| A biography of Holger Cahill, director of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) from 1935--1942, my dissertation chronicles his influence on American art as an art critic, curator, and administrator. An Icelandic immigrant, who was born in 1887 in Skogarstrand, Iceland near the Arctic Circle, Cahill grew up in the Midwest. Alienated from his family as a young man, he spent his adolescence as an itinerant worker, an experience that shaped his Populist artistic philosophies and his curatorial approach. Cahill, influenced by the Progressive theories of John Dewey, conceptualized art as an inclusive component of daily life with which everyone should have an opportunity to participate.;Settling in Greenwich Village, Cahill formed relationships with artists John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Mark Tobey, Joseph Stella, and Arshile Gorky, as well as with gallery owner Edith Gregor Halpert, collector Abby Rockefeller, and Newark Museum director John Cotton Dana. From 1922--1929, Cahill worked as Dana's assistant at the Newark Museum, where he helped build the museum's collection of Modern American art and met future Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy C. Miller, whom Cahill married in 1938. At the Newark Museum, he pioneered the first museum exhibitions on American folk art, "American Primitives" and "American Folk Sculpture." In 1932--1933, Cahill served as temporary director of exhibitions at MoMA, where he collaborated with Alfred H. Barr, Jr. on the exhibition "American Painting and Sculpture 1862--1932" and organized the exhibitions, "American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man in America" and "American Sources of Modern Art.";Cahill applied his democratic aesthetic theories most broadly through the structure and programs he implemented as director of the Federal Art Project. In particular, I argue, the New York City FAP and the WPA/FAP Exhibition Division contributed to the development of a pluralistic art scene during the 1930s and early 1940s. Through its program of local and national exhibitions, the Exhibition Division extended the art world into new communities and offered exposure to established and unknown artists. Throughout his leadership of the FAP, Cahill served as a link between artists and the New Deal administration and as a mentor to many members of the avant-garde. |
