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Sidney Janis 1896 - 1989

Sidney Janis of New York, New York County, NY was born on July 8, 1896 in Buffalo, Erie County, and died at age 93 years old on November 15, 1989 in New York, New York County.

Sidney Janis

New York, New York County, NY 10019

July 8, 1896

Buffalo, Erie County, New York, United States

November 15, 1989

New York, New York County, New York, United States

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Sidney Janis Sidney Janis (1896 - 1989)

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Sidney Janis' History: 1896 - 1989

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Introduction

Sidney Janis: Born July 8, 1896 Buffalo, New York Died November 23, 1989 (aged 93) New York City Nationality American Occupation Art dealer, writer Years active 1948–1986 Organization The Sidney Janis Gallery Spouse(s) Harriet (Hansi) Grossman Children Carroll (son), Conrad Janis (son), Robin (daughter) Relatives Carolyn Raport (sister), Martin Janis (brother) Sidney Janis (July 8, 1896 – November 23, 1989) was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited the work of most of the emerging leaders of Abstract Expressionism, but also that of such important European artists as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. As the critic Clement Greenberg explained in a 1958 tribute to the dealer, Janis' exhibition practices had helped to establish the legitimacy of the Americans, for his policy "not only implied, it declared, that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell were to be judged by the same standards as Matisse and Picasso, without condescension, without making allowances." Greenberg observed that in the late 1940s "the real issue was whether ambitious artists could live in this country by what they did ambitiously. Sidney Janis helped as much as anyone to see that it was decided affirmatively." Early life Sidney Janis was born in 1896 in Buffalo, New York, one of five children of a traveling salesman. A talented ballroom dancer, he left public high school in his senior year to travel on the eastern vaudeville circuit. Janis joined the Naval Reserve in 1917 and took courses to complete his high school diploma. After his discharge, he returned to Buffalo to work with an older brother who had a chain of shoe stores. On his frequent trips to New York, he met, courted, and in 1925 married Harriet Grossman, a writer passionate about music and the visual arts. Sidney and Harriet Janis visited as many art shows as they could. Sidney later maintained that visual experience was more important than schooling in developing an understanding and appreciation of art and the artist. Collecting In the mid-1920s, Sidney Janis opened his own shirt company, M'Lord. Its signature item—a two-pocket, short-sleeved shirt that he designed—proved to be very popular. As the business grew and prospered, so did the Janises' passion for collecting art. The couple made annual trips to Paris, where they met Mondrian, Picasso, Léger, Brâncuși, and other masters. By the early 1930s, they had acquired a number of major works by Picasso, Matisse, De Chirico, Dalí, Mondrian, and the self-taught master Henri Rousseau. In New York, Sidney and Harriet Janis became good friends with Arshile Gorky, Frederick Kiesler, and Marcel Duchamp, all of whom often visited their apartment. Career in art In 1934, Janis was invited to join the Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art. The following year, nineteen paintings from his private collection were shown at MoMA, and in 1936 they were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1939, as Chairman of MoMA's Art Committee, Janis helped arrange the loan of Picasso's Guernica to New York for the benefit of Spanish Refugee Relief. Sidney Janis closed the shirt business to devote his time to writing on art in 1939. He collaborated with his wife Harriet on books such as Abstract and Surrealist Art in America in which he explores the burgeoning styles of art rarely before discussed in America. The work exhibits a wide array of artists who were successful in conveying the surrealist and abstract styles such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur B. Carles, Man Ray, Leon Kelly, Mark Rothko, and Ray Eames. The Sidney Janis Gallery Then, in 1948, when Janis was 52 years old, he and Harriet opened the Sidney Janis Gallery which was located at 15 E. 57th Street in Manhattan sharing the fourth floor with the Betty Parsons Gallery. The gallery soon acquired a strong reputation by mounting scholarly, curated exhibitions of Léger, Mondrian, the Fauves, the Futurists, and de Stijl artists. In the 1950s, the gallery became a powerhouse of contemporary avant-garde art. In 1952, Janis gave Jackson Pollock the first of three solo shows. Also in this decade, the gallery represented Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Phillip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, and Josef Albers. In addition to his promotion of the Abstract Expressionists, Janis become the first blue chip gallery to show Pop art. In the fall of 1962 he organized the groundbreaking exhibition, the International Exhibition of the New Realists, a survey of contemporary Pop art and the seemingly related Nouveau Réalisme movement. The exhibition was located in a temporary rented storefront at 19 W. 57th Street. Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Phillip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb left the gallery as a protest. The Sidney Janis Gallery soon became a leading exhibitor and dealer in Pop art, representing Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Öyvind Fahlström, and Marisol.
07/8

