biography
| name: |
Force, Juliana Rieser
|
| |
née Reiser
|
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1876–1948)
|
| biography:
| Museum director and art supporter, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA. Born into a ‘poor but proud’ family, she became a secretary at an early age and then directed a secretarial school. Moving to New York City (early 1900s) she became the private secretary to the wealthy Helen Hay Whitney. In 1912 she married Willard B Force, a dentist. Mrs Whitney's sister-in-law was the sculptor and art patron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and in 1914 she asked Juliana to help run her Whitney Studio, a new art gallery in Greenwich Village that was to promote the more progressive American painters. Although she had no background in art, she seemed to have an instinctive feel for what Whitney and the best young American artists were seeking to achieve, and she would spend the rest of her life advancing their cause. She helped Whitney in founding the Friends of the Young Artists (1915), which evolved into the Whitney Studio Club (1918), both designed to support new artists with exhibits, purchases, and social contacts. Whitney continued to use her fortune to promote art in various other ways, including subsidizing the influential magazine Arts, and Juliana was the active executor of most of these projects. In 1928–30 she ran the Whitney Studio Galleries, but by then Whitney was convinced that a museum was needed, and the foundation of the Whitney Museum of American Art was announced in 1930. Juliana was appointed director and opened the museum (originally in Greenwich Village) in 1931. She continued to expand her support of American artists, helping to organize the federal art programme under the Public Works of Art Project (1933–4), heading a 1945 committee that persuaded the New York State legislature to earmark funds to purchase art for public buildings, and becoming one of the first women to participate in museum professionals' organizations. |
|
|
