Katherine Sophie Dreier

- Portrait of Katherine S. Dreier, between 1915 and 1916, Yale University Art Gallery Katherine Sophie Dreier was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 10, 1877. About this she stated "I was born in 1877. By a happy coincidence, three hundred years after Rubens ― and this fact has always influenced me. I had the feeling that some of his vitality and sensitiveness of color was a part of my artistic inheritance." Her parents, Theodor Dreier, a successful businessman, and Dorothea Dreier, were both immigrants from Germany. Katherine Dreier had an older brother and three older sisters. Dreier took art lessons each week when she was 12 years of age and she attended George Brackett, a private school in Brooklyn. She met and became the fiancé of American painter Edward Trumbull, also known as Edward Trumbull-Smith, when she lived in London in 1911. In August 1911, she married him in Brooklyn at her home at 6 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn. Her brother-in-law, Raymond Robins, officiated the ceremony. Within weeks of the marriage, Dreier found out that he was already married and was convinced “that an English marriage was not legally binding in America.” She printed cards and mailed them to those who had received wedding announcements. The cards stated “The marriage on Aug. 8th of Katherine S. Dreier and Edward Trumbull being void on account of the existence of a former wife of Mr. Trumbull from whom he was not legally free, and the parties not having lived together as husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. H Edward Dreier hereby recall their announcement of the marriage sent out before this fact was known.” This annulled the marriage and she subsequently returned to London. A suffragette, she was involved in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, attending its sixth convention in Stockholm, Sweden in 1911 as a delegate. She was the head of the New York City's German-American Committee of the Woman Suffrage party in 1915. Dreier was financially secure following receipt of an inheritance after the death of her parents in the late 1890s. ==Education==

Dreier studied art from 1895 to 1897 at the Brooklyn Art School. In 1900 she studied with her sister Dorothea at the Pratt Institute. She went to Europe in 1902 and traveled and studied the Old Masters there for two years with Mary Quinn and Dorothea. When she returned, Dreier had private lessons from painter Walter Shirlaw, who gave her a great foundation in the fundamentals of art and encouraged individual expression. For a quarter of a year in 1907, Dreier studied with Raphaël Collin in Paris and spent part of a year in 1912 studying under Gustaf Britsch, who she found to be the most accomplished of her teachers. ==Career==

She created an altar painting for the Saint Paul's School chapel in Garden City, New York in 1905. ca. 1911–12. Oil on canvas, 27 ¼ x 19 in. George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, Gift from the Artist's Estate. '' (1912). Oil on canvas. 57 7/8" x 35 1/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dreier returned to London to marry Edward Trumball in August 1911, but was back in England by September, and her marriage was annulled. There she saw Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was considered the "controversial centerpiece of the show." She was frustrated by the lack of respect given to the new, emerging artform. Wassily Kandinsky and Duchamp both influenced her work, which is realized in the Abstract Portrait of Marcel Duchamp that she made in 1918, Dreier, Duchamp and Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in 1920 for "the study and promotion of modern art," including Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, and Bauhaus art. Katherine Dreier deeply resented the upstart rival Museum of Modern Art, whose wealthy backers, she felt, had stolen her mission and her ideas and even her name—the Société Anonyme's subtitle was "Museum of Modern Art." In truth however, Dreier's tireless idealism could not make up for her lack of significant financial support. The Société Anonyme's exhibition rooms were too small, but Dreier's attempts to find larger quarters kept breaking down because the funds, which came mainly from her and her two sisters, were insufficient. Her society—as time went on it became more and more a one-woman operation—could and did claim precedence, nevertheless, as the first museum anywhere in the world that was devoted exclusively to modern art. She wrote the book Western Art in the New Era about modern art, which was published in 1923 The Cooperative Mural Workshop, The Society of Independent Artists, and The Société Anonyme Dreier created the Cooperative Mural Workshop in 1914 following the derisive response to the Armory Show. She described the workshop as something that "United art and artisanship and brought about usefulness and beauty." The society sponsored lectures, concerts, publications, and exhibitions of modern art. Duchamp and Dreier presented the Société Anonyme's art collection to Yale University in 1941. She gave a Trowbridge Lecture on the "Intrinsic Significance of Modern Art" in 1948 at Yale University. In 1950 Duchamp and Dreier published a catalog of the Société Anonyme's works donated to Yale. The organization ended on its 30th anniversary in 1950, when the three founders formally dissolved it. ==Later years and death==

Dreier's health began to decline, having a "crippling illness", about 1942, but she continued to work, giving lectures and writing. She died on March 29, 1952, in Milford Connecticut as the result of cirrhosis of the liver, which was not due to an alcohol issue. ==Legacy==