Thaw, Eugene Victor, 1927-2018

Eugene Victor Thaw (1927-2018) was an American art collector and art dealer based in New York City with additional residences in Cherry Valley, N.Y. and Santa Fe, N.M. He married his former gallery assistant Clare Eddy in 1954. They remained married until Clare's death in 2017.

His personal collection featured more than 400 drawings, including rare works by Goya, Van Gogh and Andrea Mantegna and price-setting items by Rembrandt and Samuel Palmer. Mr. Thaw also earned distinction as the co-author of a monumental catalogue raisonné of Jackson Pollock’s work.

He was born on Oct. 27, 1927, in Washington Heights in Manhattan. His father was a heating contractor, his mother a schoolteacher. They named him for the socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, who had died the previous year.

As a young teenager, Mr. Thaw took drawing classes at the Art Students League on West 57th Street in Manhattan. But he did not pursue the hands-on practice of art. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx at 15, he entered St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and began making day trips to art museums in nearby Washington.

Returning to New York in 1947, he took graduate classes in art history at Columbia University with Millard Meiss and Meyer Schapiro. He also followed the city’s contemporary-art scene, getting an early immersion in Pollock’s work at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Having neither the money nor the social connections generally required to be a museum curator in those days, Mr. Thaw decided on selling art as a career option.

In 1950, with a loan from his father, he opened a gallery above the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. In 1954, he moved to Madison Avenue, where he shared a floor with a carpet dealer and a beauty salon. That same year he married Clare Eddy, his gallery assistant, who suggested that when he found things he really liked, he keep them rather than sell them.

Thaw was a co-founder of the Art Dealers Association of America in 1962, and he served as its president from 1970 to 1972. He was an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With that, his parallel career as a collector began in earnest. It would take him, often in partnership with his wife, in many directions. Although drawings were a lifelong passion, he also built what he termed “subcollections” of 18th-century French faience (a type of tin-glazed earthenware), bronzes from the ancient Eurasian steppes, medieval European ornaments and architectural models, all of which found homes in museums. In 2002, the Eurasian bronzes were part of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During these early decades, he was mentored by some of the great dealers and collectors of an older generation, including Pierre Matisse and Janos Scholz, and worked closely with contemporaries like Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis. In 1962, Mr. Thaw became a founding member of the Art Dealers Association of America, which he once described as “a fractious, individualistic, secretive, eccentric but talented group of venture capitalists.” He served as its president from 1970 to 1972. He was an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From teachers and colleagues he learned useful sales tricks, one of which involved collaboration with the renowned conservator Mario Modestini. Mr. Thaw would bring clients to Mr. Modestini’s studio and sell paintings “from Mario’s easel, having him clean passages in front of their eyes to reveal truth as old varnish and dirt disappeared.”

Before long, these clients included major museums — the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington — and private buyers like Paul Mellon and Norton Simon, whose Pasadena museum Mr. Thaw did much to shape.

His closest institutional tie was to what is now the Morgan Library and Museum, which in the 1950s was one of the few New York museums to have a curator of drawings. In 1975, after the museum had expanded its acquisition parameters to include 19th-century work, the Thaws decided that the Morgan would be the recipient, in incremental allotments, of their ever-growing holdings. The Morgan exhibition “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection,” which opened in September and closes on Sunday, marked the completion of the gift, encompassing more than 400 sheets.

Among them were works by modern and contemporary artists in whom Mr. Thaw took particular interest. In the 1950s, on summer vacations in East Hampton, N.Y., Clare Thaw had struck up a friendship with the painter Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s widow. With Ms. Krasner’s cooperation, Mr. Thaw began preparing the multivolume Pollock catalogue raisonné, an annotated listing of all the artist’s known works, in the 1970s, hiring the art historian Francis V. O’Connor as co-author. At Ms. Krasner’s death in 1984, Mr. Thaw served as executor of her estate and helped establish the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which gives grants to artists in need.

While in Santa Fe, N.M. the Thaws began collecting Native American art, eventually acquiring more than 1,000 objects. They later gave the entire collection to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., not far from Cherry Valley. A wing designed by Hugh Hardy was built in 1995 to house it.

Thaw was also an art collector. The Thaws’ collection included drawings from modern and old masters, American Indian art, ancient Eurasian bronzes, early medieval jewelry, Native American art, architectural models, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oil sketches, French faience, in addition to paintings, sculpture, and furniture. He was the owner of drawings and paintings by Paul Cézanne, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Alberto Giacometti, Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Lee Krasner, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock, Odilon Redon, Rembrandt, as well as Native American art. With his wife, he donated 870 art pieces to the Fenimore Art Museum. They also donated more than 400 works to the Morgan Library and Museum. An article in The New York Times in 2007 said the home “could be mistaken for a museum,” where, among paintings and other art objects, framed drawings by Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Delacroix, Picasso and Matisse lined the walls. In parting with art that he had devoted his life to collecting, Mr. Thaw was matter-of-fact. “After I’ve owned them and learned about them, I don’t need them anymore,” he told The Times in 1994. “They’re with me, and I can give them away.”

In 1985 and 1986 a group of small format paintings from the Thaw collection was exhibited at The Pierpont Morgan Library and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts alongside drawings, bronzes, objets de vertu and faience, to present an idea of their additional interests as collectors. In 2008, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum held an exhibition titled "House Proud", that commemorated a substantial gift made by Eugene and Clare Thaw of eighty five nineteenth-century exquisitely detailed watercolors of domestic interiors, the largest collection of this subject matter in America. The selection was ultimately shown in Paris at [[Musée de la Vie romantique]] in 2012-2013.

The Pierpont Morgan Library published a collection of his articles as Reflections of an Independent Mind in 1997. The book predominantly contains book reviews from 1980 to 1995 (including a very negative review of Suzi Gablik's Has Modernism Failed?), but also articles on collecting (1977-1995), museums and auction houses (1977-1990), and essays on Vincent Van Gogh (1980, 1984), Paul Cézanne (1984), Edgar Degas (1985), John Cheever (1982), Ralph F. Colin (1985), Pierre Matisse (1989), János Scholz (1993, 1995), John Rewald (1994), and Lore Heinemann (1997). These articles originally appeared in periodicals such as The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Times, The Spectator, The New Criterion, Heritage, ARTnews, and The American Scholar, as well as book editions of art works in his collection. The Thaws had established their own foundation, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, in 1981, using the proceeds from the sale of a single van Gogh painting. The trust supports the arts, the environment and, of particular importance to Ms. Thaw, animal rights. By then Mr. Thaw was preparing to retire as a dealer, discouraged by the direction the field had taken. “The astronomical growth in wealth over the last generation has fueled merely an interest in treating art as a financial asset,” he wrote.