Anson Goodyear

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Goodyear was president of the Great Southern Lumber Company, based in Buffalo and operating a sawmill and related industry in Bogalusa, Louisiana (1920–38); and served as vice president of the Marine National Bank. His father and uncle Frank had built railroads to serve their lumber operations in isolated areas; this Goodyear served as the vice president of the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railroad (1907–10), which supported operations in New York and Pennsylvania, and was president of the New Orleans Great Northern Railroad Company (1920–30), built to support the Bogalusa pine lumber operation. He served as chairman of the board of directors of Gaylord Container Corporation, a successor to the Great Southern Lumber Company; director of Paramount Pictures, director of the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad, and as an executive or director of several other corporations.

Active in the New York National Guard, Goodyear served as a colonel in World War I and was the executive officer of the Field Artillery Central Officers Training School at Camp Zachary Taylor, Kentucky.

In the 1930s, Goodyear became president and later chairman of the board of the American National Theater and Academy. After World War I, Herbert Hoover, as director general of relief of the Supreme Economic Council, appointed Goodyear president of the council's coal mission, putting him in charge of coal distribution in Austria, Hungary, and Poland. According to Kendrick Clements:

During World War II, Goodyear was commander of the Second Brigade of the New York Guard, with the rank of major general. Later in World War II, he was a deputy commissioner for the Pacific Ocean area, including Hawaii, of the American Red Cross. In this capacity, he toured the Pacific battlefronts, covering 50,000 miles. Later, as a military observer, he was at the front in Okinawa with New York's 27th Division and reported to the Secretary of War on conditions in the field and troop morale.

A noted philanthropist and avid collector of late 19th- and early 20th-century American and European art, Goodyear had a personal collection containing several important works by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching. He also had works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Honoré Daumier, and Edgar Degas.

He was invited by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Lillie P. Bliss to help establish the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He served as its first president (1929–39), and as a member of the board of trustees of MOMA, after moving to New York City.

Goodyear traveled to Europe at his own expense to collect paintings for the museum's first showing. While there, he visited England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, and borrowed 25 paintings valued at $1.5 million (equivalent to $23,672,000 in 2021). In 1939, on the eve of the opening of the museum building on 53d Street, Nelson A. Rockefeller, later the Governor of New York, succeeded Goodyear as MOMA's chief executive.

Goodyear was also the author of several nonfiction works, including:

Goodyear donated a collection of Civil War materials he had compiled to Yale University in 1953. The collection contained correspondence, diaries, proclamations, and other papers relating to the Civil War.

By the time of his death, Goodyear donated nearly 300 artworks to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, NY. He also bequeathed many important works, including Giacomo Balla’s Dinamismo di un Cane al Guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash), 1912; Salvador Dalí’s The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image, 1938; and Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1938. Shortly before his death, the museum established the A. Conger Goodyear Fund for the acquisition of new artwork, greatly enhancing its ability to grow its collection in the years to come.

He was a close friend of actress and theater producer Katharine Cornell, also from Buffalo. Upon her death in 1974, she bequeathed part of her foundation's assets to MoMA in his honor. Goodyear was also a director of the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts, an honorary governor of the New York Hospital, and a donor to Dartmouth College. He was also a member of the Saturn Club in Buffalo. A friend of Ernest N. Harmon, Conger also made donations to Norwich University, and Norwich's Goodyear Hall is named for him.

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