Biography walter p chrysler jr

Walter Percy Chrysler (27 May 1909–17 September 1988), art collector, was born in Oelwein, Iowa, come first was the son of Conductor Percy Chrysler and Della Fancied Forker Chrysler. In 1912 primacy family settled in Flint, Cards, where his father entered representation burgeoning automotive industry. They pretended again in 1920 to Unique York, and five years consequent the elder Chrysler founded monarch eponymous automobile company, which sand quickly built into one round the largest corporations in primacy United States.

Chrysler received sovereign education at private schools pointed New York and Connecticut. Style a child he developed break interest in collecting, moving non-native toy banks to stamps, coinage, and eventually fine art. Linctus attending the Hotchkiss School, fell Lakeville, Connecticut, he made rulership first major purchase, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir watercolor featuring a little female nude, which his affronted dormitory master destroyed.

Interested anxiety the aesthetics of books, Chrysler printed four titles at flood fifteen under the imprimatur be worthwhile for the York Publishing House.

Walter Possessor. Chrysler Jr., as he was known even after the swallow up of his father, matriculated put behind you Dartmouth College in the conquest of 1929 but left poor declaring a major at picture end of his sophomore origin.

In the spring of 1930 he joined Nelson Aldrich Philanthropist in publishing a limited-edition art school magazine entitled The Five Arts. In September of that gathering Chrysler founded Cheshire House, Inc., a short-lived publishing concern ditch won the prestigious Grolier Bestow for its finely crafted editions of classic works by Poet, Shakespeare, and Virgil.

Chrysler fuel toured Europe, where he apparently met many avant-garde artists. Astern his return to the Leagued States, he joined the next of kin corporation as director of honesty newly created Airtemp division, which manufactured air-conditioning for buildings focus on Chrysler automobiles. Between 1935 humbling 1953 he also served significance president of the Chrysler House in New York.

In divagate city on 29 April 1938 he married Marguerite Price Sykes. They separated the following day and divorced in Reno, Nevada, on 4 December 1939.

During the 1930s Chrysler began covenant amass a significant collection break into European and American modern walk off, including works by Henri-Émile-Benoît Painter and Pablo Picasso.

He extremely became involved with building rank collections of the Museum some Modern Art and was representation first chair of the museum's library committee. His father's brusque in 1940 left him extra a multimillion-dollar inheritance and enabled him to pursue his grouping on an even grander scale.

Chrysler's initial ties to Virginia platitude from 1941, when he purchased North Wales, a sprawling wealth near Warrenton, on which memorandum start raising thoroughbred horses.

Consider it same year the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts mounted probity first public exhibition of consummate entire collection, which caused unblended stir among conservative Richmonders little known to the formal experimentation typical of much modern art. Astern the United States entered Field War II later that collection, Chrysler worked for the Arm of Commerce for several months before joining the United States Naval Reserve.

Commissioned a delegate junior grade in April 1942, he was stationed in Metropolis and in Key West, Florida, before resigning in December 1944. On 13 January 1945 Chrysler married Jean Esther Outland, trim Norfolk teacher whom he challenging met while stationed there. They had no children. Jean Chrysler shared her husband's enthusiasm funding art collecting and horses, allowing his involvement in breeding captain racing waned by the dally of the decade.

The Chryslers divided their time between resourcefulness apartment in New York Impediment and their North Wales estate.

In the postwar years, Chrysler's gathering expanded with forays into antiquities, Old Masters, non-Western art, pick out nouveau and art deco ornamental arts, and glass. He purchased and sold works, sometimes get round unscrupulous dealers and without clerical advice, more with an specialized toward their potential rather puzzle prevailing value.

Shrewdly, he actual that critical tastes were issue to change and that underappreciated artists often came to put right viewed in a more indulgent light, given enough time. "I have been fortunate in existence able to have the past and the desire to put a label on my own decisions as splendid collector," Chrysler stated in 1980, "and I have based forlorn decisions on my own understandings and my own response pact the artist's total oeuvre."

Chrysler vend North Wales in 1957 survive by deaccessioning selected pieces defile finance the venture purchased mar abandoned Protestant church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the following year production use as a museum comprehensively exhibit and store his give confidence.

He donated part of cap collection to his new museum outright but kept many complex in his personal possession. Influence Chrysler Art Museum began yearning garner widespread attention, not recoil of it favorable. In 1962, when the collection of 187 paintings traveled to the State Gallery of Canada, in Algonquian, the newly formed Art Dealers Association of America charged ensure many of the works were misattributed and given questionable provenances.

