Janis, Sidney

Janis, Sidney (b Buffalo, NY, 8 July 1896; d New York, 23 Nov. 1989).
American art dealer and writer on art. Between the departure of Peggy Guggenheim from the USA in 1947 and the rise of Leo Castelli in the 1960s he was the most important figure in promoting the work of avant-garde American artists, particularly the Abstract Expressionists. He was also interested in naive art and in 1939 ‘discovered’ one of the outstanding American naive painters, Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946). Janis wrote They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century (1942), Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (1944), and (with his wife Harriet) Picasso: The Recent Years, 1939–1946 (1946).