William C. Seitz
American, 1914–1974
Seitz worked for the Federal Artists Project during the Depression and as a draftsman for a rubber company in Buffalo before earning a BFA from the University of Buffalo in 1948. He taught at the university there and the state teacher's college until 1949. He spent a year in Europe before attending Princeton University the next year where he held a one-person show in the Art Museum. Although enrolled in the MFA program, Seitz was already lobbying to be allowed to study abstract expressionism, then a current movement in the art world. Princeton Dept. of Art and Archaeology Chair E. Baldwin Smith (q.v.) queried Princeton alumnus (and founder of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) Alfred Barr, Jr. (q.v.) on the suitability of this as a subject for academic study and of Seitz's proposal. The famous exchange of letters is now in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art. Much of the Princeton faculty remained divided on Seitz and the subject, but eventually Seitz succeeded and, in 1955, completed the first dissertation on Abstract Expressionism. He was immediately appointed to the Princeton faculty as critic in residence and assistant professor.
Seitz became a rallying point for students of the "new art"--both painters and those in art history. He founded the first non-credit painting studio at Princeton, where he advised painting students, among whom were Frank Stella. Seitz also instituted the first artist-in-residence program at Princeton. In 1960 Seitz, always known as "Bill," became Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. Here his seminal exhibitions, "The Art of Assemblage" and "The Responsive Eye" brought to the fore genres of art lesser known modern art to the public. Twenty years later Hilton Kramer referred to Seitz's inaugural Monet retrospective, "Claude Monet: Season and Moments," as the "the great Monet show." Seitz also mounted exhibitions of artists as disparate as Mark Tobey, Hans Hofmann and Edward Hopper. He rose rapidly in the modern art world. Between 1965-1970 he was Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University and director of the Rose Art Museum there. He organized the United States exhibition at the Ninth Biennial in Sao Paulo (1967) and the Seventh Biennial of Canadian Painting (1968). In 1970 he became the William R. Kennan Jr. Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, taking the year 1972-73 as the Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. At age 60 he contracted cancer and died at a Charlottesville hospital.
