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Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections > Manuscripts > Finding Aids Holger Cahill Papers, 1907-1983ContentsSummaryTitle: Holger Cahill Papers, 1907-1983 Size: 6.5 linear feet Access: Unrestricted Source: Gift of Dorothy Canning Miller and Jane Cahill Blumenfeld, 1989 Finding aid compiled by: Richard Salvato, Nov. 1989 Historical Statement: Holger Cahill (born Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson) was an Icelandic-American novelist, poet, folklorist, art exhibitions curator at the Newark (N.J.) Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, and National Director of the Federal Arts Project of the Works Projects Administration from 1935 to 1943. Description: Correspondence, 1933-1960, with writers, artists, publishers and others, relating to Cahill's writings on art, his poetry, and novels; family correspondence, 1907-1983, between Holger Cahill and his sister Anna Johnson, his mother, Vigdis Bjarnsdotter, and his wife, Dorothy Canning Miller, and between Anna Johnson and Dorothy Canning Miller; manuscript drafts of his novels, short stories, and articles; story ideas and notes; research notes; poetry and play scripts; writings by others; photographs; biographical material; clippings; annotated books and magazines. Biographical noteHolger Cahill was a novelist, art critic, museum curator, an authority on the folk art of the United States and the arts of Central America, and national director of the Federal Art Project of the Works Projects Administration from 1935 to 1943. He was the son of Bjorn Jonsson and Vigdis Bjarndottir of Skogarstrond, Iceland, where he was born in 1887 and christened Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarson. Cahill died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1960. Shortly after his birth the family emigrated to western Canada and later moved to North Dakota. His early childhood was blighted by poverty and domestic conflict. When he was eleven his father abandoned the family and his mother became ill. Unable to care for her children she sent Cahill to live with a nearby Icelandic farming family. Two years later he ran away to Canada where he briefly worked as a farmhand and began the wanderings and search for his mother and young sister that consumed much of his adolescence. He spent some time in a Winnipeg orphanage and in a Gaelic-speaking farm community where he attended school. Returning to North Dakota he renewed the search for his mother and sister, and eventually found them working on a farm. Shortly thereafter Cahill left and did not see his mother again until 1947. He worked as a cattle-driver in Nebraska and later in Minnesota. In St. Paul he took a job as a clerical worker for the Northern Pacific Railway and attended night school. He worked on ore boats on the Great Lakes and as a coal passer on the Empress of China which took him to Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where he jumped ship. His experiences in the Orient led in later years to the writing of two books: China: A Yankee Adventurer (1930) a biography of Frederick Townsend Ward which outlined his role in the Taiping rebellion; and a novel, Look South to the Polar Star (1947). After his return from China, Cahill sold insurance and books and washed dishes in hotels before heading for New York City just before the outbreak of World War I. He worked as a short-order cook in lower-Manhattan and attended night classes in journalism and creative writing at New York University where he met the future novelist, Mike Gold. When Gold later became the editor of the Scarsdale Inquirer and the Bronxville Review, in Westchester County, he gave Cahill a job as a reporter. It was at about this time that Cahill took the name, Edgar Holger Cahill, by which he would be known for the rest of his life. When Gold left for Harvard Cahill took his place as the editor of the two small weekly newspapers and ran them for three years before returning to New York to work as a freelance journalist and to attend courses at Columbia University and The New School for Social Research. In 1919 he married Katherine Gridley. They were divorced in 1927. They had one daughter, Jane Ann. Around 1920 Cahill was brought into contact with the painter John Sloan while writing publicity for the Society of Independent Artists. Through Sloan Cahill became friends with a remarkable group of painters and sculptors including Robert Henri, George Bellows, Max Weber (for whose important show in 1930 at The Downtown Gallery he wrote the catalogue), Mark Tobey, Walt Kuhn, Jules Pascin, Joseph Stella, and William Zorach. Thanks to his friendship with these extraordinary artists he soon got caught up in the city's bohemian life and became involved with the visual arts. A turning point in his life came in 1922 when he joined the staff of the Newark Museum, which had been successful in popularizing contemporary art through its exhibitions program. Encouraged by the Museum's director, John Cotton Dana, Cahill in 1930 and 1931 organized American Primitives, and American Folk Sculpture, two comprehensive and significant exhibitions of American folk art. In 1932 Cahill served as the acting director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and organized an exhibition of early American folk art. In his catalogue for the exhibition, American folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900, Cahill emphasized the individual qualities (within the framework of communal utilitarian traditions) of the largely unidentified artists and craftsmen and drew attention to the kinship of much of their work with modern art, intentionally blunting the customary distinctions between fine art and folk art, high culture and popular culture. In the same year he arranged an important show of American paintings and sculpture from 1862 to 1932, followed in 1933 by the notable American Sources of Modern Art exhibition which examined the pre-Columbian art of Mexico, Peru, and