Arthur Everett Austin, Jr.

Who was Arthur Everett Austin, Jr.?

Arthur Everett "Chick" Austin, Jr. was the innovative and pacesetting director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 through 1944. Austin's visionary gift included persistence in the introduction of then-modern theater and modern design and especially contemporaneous art. Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, and Gertrude Stein benefited from his advocacy.

Chick Austin helped alter the way Americans looked at and thought about modern art. For starters, he organized the first Picasso retrospective in the United States, put on the first show of Surrealist art and, with Kirstein, helped engineer the immigration of choreographer George Balanchine and sow the seeds for Balanchine's School of American Ballet.

— Michael Z. Wise, "The Man Who Pushed Picasso"