Fred Olsen

Fredrich Olsen (1891–1986) was a British-born American chemist remembered as the inventor of ball propellant and as a donor or seller to the art antiquities collections of Yale University, the University of Illinois, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professional chemist Olsen was born on 28 February 1891, in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Following education in Canada, he began his professional career in 1917 as chief chemist for the Aetna Explosives Company of Gary, Indiana. When Aetna went out of business following World War I,

Art antiquities Olsen and his wife, the former Florence Quittenton, were collectors of Coptic art, Pre-Columbian art, African Art, Modern Art and early Chinese art. He was also the original purchaser of Jackson Pollock's "Blue Poles." Being friends with Pollock, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko and other artists, Olsen bought many of their works. Olsen found the house as Smith envisaged it, in some ways unlivable, but liked it enough to make it his principal home. Within a year, Olsen made modifications which devastated Smith, who built only one more house in his lifetime. Smith later devoted himself to sculpture, his main claim to fame. In 1998, the artistic couple Jeff Preiss and Rebecca Quaytman stumbled on the house when it was for sale. Threatened with destruction by a developer, a campaign by Marjorie Olsen, the collector's daughter-in-law, enabled Preiss and Quaytman to purchase the house. Terence Riley, the chief architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) ranked the house "among the best examples of post-World War II American domestic architecture". Renovations were made to restore the sculptural clarity of Smith's vision.

Olsen died in Guilford, Connecticut, on 2 November 1986, leaving most of his art and artifact collection to American universities.