ABSTRACT

When Albert Eugene Gallatin, George L. K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Charles G. Shaw were dubbed the "Park Avenue Cubists" by their fellow members of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group, their reputations as singular painters of note were rapidly on the rise. While their work was entwined in the aesthetic theories of the AAA and its dicta that art aspire to a state of structural clarity and extend the pictorial language of Cubism, their lives remained inevitably separate, distinguished by their economic advantage and social class. Withstanding charges of imitation—that the work of the AAA was but a pale restatement of already tested European aesthetic formulas—Morris lobbied for the American adaptation of Cubism, developing a novel defense that momentarily dispensed with the notion of originality. To ensure the continuity of radical art, American artists were right, he contended, to re-use Picasso's, Braque's, Gris's, and Léger's visual experiments, as long as they were sufficiently altered or synthesized.