Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949 135018635X, 9781350186354

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction Establishing the Modern: The First Twenty Years at MoMA • Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman
Part I: Vernacular Influences
1 Folk Surrealism • Marci Kwon
2 New Rugs by American Artists: Modernism, Abstraction, and Rug Design at MoMA • Jen Padgett
3 MoMA’s Child Artists: The Politics of Creating Creative Children • John R. Blakinger
4 Floor, Ceiling, Wall, Garden, Market: The Curatorial Scene of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art • Andy Campbell
Part II: New Mediums for a New Museum: Photography, Dance, Architecture, and Design
5 Aesthetic versus the “Mere Historic”: Civil War and Frontier Photography at MoMA • Sarah Kate Gillespie
6 An Exact Instant in the History of the Modern • Jason E. Hill
7 Remediating the Body: Performance, Photography, and the Dance Archives at MoMA • Swagato Chakravorty
8 Architecture on Display: Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden • Catarina Schlee Flaksman
Part III: Mobilizing Modernism
9 Reproducing Art and the Museum: Ancestral Sources in and beyond the Museum of Modern Art • Rachel Kaplan
10 The Great Gallery Goes to New York: Ancient American Rock Art, MoMA, and the New York Avant-garde • James Farmer
11 “Toward a Happier and More Successful Life,” or When Veterans Made Art in the Modern Museum, 1944–1948 • Suzanne Hudson
Part IV: MoMA’s Global Vision
12 Occidental Arrangements: MoMA’s Emerging Global History of Art at Midcentury • John Ott
13 Exhibiting Italian Democracy in 1949: Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art • Antje K. Gamble
14 American Exceptionalism at the Modern, 1942–1959: Dorothy Miller’s Americans • Angela Miller
Index

Citation preview

Modern in the Making

Modern in the Making MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949 Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Selection and editorial matter © Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman, 2020 Individual chapters © their authors, 2020 Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image: The Museum of Modern Art, a cross-section (basement to roof). Constantin Alajolov, Vogue © Conde Nast All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8635-4 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8636-1 eBook: 978-1-3501-8637-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction  Establishing the Modern: The First Twenty Years at MoMA    Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman Part I  Vernacular Influences 1 2 3 4

Folk Surrealism  Marci Kwon New Rugs by American Artists: Modernism, Abstraction, and Rug Design at MoMA  Jen Padgett MoMA’s Child Artists: The Politics of Creating Creative Children  John R. Blakinger Floor, Ceiling, Wall, Garden, Market: The Curatorial Scene of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art  Andy Campbell

Part II  New Mediums for a New Museum: Photography, Dance, Architecture, and Design 5 6 7 8

Aesthetic versus the “Mere Historic”: Civil War and Frontier Photography at MoMA  Sarah Kate Gillespie An Exact Instant in the History of the Modern  Jason E. Hill Remediating the Body: Performance, Photography, and the Dance Archives at MoMA  Swagato Chakravorty Architecture on Display: Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden  Catarina Schlee Flaksman

Part III  Mobilizing Modernism Reproducing Art and the Museum: Ancestral Sources in and beyond the Museum of Modern Art  Rachel Kaplan 10 The Great Gallery Goes to New York: Ancient American Rock Art, MoMA, and the New York Avant-garde  James Farmer

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11 “Toward a Happier and More Successful Life,” or When Veterans Made Art in the Modern Museum, 1944–1948  Suzanne Hudson

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Part IV  MoMA’s Global Vision

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12 Occidental Arrangements: MoMA’s Emerging Global History of Art at Midcentury  John Ott 13 Exhibiting Italian Democracy in 1949: Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art  Antje K. Gamble 14 American Exceptionalism at the Modern, 1942–1959: Dorothy Miller’s Americans  Angela Miller Index

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Illustrations I.1 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Modern Art in Your Life (October 5–December 4, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2 I.2 Diagram, Average Day at the Museum. The Year’s Work: Annual Report to the Board of Trustees and Corporation Members of the Museum of Modern Art for the years June 30, 1939–July 1, 1940. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 6 I.3 “Magazine Cover Competition.” Women war workers present at the opening of the exhibition of “Women in Necessary Civilian Employment” (1943). Left to right: Dorothy I. Walker, trainman for the Pennsylvania Railroad; Betty Ward, New York, U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps; Deborah Hutchison, New York (who has worked on farms for the past two summers); Muriel Klein, Western “Unionette” or telegraph messenger; Mrs. Terella Albrecht, who drives a taxi for the Cornelia Cab Company 7 I.4 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Modern Art in Your Life. (October 5–December 4, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 10 1.1 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. (December 7, 1936 – January 17, 1937). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archive, New York 20 1.2 Installation view of the exhibition New Horizons in American Art, 23 featuring Passover Feast by F. Rick. (September 14–October 12, 1936) 1.3 Page from Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 1936, featuring Jean Hoisington (age 11), A God of War Shooting Arrows to Protect of the People, c. 1936. Alfred H. Barr Jr., ed. Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York 24 1.4 Installation view of the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, featuring (from left) work by Jean Hoisington, Wolfgang Paalen, Joan Miró, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Jean. (December 7, 1936 – January 17, 1937) 25 1.5 Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s 104 (August 1938), page 17 27

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2.1 Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964). Flying Carpet, 1942. Wool rug, woven by V’Soske. The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. Fund, 716.1943 36 2.2 Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964). Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style, 1940. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation and Museum purchase with funds by exchange from the M. and M. Karolik Collection, 1983.120 37 2.3 Marguerite Thompson Zorach (American, 1887–1968). Cartoon Sketch for Coral Sea Rug, 1942. Brooklyn Museum, NY. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Tessim Zorach, 77.126 37 2.4 Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, 1904/05–1948). Bull in the Sun Rug, 1942. Wool rug, woven by V’Soske. The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Gift of Monroe Wheeler, 199.1956 38 3.1 Michael Caputo. Installation view of the exhibition Children’s Holiday Circus of Modern Art (December 8, 1943 – January 3, 1944). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 50 3.2 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Participants at the exhibition Children’s Holiday Fair of Modern Art (December 2, 1947 – January 4, 1948). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 51 3.3 Crayon drawing by a boy, aged ten, Dover Elementary School, included in the exhibition Children’s Painting and the War (November 18– December 13, 1942). Victor D’Amico Papers, VI.38. The Museum of Modern Art Archives 54 3.4 School Arts magazine, c. 1954 57 4.1 “Sombreros de Palma/In Any Market” in Frances Toor, Guide to Mexico (revised) (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1940): 125 66 4.2 Installation view of the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (May 15–September 30, 1940). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 66 4.3 Installation view of the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (May 15–September 30, 1940). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 68 4.4 General view of Mexican Arts: An Exhibition Organized for and Circulated by the American Federation of Arts (October 14–November 9, 1930). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 70 4.5 Spread from Vogue magazine, Vogue, July 1, 1940 (pages 42–43) 74–75 5.1 Alexander Gardner. George Barnard and James Gibson. Quaker Guns, Centreville, Virginia. (March 1862). Portfolio Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War, vol. 1 (1865), The Museum of Modern Art, Anonymous Gift 87

Illustrations  5.2 Installation view of the exhibition Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (March 3–April 5, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 5.3 Installation view of the exhibition Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (March 3–April 5, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 5.4 Installation view of the exhibition Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (March 3–April 5, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 6.1 Clipping, photograph of Edward Steichen and his granddaughter, Linda Martin, looking at a picture of Eli Shonbrun during the exhibition The Exact Instant (February 8–May 1, 1949), published in the New York Daily Mirror (February 10, 1949). Edward Steichen Archive, V.A.6. The Museum of Modern Art Archives 6.2 John Reidy, photograph of Eli Shonbrun from the New York Daily Mirror, 1942 6.3 Installation view of the exhibition The Exact Instant (February 8–May 1, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 6.4 Len Morgan, photograph from the New York Journal-American with commentary on The Exact Instant exhibition, 1949 7.1 Installation view of the exhibition Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili (January 13–April 9, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 7.2 Harold Edgerton (1903–1990). Milk-Drop Coronet, 1936, photographic print / © MIT, courtesy Palm Press, Inc. 7.3 Gjon Mili (1904–1984). José Lion and Charles Weidman, c 1939, photograph. Getty Images / Bettmann / Gyon Mili 7.4 Gjon Mili (1904–1984). Down Beat – Franziska Boas, c 1940, photograph. Getty Images / The LIFE Picture Collection / Gyon Mili 7.5 Installation view of the exhibition Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili. (January 13–April 9, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 8.1 Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 8.2 Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 8.3 Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

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8.4 Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 9.1 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (August 26–September 15, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 9.2 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Torpedo” Diagram of Ideal Permanent Collection, 1933. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Papers, 9a.7A. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 9.3 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (August 26–September 15, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 9.4 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (August 26–September 15, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 10.1 Central section of the Great Gallery, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, from the Donald Scott Collection, 1930. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 10.2 Installation view of the exhibition Indian Art of the United States (January 22–April 27, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modem Art Archive, New York 10.3 Drawing of the plan of the third-floor galleries of the 1941 Indian Art of the United States exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, based on René d’Harnoncourt’s original plan currently held in MoMA Archives 10.4 Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–56). Mural, 1943, as displayed at the Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa, October 2014. Gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1959.6. University of Iowa Museum of Art, reproduced with permission from the University of Iowa 11.1 Installation view of the exhibition The Arts in Therapy (February 3– March 7, 1943). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 11.2 Installation view of the exhibition Art for War Veterans (September 26– November 25, 1945). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 11.3 Victor D’Amico, “Art for War Veterans.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13, No. 1 (September 1945) 12.1 Installation view of the exhibition African Negro Art (March 18–May 19, 1935). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Illustrations  12.2 Installation view of the exhibition Indian Art of the United States (January 22–April 27, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 12.3 E. Simms Campbell, “Harlem Sketches,” New York Amsterdam News, June 1, 1935, 5A 12.4 Installation view of the exhibition Arts of the South Seas (January 29–May 19, 1946). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 12.5 “Plan of the Exhibition,” from the exhibition catalog Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, (November 16, 1948 – January 23, 1949). The Museum of Modern Art, New York 12.6 Installation view of the exhibition Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (November 16, 1948 – January 23, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 13.1 Installation view of the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (June 28–September 18, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 13.2 Installation view of the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (June 28–September 18, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 13.3 Installation view of the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (June 28–September 18, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 14.1 Unidentified visitors at the exhibition Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States (January 21–March 8, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York 14.2 Installation view of the exhibition Twelve Americans (May 30–September 8, 1956). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives 14.3 Installation view of the exhibition 15 Americans (April 9–July 27, 1952). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

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Contributors Editors Austin Porter is Assistant Professor of Art History and American Studies at Kenyon College, where he teaches courses on modern art and photography. His research on American art has received support from fellowships provided by the Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Sandra Zalman is Associate Professor and Program Director of Art History at the University of Houston. She is the author of Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (Routledge, 2015) and has published articles in Art Journal, Histoire de l’Art, Tate Papers, Woman’s Art Journal, and Grey Room. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Contributors John R. Blakinger is Endowed Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of  Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2019). His writing has also appeared in Tate Papers, Design Issues, and CAA Reviews; his book on camouflage was published in French translation by Éditions B2 in 2014. Andy Campbell is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at USC-Roski School of Art and Design, a critic, and independent curator. His articles and reviews have been published in GLQ, Rhizomes, X-Tra, Artforum, Aperture, and his book Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art is out from Manchester University Press in their signal series, “Rethinking Art’s Histories.” Swagato Chakravorty is a PhD candidate at Yale University, in the Department of the History of Art and the Program in Film and Media Studies. His dissertation examines figures and operations of displacement in contemporary art, with a focus on postcinematic moving-image media. He has held research and curatorial fellowships at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and the Jewish Museum, New York.

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James Farmer is Emeritus Faculty in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. His areas of specialization include Precolumbian and Native North American Indian art, and modern Native and Latin American art. He is currently Director of the BCS Project, a non-profit project documenting Ancient American rock art sites in the American Southwest. His recent publications include online entries on Ancient Puebloan art and North American Indian art for Oxford Online Bibliographies, an essay in the book Ceramics of Ancient America (University of Florida Press, 2018), and multiple essays in Papers Presented at the Annual Symposium of the Utah Rock Art Research Association (2017). Catarina Schlee Flaksman is an independent researcher and Program Manager at the Architectural League of New York. She was part of the curatorial team of the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennial and of  Walls of Air, the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Biennale. Her research focuses on the role of exhibitions in disseminating and advancing architecture. Antje K. Gamble is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Design at Murray State University. From Fascism to the Cold War, her work examines the exhibition, sale, and critical reception of Italian art and how it shaped and was shaped by national and international socio-political shifts at midcentury. Dr. Gamble has had a number of essays published on related topics in the journal Italian Modern Art (January 2020), the exhibition catalogue for Material Meanings: Selections from the Constance R. Caplan Collection (Art Institute of Chicago, 2020), and in the volume  Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying “the Knot”  (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).  Sarah Kate Gillespie teaches courses in Civil War Era Studies and Art History at Gettysburg College. She was previously Curator of American Art at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Her book The Early American Daguerreotype: Cross-Currents in Art and Technology was published by MIT Press/Lemelson Center, Smithsonian in 2016. Jason E. Hill is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (University of California, 2018), and the co-editor, with Vanessa R. Schwartz, of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (Bloomsbury, 2015). Suzanne Hudson is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. She is the author of  Robert Ryman: Used Paint  (MIT Press, 2009; 2011),  Agnes Martin: Night Sea  (Afterall/MIT Press, 2017; 2020),  Mary Weatherford (Lund Humphries, 2019), and the co-editor of Contemporary Art: 1989– Present  (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).  Contemporary Painting  is forthcoming in 2021 from Thames & Hudson, in the World of Art series. Supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she is pursuing research into the

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practical applications of artmaking for her book Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of process within American modernism. Rachel Kaplan is Assistant Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her research focuses on modern Latin American art, with additional interests in histories of collecting and display. She curated the exhibition  Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation  (December 21, 2019–July 11, 2020) for LACMA’s satellite gallery at Charles White Elementary School and authored the accompanying publication, Rufino Tamayo: The Essential Figure (LACMA, 2019).  Marci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University. Her book Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism is forthcoming from Princeton University Press, and her article on Isamu Noguchi and Japanese internment appeared in Modernism/Modernity Print+. Angela Miller  is Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis. She is lead author, along with Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer Roberts, of  American Encounters: Cultural Identity and the Visual Arts from the Beginning to the Present (Pearson, 2008). Recent publications include “Home and Homeless in Art between the Wars,” in  A Companion to American Art  (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); and “Vibrant Matter: The Countermodern World of Pavel Tchelitchew” (Art Bulletin, 2020). Her current book project is on the queer circle of Lincoln Kirstein in the years around the Second World War. John Ott is Professor of Art History at James Madison University and author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Ashgate, 2014). He has also published in scholarly journals, including American Art, American Quarterly, Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Winterthur Portfolio. His current book project, Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954, has been supported by a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship and an NEH Summer Stipend. Jen Padgett is Associate Curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She received her PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research explores intersections between fine art and design, focusing on housewares and textiles designed by artists primarily known as painters, sculptors, and photographers.

Acknowledgments This project began in the spring of 2015 when the editors discovered a shared interest in MoMA’s early exhibition history. As participants at a symposium on Magic Realism and Modernism, organized by Robert Cozzolino at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, our presentations addressed MoMA’s lesser-known installations from the early 1940s. Our subsequent conversation, held while walking through Bob’s excellent exhibition Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis at PAFA, led to the decision that MoMA’s early years demanded greater scholarly attention. With this impulsive agreement, we departed Philadelphia for our respective destinations, Ohio and Texas, and began to make concrete plans to carry out an edited volume. Our next step was co-chairing a panel at the College Art Association Conference in 2017, where we staged the initial framework for this volume in front of a packed room in New York. It was validating that a discussion of MoMA’s early history generated such a receptive crowd. We want to thank the audience for the energy and ideas that came out of that panel. We are especially grateful to our panelists for their important perspectives, particularly MoMA’s Chief Archivist Michelle Elligott. We would also like to thank our panel discussant, Richard Meyer, whose book What Was Contemporary Art? (MIT Press, 2013) is a touchstone for many of the authors in this volume. Our contributors, who generously shared their scholarship and patiently endured revisions, cannot be thanked enough. Thanks are also due to the entire team at Bloomsbury Press, whose enthusiasm and organizational zeal made this project possible. Our home institutions, the University of Houston and Kenyon College, both provided grants to support securing copyright permissions and indexing. And, of course, nothing would be possible without the incredible archives of the Museum of Modern Art and its staff, not only Michelle Elligott, but also Michelle Harvey, Elisabeth Thomas, and Christina Eliopoulos. Finally, we could not have completed this project without the love, support, and distraction of our families. It is certainly thanks to them that we never had museum fatigue.