1896

Birthday

July 8, 1896

Birthdate

Buffalo, Erie County, New York United States

Birthplace

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Ethnicity & Family History

Jewish.
Early Life & Education

Janis joined the Naval Reserve in 1917 and took courses to complete his high school diploma.
Religious Beliefs

Jewish.
Professional Career

Famous Art Gallery Owner.
Personal Life & Family

Perhaps Janis' greatest genius lay in exhibiting the work of acknowledged masters alongside that of emerging artists. By placing the new work in the context of great modern art, Sidney Janis focused critical eyes on contemporary art in a different, brilliant and discriminating way. He continued throughout to show Giacometti, Mondrian (whose estate he acquired), Arp, Magritte, Dubuffet, Duchamp, Léger, and Picasso, interspersing these exhibitions with solo shows and group shows of trend-setting contemporary artists . As a collector, Sidney Janis had an unparalleled eye. In 1967, he donated 103 works from his collection to the Museum of Modern Art, including six late Mondrian oils, Boccioni's Dynamism of a Football Player, and Picasso's Artist and Model. MoMA's founding director, Alfred Barr, declared that this donation was "unequaled among the great gifts" the museum had received. The gallery moved in the 1980s to 110 W. 57th Street. In 1984, the French Government awarded Mr. Janis its highest honor for distinguished contribution to cultural life, Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He received the New York Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture in 1987. Sidney Janis remained active at the gallery through his later years, organizing the unique Mondrian + Brâncuși exhibition in 1982, when he was 86 years old. He died at the age of 93 in New York in late 1989.[4] The gallery continued under the direction of Janis' son Carroll and grandson David Janis. In the final decade of the century, the Janis Gallery continued to mount significant exhibitions, including "Mondrian: Flowers" a rare gathering of an extensive group of floral images by the seminal abstract artist.[5] Impact in Art During his lifetime, Janis continually sought to support art and creativity and create exposure for artists of his day even if they had not yet garnered the attention and adoration of the public. When talking about minimalist artists, he said that they had vision beyond their time and were part of an important movement in art. Using El Greco and his contemporaries as an example, Janis stated that his "painting seemed so distored to his contemporaries it was hidden away in convents and not appreciated until the late 19th Century."[6] In addition to his donation to the Museum of Modern Art, Janis collected art throughout his lifetime and set up exhibitions that put the contemporary art of his time on the stage. For example, he had several accomplishments in the American art scene, including the first exhibition of Futurism, an exhibition of Analytical Cubism, and the "Less is More" show.[6]
11/15

