Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff

Date born: 1907

Place Born: Bellshill, (near Glasgow) Scotland

Date died: 1978

Place died: Sharon, CT

Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department, Museum of Modern Art, NY, from 1949 to 1957 and Director, Yale Art Gallery, 1957-71.  Ritchie immigrated to the United States as a teenager, working for Westinghouse in order to pay for his American college.  He studied at the University of Pittsburgh, returning the Britain for graduate study at the Courtauld Institute, from which he received his Ph. D.  He was a research assistant and lecturer at the Frick Collection in New York beginning in 1935, the same year he married Pittsburgh native Jane Thompson.  In 1942 he was appointed director of the Albright Art Gallery (later Albright-Knox)  in Buffalo, NY. At the conclusion of World War II, Ritchie served in the Monuments and Fine Arts Section of the United States Army as a representative of the Commanding General in Austria, a civilian with the rank of colonel. He assisted in the repatriation of stolen art by the Nazis, for which he was subsequently honored by France and the Netherlands.  He returned to the Albright after the war, hiring one of the officers from the Monuments Division, Charles Parkhurst (q.v.), as an assistant curator.  In 1949 he joined the Museum of Modern Art, NY, as director of the Painting and Sculpture Department.  In 1957 Ritchie accepted the position as director of the Yale University Art Gallery.  At Yale, he was instrumental in establishing the Yale Center for British Art as well as acquiring objects for the Gallery's collections (David Smith, Noguchi, Maillol) before their jump in art market price.  In 1970 he was the first American to receive an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Arts in London.  He retired from the Gallery in 1971 and lectured the subsequent year as Clark professor at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.

Home Country: United States

Sources: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 40; [obituaries:]  Shestack, Alan. "Andrew Carnduff Ritchie." Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 37 no. 2 (Summer 1979): 12-13; R[ussell], J[ohn]. "Mr A. C. Ritchie." The Times (London) August 30, 1978; p. 14.

Bibliography: Sculpture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952; and Rewald, John. Aristide Maillol, with an Introduction and Survey of the Artist's Work in American Collections. Buffalo: Albright Art Gallery, 1945; Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America. New York: Museum of Modern Art,1951; edited, and Haftmann, Werner, and Hentzen, Alfred, and Lieberman, William S.  German Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Simon and Schuster,1957; Masters of British Painting, 1800-1950 [from the collections of] the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the City Art Museum of St. Louis and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. New York: Museum of Modern Art,1956; The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors. New York:  Museum of Modern Art, 1955; English Painters, Hogarth to Constable: Lectures Delivered April 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 1940, at the Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1942.