Introduction Establishing the Modern: The First Twenty Years at MoMA Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman

In 1949 the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened a large, materially eclectic exhibition titled Modern Art in Your Life. Part of a series of programs celebrating the museum’s twentieth anniversary, this installation combined commercial photography, fashion design, and modern furniture with avant-garde painting and sculpture in an effort to explore the relationship between art and commercial culture (Figure I.1). Museum press releases stressed that the exhibited objects “testify that modern art has largely helped to shape the appearance of our cities, our streets and the homes we live in.”1 Far from being an aberration in MoMA’s programming schedule, Modern Art in Your Life represented a consistent concern of the museum’s early years to “make modern art more comprehensible to more people.”2 The critics were convinced; a representative review concluded that MoMA’s survey demystified art and would disarm those who “still revolt against what they consider an outrageous, crack-pot misuse of paint on canvas.”3 Critical response to the museum’s exhibitions was not always this receptive. In fact, during MoMA’s first twenty years museum officials often faced detractors of modern art from numerous sources. Critics expressed a mixture of frustration and befuddlement following several early exhibitions that included avant-garde works, unorthodox object juxtapositions, and innovative installation strategies.4 Opposition to the museum’s catholic exhibition tendencies developed from some contemporary artists as well. For example, the American Abstract Artists published a broadside in 1940 that questioned MoMA’s commitments to modernism, concluding caustically, “What is this—a three ring circus?”5 The mixed reception to modern art in New York—and the United States in general—had fermented long before MoMA opened its doors in 1929. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the museum’s founding director, recalled that at least some New Yorkers hoped the 1913 Armory Show would lead to a permanent institution dedicated to the field. He later noted that “possibly because of the war in Europe, possibly because New York was not ready, no such institution developed.”6 As a result, the display of modern art fell primarily to private collectors, including Katherine Dreier and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and to small galleries such as those operated by Alfred Stieglitz. In this

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Figure I.1  Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Modern Art in Your Life (October 5–December 4, 1949). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

cultural context, modern art circulated as the private concern of individual citizens. By naming their enterprise the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA’s founders indicated both a historical importance for modernism and a seemingly public institutional endorsement. Still, the presumed superiority of European artists over their American counterparts complicated critical understandings of modernism. Lingering hostilities led in part to the creation of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1930. When Whitney offered her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward Robinson, then the director, reportedly declined by remarking that “we have a cellar full of those American things already.”7 Amid this evolving cultural landscape, the founding of MoMA marked a monumental development in the institutionalization, dissemination, and arguably normalization of modern art in the United States.

A Focus on Exhibitions, Not Collecting This book examines how exhibitions at MoMA routinely challenged viewer expectations during the museum’s first twenty years. Several included authors analyze

The First Twenty Years at MoMA

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exhibits that have seen little scholarly attention while others examine previously overlooked aspects of well-known installations. Regardless of their focus, each essay addresses how MoMA used exhibitions to expand the purview of modern art. Early museum administrators, especially Alfred Barr, resisted attempts to limit the parameters by which modern art was understood during the institution’s early years. Perhaps most significantly the museum rarely exhibited its collection—which was, in any case, intentionally provisional. As Barr put it in 1942, “Obviously [the collection] could not stay ‘modern’ unless it did change, gradually but completely.”8 As a result, in its earliest years MoMA operated much more like a Kunsthalle, with an ambitious temporary exhibition schedule that reflected the diversity of modern art.9 Years later Barr described how “[o]ther museums didn’t have to depend on exhibitions the way we did. They had large endowments, and could put on their permanent collection and let it go at that. But we had to keep the pot boiling.”10 It is telling that Barr made these remarks in 1953, the year when museum officials decided to maintain a permanent collection. By initially not depending on a fixed group of objects to represent modern art, the museum offered a malleable understanding of visual modernism as both continuously contemporary and informed by an ever-unfolding history. This volume demonstrates, therefore, that the museum’s curators and administrators cultivated modern art as a developing, rather than definitive, category. Just as MoMA prioritized an eclectic exhibition schedule during its initial two decades that de-emphasized a permanent collection, this volume similarly decenters canonical histories in favor of less-known, marginalized aspects of the museum’s early installations. This approach departs from previous scholarship, which has often emphasized that MoMA, through Barr specifically, promoted a rigid formalism.11 Indeed, MoMA’s emergence as a massively influential contributor to postwar modernism has effectively erased the experimental nature of the museum’s early years. In many ways, the museum contributed to this reputation through its own extremely robust publication program, which reprinted significant exhibition catalogues at times when interest surged in particular topics. Critics and historians alike have often pointed to these texts as evidence of the institution’s adherence to predictable patterns. For example, Barr’s infamous chart, published as the dust jacket of the Cubism and Abstract Art catalogue (1936), is regularly misunderstood by scholars and the popular press alike as evidence of his supposedly rigid understanding of modern art. Taken out of context, the exhibition (whose catalogue was only reprinted for the first time in 1966) is an easy target, but Barr never intended the diagram to be definitive, nor for it to stand for all of modern art.12 This volume thus seeks to isolate the museum’s early exhibition efforts from its later reputation. By prioritizing lesser-known exhibitions along with fresh analysis of more well-known installations, the following essays demonstrate how MoMA offered a far more tangled, complex, and indeed contradictory form of modernism in its first two decades than scholars have previously acknowledged. In short, this volume explores a period of modern art when MoMA still had the “dubious distinction of being the most controversial cultural institution the city offers.”13

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Modern in the Making

Initial Forms of a Big Broad Modernism Conceived on a posh winter excursion to Egypt, the Museum of Modern Art sought to depart from the detached elitism traditionally associated with art museums. Just days before the museum opened on November 7, 1929, the stock market crash sent the nation into a decade-long economic depression. This inauspicious coincidence may have changed the course of MoMA’s activities as courting the public became not just an ethos but also a financial necessity. The concern with serving the public led museum officials to design exhibitions and programming that promoted a version of modern art fundamentally intertwined with multiple levels of cultural production. Its initial exhibition space, situated adjacent to more traditional business interests, set an important tone. The fledgling museum’s first quarters were on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher building at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, where the museum kept company with Doolittle and Throttle stock brokers (7th floor), Dazzling Advertising Agency (8th floor), Mimi Decorators (9th floor), Metropolis Film Company (10th floor), and Shrugwell Real Estate (11th floor).14 The museum’s enterprising spirit fit right in among these commercial neighbors. Despite the stylishness of the building’s lobby, installation shots reveal how modest and unadorned MoMA’s rented rooms appeared—especially in contrast to other museums at the time, which still emulated temple-like environments. MoMA was also unique in its charter—which stressed education and study as its primary purpose. Thus, from its initial conception, museum officials demonstrated a commitment to thinking broadly about the meanings of modern art and art’s audiences. During its first decade, the museum exhibited objects that ranged widely from artifacts reflecting early traces of human civilization to contemporary industrial design. These early installations demonstrate how museum officials understood modernism in capacious terms not necessarily limited to geographic or temporal limits. Still, numerous recurring themes contributed to the shape and character of broader exhibition patterns. Historians have acknowledged the important influence of European modernism at MoMA, as seen in didactic exhibitions such as Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–7). Scholars have also emphasized the impact of industrial design displayed at Machine Art (1934) and Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1933). These installations led to enthusiastic press criticism at the time and continue to generate debate today. As with Modern Art in Your Life, these and other exhibitions attempted to challenge viewers to draw connections between the visual arts and vernacular forms ranging from the international avant-garde to corporate influences. Commercial interests reappeared often as an underlying theme. Most blatantly, the museum staged exhibitions that touted the affordability of the work on view, including Useful Household Objects Under $5 (1938).15 At the same time, the museum often organized more traditional solo exhibitions but even these ranged from showcases of artist-makers like Picasso and Matisse to the self-trained Morris Hirshfield (1943). During these early years one could argue that a defining characteristic of MoMA’s exhibition strategy was a refusal to adhere to any single template or formula. The fact that MoMA created the first curatorial departments of film, photography, architecture and design, and theater and

The First Twenty Years at MoMA

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dance in the country during this same period is further evidence of the institution’s structural commitment to a multiform modernism. Barr continued to develop MoMA as a vehicle for enquiry and discovery ten years after the museum was established. In the catalogue for Art in Our Time, staged as the museum’s tenth-anniversary exhibition in 1939, Barr explained that the “Museum of Modern Art is a laboratory; in its experiments the public is invited to participate.”16 In order to more fully disseminate this experimental spirit to the public, the museum developed strategies for broadening its audience. For example, the Department of Circulating Exhibitions generated shows for smaller venues nationwide, while the publications department began to regularly produce illustrated catalogues with scholarly essays.17 But MoMA also aggressively courted the public through less traditional means. In 1933, museum officials hired a publicity director, Sarah Newmeyer. By the end of the decade, Art in Our Time was “discussed in the first television broadcast by an American museum.”18 And perhaps most directly, MoMA sought to draw potential audiences through its progressive education department, established in 1937, which reflected its deep commitment to developing a larger, more informed, arts community.

Politics, the War Years, and Audiences beyond New York During its second decade the museum attempted to expand viewer engagement with a new, larger space and through a more direct acknowledgment of international political concerns. When the museum opened its new Goodwin/Stone building at 11 West 53rd Street in May 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt contributed to inauguration festivities with a radio address on the theme of “cultural freedom.”19 To engage with analogous themes of individuality in the new galleries, visitors passed through a façade of glass and steel that—compared to its Victorian neighbors—demonstrated not only a complete endorsement of modern efficiency, but corporate capitalism as well.20 The opening of the new building—with its comfortably “air-cooled galleries,” penthouse, cinema, and garden—not only greatly enhanced the space available for exhibitions but augmented the museum’s reputation as an appealing place to spend time.21 These seemingly secondary spaces did much to ingratiate MoMA (and modern art) in the minds of the public, as writers extolled the virtues of visiting the cinema (twice daily showings), taking tea up at the penthouse, or eating refreshments in the garden as key components “for priming the inner man to artistic contemplation.”22 Far from mere diversions, these spaces contributed to MoMA’s promotion of the ideological link between democratic ideals, modern life, and modern art. As illustrated in a 1940 museum publication, the sheer variety of public events and internal actions that represented an “average day at the museum” characterizes MoMA as a dynamic institution that does far more than simply exhibit works of art (Figure. I.2). In linking modern art with modern life, MoMA also recognized—albeit selectively— the connection between art and politics.23 This association became apparent in multiple exhibitions that responded to contemporary events such as the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. Barr expressed a strong interest in art censored by the Soviet Union and Fascist countries in several exhibitions

6

Modern in the Making

Figure I.2  Diagram, Average Day at the Museum. The Year’s Work: Annual Report to the Board of Trustees and Corporation Members of the Museum of Modern Art for the years June 30, 1939–July 1, 1940. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

staged during the 1930s. Similar political themes were addressed through the display of reproductions of frescos by Diego Rivera (1933), etchings of the First World War by Otto Dix (1934), and posters supporting Spanish Republicans in their Civil War (1937). Meanwhile, New Horizons in American Art (1936) demonstrated the influence of the federal government in cultural production through New Deal arts programs.

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7

Following the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, MoMA began organizing exhibitions that expressed support for the Allied cause while also extending the institution’s prior interest in mass media. Perhaps most notably the museum became well known for installations involving the creative use of photography that blurred distinctions between art, commerce, and politics. For example, Road to Victory (1942) included dramatic, mural-sized enlargements of photographs that enthusiastically promoted American engagement in the war abroad.24 But the museum also organized lesser-known installations that addressed the war through more pedestrian forms of media. The Women in Necessary Civilian Employment (1943) exhibition displayed magazine covers that featured photographs of women working in wartime industry. Related programming invited “real life cover girls” to the exhibition (Figure I.3).25 Other war-themed exhibitions stressed international diplomacy. Airways to Peace (1944) combined photographs that charted the history of flight along with aeronautical maps and a massive globe. The exhibition was accompanied with wall texts written by former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. These exhibitions often combined photography with patriotic themes in an effort to serve an increasingly broad range of

Figure I.3  “Magazine Cover Competition.” Women war workers present at the opening of the exhibition of “Women in Necessary Civilian Employment” (1943). Left to right: Dorothy I. Walker, trainman for the Pennsylvania Railroad; Betty Ward, New York, U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps; Deborah Hutchison, New York (who has worked on farms for the past two summers); Muriel Klein, Western “Unionette” or telegraph messenger; Mrs. Terella Albrecht, who drives a taxi for the Cornelia Cab Company. Publicity photograph. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

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Modern in the Making

patrons. Yet they also caused administrative concerns. A confidential memo circulated between museum officials in 1944 conveyed such anxieties bluntly by acknowledging that war-themed exhibitions had arguably compromised the integrity of the museum by overtly expressing political agendas.26 The crisis of the war also forced MoMA officials to reevaluate the institution’s broader goals, which subsequently led to a renewed emphasis on education as a centerpiece of the museum’s enterprise. Barr, though removed from the directorship in 1943 in part because of his support for folk and vernacular art, remained committed to the museum and its public. In 1944, Barr prepared a confidential report that sought to clarify the museum’s educational agenda and goals. Originally, the museum’s stated purpose was “to encourage and develop the study of the modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life.” Now, Barr proposed that “[t]he primary purpose of the museum is to help people enjoy, understand and use the visual arts in our time.”27 This sentence appears in all caps in Barr’s papers, and he elaborates on the importance of the distinction he is attempting to make: “Obviously, these three activities—enjoying, understanding, using—should be thought of as interdependent. Each confirms, enriches and supports the others. Together they indicate the museum’s primary function which is educational in the broadest, most creative, least academic sense.”28 In support of this mission, Barr wrote What Is Modern Painting, a small, highly readable introductory text. First published in 1943, WIMP (as the book was known internally) intended to demythologize modern art in no small part by providing Barr with the opportunity to articulate his ideas on the relationship between art, democracy, and totalitarianism. While the publication’s primary goal was to assist the general reader in understanding modernism (which Barr took seriously, soliciting feedback from farmers, maids, and children),29 later editions of WIMP featured revised language that more directly criticized totalitarianism as the Cold War intensified.30 The museum’s postwar support for US cultural diplomacy abroad, built upon a previously established interest in international exhibition programming, ironically led to domestic controversy.31 After strongly supporting the Allies and later assisting with the projection of democratic themes through its traveling exhibitions, MoMA was consistently forced to defend both its activities at home, and the rise of postwar abstraction in general, against charges of Communist sympathies from Congressional critics.32 Barr’s successor as director, René d’Harnoncourt, continued to assert that freedom of the arts was a political issue inextricable from freedom of expression. Emphasizing the connection between MoMA and democratic ideals, he declared: “I believe a good name for such a society is democracy, and I also believe that modern art in its infinite variety and ceaseless exploration is its foremost symbol.”33 MoMA’s continued interest in shaping not only aesthetic but political concerns on a global level also complicates its later reputation as a promoter of art as a largely insular entity. In fact, by the end of the 1940s MoMA’s programming had become so accepted by mainstream culture in the United States that even The Saturday Evening Post, well known for its conservativism, could assert that “the museum … resembles nothing more than a fancy six-story jack-in-the-box, which is continually popping out with something new and remarkable.”34

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1949: Twentieth Anniversary To mark its twentieth anniversary MoMA staged a series of exhibitions that exemplified the twin pillars upon which the museum operated. The first argued that modern art represented part of a continuum that existed in relation to the past, not a radical break from it. The second maintained that modern art was deeply intertwined with contemporary culture. To highlight these tenets to the public, the museum opened two exhibitions in tandem: in late 1948 Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, which ran through the beginning of 1949, and Modern Art in Your Life, which capped the year, closing on December 4, 1949. Explicitly aimed at nonexperts, these installations combined to address a suspicion that museum personnel not only entertained but also sought to redress—that people might not like modern art. MoMA’s two-pronged defense posited that if viewers liked other periods of art, they could like modern art, and if viewers liked modern living (which in this case largely meant consumer culture), they already inadvertently liked modern art. For Timeless Aspects, director René d’Harnoncourt hoped to elucidate the connections between modern art and the objects of other cultures and centuries by juxtaposing disparate works that exemplified a theme. “For example,” the press release instructed, “emphasis on structure is the link between such differing works as a 13thcentury Chinese painting, a Cezanne landscape, a cubist work by Picasso and an 18th-century Piranesi.”35 As was often the case, MoMA treated the exhibition as but one possibility among many, discouraging a dogmatic reading and inviting visitors to undertake their own explorations.36 The exhibition thus claimed both to be of the contemporary moment, and that essentially, all forms of artistic production were inherently tied to the contemporary. Press material included a statement from Picasso, who proclaimed: “To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all.”37 Despite MoMA’s popularity—it received 500,000 visitors in 1949—the general public remained skeptical of modern art at midcentury. Modern Art in Your Life sought to demonstrate that modern art was undeniably a part—even an instigator— of contemporary culture. Visitors to the exhibition would pass through a long and low tunnel to emerge into a bright, high-ceilinged room of painting and sculpture.38 D’Harnoncourt, respected for his dramatic installations, planned the exhibition with avant-garde art at the core of the show. From this central core, the visitor could explore the exhibition’s premise—that modern art had infiltrated every aspect of modern life, affecting cities, homes, and daily living. Throughout the rest of the exhibition, viewers encountered wallpaper, a Lazy Susan, a Kleenex box, fabric, and furniture. As objects of industrial design, these connections demonstrated the usefulness of modern art in a practical, product-oriented way. However, the Surrealist section of the exhibition made the case for modern art’s psychological power in ways the public might not have anticipated. In a darkened chamber lit with dramatic spotlights, D’Harnoncourt had installed re-creations of six full-scale department store window displays, complete with luxury items for sale—potentially available just around the corner on Fifth Avenue (Figure. I.4). Not only did the museum exemplify the way that modern art could be used expressly to cultivate capitalist desire, museum administrators also co-opted the role of the department store to feed off that desire themselves.

