and Moments (1960), The Art of Assemblage (1961), and also exhibitions of the works of Philip Guston (1966) and James Rosati (1969). His work Abstract Expressionist Painting in America was the first doctoral thesis written about Abstract expressionist movement that was still viewed with hostility by many American artists and much of the American art public. Thus, he was called "legal father of Abstract Expressionism".

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Art of Assemblage

    (We sell Rare, out-of-print, uncommon, & used BOOKS, PRINT...)

Connections

On December 1, 1935 he married Irma Jeannette Seigelman, like himself an artist. The couple, who had no children.

Father:

George William Seitz

Mother:

Cora Elizabeth Chapin

Spouse:

Irma Jeannette Seigelman