Smith, Gordon (Musician)

Gordon Macintosh Smith was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, June 21, 1906. After graduating from Williams College in 1929, he continued his study of art history at Princeton and later, Harvard, where he studied under Professor Paul Sachs. From 1935 to 1936, he was a curator at the Berks County Historical Society in Pennsylvania, leaving to serve as assistant regional director of the Federal Art Project in New England until 1941. During the War, he was chief of planning and intelligence for camouflage operations at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. From 1944 to 1946, he worked the Burma-India desk for the Office of Strategic Services, Washington DC. In 1946, after mustering out, he became director of the Currier Gallery in Manchester, New Hampshire. He joined the Albright as director on September 15, 1955, succeeding Edgar Schenck, who left to become director of the Brooklyn Museum. Within a year or two of his arrival, with the assistance of Buffalo Fine Arts Academy president, Seymour H. Knox, Jr., he began the transformation of the Albright Art Gallery from a regional art museum, into one that stands today at the forefront of modern art museums in America.

Building on the extensive collections purchased by his predecessors for the Room of Contemporary Art, Smith moved quickly to acquire masterpieces by emerging New York abstract expressionists before such works were widely seen in major U.S. museums. By 1957, the collection had grown with acquisitions of works by Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, de Kooning, Gorky, Rothko, and Hoffmann. In 1958, the Gallery acquired two rare paintings by Clyfford Still. None of this would have been possible without the interest of Seymour Knox who worked closely with Smith in building the collection. During the 1960's the acquisitions continued. By the time of his retirement in 1973, Smith had added well over 200 major artworks to the collection. This does not include his greatest coup, the gift of 31 Still paintings received from the artist in 1964. In 1942, Smith married Elizabeth Montague Bowser, an art historian in her own right. From 1955, Mrs. Smith served as publicity secretary for the Gallery. She died in 1959. Other staff members who served during Gordon Smith's tenure were Tracy Atkinson, Robert M. Dory, Samuel C. Miller, Richard V. West, Bruce Chambers, Robert Murdoch, James N. Wood, and Smith's eventual successor, Robert T. Buck. All of these later went on to become directors or curators of other important museums. Occasional carbon-copies of out-going correspondence and internal memorandums from these people will be found in this collection.

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