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Modern in the Making

Figure I.4  Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Modern Art in Your Life (October 5–December 4, 1949). The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Dismantling Myths Clearly, the Museum of Modern Art is one of the world’s most influential institutions in the construction of international understandings of modern art.39 Besides its importance to the increasingly global art world, MoMA’s exhibitions and publications are a constant reference point in art historical discourse. Still, the museum’s early history has not received extensive, rigorous scholarly attention. Indeed, MoMA’s reputation for exerting a rigid form of formalist modernism persists in popular memory, despite clear evidence that in its first two decades, the museum was one of the most experimental institutions of its kind.40 Critical analysis of MoMA’s role has gone from emphasizing the individuals that shaped the museum’s history to a more focused examination of the relationship between its exhibitions and the broader field. Serious independent histories of MoMA began with Russell Lynes’s Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (1971). That this book remains a key resource is evidence of the need for additional scholarly work on MoMA’s history.41 More recently, scholars have begun to address the inconsistencies between the museum’s exhibitions and the myths that surround them. While breaking new ground, this volume also builds upon a small

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but vital scholarly bibliography. Richard Meyer’s What Was Contemporary Art (2013) provides an important inspiration. However, in taking a broad view of the relationship between Alfred Barr, modern art, and museum exhibition practice in the 1930s and 1940s, Meyer discusses only a handful of exhibitions. Similarly, scholarship by Kristina Wilson (2009) and Jennifer Jane Marshall (2012) contribute meaningfully to our understanding of a single exhibition—1934’s Machine Art. Haidee Waason’s Museum Movies (2005) provides an examination of MoMA’s film department, and Mary Ann Staniszewski’s The Power of Display (1998) highlights MoMA’s innovative exhibition design history.42 The selective scholarly emphasis on specific aspects of MoMA’s history has subsequently led art historical scholarship to rely upon a relatively narrow understanding of the museum’s history as a point of departure, and at times a foil, for new contributions to the field. This volume considers the complexity of the multifaceted modernism that MoMA advocated during its formative years. The following fourteen essays analyze how MoMA’s first two decades set an ambitious, at times contradictory, agenda that has often gone overlooked. These essays expand upon several developments in research on MoMA and twentieth-century exhibition practices in general. Included authors demonstrate a particular engagement with the legacy of social art history, the turn toward visual culture, and a growing emphasis on art in global contexts. This book departs from traditional accounts of modernism that focus on artistic production to consider instead the ways in which modern art (as a shifting set of objects and ideas) circulated. In doing so, the following essays also build on a growing body of museum studies scholarship that critically considers institutional histories and curatorial agency.43 As related frameworks have become increasingly important to the ways in which we understand how the public interacted with modern art broadly construed, the early history of MoMA becomes a particularly fertile ground for intellectual revision. After all, MoMA’s mandate to court the public long before the so-called blockbuster era of museums in the 1960s makes the museum’s exhibition history a rich case study from which to examine how art was used as a tool for political and cultural engagement. These issues are addressed in essays distributed across four sections that highlight the overarching themes of MoMA’s first twenty years. The first part analyzes the museum’s engagement with vernacular and commercial influences. Marci Kwon’s essay considers the relationship between surrealism and folk art between the mid1930s and the early 1940s, which concludes by tying “folk surrealism” to the rise of totalitarianism. The influence of commercial design is addressed by Jen Padgett, who considers a largely overlooked 1942 textile exhibition that offered competing tensions of functional and aesthetic value, painting and textile, and anonymous and known modernists. Vernacular work, as represented in children’s art, is addressed further by John Blakinger, who argues that the museum’s promotion of children’s art was consistent with progressive educational values while also motivated by more political concerns. A more explicitly commercial, though racialized, understanding of exhibition display is addressed by Andy Campbell, who considers the installation of a market in MoMA’s garden as part of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art in 1940. He argues that this resulted in a new kind of display, one that sought to mimic a more authentic experience while inadvertently embodying the markets of capital and cultural patrimony.

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Modern in the Making

The following section addresses how MoMA advanced curatorial fields in mediums previously not associated with fine art, including photography, dance, and architectural design. Sarah Kate Gillespie considers how a display of nineteenth-century American photography staged during the Second World War attempted to align two very different bodies of imagery in an era when curatorial discourse on multiples remained in flux. Jason Hill also considers the exhibition of photography, hinging his analysis on the display of press photography, a form of visual reproduction whose very nature challenged traditional ideas of museum practice. Relatedly, Swagato Chakravorty considers how the exhibition of photography provided new opportunities for the museum to address dance and performance. Experiential factors are also addressed by Catarina Schlee Flaksman, who analyzes The House in the Museum Garden (1949), which allowed visitors to experience a domestic space in MoMA’s “backyard” while connecting directly with social and commercial interests as well. The third group of essays emphasizes the museum’s outreach efforts to make modernism more accessible through transportable media. Rachel Kaplan considers how museum officials used photographic reproductions to offer venues far outside of New York the opportunity to understand modernism. This focus on the mobility of images reappears in James Farmer’s essay, which examines the use of photomechanical technology to reproduce a Native American rock mural as a primary object for display within the museum. The notion of mobility is interpreted socially by Suzanne Hudson, who examines the museum’s focus on American veterans during and immediately following the Second World War. The final section examines MoMA’s engagement with international themes. By revisiting curatorial strategies that reinforced primitivist notions of objects, John Ott offers a critique of associated mechanisms by which canons are formed and enforced, while also envisioning compelling alternatives. Antje Gamble considers the exhibition of Italian modernism immediately after the Second World War, which, she argues, largely ignored Italy’s recent history of Fascism in favor of a formal beauty meant to advance diplomatic relationships in the postwar period. Finally, Angela Miller considers the postwar implications of exhibiting work identified specifically as “American” art, while seeking to interrogate previous canonical narratives. These four parts address ways in which the museum offered an innovative engagement with commercial and vernacular culture, while considering modernism as a global phenomenon informed by the past. Together, these chapters demonstrate how MoMA’s first two decades were characterized by a range of exhibitions that eschewed the idea of an inflexible artistic lineage with which the museum has nonetheless often been identified. Though several exhibitions staged during this period are touchstones for current scholarship, the museum also organized numerous installations that either have been completely forgotten or were largely regarded as failures. Perhaps most surprisingly, MoMA’s first twenty years demonstrate a remarkable willingness to “get it wrong” in order to advance aesthetic discourse. This volume also arrives at a critical historical moment as the relationship between museums and public life is particularly challenged. Today, museum officials and cultural critics no longer need to defend contemporary art from charges of communist influence. Instead, the global advance of capitalism has given art museum

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administrators new concerns: increased corporate influence, maintaining patron interest, and skyrocketing prices in the expanding international art market. Perhaps even more pressing, the culture wars of the 1990s continue today in increasingly partisan terms even as government plays an ever-diminishing role in supporting the arts in the United States. While these concerns did not originate at MoMA, the museum staged numerous exhibitions during its first twenty years that anticipated later trends in twenty-first century art museums, including the critical analysis of modernism as an international, interconnected enterprise. This book thus examines MoMA’s early years in order to demonstrate how the experimental, quirky, and decidedly non-neutral history of “Good Old Modern” might contribute to increasingly urgent debates linking the modern art museum to social and cultural responsibilities. By reconsidering how the modern idea developed, we hope to enrich ongoing conversations concerning the role of contemporary art today.

Notes 1

Press release, “Museum’s 20th Anniversary Exhibition to Show Effect of Modern Art on the Shape of Things in Our Everyday World,” Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Archives, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325688.pdf, accessed January 2019. 2 Museum of Modern Art Press Release Archives, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/ shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/1353/releases/MOMA_1949_0067_1949-0818_490818-61.pdf, accessed January 2019. 3 Dorothy Grafly, “Modern Art in Your Life,” American Artist (February 1950), 54. 4 Challenges to the museum’s exhibition practices held legal ramifications as well. For example, nineteen sculptures on loan from European collectors and museums were held up because US customs agents refused to consider the objects to be art. See Harriet Bee and Michelle Elligott, Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 44. 5 American Abstract Artists. “How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art?,” 1940, April 15. Charles Green Shaw papers, 1686, 1833–979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 6 Barr quoted in Harriet Bee and Michelle Elligott, Art in Our Time, 16. Barr also cites The Gallery of Living Art at NYU, founded by Albert Gallatin in 1925, as significant. 7 Quoted in Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 88. 8 Alfred Barr, “Introduction,” in Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1942), 10. 9 For more on this, see Sandra Zalman, “When Modern Art Was Contemporary: The Museum of Modern Art as Kunsthalle,” in Localizing the Contemporary: The Kunsthalle Bern as a Model, ed. Peter J. Schneemann (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2018), 302–15. Even in 1942, when the museum published a catalogue of its collection, Barr announced that the collection would be exhibited “only as an occasional stop-gap in the exhibition calendar” (Barr, “Introduction,” 9). 10 Alfred Barr, quoted in Dwight Macdonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street II,” The New Yorker, December 19, 1953, 40.

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Modern in the Making

11 Cantor, Sybil. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 317–18. 12 Saab, A. Joan. For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004), 84–128. 13 Emory C. Lewis, “Pioneering Museum Enters Third Decade as Top Showcase for Contemporary Art,” Cue, December 4, 1948: 21. Department of Public Information, mf 40:580, MoMA Archives, NY. 14 Alfred Barr, “Museum,” Charm, November 1929. AHB, IV.B.134. 15 This exhibition, repacked for display in department stores, was reinvented in various forms until 1950. Though John Cotton Dana had previously demonstrated the value of exhibiting commercial goods at the Newark Museum, Alfred Barr arguably encouraged an even more extensive obfuscation of distinctions between high and low culture. Carol Duncan, “Museums and Department Stores: Close Encounters,” in High-Pop: Making “Culture” into Popular Entertainment, ed. Jim Collins (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 146–50. 16 Alfred Barr, “Art in Our Time: The Plan of the Exhibition,” in Art in Our Time (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 15, also quoted in “Art” Time v. 33, n. 21, May 22, 1939, 89. 17 Although the museum organized traveling exhibitions within two years of its founding, during the war years the Department of Circulating Exhibitions expanded its program substantially (https://www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/EAD/ CEf). 18 Maurice Berger, “Preaching the Gospel: Modernism on Television,” from Revolution of the Eye (New Haven: Jewish Museum/Yale Press, 2015), 55. For more on MoMA’s early publicity, see John O’Brian, “MoMA’s Public Relations, Alfred Barr’s Public and Matisse’s American Canonization,” Canadian Art Review 18, no. 1/2: 18–30. 19 “President Roosevelt Speaks on Program Inaugurating New Building,” MoMA Press Release Archives, April 27, 1939. 20 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 4 (1978): 30–1. 21 “Record Breaking Attendance at New Museum,” June 6, 1939, MoMA Press Release Archives. An average of 1800 visitors per day visited MoMA between the time of its reopening and the date of the press release. Admission to the museum was 25 cents. This was the same price charged for admission to an amusement at the World’s Fair that year. 22 Merrill Pollack, “Museum a la Mode,” Promenade, July 1949, 42. 23 In this context, the term “political” refers to objects that through a combination of content and patronage were clearly tied to specific governments. 24 Kristie La, “‘Enlightenment, Advertising, Education, Etc.,’ Herbert Bayer and the Museum of Modern Art’s Road to Victory,” October 10: 63–86. In 1942, with Hitler on his mind, John Hay Whitney, the museum’s immediate past president, wrote: “This collection of the art of many nations is a symbol of freedom, freedom of the artist and through the artist of every individual to speak his mind without fear of persecution. And beyond individual freedom, it symbolizes the freedom of nations to cherish not only their own works of art but those of other peoples as well as that international understanding and esteem may be furthered through art which can thus participate in the defeat of international hatred and contempt against which we are fighting right now.” John Hay Whitney, “Foreword,” in Painting & Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, ed. Alfred Barr (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1942), 7.

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25 Sarah Newmeyer, MoMA Press Release (September 1, 1943). 26 “Report on Exhibitions for the Policy Committee, June 28, 1944.” James Johnson Sweeney papers, folder 8: Museum Policy Committee. 27 MoMA Archives, AHB II.C.53. 28 AHB II.C.53, MoMA Archives, NY. 29 Margaret Scolari Barr, interview with Paul Cummings, Spring 1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 17. 30 See Patricia Hills, “‘Truth, Freedom, Perfection’: Alfred Barr’s What Is Modern Painting? as Cold War Rhetoric,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, ed. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (Amherst: UMass Press, 2010), 251–75. 31 Barr also proved instrumental to ensuring the safe passage of numerous artists from Europe during the Nazi occupation. 32 See, for example, Alfred Barr, “Is Modern Art Communistic?” New York Times, December 14, 1952. 33 René d’Harnoncourt, “Challenge and Promise: Modern Art and Modern Society,” Magazine of Art, November 1948, 252. 34 Roger Butterfield, “The Museum and the Redhead,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 5, 1947. 35 “Timeless Aspects of Modern Art,” Press release, MoMA Press Release online archives, accessed May 17, 2017. Other themes included “the fantastic and mysterious” or “stylization.” https://www.moma.org/d/c/press_releases/ W1siZiIsIjMyNTYyOSJdXQ.pdf?sha=b7345302e42a9617. These were the first four works a viewer encountered in the exhibition. 36 Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, MoMA Press Release online archives. 37 Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, MoMA Press Release online archives. 38 Modern Art in Your Life, MoMA Press Release, 1949. 39 MoMA received approximately 3.08 million visitors in 2015 according to The Art Newspaper, making it the fifteenth most popular museum in the world. The Art Newspaper “Special Report,” n. 278 April 2016. http://www.museus.gov.br/wpcontent/uploads/2016/04/Visitor-Figures-2015-LO.pdf 40 See, for example, Robin Pogrebin, “MoMA’s Makeover Rethinks the Presentation of Art,” New York Times, June 1, 2017. 41 Additionally, Lynes’s text tends to conversationally reminiscence over the social lives of the museum’s leaders, which undermines some of his more scholarly contributions. Relatedly, several scholars have also focused on the life and work of Alfred Barr: Sybil Gordon Kantor’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MIT, 2002) and Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago, 1989). 42 MoMA has released important publications exploring aspects of its early years as well, including the “Studies in Modern Art” series, published in the 1990s and edited by curator John Elderfield. Other key publications include Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Harriet Bee and Michelle Elligott (2004) and René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of Installation (2018). These titles, though valuable contributions to the field, are the result of museum-sanctioned publication efforts. 43 See, for example, Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2006); Marcia Pointon, ed., Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

Part One

Vernacular Influences

1

Folk Surrealism Marci Kwon

On December 9, 1936, the Museum of Modern Art opened Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (hereafter FADS, Figure 1.1). The second in a series of exhibitions organized by Alfred Barr to highlight prominent trends in twentieth-century art, FADS included 711 works, including painting, sculpture, drawings, prints from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, advertisements, scientific instruments, architecture, film, animation cells, folk art, and the work of children and the so-called insane.1 FADS’s catholic array epitomizes the eclectic nature of MoMA’s early exhibition program, a phenomenon that has drawn renewed scholarly attention in the past decade.2 Building on this work, my essay examines the early history of MoMA through the lens of what I describe as the demotic imperative of the 1930s.3 From this vantage, the inclusion of popular, commercial, and folk art in MoMA’s galleries was neither pandering commercialism nor uncritical nationalism, but rather the museum’s attempt to address—and thus conjure into being—the unified mass known  in period parlance as the “people,” without forfeiting its commitment to vanguard art.4 MoMA’s attempts to negotiate these ostensibly opposed aims engendered an ethos of amateurism I describe as “folk surrealism,” in reference to two prominent strands of the museum’s early curatorial program.5 Surrealism’s valorization of nonprofessional modes of cultural production allowed the museum to frame folk art and the work of children as innate forms of expression, thereby demonstrating the broad accessibility of Surrealist principles. Put differently, MoMA’s ethos of amateurism can be described as a kind of domestic primitivism, which, like all primitivizing formulations, relies on the “outsider” position of its objects to prove the universality of its concept. This stance proved untenable, endangering the museum’s status as a bastion of sacralized culture and appearing uncomfortably close to the strategies of totalitarianism by the late 1930s. MoMA’s attempts to expand the idea of who counts as an artist and what counts as art thus touched upon the paradox inherent to attempts to level established cultural hierarchies, which, taken to their logical extreme, threaten to destroy the boundaries between art and the world around it.

