Vincent Melzac dating history

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Vincent Melzac (January 7, 1914 – October 11, 1989) was an American business executive and art collector, best known as one of the earliest and most daring collectors of paintings of the Washington Color School. Born in Warsaw, Melzac grew up in Cleveland, where he attended Case Western Reserve University, earning an earning a master's degree in education. He continued his studies with a doctorate in education at Harvard University. Melzac went to Washington in the early 1940s to work for the Office of Emergency Planning. Often described as a larger than life figure, Melzac was briefly chief executive officer of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Between 1969 and 1980, he donated 46 works to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, including works by Color field painters Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Jack Bush and Thomas Downing as well as abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still. Significant parts of his collection were also donated to the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, which had commissioned him in 1977 to conduct a planning study that ultimately led to the construction of a new museum building.