Manhattan Modern: The Life and Work of Charles Green Shaw

Archives of American Art New York City Research Center
1285 Avenue of the Americas, Lobby Level
(212) 399-5015

November 1, 2007 - February 7, 2008

An abstract artist and a passionate advocate of abstraction in America, Charles Green Shaw seemed to live a charmed life. Born into wealth, he reveled in the glamorous social scene of New York in the 1920s. After a successful career writing about that scene for such magazines as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, he threw himself into painting in his late thirties. The visual rhythms of New York City were the inspiration for his art.

Shaw explored his delights and his passions through a variety of professions: satirical journalist, painter, defender of avant-garde art, children's book author, and poet. The Charles Green Shaw Papers, donated to the Archives of American Art in 1974, narrate the artist's journey. More than 50 boxes of journals, letters, sketchbooks, manuscripts, and poems illustrate Shaw's development as an artist, which paralleled the growth of the New York art scene in the 20th century.

Images from this Exhibition

Stipple Green, 1967 August 20.	[Dorothy Canning Miller, New York, N.Y. letter to Charles Green Shaw, New York, N.Y.], 1956 October 9.	It Looked Like Spilt Milk, 1947.
Masked Harlequin by Charles G. Shaw, 1947.	[How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?], April 15, 1940.	Recent Paintings by Gallatin, Morris and Shaw, 1939 January 16 - February 8.
[John Graham, Brooklyn, N.Y. letter to Charles Green Shaw], 1938 January 24.	[Abstract sketch], ca. 1940.	[Cole Porter, Paris, France letter to Charles Green Shaw], 1926 March.
Are You a New Yorker? questionnaire, ca. 1926.	[Drawing of George Jean Nathan by Charles Green Shaw], ca. 1920.	[Photograph of the construction of Wrigley building with a pack of Wrigly's gum].
Twilight.	Statement.