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Modern in the Making

Figure 1.1  Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (December 7, 1936 – January 17, 1937). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

MoMA and the Common Man In an oft-cited irony, MoMA opened just days after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The museum’s first three years of operation coincided with the nadir of the Great Depression, before the implementation of the New Deal in 1933. This turmoil created an imperative for artists and poets to respond directly to the present moment, pithily described by Wallace Stevens as “the pressure of reality.”6 MoMA’s founding charter appeared to answer this “pressure of reality,” by describing popular education as one of its central goals.7 Despite this, the museum’s three wealthy founders, and especially Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, led many to view MoMA as a symbol of the elitist culture that gave rise to the Great Depression. As New Dealer Edward Bruce sneered in 1933, MoMA was considered by many to be “the little snob which was recently dedicated by the Rockefellers who have put their dead hand on everything they touch.”8 By virtue of its immutable identity as an art museum and connection to the Rockefellers, MoMA thus found itself at odds with the decade’s emergent collectivist tenor. Although it was established in 1931, the Whitney never had to face this problem as intensely as MoMA because of its identity as an American art museum, as well as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s deep ties to the Greenwich Village artistic community.9

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In other words, the paradox facing artists during the 1930s was an ingrained part of MoMA’s early institutional identity: while its stated charge was to promote modern art, the museum’s relevance depended on its ability to make these aims accessible to a public. Curator Alfred Barr was uniquely positioned to address this situation. Although he had completed postgraduate work with Paul Sachs at Harvard, Barr’s scholarly approach was equally indebted to Princeton medievalist Charles Rufus Morey’s anthropological investigation of art and culture as seen in The Index of Christian Art.10 Following Morey’s capacious attitude toward culture, Barr organized exhibitions that extended beyond the museum’s traditional charge of fine arts, which he understood as a gesture toward popular legibility. As Barr later explained to critic Dwight MacDonald, “We hope that showing the best in the arts and popular entertainment and of commercial and industrial design will mitigate the arcane and difficult atmosphere of painting and sculpture.”11 Yet it was curator Holger Cahill who was responsible for MoMA’s earliest attempt to directly answer the demotic imperative of the 1930s. Cahill, who took over as MoMA’s director while Barr was on sabbatical in 1932, remains best known for his directorship of the Federal Arts Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Cahill was also an accomplished curator, initiating his tenure at MoMA with an exhibition whose title announced its populist ambition: American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man, 1750–1900.12 For Cahill, folk art offered a means of reconciling modernism’s “revolution in form” and the decade’s radical politics.13 Unlike MoMA’s Harvardeducated moderns, Cahill’s interest in folk art originated in his early experience with Greenwich Village anarchism. None other than ardent leftist Michael Gold praised Cahill’s proletarian pedigree: “He hoboed and dug ditches and sweated in the Kansas harvest fields, he had washed dishes, rebelling at his own worthlessness, and swaggered in the fire zone and at political rallies with a newspaper reporter’s badge.”14 In Art of the Common Man’s catalogue essay, Cahill proposed that folk art’s simplified forms, so reminiscent of modernist abstraction, originated in preindustrial human instinct. Folk art, he wrote, was “an expression of the common people and not an expression of a small cultured class,” forming a lineage of modernism rooted in amateurism rather than industrial production.15 This approach was indebted to Marxist scholar Thorstein Veblen, whom Cahill studied with at the New School of Social Research.16 Drawing on Veblen’s 1918 book The Instinct of Workmanship, which traced the transition from handmade craft to mechanized production, Cahill positioned folk art as the last bastion of “workmanship” in an era of industrialized labor. Keeping with this logic, Cahill limited the exhibition to itinerant painting, wooden and metal sculpture, and plaster ornaments, deliberately excluding furniture, silver, glass, and other examples of decorative arts he deemed the work of “professionals.”17 Yet even within this idealistic framing, Cahill did not entirely eschew established cultural hierarchies.18 As he stated at the end of his catalogue essay, “Folk art cannot be valued as highly as the work of our greatest painters and sculptors, but it is certainly tied to a place in the history of American art.”19 Cahill’s deliberate privileging of fine art underscores folk art’s implicit challenge to the history of art museums in the United States, which since the Gilded Age had been charged with displaying “unique aesthetic and spiritual properties that rendered it inviolate, exclusive, and eternal.”20 Folk art’s

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presence in the museum instead located modern art’s most cherished principles of formal simplicity in the work of amateurs.21 Art of the Common Man thus placed MoMA in a precarious situation: while demonstrating the “inviolate, exclusive, and eternal” qualities of modern art, folk art’s connotations of amateurism also threatened to destabilize the very hierarchies that traditional museums were charged with upholding. The untenability of this position became apparent with MoMA’s 1934 Westchester Folk Art. Hoping to boost museum membership, the museum organized a condensed reprise of Art of the Common Man at the Westchester Workshop, a community center specializing in arts education.22 In a gallery adjacent to the main exhibition, MoMA installed a show of children’s art from public and private institutions around Westchester County. The work was selected by teachers and judged by a committee including art critic Helen Appleton, artist William Zorach, and Barr himself, which awarded small monetary prizes to eleven of the nearly 400 entries.23 The exhibition illuminates the paradox inherent to MoMA’s ethos of amateurism. On the one hand, exhibiting the work of children alongside folk art demonstrated the broad purchase of modern art; on the other, the inescapable constraints of space and money required the committee to devise other standards of quality. These competing imperatives of quality and expansiveness were also apparent during New Horizons of American Art, which closed three months before FADS. New Horizons included 435 examples of work produced under the auspices of the FAP, now headed by Cahill, who also organized the exhibition. In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Barr explicitly addressed notions of quality within the sprawling display, noting that Cahill selected each work “for its artistic value alone.”24 New Horizons also included a selection of children’s art made under the FAP’s education program, including works such as Passover Feast by the ten-year-old F. Rick (Figure 1.2). At Barr’s request, the museum acquired several examples of children’s work from the exhibition, compensating the child artists with opening invitations, free admission to the museum, film screenings, and lectures, ten complimentary museum tickets, and access to the museum library.25 Barr later echoed Cahill’s rhetoric about folk art when he noted that the best children’s art was “truer to the human type than the mature world of more precise and self-conscious knowledge.”26 Yet like Cahill’s qualification in the Art of the Common Man catalogue, the conditions of the museum’s acquisition also illustrate the liminal status of children’s art. While deserving of inclusion in the museum’s collection, they were procured by trade rather than purchase. Barr’s exacting connoisseurship in acquiring select examples from the exhibition furthermore suggests that his aesthetic judgment occurred within aesthetic categories rather than between them. In other words, Barr saw the “best” child’s drawing as worthier of consideration than a third-rate modernist work.

Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism For Barr, Surrealism’s emphasis on found objects and automatic drawing offered a model for narrowing the distance between amateur and professional artists. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism was preceded by Cubism and Abstract Art, the first of his

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Figure 1.2  Installation view of the exhibition New Horizons in American Art, featuring Passover Feast by F. Rick (September 14–October 12, 1936). Gelatin silver print, 7 ½ x 9 1/2˝ (19 x 24.1 cm). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

ambitious synthetic survey exhibitions, which opened eight months prior.27 Although Cubism and Abstract Art debuted to critical acclaim, Barr found the subject matter passé, describing the show as little more than “an exercise in recent archeology.”28 By contrast, Barr understood FADS as unveiling a vibrant modern tendency towards the “bizarre, dreamlike, absurd, uncanny, enigmatic,” a host of characteristics he christened “the fantastic.”29 Barr continued that he considered Surrealism “[a] serious affair and for many it is more than an art movement: it is a philosophy, a way of life, a cause to which some of the most brilliant painters and poets of our age are giving themselves with consuming devotion.”30 As with MoMA’s earlier exhibitions of folk art, Barr’s approach to Surrealism contained an implicit argument for Modernism’s universality. By including work by those ostensibly unencumbered by the conditioning of modern society—children, folk artists, “the insane”—Barr construed “the fantastic” as an essential element of human nature. Other works in the exhibition included drawings and assemblages by so-called psychopathic patients (including an example lent by André Breton), a winking porcelain cat, and a spoon found in the cell of a prisoner. The exhibition’s scope illuminates the way Surrealism’s emphasis on unconscious expression at once expanded the idea of art and aligned with MoMA’s established commitment to amateurism.

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While critics lambasted the show as hopelessly disorganized, Barr had in fact carefully researched and selected what he considered the best examples of each included object. For example, he wrote to a school official in Michigan to help him find a specific child’s drawing he had seen in a 1933 photograph. Created by eleven-year-old Jean Hoisington, A God of War Shooting Arrows to Protect the People (Figure 1.3) shows a small humanoid figure facing off against a monstrous form festooned with tails and multi-toed limbs.31 With its elemental violent struggle and timely invocation of “the people,” Hosington’s drawing would seem to encapsulate the idea of Surrealism as a “universal human tendency.” As if to underscore this point, Barr installed the drawing alongside work by Joseph Cornell, Joan Miró, and Marcel Jean, with only a museum label to differentiate it from these distinguished counterparts (Figure 1.4). Despite Barr’s efforts, FADS was summarily dismissed by both cultural conservatives and avant-garde partisans for its willingness to elevate the work of “madmen” to art. In a characteristically vituperative remark, Thomas Craven declared it “one of the foulest doses of art ever compounded by the international apothecaries … The freaks of art belong in the tent show along with the two headed calf and the tattooed idiot.”32 It was precisely this reaction that Société Anonyme doyenne Katherine Dreier feared when

Figure 1.3  Page from Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 1936, featuring Jean Hoisington (age 11), A God of War Shooting Arrows to Protect of the People, c. 1936. Alfred H. Barr Jr., ed. Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 1.4  Installation view of the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, featuring (from left) work by Jean Hoisington, Wolfgang Paalen, Joan Miró, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Jean (December 7, 1936 – January 17, 1937). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

she wrote to Barr, “It seemed as if you had deliberately hung the pictures to give the emphases to the abnormal!”33 Barr did little to dispel Dreier’s fears, replying, “Genius consists in the ability to retain in security the imaginative faculties of childhood.”34 Unconvinced by his response, Dreier withdrew her loans from FADS’s subsequent venues. Although diametrically opposed in position, Dreier and Craven appeared to discern the threat Barr’s approach posed to the sanctity of so-called high art. This suspicion of amateurism was also at the heart of critic Emily Genauer’s notorious “The Fur-Lined Museum,” published in Harper’s Magazine in 1944. As its title suggests, Genauer pinpoints Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism as the originary moment of MoMA’s decline, paving the way for what she described as “stunts like the display of a tinsel-bedecked shoeshine shoe chair, of the doodlings of inmates of insane asylums, and of the pathetic efforts of frustrated amateurs.”35 Genauer’s invocation of Joe Milone’s reviled shoeshine stand alongside Meret Oppenheim’s titular fur-lined teacup illuminates folk art and Surrealism’s elision in the mind of the museum’s critics: both validated the work of amateurs, threatening the sanctity (and labor) of professional artists. For Genauer, this focus siphoned support from “real” artists: “While serious professional artists fight for the recognition that life means to them, the Modern fiddles away its resources, building a precious cult around amateurism.”36

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Genauer was not alone in her outrage. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, artists affiliated with professional associations such as the American Abstract Artists and the Federation of Modern Painters organized letter-writing campaigns and protests against what they saw as MoMA’s willful ignorance of abstract art. A flier advertising action against the museum excoriated it for “attempt[ing] to elevate handicrafts, industrial design, and children’s art to the highest forms of human endeavor; and develop[ing] the public image of the painter as a madly inspired child, rather than a human being.”37 For these protesters, the museum’s “precious cult of amateurism” denied both material support and respect for their artistic practice, which the WPA had recently redefined as valuable labor.38 MoMA official James Thrall Soby offered a point-by-point rebuttal of Genauer’s article in a remarkable sixteen-page internal museum memo. He wrote that Genauer’s argument was premised on a narrow-minded definition of art that refused to recognize “allied arts” such as architecture, design, and film, as well as Romantic or Surrealist works.39 Soby also astutely pointed out that Genauer’s accusation of the museum’s “fashionability” was supported by a litany of its successes, quoting her observation that “[the museum’s] audiences range from kindergarteners, for whom there is a special Young People’s Gallery, to soldiers who come in to see not only the painting exhibitions but also the occasional shows of sketches made at the front by their brothers-in-arms.”40 Reaching such audiences, Soby maintained, had always been MoMA’s primary aim, and by this measure FADS had been a success. What Soby and Barr had failed to anticipate was the extreme strain such collectivist ideals would undergo in the subsequent years.41 And indeed, as Serge Guilbaut and more recently Thomas Crow have discussed, Barr’s 1942 ouster by trustee Stephen Clark was motivated in part by his support for the “naïve” work of Morris Hirshfield and Joe Milone.42 The exhibition’s success in galvanizing audiences and the subsequent denigration of these efforts suggest that Barr had touched upon something larger with his exhibition. If folk art and Surrealism seemed to imply that modern art could encompass work created without artistic intention, by what criteria could art distinguish itself from the commercial and political world? The potential danger of Surrealism’s populist valences was presaged by a notorious episode in 1934, in which MoMA’s executive director Alan Blackburn and curator Philip Johnson quit their posts to join demagogue Huey Long in Alabama.43 Strikingly, the headline in the Rockefeller Republican New York Herald Tribune framed this populist venture as an act of Surrealism, blaring “Two Quit Modern Art Museum for SurRealist Political Venture.”44 For the Herald Tribune, the “sur-realist flavor” of Blackburn and Johnson’s politics emanated from their proclaimed anti-intellectualism.45 Instead, these so-called Gray Shirts advocated for an anti-capitalist system based on emotion and a strong charismatic leader, an overtly fascistic line of thinking. This presumed alignment of fascism and Surrealism could also be seen in the pages of Art Front, the leftist magazine of the Artists Union edited by Stuart Davis and Joseph Solman.46 Art Front deemed Blackburn and Johnson’s abdication from MoMA the “Surrealist Revolution Counter-Clockwise,” decrying their perversion of Surrealism’s long-standing association with leftism in the work of artists such as Walter Quirt and O. Louis Guglielmi. The article detailed Blackburn and Johnson’s

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Figure 1.5  Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s 104 (August 1938), page 17.

fascistic tendencies, which included a secret enemy list as well as a wish for revolutionary violence. Art Front also drew attention to the men’s role in bringing commercial strategies to MoMA, noting, “With some experience in advertising and high-pressure salesmanship, he is credited with combining Macy department

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store methods and Johnson’s super-window display decoration in the most successful feat of selling a museum to a large public yet known in this country.”47 The reception of the Blackburn/Johnson incident in two ideologically divergent publications suggests the shifting understanding of Surrealism, populism, and commercialism from strategies of achieving collectivity to a potentially fascistic strategy of irrational conformity. The conflation of these narratives in the late 1930s is perhaps best encapsulated by Frank Caspers’s 1938 Scribner’s article “Surrealism in Overalls” (Figure 1.5).48 For Caspers, Surrealism’s greatest danger lay in its “effectiveness” in promoting consumer consumption, and no doubt thinking of the fascistic rallies across the Atlantic Ocean, he issued a grave warning: “What the medium will succumb next cannot be imagined.”49 Caspers’s evocative title inevitably calls to mind the garb of a humble farmer, no longer a mark common authenticity, but a veneer of faux-innocence intended to manipulate.50 If in 1930 the figure of the so-called common man had emerged as a potent symbol of proletarian collectivity, Caspers’s article demonstrates its perceived deceptiveness by the end of the decade. It was from this heated context that Clement Greenberg’s canonical “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” emerged.51 Much has been written on this foundational essay in American modernism and rightly so: Greenberg powerfully presents and anticipates many of the concerns of American art in the second half of the twentieth century.52 From the perspective of the history delineated in this essay, Greenberg’s text is most masterful in its ability to unite the various threads of 1930s art and politics into a statement of compelling moral clarity—a quality sorely lacking during this decade of drastic political reversals. For Greenberg, kitsch is an “ersatz art” whose power lies in its ability to manipulate. Like totalitarianism, it is not beholden to a single ideology (he notes that both Stalin and the Nazis make use of it) and can be used to indoctrinate the masses or trick them into mindless consumption. The idea of “kitsch” thus allowed Greenberg to place propaganda and commercial culture on the same plane and attribute kitsch’s danger not to any single ideology, but to formal representation. For Greenberg, representation combined disingenuous folk simplicity with the enchanting qualities of Surrealism. Kitsch was therefore a literalization of Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish, ascribing to commercial objects the dangerous power to manipulate or control. Yet creating an enemy of such magnitude came at a cost. Imbuing kitsch with such power required a corresponding lack of agency on the part of the public, now recast as individual consumers. Indeed, it was the issue of audience rather than representation that first prompted Greenberg to write “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” The essay had its genesis in a letter from Greenberg to Dwight MacDonald regarding an article by the latter in the Partisan Review. In it, MacDonald wondered what to make of the curious disparity in attendance between the modernist Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Tretyakov Gallery, whose exhibition of the Russian Academic painter Ilya Repin drew sizable audiences. “The scales,” Greenberg explained to MacDonald, “are weighted in favor of kitsch to start with, by the very ignorance of the peasant.”53 The figure of the “ignorant peasant” appears again at the end of the letter, in far more ignominious form, as Greenberg elucidates the political stakes of his argument:

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And I’m pretty pessimistic now, for it seems to me that in England, France, and this country, as well as in the dictatorships, avant-garde culture is beginning to retreat all along the line under the pressure of the demoralization of the left and in the face of the increasing boldness with which hill billies everywhere are coming into the light to attack all culture. Where Hitler came with Wotan, in this country they come with the Bible.54

MacDonald responded enthusiastically to Greenberg, encouraging him to turn the letter into what would eventually become “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In its final  form, the essay focused on the definition and historical character of kitsch, spending comparatively little time on the issue of audience. Yet as evidenced by Greenberg’s letter, kitsch requires the figure of the “ignorant peasant,” whose lack of sophistication and knowledge renders him wholly susceptible to its empty promises. If kitsch takes advantage of the ignorant, then it stands to reason that Greenberg and his enlightened brethren could resist such manipulations; thus Greenberg’s “hill billies” also implicitly inoculate him against kitsch’s enchantments, his exacting intellectual judgment affording him separation from the now-denigrated masses. Greenberg’s disdain for the “common man” (never a woman) can be understood as the culmination of the growing discontent with populism as a viable artistic and political goal. And indeed, as the decade closed, Greenberg’s proclamations proved prescient. Russia’s unwillingness to intervene in the Spanish Civil War and Stalin’s purges created a growing disillusionment with Russia on the left, culminating in the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on August 23, 1939. With these events, the focus of the New York art world shifted from the people to the artist, from an art of the people to an art that could resist the corrupting influence of the public, thereby providing a bulwark against the mindless submission to a charismatic, enchanting leader.55 While MoMA’s engagement with folk art and Surrealism persisted well into the 1940s, the rhetoric around both shifted. In the 1938 exhibition Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America, for example, Barr described his aim “to show, without apology or condescension, the paintings of some of these individuals, not as folk art, but as the work of painters of marked talent and consistently distinct personality.”56 The keyword here is “individual”: Barr reframes amateurism as a marker of individual genius rather than collectivist appeal. This shift was no doubt encouraged by the popular and critical renown of Henri Rousseau, of whom Barr noted, “It is only since the apotheosis of Henri Rousseau that individual [emphasis his] popular artists have been taken seriously.”57 If Cahill had described folk art as “the sense and sentiment of a community” just six years earlier, Barr’s essay marks the decline of Cahill’s formulation by the decade’s end. The oft-remarked-upon shift in American art during the 1940s was not simply a matter of style, but of the individual’s triumph over collectivism. While MoMA’s idealistic promotion of folk surrealism could not survive its enshrinement within a museum or the mounting political threat of the late 1930s, for a few brief years it offered one vision of a modernism for the people.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

The five shows in this series were Cubism and Abstract Art [MoMA Exh. #46, March 2–April 19, 1936]; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism [MoMA Exh. #55, December 7, 1936–January 17, 1937]; Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America [MoMA Exh. #76, April 27–July 24, 1938]; Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists [MoMA Exh. # 217, February 10–March 21, 1943]; Romantic Painting in America [MoMA Exh. #246, November 17, 1943–February 6, 1944]. See Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art, 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2015); Thomas Crow, The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Lynne Cooke, ed., Outliers and American Vanguard Art (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2018). My use of the terms “populist” and “demotic” are not intended to invoke specific political formations, but rather the general period concern with the so-called common people. As such, this essay departs from the prevailing art historical view of the period as defined by a search for “American” identity or art. This is not to deny that such a tendency existed; rather I see such discussions as motivated by a broader societal emphasis on collectivity rather than an ahistorical Cold War nativism. For more on American art and nationalism, see Matthew Baignell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974); Celeste Connor, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Kristina Wilson, The Modern Eye: Stieglitz, MoMA, and the Art of the Exhibition, 1925–1934 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). As both T. J. Clark and Thomas Crow have argued, the “public” (the “people” in 1930s parlance) is a perpetually unstable construction that struggles to assimilate specific lives and bodies into its abstract collectivity. T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848–1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973); Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). My use of the term “public” is also influenced by Michael Warner’s discussion of publics as social imaginaries that are called into being by being addressed, rather than preexisting entities. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 67. I use the term “folk art” not as a discrete ontological category, but as period-specific term. For a thorough discussion of the historiography and implications of this term see Julia S. Ardery, The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-century Folk Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1951), 20.

