Katherine Dreier

Katherine Dreier (born September 10, 1877, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died March 29, 1952, Milford, Connecticut) American art collector, artist, and writer who took it as her mission to promote the understanding and appreciation of modern art and the work of living artists, including Paul Klee, Jacques Villon, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Naum Gabo, and many more.

Dreier was born to immigrants from Bremen, Germany. Her father, Theodor, found success in the United States in the iron and steel business, and her mother was active in social causes. Dreier was the youngest of their four daughters, each of whom made her mark in social reform, the arts, or both. She took private art lessons beginning at age 12, and she later got involved in social issues, volunteering at the German Home for Recreation of Women and Children, which had been founded by her mother in 1898, and helping to establish the Little Italy Neighborhood Association in Brooklyn. Later on, Dreier was active in the woman suffrage movement. She continued her art studies at the Brooklyn Art Students League (1895–97).

Dreier’s parents both died in the late 1890s, leaving her an inheritance that provided lifelong financial security. Dreier thus had the means to travel frequently to Europe, where she painted and immersed herself in the study of art. After a year of studying painting at the Pratt Institute (1900–01), Dreier went to Europe to examine the paintings of the Old Masters in the original. She returned to New York in 1903 and took private lessons with Scottish American artist Walter Shirlaw through 1909. That year Dreier returned to Europe for an extended period, and she had her first solo exhibition in London in 1911. While abroad she also attended the Sixth Convention of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm (June 1911) and toured Germany, and in 1912 she returned to New York. While in Germany, she attended the Sonderbund Exhibition, a landmark show of modern art in Cologne. That exhibition and the 1913 New York Armory Show (in which her own work was exhibited) were the events that inspired Dreier to devote herself to promoting the work of modern artists, who were largely dismissed and misunderstood by American audiences.

Dreier’s own first U.S. solo exhibition was held in October 1913 at the Macbeth Gallery, New York City. In 1914 she and her sister, Dorothea, launched the Cooperative Mural Workshop, a collective that painted private and public murals, offered art workshops, and organized exhibitions of their work. Dreier joined the Society of Independent Artists in 1916, a community of artists and art patrons who met regularly at the home of art collector Walter Arensberg. It was through that society that Dreier met artist Marcel Duchamp, with whom she forged a lifelong friendship and collaborative partnership. By the time she met Duchamp, Dreier had become known for her abstract paintings consisting of layered geometric forms. An example is her most-recognized work, Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1918), which, as the title indicates, is nonrepresentational.

Dreier and Duchamp, along with Man Ray, founded the Société Anonyme in 1920, an organization that aimed to teach Americans about European and American modern art and to introduce the art and artists through lectures, performances, publications, and exhibitions. The Société supported modern art and living artists who worked in all styles and movements. Spearheaded by Dreier and Duchamp, the organization amassed a large collection of works and, in effect, created a museum without walls. The activities of the Société took place in various venues in and around New York City as well as in Dreier’s West Redding, Connecticut, home. The Société’s first large-scale exhibition, which included works by 59 artists, took place in 1921 at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. In 1926 the Société mounted the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum, an exhibition that forever influenced the way people would view modern art. It featured more than 300 works of art by 106 artists and was accompanied by a 142-page catalog titled Modern Art. The sheer size of the exhibition made it a standout, but Dreier also produced an innovative installation. Instead of stacking artworks in rows one above the other, as they had been viewed in traditional salon shows, she installed the works in a single row at eye level. Thereafter, Dreier’s manner of display became the convention in art galleries and museums.

Dreier attempted to establish the Société Anonyme as a traditional museum with a permanent home but was unsuccessful. Ultimately, in 1941, Yale University accepted the collection of hundreds of works that she had amassed with Duchamp and had, up to that point, stored in her home. In 1950 she and Duchamp dissolved the Société and completed a comprehensive catalog of the collection’s holdings, Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920. Until her death Dreier continued to add to the collection, eventually leaving more than 1,000 works of art to the university.

In the 30 years that the Société Anonyme was in operation, it produced some 80 exhibitions, 85 public programs, and 30 publications. As part of her educational mission, Dreier wrote prolifically and lectured often on modern art. Notable publications include Western Art and the New Era: An Introduction to Modern Art (1923) and Three Lectures on Modern Art (1949). Dreier’s art collection included work by the best and most-renowned artists of her time, as well as less-well-known artists soon to achieve fame and other talented artists who never would. Among the artists for whom the Société organized first solo exhibitions in the United States were Louis Eilshemius, Alexander Archipenko, Villon, Klee, Kandinsky, and David Burlyuk. Dreier had a significant impact on early American museum collections of modern art, including that of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, whose founding in 1929 may have been one of the reasons that the Société Anonyme never became the country’s first modern art museum with walls.