Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America 1. Edition

When Chick Austin first saw the palace of Gustav III, near Stockholm, he was so enchanted that he said he must have been conceived in Sweden. It was not surprising that Drottningholm, the baroque residence of the eighteenth century's most captivating king--who fostered the arts at his court, performed on his own stage, and was murdered at a masked ball--made him feel at home. Chick was in his element in any palace fitted out with gilded rococo rooms, formal gardens, fountains, pools, and the private theaters of princes. He reveled in the settings, props, and costumes of Europe's most ornamental era.

Yet he embraced the twentieth century as it unfolded. Fast cars and cocktails, cigarettes, the Ballets Russes, Picasso, Stravinsky, Erik Satie, movies, mobiles, and modern dance, Bauhaus buildings, machines for living, Balanchine, Dalí, and Gertrude Stein--if it was new, if it had quality and style, it was for Chick, first to experience and enjoy, then to share with the widest possible audience.

His arrival, coinciding almost exactly with that of the new century, occurred on December 18, 1900, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Coming into the world seven days before Christmas had a definite effect. As a child, he thought that evergreens and tinsel were hung up to celebrate his birth--a belief he never entirely outgrew.

He was christened Arthur Everett Austin, Jr. To his family he was known as Everett, but throughout his life, his mother, Laura Etnier Austin, addressed him, more often than not, as "Boy Dear." He was her only child, the center of her universe. Just before he was born, she made a will, leaving the bulk of her large estate to him and his descendants, naming her brother as guardian and her late uncle's business partner as sole executor, though the other contributor to his conception, Dr. Arthur Everett Austin--surgeon, professor of medicine, and expert on poisons--was in good health and living with her at the same address.

Laura Austin was an independent and inventive woman. As she charted Everett's future, she magnified their mutual past. Obsessively, and for decades, she delved into her ancestry, discovering in triumph that her mother's forebears, the Morrisons, could be traced to Scottish chieftains and Norse kings, and that the Etniers, on her father's side, were descended from at least one errant pope and several royal lines of France. But one of Laura's brothers, constructing a rival version of the family tree, reached a different conclusion based on overwhelming evidence: the Morrisons were solid Scottish immigrants, and the Etniers came from honest German peasant stock.

Johannes Eideneier, patriarch of the family in America, arrived in Philadelphia from one of the Protestant German states in 1751, and by 1785 a branch of the family, spelling the name "Etnier," had moved north to the fertile wilderness of Pennsylvania and put down roots in Germany Valley, along the Juniata River. Laura's father, David Etnier, was born on his family's farm outside Mount Union, Pennsylvania, in 1835. After working as a schoolteacher and bookkeeper, he helped establish a company in Mount Union that shipped grain down the Pennsylvania Canal to Baltimore and Philadelphia, and in the early 1870s, he bought a sawmill and a flour mill. He was tall, handsome, and commanding, his dark hair swept back above a reverse widow's peak, his eyes penetrating under graceful brows. Long after his death, beside his photograph in a family album, Laura mounted a picture of her son. The resemblance between the two, even to the hairline, was uncanny, as though Everett had descended exclusively from his mother's line.

In 1862 David Etnier married Hannah Jane (Jennie) Morrison, the daughter of John Morrison, a prominent Pennsylvania state legislator. Like the Etniers, the Morrisons were among the original settlers of Mount Union, having come from Virginia in the eighteenth century. They were well-to-do landowners, and Jennie's father bought the couple a new brick house in Mount Union. There Laura Ann, the second of their seven children, was born on March 14, 1864. Her only sister, Virginia Catharine (Virgie), ten years younger, was the last.

Although stern and self-righteous Methodism defined the Etnier men, they were not immune to the lure of gain. In 1849 Laura's grandfather, Oliver Etnier, left his wife and seven children to look for gold in California, but he returned empty-handed. Twenty-eight years later, when gold was found in California again, David Etnier left his own wife and seven children to go off on a similarly unprofitable quest. Laura may have inherited her powerful wanderlust from them.

In 1878, when Jennie Etnier died unexpectedly, still in her forties, the Morrisons swooped down on the children, persuading their father that life for the young Etniers would be better with them. Laura, then fourteen, and the four younger children were taken in by Jennie's unmarried sister, Mary Morrison, who owned a large house in Mount Union. Their rich bachelor uncle, John Morrison, founder of the Roaring Spring Paper Mill, became their legal guardian. Laura and Virgie eventually went to live with Uncle John in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and they adored him. Unlike David Etnier, he was jovial and tolerant of everything but what he called "professional Christians." He encouraged the girls to broaden their view of the world, sending them off on holidays at the New Jersey shore. Having paid for Laura's education at Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, he sent Virgie to Wellesley Academy in Philadelphia. When he died at fifty-two in 1890, he left his two sisters and his twelve nieces and nephews the considerable sum of $10,000 each. Shrewdly invested for them by his lawyer, these legacies rapidly grew.

Laura and Virgie, now financially independent, remained in Tyrone. Their brothers had moved on to careers that would scatter most of them far from Pennsylvania. As Virgie was only sixteen, Uncle John had appointed a close business associate, rather than David Etnier, to succeed him as her guardian. The girls had little to do with their father, who still lived in their childhood home. They did not make the twenty-five-mile trip from Tyrone to Mount Union to see him at Christmas in 1891, nor did they come to nurse him when he contracted pneumonia and died early the next year.

Laura, at twenty-eight, was almost on the verge of spinsterhood, but she had grown into a gregarious, determined woman with a sense of humor. Her soft, girlish face and luxuriant dark red hair made her look younger than her age. A carte de visite taken at the time shows her perched on the arm of a wicker bench in the studio of a fancy Philadelphia photographer. In her frothy white summer frock, she seems the picture of innocence, but her keen gaze and the hint of a wry smile suggest a certain calculation. She began to call herself an "heiress" and had little use for her old Mount Union friends. She had had enough of small-town life.

She and Virgie traveled, first in the United States and then, beginning in August 1895, to Europe. Their year-long trip took them throughout the Continent and to North Africa. Box camera in hand, Laura recorded palaces, parks, gardens, cathedrals, and cemeteries from Amsterdam to Potsdam, Munich to Milan. Her well-composed snapshots documented picturesque "types"--street urchins, well-starched nannies, and any members of European royalty who happened to come within range. She aimed her lens at Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin and at Princess Victoria Louise in Postdam. In Corfu, she snapped the huge steam yacht of the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph II.

The Etnier sisters spent the winter of 1895-96 in Berlin, making excursions to Dresden, Nuremberg, and Munich. Among the Americans living in the German capital was...