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The charter describes MoMA’s aim as “encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life and furnishing popular instruction.” Quoted in Suzanne Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 37. 8 Quoted in Andrew Hemmingway, Artists on the Left (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 81. 9 For more on the history of Whitney Museum of American Art, including its roots in the Whitney Studio Club, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s identification with American artists, see Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Athenaeum, 1990); and Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Family Memoir (New York: Arcade, 1999). 10 Charles Rufus Morey included a diverse array of evidence, including liturgical metalwork, tapestries, and panel painting in the Index of Christian Art, which he began in 1917, a year before Barr entered university. Following German historian Heinrich Wöfflin, Morey organized the Index thematically and iconographically to trace stylistic transformations over time. 11 Quoted in Sybil Kantor, Alfred Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 309. 12 Art of the Common Man was a reprise of Cahill’s successful exhibition of folk art at the Newark Museum in 1930. Cahill began working at the Newark Museum in 1922, which was then under the directorship of Progressive reformer John Cotton Dana. For more on John Cotton Dana and the Newark Museum, see Carol G. Duncan, A Matter of Class: John Cotton Dana, Progressive Reform, and the Newark Museum (New York: Periscope, 2010). 13 Recent scholarship on Cahill and folk art include Kathleen Jentleson, “‘Not as Rewarding as the North’: Holger Cahill’s Southern Folk Art Expedition,” Available at https://www.aaa.si.edu/essay/katherine-jentleson; Jillian Russo, “From the Ground Up: Holger Cahill and the Promotion of American Art” (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2011). 14 Mike Gold, “Two Critics in a Bar-Room,” The Liberator 4 n. 9 (September, 1921), 28. 15 Holger Cahill, American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 6. Scholars such as Wanda Corn, Joan Saab, and Celeste Connor have argued that Cahill’s interest in “community” can be seen as an attempt to create a singular national aesthetic identity, a view undoubtedly grounded in his work with the Federal Arts Project. Cahill forcefully denied such a view, noting in the Pring interview, “Now, I didn’t think very much of this idea of a nationalistic art, but I did think that we needed to study phases of our art and to bring some of this back into circulation, and we needed to build up certain American artists who had been neglected in the previous write-up of the American tradition of painting.” Cahill, “Interview with Joan Pring,” reel 5285, frame 244, Holger Cahill Papers, AAA. 16 It is also possible that Veblen’s example led to Cahill’s initial interest in folk art. See Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: A. M. Kelly, 1961), 349. 17 Cahill, American Folk Art, 6. 18 For an important consideration of the relationship between the designation of “folk” and social and cultural hierarchies, see Eugene W. Metcalf, “Black Art, Folk Art, and Social Control,” Winterthur Portfolio 18, no. 4 (Winter 1983), 271–89. 19 Cahill, American Folk Art, 28.

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20 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 21 Cahill’s tendency to compare folk art with children’s art was present as early as 1930. As he noted in a 1930 radio speech, “One of the characteristics of folk art is that it goes straight to the essentials. It is like the art of children. It is naive, but it has great vitality. It is highly individual and often original expression.” Holger Cahill, “American Folk Art,” radio talk, November 1930, reel 5290, frame 2, Holger Cahill Papers, AAA. 22 MoMA Exhs., Westchester Folk Art Exhibition, folder 22.2, MoMA Archives, NY. 23 Ibid. 24 Alfred Barr, foreword to New Horizons in American Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 7. 25 Of the works Barr acquired, only a sculpture by Mike Mosco remains in the museum’s collection. Another by Hyman Dorfman is currently in MoMA’s study collection. My thanks to Kristin Gaylord for this information. 26 Alfred Barr, undated notes on Surrealism, folder 10A.71, Alfred Barr Papers, MoMA Archives, NY. 27 Edward Alden Jewell, “The Anatomy of Cubism and Abstract Art,” New York Times, June 7, 1936, 88. See also “Cubism and Abstractions,” Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 1936, 14. For a negative review, see W. B. C., “The Cult of Ugliness,” letter to the editor, New York Herald Tribune, March 28, 1936, 12. 28 Alfred Barr to Jerome Klein, July 19, 1936, folder 1.5, AHB, MoMA Archives, NY; Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 18. 29 Alfred Barr, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 12. 30 Ibid., 8. Quite predictably, this framing drew the ire of André Breton and Paul Éluard, who implored Barr to hew more closely to their published theories, to no avail. See Sandra Zalman, “Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 1 (2007): 46. 31 Barr Correspondence, MoMA Exhs., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA Archives, NY. 32 Katherine Dreier, letter to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism Exhibition Files, MoMA Archives. My discussion of this exchange draws on Sandra Zalman’s Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2016), which expands the present chapter’s concern with Surrealism at MoMA through the 1939 World’s Fair. 33 Katherine Dreier to Alfred Barr, February 27, 1937, MoMA Exhs., folder 55.2 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA Archives, NY. 34 Alfred Barr to Katherine Dreier, MoMA Exhs., folder 55.2., Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, MoMA Archives. 35 Emily Genauer, “The Fur-Lined Museum,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1944, 130. 36 Ibid. 37 “Protest against the Museum of Modern Art,” April 24, n.d., Mary Ryan Gallery. 38 The WPA officially closed in 1943, and it is possible that the increasing vitriol against the Museum of Modern Art for not supporting artists was due in part to the loss of

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this source of support. My thanks to Angela Miller for drawing my attention to this important event. 39 James Thrall Soby, “Statement in Response to ‘The Fur-Lined Museum’ by Emily Genauer, Harper’s Magazine, July, 1944,” August 18, 1944, folder IV.16, Early Museum History Administrative Records, MoMA Archives. 40 Genauer, “The Fur-Lined Museum,” 129. 41 For more on the Popular Front, whose reception offers a striking parallel to that of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 103; Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale Press, 1989), 38. 42 Thomas Crow, “Folk into Art: A Phenomenon of Class and Culture in Twentiethcentury America,” in Harry Smith and the Avant-garde in the American Vernacular, ed. Andrew Perchuck and Rani Singh (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010) 205–24. 43 For more on Long and Father Coughlin, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 44 “Two Quit Modern Art Museum for Sur-Realist Political Venture,” New York Herald Tribune, December 18, 1934, 1. With its invocation of the word “sur,” which means “South” in Spanish, the phrase “Sur-Realist” also operates as a pun for Johnson and Blackburn’s departure for Alabama. I am grateful to David Reilly for drawing my attention to this. 45 Ibid. 46 For a detailed account of Art Front’s history and its position with respect to other leftist magazines of the time see Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 39–42. 47 “Surrealist Revolution Counter-Clockwise,” Art Front, February 1935, 3. 48 Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scribner’s Magazine, August 1938, 17. 49 Ibid., 20. 50 The title of the article refers to a passage in which Caspers argues that Surrealism’s manipulation can be traced back to the paintings of Bosch and Breughel (neatly echoing, Barr’s thesis of the “fantastic”). “They had surrealism in overalls even then,” he notes, “for their monsters were selling religion by picturing the horrible fate of the people who refused the wares of their sponsors.” Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” 18. 51 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, Fall 1939, 34–49. 52 For more on Clement Greenberg’s art theory, and especially its relationship to 1930s politics, see Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art”; Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism during the Depression Years (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1999). 53 Clement Greenberg to Dwight MacDonald, February 6, 1939, box 24, folder 8, Clement Greenberg Papers, GRI 54 Ibid. 55 For an excellent consideration of this shift, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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56 Alfred Barr, Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 9. For more detailed considerations of this exhibition, see Sandra Zalman, “Janet Sobel: Primitive Modern and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” Woman’s Art Journal (Fall/Winter 2015): 21, and Richard Meyer’s essay in Outliers and American Vanguard Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 57 Barr, Masters of Popular Painting, 9.

2

New Rugs by American Artists: Modernism, Abstraction, and Rug Design at MoMA Jen Padgett

In December of 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York invited a dozen contemporary American painters to create rug designs highlighting modern experimentation in the textile medium.1 Long overlooked by scholars, the resulting exhibition New Rugs by American Artists stands out in MoMA’s early history for several reasons. The exhibition required an unusual level of involvement from curatorial staff, as the museum was not displaying already-existing objects but instead arranging for the creation of new works. Museum staff selected artists to participate, coordinated the design process between artists and the rug manufacturer V’Soske of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and displayed the completed works at MoMA and seven venues in an extensive traveling exhibition. The exhibition was directed by Eliot F. Noyes and Alice M. Carson of the Department of Industrial Design, who worked on a tight schedule to open the installation less than seven months after artists were initially contacted. New Rugs crossed traditional boundaries between fine art and functional goods in an effort to both improve American rug design and promote modern abstraction, showing its transferability to a functional medium. At a time when the American public was hesitant to embrace modern painting— especially its radical forms of abstraction—the exhibition framed abstract experimentation in rug design as a dynamic way to introduce modern art into everyday life. In reviews of the exhibition, however, critics of abstraction summoned the conventional hierarchies between media to belittle modern styles. During a period of curatorial and educational experimentation at MoMA, New Rugs catalyzed debates about hierarchy among media and the value of modern abstraction. Resulting criticism may have hit too close to home for museum leadership, as MoMA officials did not repeat the collaboration between painters and rug manufacturers. Though the hierarchy of media was re-entrenched in postwar formalist discourse, New Rugs signals a moment when MoMA staff looked to innovative European models of design and took a creative approach to integrating the arts.

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The Exhibition The exhibition sought to bring together the abstract formal innovations of contemporary American artists with the functionality of rug design. Ten prominent American painters contributed designs to the exhibition: Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Marguerite Zorach, Irene Rice Pereira, John Ferren, A. E. Gallatin, Charles Howard, Loren MacIver, Edward McKnight Kauffer, and George L. K. Morris.2 Two additional artists, Arthur Dove and Isamu Noguchi, received invitations but declined to participate.3 In the surviving letters sent to confirm their participation, artists expressed enthusiasm about the project as an opportunity to connect modern art with everyday life. Pereira, for example, responded saying, “I am very happy to be invited to participate in this enterprise, especially since I have an extremely high regard for the work the museum is doing in coordinating contempary [sic] art with the daily lives of the people.”4 The rugs that resulted from the New Rugs collaboration show the remarkable transference between the artists’ characteristic styles and the format of hand-tufted wool rugs. Stuart Davis’s rug Flying Carpet (Figure 2.1) envisioned a landscape as seen while flying high above in an airplane. Its energetic composition, with a nonhierarchal arrangement of shapes, bears close similarity to his paintings during the period such as Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style (Figure 2.2). Contemporary reviewers

Figure 2.1  Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964). Flying Carpet, 1942. Wool rug, woven by V’Soske, 7’ 1" x 10’ (215.9 x 304.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. Fund, 716.1943. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY © 2019 Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

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Figure 2.2  Stuart Davis (American, 1892–1964). Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style, 1940. Oil on canvas, 36 x 44 7/8 in. (91.44 x 113.98 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation and Museum purchase with funds by exchange from the M. and M. Karolik Collection, 1983.120. Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2019 Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Figure 2.3 Marguerite Thompson Zorach (American, 1887–1968). Cartoon Sketch for Coral Sea Rug, 1942. Watercolor on paper, 41 3/4 x 94 7/8 in. (106.0 x 24.01 cm). Brooklyn Museum, NY. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Tessim Zorach, 77.126.

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Figure 2.4  Arshile Gorky (American, born Armenia, 1904/05–1948). Bull in the Sun Rug, 1942. Wool rug, woven by V’Soske, 85 x 116 1/2 in. (215.9 x 295.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Gift of Monroe Wheeler, 199.1956. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY © 2019 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

noted that almost all of the rugs featured highly abstract designs, with Marguerite Zorach’s Coral Sea (Figure 2.3) mentioned as the most pictorial example installed. Bull in the Sun (Figure 2.4) by Arshile Gorky—“a dramatic affair of yellow gold background supporting black and purple and brilliant red”—received acclaim in multiple reviews.5 Gorky supported the idea that its abstract forms should incite viewers’ imagination: “The design on this rug is the skin of a water buffalo stretched in the sunny wheat field. If it looks like something else, then it is even better.”6 The evocative, amorphous form of Gorky’s design contrasted the orderly aggregation of geometric shapes in Irene Rice Pereira’s rug, which received special praise for its subtle use of varied textures. These textural effects were achieved by the handcraft process of specialty manufacturer Stanislav V’Soske, using a labor-intensive tufting technique and careful dye-matching that also ensured the accuracy of colors from the artists’ designs.7 The exhibition installation amplified the project’s innovative quality by foregrounding both the creative and technical aspects of the rugs’ production. Preparatory design drawings by the artists were shown alongside the fabricated rugs, highlighting the creative process and emphasizing the individuality of each artist’s approach.8 The installation of four of the eleven rugs on gallery walls underscored the

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parallel between rug design and painting, as the vertical display shifted the rugs from a context of use toward the realm of contemplative viewing typically associated with painting.9 Six remaining rugs were positioned on custom-made Masonite platforms, raised several inches from the ground. Only one rug, designed by George L. K. Morris, was displayed directly on the floor. Morris’s rug was positioned in a corner of the gallery with a temporary wall built on one side and a rope barring access from the only open side, keeping viewers at bay. While the rugs were objects of functional use, their intensive design process and custom fabrication distinguished them from the realm of mass-produced home goods. Didactic panels drew attention to the meticulous craftsmanship and science of rug production on the part of V’Soske, with processes such as “Measuring Color,” “Dye Formulas,” and “Tufting” explained in detail. The New Rugs exhibition developed from the museum’s commitment to exploring modern art’s impact across media. From the beginning MoMA’s mission featured an expansive approach to the potential forms and venues for modern art. The original 1929 charter dedicated the institution to “encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life, and furnishing popular instruction.”10 Founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s vision of modern art encompassed a range of media and the integration of the arts, inspired by the medievalist framework and looking to European models including the Bauhaus School.11 Over the course of his fourteen-year directorship at the institution, Barr established a multi-departmental structure that would ensure a breadth and depth to the museum’s presentation of modern art. Design was first officially introduced into MoMA’s departmental structure when the Department of Architecture (established in 1932) expanded to become the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design in 1935, though the museum had already begun to stage major design exhibitions such as Machine Art in 1934. In 1940, the establishment of a separate Department of Industrial Design signaled a rising institutional commitment to the development and promotion of design.12 Along with the organization of the Department of Industrial Design came the hiring of a young and energetic departmental director, Eliot F. Noyes, who brought innovative ideas for fostering modern design. Noyes had recently graduated with a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard’s School of Design, where he had received instruction from Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.13 Both Gropius and Breuer took positions at Harvard after the rise of the National Socialist regime in Germany drove many former Bauhaus School students and instructors to the United States. Under their instruction, Noyes was stimulated by the Bauhaus principles of functionality, connection of fine and applied arts, collaboration with industry, and the cooperation between craft and machine production. He embraced a theory of “total design” that regarded both architecture and design as opportunities to integrate art into everyday life. As director of the Department of Industrial Design at MoMA from 1940 to 1946 (with a temporary leave to serve in wartime design efforts), Noyes aimed to use the museum’s cultural authority to direct commercial design production. He believed that the conventional production chain—from manufacturer to retailer to consumer—led to a preponderance of conservative styles on the market. Thus through his position at the museum, he sought to promote the integration of art in daily life.

