Holger Cahill

Holger Cahill
Holger Cahill on February 15, 1938
Born	Sveinn Kristján Bjarnason 13 January 1890 Skógarströnd, Iceland
Died	8 July 1960 (1960-07-09) (aged 70)
Occupation	Art administrator Art curator Writer
Citizenship	American

Edgar Holger Cahill (January 13, 1890 – July 8, 1960) was an Icelandic-American curator, writer, and arts administrator who served as the national director of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal in the United States.

Cahill was born Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson in Skógarströnd, Iceland on January 13, 1890.

Cahill’s Icelandic family migrated to Canada about 1890 and then to North Dakota as homesteaders, anglicizing their name to Bjornson and eventually, Johnson, although they continued to speak Icelandic at home. Extreme poverty, lack of formal education and domestic strife marked Cahill’s early childhood. When he was young, his father abandoned the family and his mother sent the young Cahill to live and work on a farm owned by an Icelandic family 50 miles away where he was mistreated. His mother remarried and had another child, Anna. That marriage also did not last. After two years with the Icelandic farmers, Cahill ran away at first to neighboring farms where he found work and eventually to Winnipeg, in search of distant cousins. The cousins refused to take him in and he ended up in an orphanage. A Gaelic-speaking family in a nearby cooperative farm community adopted Cahill and he was able to attend school regularly for the first time. After several years with the Gaelic family, he returned to North Dakota in search of his mother only to discover that his mother and step-sister had moved. Eventually he found them working on a nearby tenant farm in 1902. His mother had remarried to a younger man named Samson, and she and her son quarreled. Once again, he left home and did not see his mother again for 45 years.

Cahill's first official position in the field of visual arts was as publicity director for the Society of Independent Artists in 1921 where he met many of the leading modernist artists of the period including John Sloan. As a former journalist, Cahill knew how to write and effectively create new interest in the Society’s exhibitions. The following year, he was hired by John Cotton Dana to become his assistant at the Newark Museum. At Newark, Cahill managed publicity, organized radio and newspaper coverage of the museum’s activities, purchased works by contemporary artists for the museum’s growing collection and, in 1930 and 1931, organized the first museum exhibitions of American Folk Art. During his tenure at Newark (1922–30), he continued (with Dana’s encouragement) to write fiction, essays and short stories including art criticism for Shadowland magazine, International Studio and the New York Herald Tribune. He published a novel, Profane Earth in 1927 and, in 1930, a biography of Frederick Townsend Ward and his role in the Taiping Rebellion of 1861, A Yankee Adventurer. At Newark, he met his future wife, Dorothy Canning Miller whom he married in 1938.