Jean Paul Slusser

Jean Paul Slusser (15 December 1886 – 28 May 1981) was a painter, designer, art critic, professor, and director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Early life Slusser was born in 1886 in Wauseon, Ohio. He graduated from Lyons Township High School in La Grange, Illinois, and spent one year at Downers Grove High School near Chicago.

He donated his papers to the Bentley Historical Library in 1981.

Painting He lived in New York City as a freelance painter from 1919 to 1924.

His paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Illinois State Museum. He remained an active painter into his nineties.

Art criticism Slusser worked as an art critic for the Boston Herald from 1913 to 1915, and the New York Herald from 1921 to 1923.

Museum directorship In 1946, he was named the acting director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art. He was then named director in 1947, and served until his retirement in 1957.

Of his work at UMMA, he said, "A University museum of art, is primarily a device for the furtherance of teaching. Its function is to conserve and display the various art works belonging to the institution, and to supplement them with showings of other material pertinent to the work pursued in the courses dealing with the theory, practice and history of the visual arts."

While director, Slusser used his small annual appropriation for acquisitions to build a collection that included European and American modernist works on paper, Japanese woodblock prints, works from the Parisian belle epoque, and German expressionist works. Alberto Giacometti, William Hogarth, and Paul Cézanne.

Legacy Slusser died in 1981 at the age of 94. A gallery at the U-M Art and Architecture Gallery was named for him in 1975.