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Noyes’s creative thinking and strategy for presenting design were exemplified in his invitation to artists to participate in the New Rugs project. “Our purpose is double,” he wrote. “First, we are interested in sponsoring the creation of ten rugs of distinguished new design. We shall exhibit them here and throughout the country in a circulating exhibition.”14 MoMA acted as both patron and distributor, supervising the production of the rugs and promoting the results through a tour of seven venues in the United States and Canada following the presentation in New York.15 Noyes explained the aims of the project to effect change in the design field on a greater scale: Second, we hope that by demonstrating some fresh possibilities in rug design, we may later be able to invade the larger commercial field in collaboration with companies who would take some new designs for quantity production. With this in mind, we feel that the present project would immediately produce extremely important results, and would be a strong design stimulus in a field where very little interesting contemporary design is being done.16

Noyes’s letter expressed his goals in vivid terms—his desire “to invade” the larger market takes on an almost colonizing tone.17 The institutional commitment to influencing the commercial field had been clear in earlier design exhibitions, including the Useful Objects series initiated in 1938 and Machine Art in 1934. In these cases, the museum’s endorsement of “good” design in the commercial sphere was intended to guide contemporary audiences to appreciate and purchase these wares. The rationale for this strategy was that improved taste on the part of consumers would drive manufacturers to produce better-designed modern merchandise, thus improving American design as a whole.18 Prior to Noyes’s arrival at MoMA, Barr and Philip Johnson (director of the Department of Architecture and later the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design) both believed American design could be improved by looking to European models that embraced principles of functional design. Barr and Johnson strongly disapproved of the widely popular “streamline” design, which they viewed as superficial. Noyes continued the goal of educating viewers’ taste by considering how the museum might intervene between manufacturers and consumers by sponsoring innovative design production. Perhaps the most well-known episode from Noyes’s time at MoMA was the Organic Design in Home Furnishings exhibition of 1941, in which the museum sponsored a contest with winning designers receiving contracts with department stores to have their work produced and distributed. Like Organic Design, New Rugs involved rethinking how the museum could take a proactive approach in directing modern American design. New Rugs by American Artists stands out among the many inventive exhibitions at MoMA during this period, as the museum facilitated the production of new work from conceptualization to display. Noyes handled initial arrangements for New Rugs, though he took temporary leave from the museum in May 1942 to work on a military glider design project.19 In Noyes’s absence, Alice M. Carson became acting director of the Department of Industrial Design and accordingly took charge of the New Rugs exhibition. She had attended Smith College for her bachelor studies and later

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earned a master’s degree from the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, an institution affiliated with Smith that provided professional training for women in the field. Carson oversaw the advanced stages of the rugs’ production as well as the exhibition installation, and a MoMA press release credits her as Director of the Exhibition.20 Despite the uncertainty of the wartime environment and the leadership change, on top of the logistical challenge of working with a manufacturer based in Grand Rapids, the exhibition opened successfully in June of 1942.

Precedents in Modern Rug Design The museum had previously displayed modern rugs in the 1937 exhibition Rugs from the Crawford Shops Designed by American Artists, which included designs by both well-known painters and professional designers. That exhibition had been proposed by Mrs. Barbara McKee Henry, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s daughter and chairperson of the Crawford Rug Shop run by the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.21 The exhibition was a novel combination of modern design with a charitable mission, as the Crawford Shops provided work for unemployed, middle-aged women.22 Barr and MoMA president A. Conger Goodyear were both impressed by the work of the painters, while they found the work of the designers rather disappointing. “As I said when I first heard of the project,” Barr wrote to Goodyear after seeing the completed rugs, “I felt like it was an excellent idea to have good painters make designs. Certainly the results seem to prove that a good painter is incomparably better than a professional ‘designer.’ The ‘designers’’ rugs seemed to me about as bad as the painters’ rugs were good, and seriously lowered the average of the quality.”23 Goodyear very much agreed with Barr and wrote to the museum’s publicity director Sarah Newmeyer saying, “The rugs designed by the artists are by far the best.”24 The mixed results of the 1937 exhibition no doubt factored into the planning for New Rugs, as Noyes invited only painters to contribute designs. Furthermore, MoMA oversaw the production from start to finish instead of simply presenting completed rugs.25 While charity motivated the Crawford Shop exhibition, New Rugs had greater aesthetic ambitions and directed closer attention to the transference between painting and rug design. Handcrafted rugs featuring modern designs operated as hybrids between tradition and innovation, craft and painterly aesthetics, domestic space and international art discourses.26 In an era of machine-produced domestic goods and furnishings, modernist rugs offered the luxury of the handmade and a sense of individuality, even rarity. The suitability of geometric and abstract designs for the rug format was a key factor in their success. While Noyes’s letter of invitation maintained the New Rugs project would “provide a strong design stimulus in a field where very little interesting contemporary design is being done,” there was in fact already an active practice of modern rug design in the United States.27 Designer and modern rug business owner Ralph Pearson promoted this enterprise claiming, “The hooked rug is a logical medium … for a modern renaissance in rug design.”28 The application of modern abstraction to the format energized interior spaces while appealing to

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both nostalgia for traditional American production and a desire for newness and innovation. “In addition to being a typical American process,” Pearson elaborated, “[the hooked rug] is extremely flexible and therefore adaptable to modern creative design with its informality and daring colors, lines, and spaces.”29 New York Times critic Walter Rendell Storey also encouraged the use of new styles in rug design, writing, “Each piece of decorative furniture necessarily is stamped, either consciously or unconsciously, with the mode of its age. So the creation of hooked rugs with modern designs is a tribute to the utility of a craft form.”30 Championing the adaptability of the rug format and an intrinsic connection between the modern “mode of its age” and decorative production, Storey and others encouraged this alliance of modernist style and traditional process as a way to reinvigorate the medium and benefit the homes that would be enhanced by such objects. Noyes and Carson did not highlight prior examples of modern American rugs in their explanation of New Rugs, however. They also did not explicitly reference the Bauhaus, though connecting art with industry—so central to Gropius’s ideology—was clearly an important component of the exhibition.31 Instead they cited rug design projects by European painters as a model for connecting fine art and functional design, capitalizing on the higher cultural standing of French artists at the time. In France, the collaboration between modern artists and the textile industry was extremely active, with firms recruiting artists to create designs or artists independently experimenting with the rug format. In the press release for New Rugs Carson explained, “Similar projects have been undertaken in Europe where many of the outstanding painters have been commissioned to design rugs and tapestries.”32 The comparison was evident to reviewers of the show including Emily Genauer, who in a generally positive review in Arts and Antiques commented, “They’ve been doing this sort of thing in France for years … Picasso, Rouault, Braque, Miro, Lurcat and others of the most distinguished School of Paris painters have not felt the designing of rugs and tapestries beneath them.”33 Here, Genauer implicitly referenced the hierarchy of high and low that conventionally shaped attitudes toward fine art and design. The notion that European modernists did not find textile design “beneath them” offered validation for the corresponding American experiments in the medium. Perhaps stemming from an anxiety about the commercial nature of design work, many individuals in the American art world were increasingly invested in defining fine art as a separate sphere. The opposition to connecting arts that had a practical use (such as textiles) with paintings and sculpture may have been fostered by defensiveness about the perceived inferiority of American work in comparison to European counterparts. While this kind of self-consciousness did not affect all artists—many US artists were eager to cross between design and fine art—the interest in protecting the seemingly fragile status of American painting and sculpture led to the deepening of artificial boundaries between high and low in the American art world in general. MoMA’s New Rugs project pushed back against this trend and, looking to European models, explored how the work of modern artists might be applied to functional goods and how it might intervene in the consumer market.

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Evaluating Abstraction Noyes and Carson imagined that the collaboration between artists, manufacturers, and the museum for New Rugs would promote the value of modern abstraction as a relevant aesthetic language in an important area of design and home furnishing. The New Rugs press release mounted a defense of abstraction, presenting a lengthy statement by Stuart Davis elaborating on his approach to Flying Carpet (Figure 2.1): My rug design is a pure invention but its shapes, colors, and composition are directly related to sensations connected with airplane views. Several years ago I was a member of a jury to judge some murals for an airport. The jury was composed of politicians, professional people and artists. The murals were in a style commonly referred to as abstract and there was considerable reluctance on the part of politicians to accept them. As a final suggestion toward making a decision an airplane pilot was called in for his opinion. He professed himself ignorant of art but said that if the meaning of reality of the forms was in question he could accept them because he had seen similar shapes and colors very often in his flying experience.34

Davis’s anecdote referenced crucial debates about modernism and the criteria by which one could analyze abstract forms. Underscoring his beliefs about the potency of abstraction as a vehicle for artistic expression, Davis asserted that abstraction is derived from one’s experience of reality and that abstraction is, in essence, already inherent in the phenomenal world. In his recounting, the valuation of abstraction hinges upon the judgment of the airplane pilot, an individual who claims distance from the art world and thus is independent.35 The pilot’s approval of the abstract mural designs— based upon their visual similarity with his own observation—affirms the viability of the connection between abstraction and experience. The story addressed the general public’s incredulity about art and staged in miniature the debate about the validity of modern styles in popular opinion—a debate central to the MoMA mission. Davis did not directly address rug design, the complexity of working between media, or the hierarchy of art and craft. Instead he directed the audience’s attention to a broader justification of abstraction and proposed an equivalency between his Flying Carpet design and the mural painting. While aiming to make abstraction more approachable to viewers, New Rugs also used the prestige of fine art to elevate the status of the rugs and highlight their artistic merit. The installation emphasized the creative process of making, as described earlier, while the high price of the rugs reinforced their status as luxury objects. The rugs ranged from $85 for the smallest rug (for Charles Howard’s The Spot) to $835 (for a second rug by Howard, The Virgin). Flying Carpet was listed at a wholesale price of $685, far more expensive than a standard easel painting by Davis during the period.36 The rugs in the exhibition may have been symbolically more approachable than easel paintings, but the rugs were not attainable by a viewer of average means. By contrast, many other exhibitions at MoMA during the period emphasized the accessibility of

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good design for the middle-class consumer, with shows such as Useful Objects under $10 making the price point a determining factor in the material on view. Though the rugs displayed were available for purchase by custom order, New Rugs generated few sales, likely due to the high price of the works. Perhaps surprisingly, the artists invited to participate were not offered any funds for their labor at the outset. They would receive a partial commission only if a rug of their design sold, which made the project potentially less remunerative than the production of an easel painting.37 While MoMA intended New Rugs to improve design and promote abstraction through the synthesis of media, critics unsympathetic to abstract modernism seized upon this crossover potential as confirmation of abstraction’s lesser status. The reviews of the exhibition were favorable overall, but several played upon the boundaries of high and low to deliver backhanded compliments. Genauer praised New Rugs saying it was “as exciting and stimulating an event as the galleries have seen in months,” featuring “the most exquisite floor coverings imaginable,” but her review took a turn in its final lines.38 “I got a special satisfaction out of seeing this show,” she explained. “For years I’ve been saying of the paintings of A.E. Gallatin, Charles Howard, George L.K. Morris and some of the others, ‘They may not be art, but wouldn’t they be dandy designs for floor coverings!’ Turns out that they are, too.” Despite her recognition of European painters engaged in textile design, she upheld the notion that rugs were not “art” and that painters who failed to satisfy her aesthetic standards should resign themselves to that supposedly lesser format. Another review titled “Fistprints & Abstractions” in Time similarly jested at the adaptability of modern abstraction to floor coverings and suggested the exhibition was a fitting opportunity for some viewers to take out their frustrations on art they did not appreciate. “For people who had always wanted to trample on modern abstract art,” the review joked, “[New Rugs] provided a comprehensive if somewhat expensive ($85 to $835) opportunity.”39 Never mind the fact that visitors were not permitted to walk across the rugs on display—the mental image of putting modern art underfoot was apparently enough to excite detractors. Another reviewer took a less humorous tone and insisted that “in leading modern abstraction into such practical decorative fields instead of forcing it to compete in the field of easel painting, it is a step in the right direction.”40 No doubt such criticism dismayed MoMA leadership. While the idea of presenting modern abstraction as an aesthetic language that worked across media was appealing, the long-standing prejudices against practical or decorative formats held strong in popular press and perhaps the minds of the public. There are no notes in MoMA’s archives from Noyes, Carson, Barr, or any other MoMA staff commenting on the biting tone of the reviews. Carson, who was at that point handling all of the New Rugs organization and promotion, expressed satisfaction with the exhibition and praised both V’Soske and the painters for their work.41 Select reviews, however, serve as a partial explanation for why the museum did not pursue a similar project in the future.42 While it promised to be a productive opportunity to advance modern design, New Rugs opened a strain of criticism that harnessed conventional biases to denigrate modern abstraction. In the postwar period, the boundaries between media were solidified even further with the rise of Abstract Expressionism and the dominance of Clement Greenberg’s formalism. According

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to Greenberg, the decorative was the “specter that haunts modernist painting” and his theory of medium specificity championed the heroicization of painting at the expense of such formats as rug design.43 While MoMA has largely been associated with this formalist idea in art historical scholarship, New Rugs reveals the Department of Industrial Design’s ambitious approach to exploring the potential of modern abstraction during a period of experimentation at the museum, suggesting a more fluid and complex history of modern art at MoMA than has been previously told.

Notes 1

Invitation letter from Eliot F. Noyes to Irene Rice Pereira, December 5, 1941. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 188.2. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York [hereafter MoMA Archives, NY]. 2 Today Kauffer is more well known for his work in graphic design than painting; other artists (especially Zorach and Pereira) worked in several media. Because the exhibition planning and promotion consistently referred to the participating artists as “painters” and attached significance to the crossover, I use that label to categorize the group. See press release for New Rugs by American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 188.1. MoMA Archives, NY. 3 Dove explained that his schedule prohibited him from taking on the project at that time; there is no recorded explanation for Noguchi’s choice to decline. 4 Letter from Irene Rice Pereira to Eliot Noyes, December 8, 1941. New Rugs by American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 5 “Rugs Designed by U.S. Artists Shown,” New York World-telegram [n.d.]. MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY. 6 “Rugs Designed by U.S. Artists Shown,” New York World-telegram [n.d.]. MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY. 7 These details were included in the invitation letter from Eliot F. Noyes to Irene Rice Pereira, December 5, 1941 (MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY). 8 The artists’ preparatory designs varied greatly in media and size, from an oil on canvas by Morris (24 x 20 1/8 in.) to Zorach’s nearly full-scale gouache (41 3/4 x 94 7/8 in.) for Coral Sea. Most artists only had one or two rug studies presented, but the exhibit included ten gouache designs by Ferren for his untitled rug (New Rugs by American Artists Exhibition Checklist, MoMA Exhs., 188.1. MoMA Archives, NY). 9 Rugs by Davis, Gallatin, Howard, and Zorach were hung on the wall. Rugs by Ferren, Gorky, Kauffer, MacIver, and Pereira were exhibited on platforms four to eight inches from the ground, as was the second rug that Howard contributed to the exhibition, The Virgin (floor plan for New Rugs by American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY). 10 Provisional Charter of the Museum of Modern Art, September 1929. Quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., ed., “Chronicles,” in Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art 1929–1967 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 620. 11 The instruction that Barr received under medievalist Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton University provided an important basis for his conception of the integrated model of the arts. For more on Barr’s intellectual formation, see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

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12 The departments were combined again as the Department of Architecture and Design in 1949 with Philip Johnson as director of the department. 13 Noyes was chosen when Barr sent architect Wallace K. Harrison to Cambridge to ask Walter Gropius for recommendations for the position. Gropius had recently worked with MoMA on the Bauhaus: 1919–1928 exhibition of 1938–9. Gordon Bruce, Eliot Noyes (London: Phaidon, 2006), 53. 14 Invitation letter from Eliot F. Noyes to Irene Rice Pereira, December 5, 1941. MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 15 The exhibition appeared at the following locations: Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; Art Gallery of Toronto, Toronto, Canada; Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; and the gallery of the department store Frederick and Nelson in Seattle, Washington. 16 Invitation letter from Eliot F. Noyes to Irene Rice Pereira, December 5, 1941. MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 17 On the connection between MoMA and industry, Christopher Grunenberg offers a stringent critique, claiming that at MoMA modern art was “transformed into an aesthetic that was acceptable to American business without disturbing the social order.” Grunenberg, “The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across Europe and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 205. For other accounts of how the museum promoted art as a consumer good, see A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 18 After Noyes’s departure, Edgar Kauffman, Jr., became the director of the department. 19 Bruce, Eliot Noyes, 77. 20 Press release for New Rugs by American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 188.1. MoMA Archives, NY. 21 Press release for Rugs from the Crawford Shops Designed by American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 57.1. MoMA Archives, NY. 22 For more on the project, see Cynthia Fowler, Hooked Rugs: Encounters in American Modern Art, Craft and Design (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 148–55. 23 Letter from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to A. Conger Goodyear, October 2, 1936, Rugs from the Crawford Shops Designed by American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 57.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 24 Letter from President A. Conger Goodyear to Sarah Newmeyer, October 3, 1936, MoMA Exhs., 57.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 25 Noyes assembled a group of MoMA staff including himself to serve as a “sort of jury” for the design process, approving or rejecting the artists’ submitted designs. The process for Zorach’s submission was particularly involved, as she first submitted a batch of designs that Noyes and others did not approve. She subsequently sent another group of designs and the MoMA “jury” chose Coral Sea as the most fitting for rug fabrication (Letter from Eliot Noyes to Marguerite Zorach, January 30, 1942, MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY). 26 On this history, see Virginia G. Troy, The Modernist Textile: Europe and America, 1890–1940 (Aldershot, England: Lund Humphries, 2006). For more on the

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relationship between modernist rug design and American handcraft traditions in particular, see Fowler, Hooked Rugs. 27 Ralph Pearson had in fact written to Barr in 1940 and expressed his frustration that the museum had not recognized his work. On Pearson’s angry correspondence and Barr’s response, see Fowler, Hooked Rugs, 159. 28 Ralph Pearson, “Rugs in the Modern Manner,” Country Life, February 1929, 60. Quoted in Fowler, Hooked Rugs, 43. 29 Pearson, “Rugs in the Modern Manner,” 60. Quoted in Fowler, Hooked Rugs, 43. 30 Walter Rendell Storey, “Old and New Rivals in Decoration,” New York Times, May 6, 1928. 31 MoMA’s Bauhaus exhibition in 1938–9 included examples of rug design among the variety of media demonstrating the school’s integrative approach to art making. 32 Press release, New Rugs for American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 188.1. MoMA Archives, NY. 33 Emily Genauer, “Exhibits Are Broad in Scope: Rugs by 10 Painters Make Exciting Show,” Arts and Antiques [n.d.], 5. MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY. 34 Press release, New Rugs for American Artists, MoMA Exhs., 188.1. MoMA Archives, NY. 35 The dynamics of class or social position play a crucial role in this anecdote, as Davis casts the politicians in opposition to modern art while the evaluation of a whitecollar professional who can relate abstraction to everyday life is the decisive voice. 36 That same year, for example, the collector Roy R. Neuberger purchased the painting Barber Shop (1930) by Stuart Davis for $250. “I paid $250 for that terrific Stuart Davis,” Neuberger recounted many years later, “In 1942, $250 was a lot of money.” Roy R. Neuberger, Alfred Connable, and Roma Connable, The Passionate Collector: Eighty Years in the World of Art (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003), 76. According to inflation calculations, $685 is equivalent to a price of $10,276 in 2017. “Rugs for Exhibition with Price List,” MoMA Exhs., 188.1. MoMA Archives, NY. 37 “Because the making of the rugs constitutes an investment of several thousand dollars,” MoMA’s letter of invitation read, “the V’Soske Shops cannot offer a fee to the artists unless the rug is sold, in which case they will pay the artists 25% of the sale price of the rug.” Invitation letter from Eliot F. Noyes to Irene Rice Pereira, December 5, 1941. MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 38 Genauer, “Exhibits Are Broad in Scope: Rugs by 10 Painters Make Exciting Show,” Arts and Antiques [n.d.], 5. MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY. 39 “Fistprints & Abstractions,” Time, July 13, 1942. MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY. 40 “Artists and Rugs,” New York Times, July 1, 1942. MoMA Exhs., 188.3. MoMA Archives, NY. 41 See letter from Alice M. Carson to Stanislav V’Soske, June 22, 1942. MoMA Exhs., 188.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 42 Noyes left MoMA in 1946 to focus on his own architectural practice. The subsequent director of industrial design, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., pursued a range of inventive exhibitions including the Good Design series, which included a seal of approval bestowed upon select goods available in department stores. But the experiment of modern painters creating rug designs was not revisited at MoMA. 43 Clement Greenberg, “Milton Avery” (1957), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43.

