|
|
Sarah Goodwin Austin: A Life in the Arts by Eugene R. Gaddis |
| A love of fine arts and the cultural institutions that sustain them, a fascination with the changing story of art history, and an eye for artistic quality were Sally Austin’s by inheritance as well as by natural inclination. She was born, Sarah G. Austin, on April 22, 1935, in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Helen Goodwin Austin (1898-1986) and A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr. (1900-1957). The Goodwins, on her mother’s side, were among the oldest and most influential families in New England, having been original settlers of Hartford in 1636. In the early nineteenth century, Sally’s great-great grandfather, James Goodwin, married Lucy Morgan, the future aunt of Hartford-born financier and art collector J. Pierpont Morgan. In 1842 the Goodwins and the Morgans joined Daniel Wadsworth and other Hartford citizens in founding the Wadsworth Atheneum, America’s oldest public art museum. Sally’s great grandfather, the Reverend Francis Goodwin, and her great uncle, Charles A. Goodwin, served as presidents of the Atheneum over a period of nearly sixty years. Her great aunt, Ruth Goodwin, was president of the Hartford Art School, and her uncle, Francis Goodwin II, founded the Hartford Symphony. Sally’s mother Helen was a sophisticated and well-traveled student of art and was as enthusiastic about the avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s as she was about the art of the past. |
|
Sally’s
father, Chick Austin, head of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1944, was one
of the twentieth-century’s most forward-looking museum directors, producing
America’s first comprehensive exhibitions of Italian baroque painting (1930),
Surrealism (1931) and the art of Pablo Picasso (1934). He was among the first to
bring all the arts—including photography, movies, music and dance—into the
American museum world. He also designed the International Style interior of the
Atheneum’s Avery Memorial wing of 1934, produced the premiere of the Gertrude
Stein/Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, and, with his friend
Lincoln Kirstein, sponsored the immigration of choreographer George Balanchine
to America. Balanchine’s company, the predecessor of the New York City Ballet,
gave its first public performances at the Atheneum in 1934. At the same time,
Chick Austin founded the fine arts department at Hartford’s Trinity College,
where he taught for fifteen years. He himself was a multi-talented artist—a
painter, actor, magician, and designer of sets and costumes. As Patrick
McCaughey, a later director of the Atheneum (1988-1996), observed, the Goodwins’
tradition of support for their city’s cultural assets and Chick Austin’s
artistic innovation and creativity, came together in Sally Austin’s life and
career. |
|
Along with her brother David, Sally grew up in Hartford in the extraordinary house built by her parents in 1930 on Scarborough Street—with its Palladian façade, its baroque-rococo décor on the first floor and its Art Deco and Bauhaus interiors on the second floor. During her early childhood, the house was a gathering place for such figures in the international art world as Alexander Calder, Salvador Dali, Virgil Thomson, and Le Corbusier, who came to Hartford to participate in her father’s advanced programs at the Atheneum. Sally spent summers in Castine, Maine, attended the Oxford School in West Hartford (interrupted by a two-year stay in Los Angeles with her mother and brother), and graduated from the Concord Academy in Massachusetts in 1954. After private study of art in Florence and additional classes at the Hartford Art School, she joined the staff of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In 1960 she moved to New York City and worked first for the Archives of American Art, then at the Pace Gallery, and later as a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For many years she was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club of New York, serving as vice president and chairman of the Art Committee. An insatiable museum-goer, she was also a collector of contemporary art and an avid devotee of classical music. |
| Sally attracted a legion of friends of all ages, as much through her irreverent playfulness—whether she was making comic movie shorts or launching weather balloons off the Maine coast—as through her warmth and intelligence. Her love of gadgetry, mechanical toys and puzzles, coupled with an unusual degree of manual dexterity, led her in the early 1960s to experiment with making her own motorized constructs. She soon produced elaborate mechanized sculptures that incorporated images from Op Art. She quickly progressed to making both small and large-scale boxes on broad themes in twentieth-century art—whether sculptors, painters, Surrealists, or Cubists. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, she concentrated on interpretations of portraits of modern artists, composers and literary figures as well as famous paintings from the fifteenth century to the present. She prided herself on fine craftsmanship and, to the end of her life, continued to try out new materials and colors. For many years Sally was reluctant to show her boxes publicly, but in the early 1990s, largely through the efforts of her close childhood friend Priscilla Cunningham, she was persuaded to exhibit them. Her work appeared to great effect in exhibitions at the MMC Gallery of Marymount Manhattan College in 1993 and at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, Long Island, each year from 1991 through 1994. |
| In her love of fantasy and illusion, in her attraction to both Old Masters and Modernists, and in her invitation to the viewer to ponder the meaning of an artist’s images, Sally Austin was very much her father’s daughter. Though as a child she found it difficult to accept his long absences from home after he became director of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, in 1946, she was deeply attached to him and intensely proud of his achievements. In 1985 she joined her mother and brother in giving the Austin family home to the Wadsworth Atheneum to be preserved as one of Hartford’s most important historic sites. Shortly before her death from cancer on April 16, 1994, Sally learned that the Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior was about to designate the Austin House a National Historic Landmark. This recognition of Chick Austin’s role as a pioneer in the cultural life of his time brought her, both as his daughter and an artist whom he had inspired, great happiness. |
|
Eugene R. Gaddis William
G. DeLana Archivist and Curator of the Wadsworth
Atheneum
|