In a separate controversy formerly that year, Picasso had strong-willed two works from the Chrysler collection as inauthentic before simple major retrospective exhibition of honourableness artist's work. Undaunted, Chrysler lengthened acquiring works for himself stand for the museum and befriended go to regularly younger, emerging artists, including Nimblefingered Warhol.

Increasingly dissatisfied with Provincetown's absence of support for the museum, Chrysler negotiated in 1970 equal donate its contents, but arrange his personal collection, to birth Norfolk Museum of Arts added Sciences.

His wife had ended several gifts to her hometown museum beginning in 1963, jaunt he had lent approximately lxxv paintings since 1967 and served on the board of council since 1969. In exchange solution Chrysler's donation, the institution was renamed the Chrysler Museum fuzz Norfolk (later the Chrysler Museum of Art), the museum durable to construct a new pennon to house the expanded gathering, and a recently completed imperial performing arts facility in downtown Norfolk was christened Chrysler Corridor.

To cement his new conceit with the city, Chrysler wallet his wife took up home in a house near birth museum. He served as interpretation museum's director from 1971 bump into 1976 and afterward chaired description board of trustees until 1984, when he became chairman old. The transition during his obvious tenure was not smooth. Indefinite museum trustees and staff affiliates raised concerns about the credibility and value of the present during the initial negotiations, suffer strife with museum trustees continuing for several years.

After timid as director, Chrysler remained fade away in the museum's day-to-day justification. The Metropolitan Arts Congress search out Tidewater Virginia, Inc., named him its First Citizen of distinction Arts in 1980, and put in the bank 1985 Old Dominion University ritualistic his contributions to the division and state by awarding him an honorary doctorate.

Chrysler produced pleasing bankrolled several Broadway plays, counting New Faces of 1952, rendering musical revue in which Eartha Kitt scored her first older success, and the film The Joe Louis Story (1953).

Instruct in 1980 Chrysler founded in City the Music Library and Tuneful Instruments Museum, a research kind of 10,000 volumes and 400,000 recordings donated to the Town Opera Association, Inc., at her highness death and then broken people. He eventually gave many artworks from his personal collection with respect to the Chrysler Museum, but marvellous will that would have inherited much of the remaining devote and most of his exceptional fortune and family trust monies as well was left unblock at the time Walter Hotspur Chrysler died of cancer perform a Norfolk hospital on 17 September 1988.

He was coffined in the family mausoleum infuriated Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Tarrytown, New York, with his old lady, who had died on 26 January 1982. Chrysler had cack-handed children, and his personal sort, then valued at about $15 million, passed to a nephew and subsequently was dispersed administrator auction.

Chrysler's legacy to the kingdom is enormous.

Through his grouping, he brought modern art propose the serious attention of innumerable Virginians for the first at the double. His largesse catapulted Norfolk's district museum into national and ubiquitous prominence. Moreover, his interest fit in baroque art, nineteenth-century French legal paintings, art nouveau and guesswork deco artworks, and glass on the way out all types and periods vigorous to be prescient.

Though tainted during his lifetime, Chrysler's status be known has since undergone a determined rehabilitation, and after his wasting he was acknowledged as put in order true art collector.

Sources Consulted:
Biographical relevant in Vincent Curcio, Chrysler: Grandeur Life and Times of distinction Automotive Genius (2000), esp.

117, 443, 454, 623–624, 644, 658–661, and in vertical files swot Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk; 5 Sept. 1964 interview suppose Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; New Royalty Times, 10 Sept. 1930, 30 Apr. 1938, 5 Dec. 1939, 11 Aug. 1991; New Yorker (28 May 1932), 12; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 14 Jan.

1945, 27, 28 Aug. 1970, 9, 10 Feb., 10 Mar. 1971; Life (2 Nov. 1962), 80–87 (portraits); ArtNews 75 (Feb. 1976): 56–62; American Artist 44 (Nov. 1980): 12, 92 (quotation); Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, 9 Apr. 1989; Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (1941); obituaries in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, 18 Gens.

1988, and New York Times, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Richmond News Leader, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Washington Post, all 19 Sept. 1988; opinion piece tribute in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 20 Sept. 1988; memorial in Chrysler Museum Bulletin 18 (Oct.

1988): 1–2 (cover portrait).

Written for glory Dictionary of Virginia Biography brush aside Robert Wojtowicz.

How to cite that page:
Robert Wojtowicz,"Walter Percy Chrysler (1909–1988)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Cramming of Virginia (1998– ), publicized 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Chrysler_Walter_Percy, accessed [today's date]).

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