1989

Death

November 15, 1989

Death date

Unknown
Cause of death

New York, New York County, New York United States
Death location

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Obituary

Sidney Janis, the doyen of New York art dealers, whose gallery on West 57th Street mounted significant shows of European masters and helped put Abstract Expressionism on the international map, died yesterday after a bout with pneumonia. He was 93 years old and was active in the Sidney Janis Gallery until his 90th birthday. In 1967 Mr. Janis gave his private collection, comprising 103 works by major European and American artists, to the Museum of Modern Art. Among them were important paintings by Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and Umberto Boccioni. At the time the gift was valued at $2 million; today it would be worth more than $100 million. Mr. Janis, a onetime professional dancer on the vaudeville circuit and later a shirt manufacturer, began his long involvement with art as a collector. Visiting Europe in the late 1920's and early 30's, he bought major works by School of Paris painters and acquired a small Mondrian canvas directly from the artist. It was the second Mondrian work to be brought to the United States. The impressive collection he assembled with his wife, Harriet, had several museum shows, and Mr. Janis himself became an exhibition organizer and a writer on art. Gallery Opened in 1948 In 1948, at the age of 52, he opened his first gallery and during its early years mounted museum-quality shows of 20th-century masters and movements. Among them were the first American presentations of Jean Arp, Robert Delaunay and Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and - in 1951 - the first comprehensive exhibition of Henri Rousseau. In 1953 Marcel Duchamp produced a Dada show at the gallery, and there were also comprehensive shows of Futurism and Cubism. Although Mr. Janis was not the first to show the Abstract Expressionist artists, he became involved with them early. In 1950 he mounted a group show that included the work of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and during that decade became the dealer for Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko, Philip Guston, Kline and Robert Motherwell. In 1961 he presented ''The New Realists,'' one of the first dealer shows of Pop Art. The show brought younger Pop artists into the Janis stable, among them Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine and Tom Wesselmann. A Talent for Promotion The dealer himself acknowledged that his vocation lay not so much in discovering new talents as in promoting those with established reputations, but he did that so well that his gallery became a major pace-setter for the art world in the 1950's and 60's. During that period he was described by Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, as ''the most brilliant new dealer, in terms of business acumen, to have appeared in New York since the war.'' Mr. Janis was born in Buffalo on July 8, 1896, and attended schools there. In his teens he did professional ballroom dancing on the Gus Sun Time vaudeville circuit. He kept up his interest in dancing throughout his life, and the small, dapper Mr. Janis was a familiar figure at Roseland. At a 90th birthday party given by the Museum of Modern Art in 1986, he whirled a woman partner around the floor in a brisk tango. After a tour as a machinist in the Navy during World War I, Mr. Janis went to work for his brother Martin, who owned a chain of shoe stores. On business trips to New York, he began going to art galleries - ''a nice diversion that you could enjoy in the daytime,'' he once told an interviewer. In 1924, he married Harriet (Hansi) Grossman, and the couple moved to New York. The Success of His Shirt Kristen Wiig Would Have Said Yes to One Line in ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ With the help of his wife, Mr. Janis opened a shirt manufacturing business called M'Lord. Its sole product was a shirt with two breast pockets that sold well in the South, where men doffed jackets. The shirt was a great success and Mr. Janis was soon able to devote most of his time to his growing passion for collecting art. A painting he acquired in 1934, ''The Dream'' by Rousseau, aroused his interest in folk art, and during the 1930's he traveled throughout the country in search of unknown primitive painters. Among those he found and gave shows to were Patrick J. Sullivan, a West Virginia steelworker, and Morris Hirshfield, a retired Brooklyn slipper manufacturer who tended to paint women with two left feet. In 1942 he published ''They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century,'' which contained critical and biographical studies of 30 self-taught American painters from Joseph Pickett to Horace Pippin. During the 1940's Mr. Janis came to know many of the European artists in exile in the United States, among them Fernand Leger, Max Ernst, Mondrian and Roberto Matta. Becoming more interested in Surrealism, he was editorial adviser for a prominent Surrealist review and in 1942 helped organize an international Surrealist show called ''First Papers of Surrealism.'' Leger Show Was His First His books include ''Abstract and Surrealist Art in America'' (1944) and ''Picasso: The Recent Years, 1939-1946,'' both done in collaboration with his wife. In 1948, short of money after a decade of retirement, Mr. Janis re-entered the business world. ''This time,'' he told an interviewer, ''I decided to do something I loved.'' He opened his art gallery, with a show of work by Leger. As a dealer, he was at times an embattled figure. He was occasionally sued by artists he represented and accused by fellow dealers of talent raids. Critics also said he told his artists what to paint. But Mr. Janis continued to enjoy a reputation as a trend-spotter and a taste-maker, and in the 1960's he played an important role in the growth of Pop Art, showing such artists as George Segal, Tom Wesselmann and Marisol. An active tennis player until his late 80's, Mr. Janis retired from the gallery in 1986, and it is today run by his sons, Carroll and Conrad (the actor and jazz musician), and Carroll's son David. Mr. Janis's wife died in 1963. Besides his sons, he is survived by a daughter, Robin, of New York City; a sister, Carolyn Raport of Los Angeles; six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

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