Showing a youthful interest in art and literature, he began to collect works by Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, and James McNeill Whistler while still in his teens.

For the two decades following the turn of the century, Gallatin produced a constant stream of articles, small monographs, and books of engraved plates.

[7] He also drew attention to what he called a "decorative feeling" in works by these two artists in contrast to what he considered to be the less aesthetic realism of Degas and Millet.

For example, in 1902 he wrote that Beardsley's drawings attracted notice by their shocking distortion of perspective and proportion and their escape from artistic conventions.

[2][4] His inheritance made it unnecessary for him to work for a living and he chose not to follow the lead of other members of his class by engaging in banking, stock brokerage, or other professional occupation.

[15] While the drawings, paintings, and prints of these artists appear to have little in common with the work of Beardsley and Whistler, he saw in them a similar feeling for form, elegance of line, and "entire freedom from all taint of the academic.

[16] Shinn's paintings revealed to him a "personal expression of the artist's genius" and he also saw in them a "decorative instinct" that he admired in virtually all the art he collected.

[14] He was pessimistic about the capacity of museums and government agencies to support young American artists and believed they would be best served by individual art lovers, collectors, and "enlightened" critics.

[23][24] By the middle of the 1920s, through the influence of Nevinson, of the critic, Clive Bell, and of the authors of articles in The Arts magazine, he had thoroughly revised his opinions.

[22] Bell articulated a formalist aesthetic that coincided with Gallatin's belief that art was not good because of its realism, but because the two-dimensional space of the painting, drawing, or print possessed a satisfying composition, line, shape, color, and texture.

The difficulty of judging what is a "masterpiece" and what is an "abortion" is no different for abstract than it is for representational art: it takes experience, careful study, and "listening to one's inner response.

"[26][27] In the years between 1920 and 1926 Gallatin became a member of the modernist Société Anonyme[28] and was introduced to the influential artist-critic Jacques Mauny who soon became his friend and advisor.

[2][4] In the mid-1920s Gallatin studied art with the artist and teacher, Robert Henri, and in 1926 produced some small still lifes and mythology-themed paintings which have been described as having "broad areas of open space broken up by clusters of oddly shaped forms.

[4][31] The composition of the Gallery of Living Art was informal and fluid, changing frequently as Gallatin added to his collection or simply wished to revise the display.

[32] Most of the collection consisted of small works making it easy for moderately sized ones, such as Miró's Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) and Mondrian's Composition with Blue and Yellow (1932), to attract the viewer's notice.

He also was aided by a succession of friends and acquaintances beginning with Henry McBride (1927–32), followed by Robert Delaunay (1932–33), and then Jean Hélion and George L.K.

He had been deliberate and unhurried in his collecting, acquiring first small pieces on paper and, on becoming comfortable with an artist's work, gradually moving on to larger oil paintings.

"[34][38][39] In 1938, Edward Alden Jewell, the perceptive critic for the New York Times called them "pure" and, making an early use of the term, "non-objective" (the quote marks are his).

Previously exhibited in the Paul Reinhardt Galleries in New York, the show was then called "Five Contemporary American Concretionists" and lacked his work.

[4][34] In keeping with this attitude, he rarely gave his paintings distinctive names, leaving them untitled or calling them simply "Composition" or "Abstraction."

In 1937 Gallatin joined the American Abstract Artists group (to which Morris already belonged) and began to give it financial support.

The group was formed by a loose assembly of artists to help educate the public about abstract art and to hold exhibitions.

[2][4] The following year, at the Georgette Passedoit Gallery in New York, he had his first solo exhibition[40] and also sold a painting, Composition (1938), to the Museum of Modern Art.

"[43][50] In 1942 Gallatin was referred to as New York's "abstract king" in a profile that appeared in the "Talk of the Town" section of the New Yorker magazine.

In 1942 he put together a show devoted to American women, including Morris's wife, Suzy Frelinghuysen, as well as Alice Trumbull Mason and Esphyr Slobodkina.

[4] That same year New York University informed him that he had to close the Museum of Living Art so that the space it occupied could be repurposed as a wartime economy measure.

Within a few months, 175 works from his collection were moved to Philadelphia and a few were donated to the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to which Morris and Frelinghuysen were connected.

[55] At the end of his life the style of painting that he had championed was falling out of favor as abstract-expressionist art achieved its first critical recognition.

[66][67] Gallatin himself was born on July 23, 1881, in the country house of his maternal grandmother, Cornelia Lansdale Ewing, which was located in Villanova, Pennsylvania.

Duncan Phillips of the American Federation of Arts and Augustus Vincent Tack of the Liberty Loan Committee were co-organizers.