Midtown Modern: Commercial Art Galleries 1900-1925

Before Chelsea, before Soho, the commercial art gallery district was primarily on and just off Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Although most of the original buildings have disappeared, we will trace the steps of collectors “doing the galleries” in the first decades of the 20th century. We will uncover the location of Robert Henri’s 1901 show of American Modernists, see where the first solo exhibitions of Man Ray, Marguerite Zorach, and Florine Stettheimer were held, and note the various galleries opened by frustrated assistants of Alfred Stieglitz, as well as shops catering to the etching revival and American crafts movement.