Central America, especially in the light of its influence on Gauguin, the fauvists and cubists, and a generation of Latin American muralists. By 1934 Cahill's catalogues and articles had firmly established his reputation as a writer on art. Early in that year Cahill directed the first Municipal Art Exhibition of New York and was the co-editor with Alfred Barr of Art in America in Modern Times, and, in 1935, Art in America: A Complete Survey. In that year, when he was planning to devote full time to writing he was summoned to Washington to help organize the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program for some 40,000 painters, sculptors, musicians, writers and theatre people. In the late summer of that year Cahill was appointed national director of the Federal Art Project which administered funds allocated for needy painters, sculptors, graphic artists, craftsmen, and art teachers. He proved to be an imaginative and skillful administrator. Under his leadership public art gained new meaning, art centers were established in over a hundred towns and cities, an index of American design was produced, and a generation of artists was encouraged, supported, and nurtured. When the Federal Art Project ended in 1943 Cahill returned to New York to concentrate on writing novels, although he did some articles on art and the history of the Federal Art Project. Despite being hampered by various illnesses and a severe heart attack in 1947 he managed to complete two books, Look South to the Polar Star, in 1947, and The Shadow of My Hand, in 1956, which was set in the midwest of his youth. In the same year he began studying poetry with Stanley Kunitz, and taped a memoir for the Columbia University Oral History Project. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on another novel, The Stone-Dreamer, which was left unfinished at his death in 1960. In 1938 Cahill married Dorothy Canning Miller, who was his colleague at MoMA and later became the museum's curator of paintings and sculpture. DescriptionThe papers consist of general correspondence, 1933-1960, with writers, artists, publishers and others, including such notables as Albert Barr, Malcolm Cowley, Dorothy Day, Hallie Flanagan, Mike Gold, Josephine Herbst, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Nikolaus Pevsner, Mari Sandoz, and Ethel Schwabacker. Although mostly routine, many of the letters in this section are outstanding, including over sixty by Josephine Herbst, covering the period 1950-1960, which contain cogent criticisms of Cahill's writings, biting comments on literature and politics, and reflections on her own writings, her friendship with Cahill, her relationships with various publishers, and her radical political views. The witty, breezy, and urbane letters of Stanton MacDonald-Wright, written in 1947, are also of unusual interest, and reflect his opinions on art, especially Oriental art, and his life as a painter. Other letters of interest in this group are those of the British art historian, Nikolaus Pevsner, requesting that Cahill write a book for the Penguin History of Art series, of which Pevsner was the editor; the emotion-charged family correspondence, 1907-1983, between Cahill, his sister, Anna Johnson, and his mother, Vigdis Bjarnsdottir (many of them dealing with Cahill's childhood and the years of family separation and estrangement) and his second wife, Dorothy Canning Miller, a long-time colleague of Cahill's at the Museum of Modern Art and a curator of that museum's collection of American paintings and sculpture, and between Anna Johnson and Dorothy Canning Miller concerning Cahill's misrepresentation of his name, age, and place of birth; manuscript drafts of his novels, short stories, and articles; story ideas and notes for fiction; research notes on Gaelic; notes on Finnegans Wake; some poetry and scripts of plays by Cahill; writings by others, including Josephine Herbst, Robert Armstrong Andrews, and Bobby Edwards; photographs of Cahill, members of his family, and friends; and biographical material, interviews, miscellaneous clippings, and some annotated books and magazines. Cahill's papers on art and the Federal Arts Project were given to the Archives of American Art. The appended list of letters, and list of published works by Holger Cahill, were prepared by Wendy Jeffers. Container List
List of Prominent CorrespondentsAndrews, Robert ArmstrongBarker, Virgil Barr, Alfred See: Penguin Books, Inc.Burke, Libbie (Mrs. Kenneth Burke) Burlin, Paul Columbia University Oral History Project Cowley, Malcolm Davis, Hallie Flanagan Davis, Stuart Day, Dorothy Dewey, John Evans, Ernestine Feitelson, Lorser Fitzgerald, Robert Flanagan, Hallie See: Davis, Hallie FlanaganGavert, Olive Lyford Gold, Michael Giroux, Robert See: Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc.Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guttornsson, Guttornnur Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc. Hardy, Bettina Sallemme Hatcher, Doris See also: Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., under the name Doris Schneider;Hauksson, Porleifur, to Halldor Laxness Herbst, Josephine Jordan-Smith, Paul Komroff, Manuel Lattimore, Eleanor Frances See: Andrews, RobertLattimore, Owen Laxness, Halldor Lindley, Denver See: Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc.M.C.A. Management, Ltd. Mac Donald, Dwight MacDonald-Wright, Stanton MacGibbon & Kee Mangione, Jerre Mencken, Henry Louis Meyer, Frank S. Morrison, Dick Mount, Charles Munson, Gorham Norman, Geoffrey R. Pelican History of Art See: Pevsner, NikolausPenguin Books, Inc. Perkins, Maxwell Pevsner, Nikolaus Phelps, Robert Prescott, Orville Richardson, Edgar P. Sandoz, Mari Schneider, Doris See: Hatcher, Doris SchneiderSchneider, Douglas Schwabacker, Ethel Scribner's Sons See: Perkins, MaxwellSiporin, Mitchell Smedley, Agnes Smythe, Donald Tahcheechee, Leon Thorfinson, Snorri Ullman, John Weld, Jacqueline Bogard Melanie A. Yolles |
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