KRAUSHAAR GALLERIES CELEBRATES 125TH ANNIVERSARY
September 7th, 2010 marks the 125th anniversary of the first sale at Kraushaar Galleries.
Charles W. Kraushaar opened Kraushaar Galleries in 1885. Early clients for his artists’ supplies included Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt. Encouraged by his success, Kraushaar took on his 16-year old brother, John, as an employee.
During its history, the gallery has given artists their first exposure to curators, historians, other artists, and the general public. Kraushaar gave Henri Fantin-Latour his first American exhibition in 1890. It gave George Luks, who John Kraushaar met playing baseball, his first exhibition, in 1913, and John Sloan his first solo show in 1917. It also represented William Glackens and Guy Pène du Bois for decades and showed works by Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, Everett Shinn, Marsden Hartley, and Gaston Lachaise. Beginning in the nineteen-teens, the gallery’s activities helped shape the course of American art.
Following Charles Kraushaar’s death in 1917, John Kraushaar steered the gallery in an increasingly Modernist direction. Although best known for handling American progressive realist and Modernist works, John also sold important European paintings, including Pablo Picasso’s Woman in White, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case, now in the Museum of Modern Art, to Lillie P. Bliss, and Paul Gauguin’s Self Portrait, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Antoinette Kraushaar, John’s daughter, who had begun working at the gallery in 1917, took an increasingly prominent role and became the director in 1946 upon her father’s death. She added to the gallery stable John Koch, William Kienbusch and John Heliker, among others.
Miss Kraushaar retired in 1988 and Carole M. Pesner, who has worked at the gallery since 1959, became just the fourth director in the gallery’s 107-year history. Katherine Degn has since joined her as co-director.
Beyond its commercial activities, Kraushaar has long worked with curators, scholars, and academics in support of research in the field of American art.
Concurrent with the gallery’s 125th celebration year, the Archives of American Art’s New York Research Center will hold Kraushaar Galleries, Celebrating 125 Years, an exhibition of original letters, invoices, ledgers and other archival material culled from the voluminous records of the Kraushaar Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. The exhibition, curated by Betsy Fahlman, opens on September 7, 2010 and will run until December 7, 2010. The Archives’ New York Research Center, located at 1285 Avenue of the Americas (between 51st and 52nd Streets), is open to the public from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
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Press contact:
Katherine Degn, Co-Director, Kraushaar Galleries
Tel. 212.288.2558, gallery@kraushaargalleries.com
Gallery info:
Kraushaar Galleries
74 East 79th Street, Suite 9B
New York, NY 10075
tel 212.288.2558
gallery@kraushaargalleries.com
Open by appointment