Sveinn Kristján Bjarnarsson (January 13, 1887 – July 8, 1960), also known as Edgar Holger Cahill, was an Icelandic-American curator, writer and arts administrator. He served as the national director of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal in the United States.
Biography Cahill was born Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson in Skógarströnd, Iceland on January 13, 1887.
Cahill's Icelandic family migrated to Canada in about 1890 and then to North Dakota as homesteaders, anglicizing their name to Bjornson and eventually, Johnson, although they continued to speak Icelandic at home. Extreme poverty, lack of formal education and domestic strife marked Cahill's early childhood. When he was young, his father abandoned the family and his mother sent the young Cahill to live and work on a farm owned by an Icelandic family 50 miles away where he was mistreated. His mother remarried and had another child, Anna. That marriage also did not last. After two difficult years with the Icelandic farmers, Cahill ran away at first to neighboring farms where he found work and eventually to Winnipeg, in search of distant cousins. The cousins refused to take him in and he ended up in an orphanage. A Gaelic-speaking family in a nearby cooperative farm community adopted Cahill and he was able to attend school regularly for the first time. After several years with the Gaelic family, he returned to North Dakota in search of his mother only to discover that his mother and step-sister had moved. Eventually he found them working on a nearby tenant farm in 1902. His mother had remarried to a younger man named Samson, and she and her son quarreled. Once again, he left home and did not see his mother again for 45 years.
Career Cahill's employment in the field of visual arts began in 1921 when he was hired by John Cotton Dana at the Newark Museum and the Society of Independent Artists to write publicity about their activities. As a former journalist and editor, Cahill had learned how to write effectively and he helped create new interest both organizations in the media. Through his friend, the artist John Sloan, Cahill knew many of the leading artists of the day and he encouraged Dana to purchase works by contemporary artists for the museum's growing collection. After Dana's death in 1929, Cahill organized the first major museum surveys of American Folk Art at the Newark Museum in 1930 ("American Primitives") and 1931 ("American Folk Sculpture"). While at Newark, he also published fiction, essays and short stories including art criticism for the magazines Shadowland International Studio and the New York Herald Tribune. He published a novel, Profane Earth in 1927 and, in 1930, "A Yankee Adventurer" a biography of Frederick Townsend Ward and his role in the Taiping Rebellion of 1861. At Newark, he met his future wife, Dorothy Canning Miller whom he married in 1938.Jeffers, Wendy "Holger Cahill and American Art", Journal of the Archives of American Art, fall 1992, volume 31, #4, 1991. pp. 2–11. Together with the galleries Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery, Cahill published a monograph on Pop Hart in 1928, Max Weber in 1930 and Jules Pascin in 1931. Halpert and Cahill also launched a magazine called Space that ran for three issues in January, March and June, 1930.
In 1932–33, Cahill served as acting director of the Museum of Modern Art when the founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., took a leave of absence. He organized several notable exhibitions including American Sources of Modern Art, American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man in America and a survey exhibition, American Painting and Sculpture 1862–1932. In 1934, he directed the First Municipal Art Exhibition at Rockefeller Center in New York; the exhibition coincided with the destruction of the mural by Diego Rivera and many of the artists threatened to withdraw. When Cahill left Newark, he employed Dorothy Miller as his assistant on his various projects. At the First Municipal Art Exhibition, Miller stepped in as director when Cahill landed in the hospital and was unable to continue which led to her later position as curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
From August 1935 until April 1943, Cahill was the national director of the Federal Art Project, the role for which he is best known today. His contributions to the research, documentation and understanding of the visual arts in America were wide-ranging—from the earliest crafts of the Native Americans to the abstract expressionists. In the 1920s, his early endorsement of American folk art as well as the early American modernists introduced their work to a larger public through exhibitions, catalogues and criticism. During his tenure of the WPA, his oversight of the Index of American Design established a greater understanding of the variety and quality of American iconographic imagery.
Cahill proved to be an imaginative, sensitive and skillful administrator. Under his leadership community art centers were established in over 100 towns and cities nationwide, murals drawing upon the geographical environment were painted in public buildings throughout the country, and some 10,000 artists and craft workers were sustained through the Great Depression. An entire generation of artists was nurtured, their work exhibited, and an expanded public for art was created.
In 1938, Cahill married Dorothy Canning Miller, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. The following year, he took a leave of absence from the WPA to stay in New York City and direct a large survey exhibition at the 1939 World's Fair, American Art Today. Through Miller, he continued to meet new artists and he was an avid and interested spectator of all of the programming at the Museum of Modern Art.
Writing When the Federal Arts Project ended in 1943, Cahill returned to New York to concentrate on writing novels and essays. Hampered by various illnesses after his busy tenure as Director of the Federal Art Project and a severe heart attack in 1947, he managed to complete two novels, Look South to the Polar Star, in 1947, and The Shadow of My Hand, in 1956, set in the Midwest of his youth. In the same year he began studying poetry with Stanley Kunitz, and taped a memoir for the Columbia University Oral History Project. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on his novel Stone Dreamer, which was left unfinished at his death in 1960.
Cahill died on July 8, 1960, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he is buried in the town's cemetery.