3

MoMA’s Child Artists: The Politics of Creating Creative Children John R. Blakinger

A photograph of the Young People’s Gallery, an unusual space MoMA dedicated to educational programs for and about children, shows child artists seated on bright bucket chairs at kid-sized easels, paintbrushes in hand (Figure 3.1). They are gathered during the 1943–4 holiday season for the second annual Children’s Holiday Circus—an event for kids only (no grown-ups allowed, though they could watch from afar) variously called the Children’s Holiday Fair, the Children’s Holiday Carnival, the Children’s Festival of Modern Art, and eventually just the Children’s Art Carnival. Boys and girls spanning ages four to eight create vivid pictures: landscapes, street scenes, family portraits, and purely abstract images.1 Paintings completed by other young artists hang just above each child’s easel, while reproductions of works by artists in MoMA’s collection are fixed above. These inspirational images include an abstraction by Joan Miró, visible at the upper left; at various times, the Young People’s Gallery exhibited playful works in copy and original by modern masters like Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Marc Chagall. MoMA provided these young artists with the unique opportunity to create art in an institution—the art museum—typically understood as devoted primarily to art’s collection and display. The value of this experience is addressed in another photograph from a later carnival that depicts two boys engaged in an artistic process unencumbered by self-consciousness or the burden of expectations (Figure 3.2). News articles from the period describe how children “gleefully” discovered the gallery’s assorted amusements.2 Through these educational initiatives, MoMA challenged common distinctions between adults and children—the work of both was on view, thus blurring traditional boundaries based on age—but also the typical function of museum space. Children studied art and made their own while exploring an interactive learning environment filled with music, puzzles, toys, and workstations, where they learned to make stained glass windows from plastic gels and mobiles from metal hangers. The goal of these efforts was to teach children a skill that MoMA, and art educators across the country, believed was crucial for living a fulfilling life in modern America: how to be creative.

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Figure 3.1  Michael Caputo. Installation view of the exhibition Children’s Holiday Circus of Modern Art (December 8, 1943 – January 3, 1944). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

But these photographs, and the events they document, also raise questions about the purpose of cultivating creativity—and showing it off on gallery walls, in publicity shots, and through media coverage. Why did MoMA prioritize these educational initiatives? To be sure, they helped MoMA open its doors to new audiences by promoting an inclusive version of modernism for visitors of all ages. But what were

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Figure 3.2  Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Participants at the exhibition Children’s Holiday Fair of Modern Art (December 2, 1947 – January 4, 1948). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

the politics of promoting creative children? MoMA founded the Young People’s Gallery in 1937, during the Great Depression. It inaugurated the carnival in 1942, at the beginning of US involvement in the Second World War. Its educational programming expanded dramatically in the early years of the Cold War. This timing is not a coincidence.

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This essay argues that MoMA’s educational initiatives for young people were explicitly intended to teach children liberal values that would help strengthen American democracy during the Great Depression and especially the Second World War and Cold War. For MoMA, “creativity” was an ideological concept—a discourse based on freedom of thought and imagination that rhetorically framed museum programs as potent antidotes to totalitarian and authoritarian ways of seeing and thinking, as imagined under both fascism and communism. In other words, creative freedom was understood as a cognate for political freedom. Teaching children to be creative was a political project, one MoMA pursued in response to current events. MoMA’s educational initiatives no doubt provided children with valuable enrichment, but they also served these larger institutional and national goals. Moreover, “creativity” was a highly abstract ideological concept, a discourse that was malleable enough to accommodate powerful yet ambiguously concealed meanings. Promoting educational programs that encouraged creativity allowed MoMA to address current events obliquely, to promote liberal values without relying solely on the exhibition of overt displays of patriotic propaganda. This story centers on an important figure in MoMA’s early history: Victor D’Amico, the pioneering art educator who established MoMA’s Department of Education (first known as the Educational Project) in 1937 and introduced experimental initiatives like children’s exhibitions and art-making workshops. Museums had long hosted adult art instruction, but MoMA’s programs for children helped popularize the concept of art education and were soon widely imitated, becoming standard practice. D’Amico’s pedagogy drew above all from John Dewey, whose progressive philosophy emphasized process over product and learning by doing. Dewey understood art as a humanistic pursuit that encouraged a tolerant, ethical, and democratic worldview.3 This essay considers the political valence of MoMA’s and D’Amico’s educational programs, revealing how both mobilized intertwined ideas about creativity and democracy derived from Dewey for expressly ideological ends. While other scholars are largely sympathetic to the progressive values behind the museum’s educational mission, I show how these values also served instrumental midcentury political goals, demonstrating how events in the world at large structured events taking place in the museum.4

Children’s Art as Modern Art While D’Amico figures largely in this story, MoMA’s enthusiasm for children’s art notably predates his tenure; it is rooted in the very origins of the museum. MoMA’s founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., had a long-standing fascination with the subject. He originally imagined a doctoral thesis for his degree in art history exploring the beginnings of modern art in, as he writes somewhat awkwardly, “various waves of enthusiasm for the medieval, oriental, pre-Hellenic, African, children, pre-Columbian, Victorian, subconscious etc., etc.”5 This interest in children’s art as an analogue to modern art also pervaded MoMA’s early exhibitions. In the catalogue to his landmark 1936 show Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr describes children’s art as a source for both Miró and Paul Klee.6

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More controversially, Barr displayed actual work by children as “comparative material” in his other landmark show of 1936, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.7 The exhibition caused an uproar; collector Katherine Dreier of the Societé Anonyme was outraged, believing that such pedestrian artifacts of visual culture confused the public—a position confirmed by the show’s mixed reception in the popular press.8 Just months before Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism opened, the museum even acquired nine watercolors by children for its collection; the paintings had appeared in New Horizons in American Art, a 1936 survey of art sponsored by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, as examples of classroom work supported by the program (the show was likely the first time the museum put children’s art on its walls). MoMA compensated the artists with museum memberships and copies of the catalogue. A press release published on the occasion of the acquisition quotes Barr, who argues that the “paintings of children have for many years been admired by modern artists” as a key to the creative process.9 He specifically cites the “imaginative freedom” in children’s art—a quality that has “often been the envy of grown-up artists.”10 Another press release explains that Barr “is particularly interested in children’s art and has a private collection of their work,” presumably a study collection to be compared and contrasted with modernist examples.11 MoMA began using children’s art in more complex ways after Barr hired D’Amico in 1937, thereby making educational programs a central component of the institution’s mandate. At trustee and then treasurer Nelson Rockefeller’s urging, Barr had commissioned the art historian Artemas C. Packard of Dartmouth College in 1936 to produce a study of the museum and its purpose. Packard was an adherent of progressive education and a follower of Dewey, and it is therefore not surprising that his resulting report proposed “facilities for popular instruction in accordance with the public need.”12 D’Amico would fulfill this charge. D’Amico had free rein to innovate in his new role. While running the Educational Project on a part-time basis, he introduced novel initiatives including slide talks for schools and meetings for art teachers. He also established the Young People’s Gallery, where students could curate shows and display their work; there were more than thirty-five children’s art exhibitions in MoMA’s first twenty years alone. These efforts expanded considerably during and after the Second World War when MoMA founded the Children’s Art Carnival and the War Veterans’ Art Center, held classes for kids and their parents, published how-to books, recorded a television program, and even exported the carnival abroad.13 One of MoMA’s most significant educational activities was the formation in 1942 of the Committee on Art in American Education and Society (later simply the Committee on Art Education), a think-tank-like organization that provided an intellectual framework for the museum’s educational programs; the committee gave MoMA and D’Amico vast influence over the direction of art education as a professional field, especially through the elaborate annual conferences that D’Amico chaired and that MoMA sponsored and hosted. These myriad initiatives dramatically transformed the function of children’s art at MoMA, turning these works into sites for potent and often expressly political meanings. What Barr understood as the “imaginative freedom” in such images made them, and art education itself, useful for a range of applications.

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Hitler Youth and MoMA Youth D’Amico conceived of MoMA’s educational initiatives more specifically in terms of politics after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the museum at large began directing its activities to the war effort. Like other exhibitions from the period, including Road to Victory (1942), Camouflage for Civilian Defense (1942), and the National War Poster Competition (1943), many of the shows in the Young People’s Gallery became explicitly propagandistic. Anti-hoarding Pictures by New York School Children (1942) displayed designs by children for actual propaganda encouraging wartime rationing. Other shows, like Chinese Children’s War Pictures (1944), did not offer propaganda so much as satire; the exhibition included caricatures mocking Japanese soldiers and a child’s painting of a “bulbous Hitler in bilious green wash.”14 But the ideological charge of children’s images was not always so heavy-handed. Consider a drawing displayed in the 1942 show Children’s Painting and the War (Figure 3.3). Created by a boy of ten, it portrays an imagined aerial strike on Dover, Delaware. The drawing is ambiguous, suggesting fear—it shows an attack on the boy’s hometown—and fascination. It is also unremarkable, the type of drawing made by kids everywhere, likely inspired by any number of depictions in newspapers, comic strips, magazines like Life, or even shows at MoMA (Children’s Painting and the War opened just weeks after Road to Victory closed). For D’Amico, the image

Figure 3.3  Crayon drawing by a boy, aged ten, Dover Elementary School, included in the exhibition Children’s Painting and the War (November 18–December 13, 1942). Victor D’Amico Papers, VI.38. The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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was ideological because of its content but also its aesthetics. In an article on the exhibition, he describes not only the “startlingly effective” themes in war images like this one but also, more importantly, the “direct and spontaneous” quality of the child’s inscriptions, the “vitality” that results from an “independence of thought and imagination.”15 D’Amico reads an abstract set of meanings into the work not through subject matter but through form and style, what he calls “scribbles,” which record the freedom, flexibility, and openness of the creative process—values that could also be described as inherently democratic.16 D’Amico’s extensive writings reveal how he used rhetoric to carefully connect children’s art and art education to such meanings. He begins Creative Teaching in Art, a 1942 textbook, with a brief statement embracing a teaching method that could “arouse in the individual some desire or need for creative expression.”17 Such pedagogy explicitly opposed “indoctrination” or teaching based on repetition and imitation; while he may have had in mind the strict classroom instruction of the Victorian or Edwardian periods, such a phrase circa 1942 also hints at totalitarianism and authoritarianism (the revised preface in the second edition of the book, dated 1953, ties indoctrination to “dictatorial procedures of the past,” alluding to actual dictators like Hitler and Stalin. This edition was illustrated with photographs taken at MoMA of children and their art).18 As D’Amico explains, “The child becomes enslaved”—the word choice here is alarming—through indoctrination, prevented from “discovering himself an artist who lives, feels, sees, and reacts to life sensitively and aesthetically.”19 D’Amico disapproved of teaching tools that he understood as dictatorial impediments to creativity: coloring books, paint-by-numbers kits, and mail-order or televised courses that taught realism through rote learning. But D’Amico did not support a teaching method that was completely open-ended: the “laissez-faire” approach, as he derisively called it, would let self-expression become self-indulgence.20 Instead, he advocated a balanced form of creative freedom, a process that was flexible but still focused, open but with limits, and which required children to work together and follow instructions.21 D’Amico’s pedagogy was surprisingly consistent across his career, but the specific ends to which he aimed it changed over time; he positioned his methods as variously democratic, anti-fascist, or anti-communist in response to the moment. For example, in the 1930s he wrote—again with apt choice of words—about the need for a “New Deal for Art Education.”22 A pull-quote from a 1936 news article exclaims, “NEGLECT OF ARTS DECRIED: They Could Help Democracy More, Victor D’Amico Says.”23 In the 1940s, a report jointly authored by D’Amico along with Packard and other members of the Progressive Education Association similarly argued that art education “is vital for democracy.”24 In the 1950s, D’Amico published a short but revealing essay titled “Creative Expression: A Discipline for Democracy.” It critiqued teaching methods that would produce “individuals who lack independence of thought and action and are easy prey for dictators.”25 The point is that D’Amico framed creativity—regardless of its authentic benefits—as a response to ideological demands, whether that meant the New Deal, the Second World War, or the Cold War; his discourse was adaptable, his agenda malleable for the moment.26

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D’Amico’s motives were never secret; he presented his philosophy in no uncertain terms. In Art Education in Wartime (1943), a didactic exhibition in the Young People’s Gallery made of photographic panels and text, D’Amico demonstrated “the role that art plays in the life of a democratic people in peace or at war.” Panels illustrated “the permanent values of creative expression, its essential and undeniable contribution to the war effort, and its tasks for the building of peace” in sections labeled “art in a democracy” and “art education mobilizes for victory.”27 Some panels even included images of children’s art, like a boy’s drawing of an aerial attack recalling the work displayed in Children’s Painting in the War (Figure 3.3), which had closed a month earlier. D’Amico’s association of creativity with democracy was inversely related to the prevailing understanding of art under authoritarian regimes. D’Amico celebrated aesthetic criteria such as expression that fascists instead attacked as evidence of “degenerate art.”28 He was also likely familiar with studies of art by children living in totalitarian societies. In Art under a Dictatorship, from 1954, the scholar Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt describes art education as a means of oppression in both National Socialism and Soviet Communism and presents children’s art as a document revealing how control operates aesthetically, as a force structuring ways of seeing and thinking.29 A section titled “Strait Jackets for the Youngsters” analyzes the visual traits in images made by children in totalitarian and authoritarian societies: The lines are straight, precise, and sharp … Everything is neat and clear; there is a general atmosphere of orderliness and discipline … Symmetry prevails and so do straight verticals and horizontals, neatly cutting each other at right angles … Individual symbols are mechanically repeated without variation.30

Like D’Amico, Lehman-Haupt saw ideology in formal qualities. The excessively organized artwork of children living in oppressive socities indicates a “frightened servility” and an “amazing conformity.” Under dictatorship, the child artist’s “urgent desire for individual expression” is repressed; the art teacher is nothing more than a “drill sergeant on the march to realism.” Art education in Nazi Germany ultimately aimed “to make the person a better Nazi.”31 Lehmann-Haupt’s comments are hardly statements of fact, and his programmatic reading of all straight lines and every right angle as evidence of domination is obviously reductive. But both his and D’Amico’s interpretations suggest how highly charged historical moments allow and maybe require that one read highly politicized meanings into images; something as seemingly innocent as children’s art can become a fraught ideological artifact in which politics writ large are manifest in form and style. Children’s art was also a product of pedagogy, further suggesting that education could be used to actively promote particular political values. Lehmann-Haupt’s claim that art education was a “major force by which to influence, condition, and mold … the individual” could well describe MoMA’s objectives.32 To teach a controlled line might create a controlled mind, but to teach an expressive one might create a more expressive individual, and thus—for D’Amico—a more democratic child.

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In effect, even exhibitions in the Young People’s Gallery that seemed completely anodyne, devoid of clearly stated agendas—shows like Creative Art by American Children (1946) or even Art Materials for High Schools and Colleges (1947)—could still carry such agendas. An exhibition titled Developing Creativeness in Children (1955) was especially blunt in this type of messaging.33 One photo panel depicts students copying a teacher who draws a sphere and cylinder. “Creativeness is hindered or even

Figure 3.4  School Arts magazine, c. 1954.

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destroyed by indoctrinary teaching,” the panel warns (in his exhibition plans, D’Amico refers to the image as a “photo of old fashioned classroom with blackboard and fixed desks, children all doing what teacher is demonstrating”). The next panel shows the resulting student works as a regimented, repeating grid or what D’Amico describes as an “all-over pattern of similar art work.”34 An image of Hitler Youth on the march is superimposed over the panel. A spread published in School Arts on occasion of the exhibition includes all three images in a single compelling layout (Figure 3.4). The equation of particular types of children’s art and art education with the Hitler Youth— and the implicit contrast between the Hitler Youth and MoMA’s democratic youth—is hyperbolic. But it is also a comparison that D’Amico had made many times before. In a 1931 article, he similarly declares that classrooms should have “no depressing blackboards, no cumbersome screwed-down desks or tables,” all of which he linked to the aesthetics of control: “How can we teach freedom in a room that is shackled with locks and where every usable piece of furniture is pinioned to the floor? The mind and spirit are also shackled and pinioned.”35 The panel’s example also draws from a 1913 syllabus for a fifth-grade class, as indicated in the School Arts spread; D’Amico borrows an illustration of indoctrination that a previous generation of educators, Dewey among them, would have critiqued as merely conservative, but adapts it in terms of immediate threats, namely fascism and communism.

