[1] Artists closely associated with the Grand Central Art Galleries included Hovsep Pushman, George de Forest Brush, and especially Sargent, whose posthumous show took place there in 1928.

The Grand Central Art Galleries were also responsible for the creation, design, and construction of the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

[11] The Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association was established in 1922 by Walter Leighton Clark together with John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, and others.

Non-artists (referred to as "lay members") agreed to give a sum of money (initially $600, the equivalent of $7,500 in 2008) to purchase one of the donated works, but available only after the first year.

As Clark wrote: "The beauty of this plan of operation is that it accomplishes results in a practical way and is free from the sting of charity because the artists are actually underwriting their own organization.

[9] The original board of trustees consisted of Walter Sherman Gifford; the Galleries' architect, William Adams Delano; Robert W. DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Logan, vice-president of the Art Institute of Chicago;[13] Irving T. Bush, president of the Bush Terminal Company; and artist and businessman Walter Leighton Clark.

Sculptors included Daniel Chester French, Herbert Adams, Robert Aitken, Gutzon Borglum, and Frederic MacMonnies, who showed a fountain, The Boy and the Fish.

[4] The gala event attracted 5,000 people and received a positive review from The New York Times: "The initial exhibition, seen for its own sake, is a beauty.

As described in the 1934 catalog, the procedure was as follows: "[The drawing] will be accomplished by placing the name of each lay member on a slip of paper in a sealed jar which will be shaken thoroughly.

"[9]Available works were placed on display prior to the drawing, and lay members were requested to "make a list of thirty choices, arranging same in the order of his preference."

The school was directed by John Singer Sargent and Daniel Chester French; its first year teachers included painters Edmund Greacen, Wayman Adams, Jonas Lie, George Elmer Browne, Nicolai Fechin, and Sigurd Skou; sculptor Chester Beach; illustrator Dean Cornwell; costume designer Helen Dryden; George Pearse Ennis, who worked in stained glass and watercolors; and muralist Ezra Winter.

and Holger Cahill delivering an eleventh hour informal lecture to salespeople on "how to sell modern art," and nearly a dozen pictures sold on the opening day along, and important American collectors on hand who had probably never until that moment stepped foot in the premises, and for Monday's reception the gallery's best china brought out, and tea poured in such quantities as are seldom exigent, and heaped plates of the most special kinds of cake, and everybody trying, generally in vain, to catch sight of the art over a Caliban sea of shoulders.

While this practice declined in the late 1940s as the United States railroad system was progressively dismantled and shipping costs increased, it continued until at least the 1980s.

[58] Up until then there was no place at the Biennale dedicated to American art, and Clark felt that it was crucial to establishing the credentials of the nation's artists abroad.

[59] The pavilion's architects were William Adams Delano, who also designed the Grand Central Art Galleries, and Chester Holmes Aldrich.

As he wrote in the 1934 catalog: "Pursuing our purpose of putting American art prominently before the world, the directors a few years ago appropriated the sum of $25,000 for the erection of an exhibition building in Venice on the grounds of the International Biennial.

[59] The Galleries had built the pavilion with the hope that, like the other buildings at the Venice Biennale, it would eventually be run by nation whose art it showed.

In 1933 the Grand Central Art Galleries opened a second location at Fifth Avenue and on 51st Street in the former building of the Union Club of the City of New York.

[9] As Clark wrote: "These beautiful new Galleries with their many windows on Fifth Avenue and on 51st Street, have presented during the past eight months an ever-changing panorama of American Art which has been viewed by over one hundred thousand people daily.

"The former Union Club building was used for six years, until 1939, when Galleries' "uptown division" moved to the second floor of the Gotham Hotel on 5th Avenue.

Eighty artists' works were shown at the new location's December 9 opening, including those by Eugene Higgins, Wayman Adams, John Johansen, Albert Sterner, Sidney Dickenson, Carl Rungius, Randall Davey, John Follinsbee, Robert Brackman, Robert Philipp, and Leopold Seyffert.

Artists represented by Grand Central Moderns included Byron Browne, Lamar Dodd, Jennett Lam, and Louise Nevelson.

Erwin S. Barrie, who had served as director of the since the Galleries' 1922 founding, supervised their relocation in 1958 to the nearby Biltmore Hotel, at 40 Vanderbilt Avenue.

But people have shown a rare persistence this last day or two in pushing their way upstairs at the entrance on Vanderbilt Avenue to where the Grand Central Galleries has been holding its own.

There Cox worked to adjust the Galleries' approach to fit the times, holding shows such as "La Femme: The Influence of Whistler and Japanese Print Masters on American Art, 1880-1917.

[64] The archives of the firm of William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich are held by the Drawings and Archives Department in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University; the university's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library also has a significant collection of Chester Holmes Aldrich's correspondence.