Bibliography 1921-1925 Shadowland magazine. August 1921. "John Sloan: Man and Artist" by Edgar Cahill. pp. 11, 71–73. Shadowland magazine. December 1921. "A High Northern Renaissance on Iceland". The Nation. August 17, 1921 (volume 113, number 2928). "Purity in the Sixth Printing". Hunger by Knut Hamsun, reviewed by Edgar H. Cahill. pp. 181–182. The Nation, October 26, 1921 (volume 113, number 2938). "Artists and Business Men". Shallow Soil by Knut Hamsun. New York Herald Tribune. November 27, 1921. "Hunger From Hamsun," Dreamers by Knut Hamsun reviewed by Holger Cahill. The Bookman, January 1922 (volume 54, number 5). "Icelandic Renaissance". pp. 496–497. The New York Times Book Review. February 19, 1922. "Hanging out the Crepe for Europe". pp. 12, 23. International Studio. March 1922 (volume 75, number 299). "America Has Its Primitives". pp. 80–83. (Article about the Pueblo-Indian art in the Exhibition of Independent Artists.) Shadowland magazine. February 1922. "Ernest Lawson and His America" by Edgar Holger Cahill, pp. 23, 72. [Shadowland magazine. June 1922. "Bruce Crane: Master of Landscape" by Edgar Holger Cahill. pp. 11, 70, 75 (with color reproduction). Shadowland magazine. August 1922. "Bryson Burroughs" by Edgar Holger Cahill. pp. 11, 66-67 (with color reproductions). Shadowland magazine. September 1922. "John Costigan Carries the Flame" by Edgar Holger Cahill, pp. 11, 71 (with color reproductions). Shadowland magazine. November 1922. "Hayley Lever, Individualist (The artist who believes that man may draw inspiration from all sources, but that the only deadly sin is imitation)" by Edgar Holger Cahill. p. 11, 77 (with color reproductions). International Studio. November 1922 (volume 76, number 306). "Trygue Hammer's Sculpture". pp. 104–107. The Freeman. November 23, 1922. Article title unknown, by Holger Cahill, p. 254?. Shadowland magazine. February 1923 (volume 7, number 6). "Jonas Lie: Poet of Today" by Edgar Cahill. pp. 11, 70. Shadowland magazine. April 1923. "Kenneth Hayes Miller Who Occupies the Place in the World of Art that James Branch Cabell Holds in Literature" by Edgar Cahill. pp. 11, 71. Shadowland magazine. June 1923. "The Odyssey of George Hart — Who is the Dean of the Globe-Trotting Painters, and Whose Work Shows a Genuine Gusto for Life" by Edgar Cahill. pp. 11, 70. Shadowland magazine. September 1923. "Gaspard and America's Growth" (article about Leon Gaspard of the Milch Galleries by Edgar Cahill. Tavern Topics. April 1924. "Norsemen of Old Invade American Art, Viking Warriors and Traditions Embodied in the Beautiful Decorative Motifs of New York's Newest Restaurant" by Edgar H. Cahill. pp. 17, 39.
1926-1930 Paintings: Newark Museum, (Second List). The Newark Museum Association. 1926. Newark, New Jersey; notes by Holger Cahill. Profane Earth. The Macaulay Co., New York 1927. (book jacket drawn by John Sloan; dedicated the book to John Cotton Dana) (fiction). New York Herald Tribune book review. November 27, 1927. "Adventures in Lithography" George W. Bellows: His Lithographs reviewed by Holger Cahill. George O. "Pop" Hart, The Downtown Gallery, New York, 1928, 25 pages. Essay by Holger Cahill. Some editions of the book were published with an original lithograph in frontispiece. Poster. June 1928. "Poster Art in the Newark Museum" by Edgar Holger Cahill, staff member of the Newark Museum and the Newark Public Library. Louise Connolly The Newark Museum, "Miss Connolly Continued Her Teaching in the Library and Museum" by Holger Cahill (small booklet published by the Newark Library and Museum at the time of her death. JCD: "these notes on the life of Miss Louise Connolly were prepared by Mrs. Henry B. Twombly of Summit New Jersey and by HC of the library museum and staff"). Contemporary American Art, Municipal Art Gallery, Atlantic City, New Jersey. 1929. (exhibition dates: June 19 — October 1, 1929). introduction by Holger Cahill (Cahill listed as one of three on the Exhibition Committee.). Creative Art. 1929. "The Museum and American Contemporary Art" (the Newark Museum issued a reprint). Forbes magazine, August 15, 1929. "The Machine Industry's Need for Art" by John Cotton Dana, in collaboration with Holger Cahill. The Museum. Newark, New Jersey. February 1929 (volume II, number 5)., "New American Paintings and Sculpture", pp. 34–35. A Yankee Adventurer, The Macaulay Company, New York, 1930. [Fall]. Americana Illustrated. January 1930 (volume XXIV, number 1). "The Life and Work of John Cotton Dana", pp. 69–84. (by Edgar Holger Cahill). Space. Volumes 1-3 — January 1930, March 1930 and June 1930. (Cahill was editor in chief.) Max Weber, The Downtown Gallery, New York, 1930, 45 pages, 32 photographic plates. Essay by Holger Cahill. Some editions of the book were published with an original lithograph in frontispiece. Modern American Watercolors, January 4 — February 9, 1930, Newark Museum, introduction by Cahill, pp. 7–8. American Primitives — An Exhibit of the Paintings of Nineteenth Century Folk Artists. Newark Museum, 1930. Introduction by Cahill (pp. 7–9); descriptive notes by Cahill for "Portraits" (pp. 11– 15); "Landscapes and Other Scenes" (pp. 61–63); "Decorative Pictures" (pp. 69–75); and "Wood Sculpture" (p. 77). (exhibition dates: November 4, 1930 — February 1, 1931).