Chick Austin

Arthur Everett Austin, Jr.
Born	December 18, 1900 Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	March 29, 1957 Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.
Resting place	Cemetery on the Hill, Windham, New Hampshire, U.S.
Education	Harvard College, Phillips Academy, Andover

Arthur Everett "Chick" Austin, Jr. (December 18, 1900 – March 29, 1957) was the innovative and pacesetting director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 through 1944. Austin's visionary gift included persistence in the introduction of then-modern theater and modern design and especially contemporaneous art. Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, and Gertrude Stein benefited from his advocacy.

Chick Austin helped alter the way Americans looked at and thought about modern art. For starters, he organized the first Picasso retrospective in the United States, put on the first show of Surrealist art and, with Kirstein, helped engineer the immigration of choreographer George Balanchine and sow the seeds for Balanchine's School of American Ballet.

Austin was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, attended Noble and Greenough School near Boston and Phillips Academy, Andover, before entering Harvard College in the Class of 1922. He interrupted his undergraduate career to work in Egypt and the Sudan (1922-1923) with the Harvard University/Boston Museum of Fine Arts archaeological expedition under George A. Reisner, then the leading American Egyptologist. After taking his degree in 1924, he became a graduate student in Harvard's fine arts department, where he served for three years as chief graduate assistant to Edward W. Forbes, Director of the Fogg Art Museum. He was a first-cousin of the American artist Stephen Etnier.

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