Children’s Art Education, Weapon of the Cold War MoMA and D’Amico used related ideas about creativity and democracy to turn children’s art and art education into ideological instruments, tools to be wielded in response to current events. But the scale of these ambitions ultimately extended beyond the confines of the museum—beyond the Young People’s Gallery and its exhibitions, classes, and carnivals—to the field of art education at large. The Committee on Art Education, founded by D’Amico and sponsored by MoMA, gave the museum a platform for spreading the arguments that first appeared in its gallery to teachers across the country. The committee was thus a crucial aspect of MoMA’s educational program, a way to advance its pedagogical and political aims to the widest possible audience. In fact, the committee had argued for the use of art education as a political tool since its very inception. In announcing the establishment of the committee in 1942, for example, D’Amico declared: “The committee is art education’s answer to fascism and its contempt for creative art. We hope to mobilize the art educators and students of America … to work for victory.”36 One of their first tasks was the production of a pamphlet titled “Art Education, Weapon of Democracy.”37 The agenda could not be more succinctly stated. But the committee’s scope broadened greatly in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In a memorandum circulated throughout the museum about the committee’s 1946 conference, D’Amico describes the “vital importance” of the upcoming meeting “to all those who are interested in the future course of world events.”38 Such remarks indicate the global aspirations of MoMA’s and D’Amico’s

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program. “Every group or individual charged with the education of youth carries an enlarged share of directing the fate of mankind.” These comments were not simply a justification of professional relevance, however; D’Amico is very specific in enumerating exactly how art education, through the figure of the art teacher, might influence human society: In fact, the art teacher—the teacher of a creative and an international language— has a task at once intimately personal and ultimately one-worlded. The creative art is the common fundamental aspect of this international language. It is through this creative expression that we can find our common humanity. The art teacher, thus, is in a favored position to help create attitudes of wide understanding. The art teacher can and should provide experiences leading to world citizenship in democratic living; Help lay a safe foundation of “one worldedness”; Make known, both implicitly and explicitly, the FACT that the studio classroom encompasses the basic choices facing mankind. The art teacher must fully realize that to do otherwise would be to nurture the seeds of destruction.39

Here, D’Amico promotes art education not only as democratic, but also as a means of building “one world,” as put forth by the postwar “one-world” movement, which advocated global cooperation as a defense against future war.40 Children’s art was particularly appropriate for such a project; the experience of childhood and of art defies national boundaries—both are international, even universal. The conference followed this program in its interdisciplinary content; it included, for example, a talk by anthropologist Margaret Mead that explored how “we are no longer obsolete entities called ‘nations,’ but different kinds of people living in one world,” with specific emphasis on actions art educators “may take to further an understanding and application of this concept.”41 At the next committee conference, in 1947, MoMA presented the purpose of art education in extremely exaggerated terms. Much of the conference was mundane and revolved around practical sessions about topics like curriculum development. But it concluded dramatically. First, the museum screened a “color film of Operations Crossroads, Bikini tests, U.S. Navy release”—the footage of the US military’s first atomic weapons test since bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the test was a disaster, spreading radioactive fallout across the Pacific).42 To show nuclear blasts—images of immense destructive power—at a conference about educating children was extremely dissonant. It visually emphasized the do-or-die stakes for art education at MoMA and across the country by contrasting destruction with the power of creation, as embodied by creative children. René D’Harnoncourt, who would soon become Director of the Museum and served as UNESCO’s Counselor on the Arts in the summer of 1946, followed the screening with comments relating art, and by extension art education, to the shocking footage (it was likely D’Harnoncourt’s idea to use the film as a prelude to his remarks). A press release titled “Art Mightier Than Atom” quotes D’Harnoncourt’s lecture:

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Modern in the Making We know that no amount of armaments and political negotiations based on fear will give us permanent security until we assert our passion for a full and creative life in a positive will to peace … Many of us are accustomed to consider [the arts] either a luxury reserved for the rich or a leisure-time activity … They are, in fact, indispensable for the real understanding of any nation or any group of people and without them, international understanding and collaboration would be impossible.43

D’Harnoncourt suggests that art—and art education, by proxy—could teach liberal values like “understanding” and “collaboration.” MoMA offers creativity as a force more powerful than the bomb; to cultivate creativity in the child could potentially prevent nuclear war. In later decades, MoMA would specifically exhibit Abstract Expressionism as a “weapon of the Cold War,” and D’Amico would even send the Children’s Art Carnival to international locales under a similar premise in the 1950s and 1960s.44 But the 1947 conference demonstrates that D’Amico’s work had already become entangled and enmeshed with an ideological mission. The “weapon of the Cold War” was not just modern art by artists like Pollock and Rothko, but also modern art education. The museum’s educational programs not only predated plans to send American art abroad, they also functioned somewhat differently, perhaps more effectively; as pedagogical initiatives, they were intended to actively teach values directly to children, not to passively project messages from the gallery wall. The irony is that while D’Amico and D’Harnoncourt formulated a project generally aligned with American diplomacy during the Cold War, far-right reactionaries assailed the museum’s efforts as wholly un-American. Congressman George A. Dondero, a Republican from Michigan, infamously singled out MoMA in his notorious 1949 broadside against modernism delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the speech, titled “Modern Art Shackled to Communism,” Dondero specifically mentions MoMA’s educational programs as a communist plot, focusing in particular on the speakers D’Amico invited to the committee conferences. “Last year, in 1948, the Museum of Modern Art brought Herbert Read here from England”—the British critic was a socialist—“to address the sixth annual conference of the committee on art education, a committee of 1,000 American art educators and teachers.” Dondero accused these participants of offering “their bared breasts for free injections of the evil virus of the ‘isms,’”—a reference to the various artistic movements (“isms”) that constituted modern art. He blamed MoMA and Read for using these movements to instill values in children that were not just liberal but dangerously libertine: “antiChristian, antisanity, antimorality, and anti-American.”45 The insinuation was that teaching art could corrupt the country. It is significant that Dondero’s attack was targeted not only against modern art or even modern art at MoMA, but MoMA’s modern art education, as represented by the annual conference of the committee (in other speeches, Dondero also chastised D’Amico’s rehabilitative work with veterans).46 In response to Dondero’s continued diatribes over multiple years, Viktor Lowenfeld, perhaps the most important art educator at the time and an active member of MoMA’s committee, privately urged D’Amico, in his role as chairman, to take a stand against Dondero:

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This is exactly the same technique as has been used previously by Fascists and also by Soviet dictators: to use a brand of patriotism to cover the desire for power and regimentation; only the brand of patriotism changes. In Germany the National Socialistic patriotism for the super race was used to eliminate individual differences in art expression (degenerate art).47

Lowenfeld asked D’Amico to publish a text comparing Dondero to Hitler and Stalin; D’Amico subsequently proposed to D’Harnoncourt that “the Museum of Modern Art and the Committee together express their feeling in opposition” in some way.48 In the end, Barr offered a more muted response on behalf of the museum at large, a defense of modern art rather than a critique of the Republican Congressman.49 The consequence of the episode, however, is less MoMA’s official statement than the way Lowenfeld and D’Amico theorized art and art education as political; as Lowenfeld puts it, “[C]ontemporary art constitutes a ‘glorification’ of individualism and is therefore a most powerful weapon against Fascism and collectivistic thinking.”50 This had been one of D’Amico’s basic arguments since his arrival at MoMA. D’Amico was unwavering in his belief that using art to teach children a tolerant, ethical, and democratic worldview could change society for the better. His progressive philosophy is persuasive, and his embrace of creativity is compelling. But the fundamental importance of these humanistic principles ultimately does not negate the fact that they also served ideological and instrumental ends.

Notes 1 2 3

4

See the published photographs of the gallery in the Victor D’Amico Papers [hereafter VDA], IV.a.i.2. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York [hereafter MoMA Archives, NY]. “Children Urged at Art Festival to Try Painting,” New York Herald Tribune, March 11, 1942. This article refers to the spring 1942 Children’s Festival of Modern Art. For more on D’Amico’s professional activities, see Briley Rasmussen, “The Laboratory on 53rd Street: Victor D’Amico and the Museum of Modern Art, 1937–1969,” Curator 53, no. 4 (October 2010): 451–64; and Carol Morgan, “From Modernist Utopia to Cold War Reality: A Critical Moment in Museum Education,” in Studies in Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: Continuity and Change, vol. 5, ed. John Elderfield (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 150–73. See also Doris Lerman, “50 Years of Humanizing the Arts: Victor D’Amico,” Roundtable Reports 5, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 4–7; and the references in Mary Anne Staniszeweksi, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). For D’Amico’s connection to kid-centered consumer culture, see Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Mid-century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 147–86. For D’Amico’s impact on artists, see Suzanne P. Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 27–51. In addition to Ogata, Designing the Creative Child, see Michael Wakeford, “The Aesthetic Republic: Art, Education, and Social Imagination in the United States,

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1900–1960” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014); and Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 181–97. For the politics of creativity broadly, see Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 35–62. 5 Barr quoted in Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 148. Barr was especially interested in the work of art historian Paul Ganz’s son. 6 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 68, 179–82. 7 See Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 237. Two drawings are reproduced in the catalogue. 8 See Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 148n8; and Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (London: Ashgate, 2015), 25. 9 Press release dated October 6, 1936. 10 Ibid. 11 Sarah Newmeyer in a press release dated October 5, 1936. 12 Quoted in Morgan, “From Modernist Utopia to Cold War Reality,” 153. See also A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 94–5. 13 D’Amico surveys these projects in Experiments in Creative Teaching: A Progress Report on the Department of Education (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1960). 14 From a press release titled “Exhibition of War Pictures by Chinese Children Opens at Museum of Modern Art” and dated April 4, 1944. See also Mai-mai Sze, “Chinese Children’s War Pictures,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 11, no. 5 (April 1944): 15–17. 15 Victor E. D’Amico, “Children’s Art and the War: What Does the War Mean to Our Children?” Design 44, no. 5 (January 1, 1943): 6, 10. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Victor D’Amico, Creative Teaching in Art (Scranton: International Textbook Company, 1942), v. 18 Victor D’Amico, Creative Teaching in Art, revised edition (Scranton: International Textbook Company, 1953 [1942]), viii. 19 D’Amico, Creative Teaching in Art, 1942, v. 20 Ibid. 21 As Fred Turner describes it, the goal broadly in this period was to raise “openminded, empathetic, emotionally flexible children.” See Turner, Democratic Surround, 191. 22 Victor E. D’Amico, “Toward a New Art Education,” Progressive Education 10 (December 1933): 461, 463. 23 “Unbiased Teaching of History Urged,” New York Times, November 15, 1936. 24 The Visual Arts in General Education: A Report of the Committee on the Function of Art in General Education (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940), 150. 25 Victor D’Amico, “Creative Expression: A Discipline for Democracy,” Child Study 29, no. 4 (1952): 11. 26 Creativity was also structured against concepts of conformity in American culture, like those studied by David Riesman and William H. Whyte. See Ogata, Designing the Creative Child, 10–16; Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American

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Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 124–34; and Cohen-Cole, Open Mind, 35–62. 27 Victor D’Amico, “Art Education in Wartime,” Design 44, no. 8 (April 1, 1943): 9. The show coincided with the first meeting of the Committee on Art Education. A draft press release for the show even compared democratic values with fascistic ones; see Turner, Democratic Surround, 185. 28 It is relevant that many important art educators had fled fascism. For example, Henry Schaeffer-Simmern emigrated from Germany in 1937 and Viktor Lowenfeld emigrated from Austria in 1938. Both were leading figures in the field and involved in MoMA’s Committee on Art Education; both advocated expressive trends that opposed regimented teaching. See Lowenfeld’s, Creative and Mental Growth: A Textbook on Art Education (New York: Macmillan, 1947) and Schaefer-Simmern’s, The Unfolding of Artistic Activity: Its Basis, Process, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950). 29 Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 160. 30 Ibid., 173. 31 Ibid., 182. For more on Lehmann-Haupt, see Barbara McCloskey, The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 165–6; and Wakeford, “The Aesthetic Republic,” 314–15. 32 Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 160. 33 See also the references to this show in Wakeford, “The Aesthetic Republic,” 327–9; Ogata, Designing the Creative Child, 164; and Aiden O’Connor, “‘Developing Creativeness in Children’: Victor D’Amico at MoMA,” in Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900–2000, ed. Juliet Kinchin and Aiden O’Connor (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 180. 34 Plans for the exhibition are in VAD, IV.137. MoMA Archives, NY. 35 Victor E. D’Amico, “The Modern Art Room,” Progressive Education 8 (November 1931): 575. 36 D’Amico quoted in Thomas C. Linn, “Art Education Committee Is Organized to Foster Creative Work during Wartime,” New York Times, October 11, 1942. At the committee’s first meeting, a representative from the US Office of Education made similar arguments. See “Art Teachers’ Role in War Is Discussed; Told We Should Use ‘Powerful Weapon,’” New York Times, January 24, 1943. 37 Victor D’Amico, “Art for Victory,” Design 45, no. 2 (October 1, 1943): 15. The pamphlet was never published. 38 Memorandum from D’Amico to Helen Ward, Monroe Wheeler Papers [hereafter MW], I.217. MoMA Archives, NY. 39 Ibid. 40 The “one world” concept and phrase gained traction during the Second World War partially through the work of Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate. See Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943). 41 Ibid. Mead represents the proximity of the culture and personality school of anthropology to D’Amico; Mead was also a member of the Progressive Education Association, which sponsored the 1940 report The Visual Arts in General Education. See note 24. For more on these connections see Turner, The Democratic Surround. 42 The conference program is in MW, I.30. MoMA Archives, NY. 43 Quoted in a press release titled “Art Mightier Than Atom” and dated April 27, 1947.

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44 Among other texts, see Max Kozloff, “American Painting during the Cold War,” Artforum 11, no. 9 (May 1973): 43–54; Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974): 39–41; and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). For the circulation of the carnival, see Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, 112–34; Ogata, Designing the Creative Child, 168; Turner, Democratic Surround, 127–30. 45 See George A. Dondero, “Modern Art Shackled to Communism,” Congressional Record, First Session, 81st Congress, August 16, 1949. This key section is missing from most abridged and anthologized versions of the speech. 46 See the reference to a “gallery-on-wheels” that visited hospitals and was run by a member of MoMA’s Committee on Art Education in George A. Dondero, “Communist Art in Government Hospitals,” Congressional Record, First Session, 81st Congress, March 11, 1949. 47 Lowenfeld to D’Amico, May 28, 1952. René D’Harnoncourt Papers [hereafter RDH], IV.59. MoMA Archives, NY. Lowenfeld had been involved with MoMA for more than a decade; his research inspired D’Amico’s 1940 show Visual and Non-visual Expression in Art. 48 D’Amico to D’Harnoncourt, July 8, 1952. RDH, IV.59. MoMA Archives, NY. 49 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Is Modern Art Communistic?” New York Times, December 14, 1952. 50 Lowenfeld to D’Amico, May 28, 1952. RDH, IV.59. MoMA Archives, NY.

4

Floor, Ceiling, Wall, Garden, Market: The Curatorial Scene of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art Andy Campbell

A sombrero vendor sits surrounded by his wares. He is the subject of a photograph reproduced in Frances Toor’s Guide to Mexico (Figure 4.1), a guidebook first published in 1936 and subsequently expanded and revised in 1940. That same year the Museum of Modern Art opened Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, a broad, free-wheeling survey of the arts and architecture of Mexico. The photograph in Toor’s Guide depicts the vendor holding the brim of one of his hats, showing it to a prospective customer outside the frame; others stand at the perimeter of the vendor’s stall. The photograph’s label reads in part: “Sombreros de Palma, Mexico.” Hats made of palm. This caption indicates that it is not the vendor, but the hats that are this photograph’s true subject. To this Toor added her own evocative caption: “In any Market.” Every other photograph in Toor’s Guide is described specifically in terms of either its geography or the cultural practices depicted therein. But this market, it is any market. And in this way I have found this photograph to be a useful touchstone for thinking about what I term the curatorial scene of Twenty Centuries—the result of the entanglement of transnational and institutional aspirations to present a deep history of Mexican art and visual culture predicated on producing the Mexican folk art object as a desirable, purchasable, and wearable commodity. Such transactional politics of display are nowhere better emblematized than in the transformation of MoMA’s sculpture garden—then a very recent addition to the exhibition space of the museum—into an imitation of a Mexican market, with makeshift stalls hung with ceramics and textiles. In any market … even at MoMA (Figure 4.2).

Floor Twenty Centuries was not originally meant for New York. André Dezarrois, custodian of the National Museums of France, organized the exhibition for the Jeu de Paume, following closely on the heels of the MoMA outpost exhibition Three Centuries of

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Figure 4.1 “Sombreros de Palma / In Any Market” in Frances Toor, Guide to Mexico (revised) (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1940): 125.

Figure 4.2  Installation view of the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (May 15– September 30, 1940). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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American Art. This suggests that Dezarrois saw such exhibitions as a component of broader international relations and cultural exchange. This is especially significant because of France’s history of military incursion into Mexico in the nineteenth century. When France declared war on Germany after the latter invaded Poland in September 1939, Twenty Centuries was necessarily put on hold. John McAndrew, curator of Architecture and Industrial Art at MoMA, knew about the stalled exhibition from his contacts with the artist Diego Rivera, who was to serve as one of the exhibition’s many curators. McAndrew communicated to his colleagues the status of the French exhibition, and soon thereafter, Nelson Rockefeller, MoMA’s president, arranged a meeting with Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas. While the details of what the two men discussed are not known, in the following days Twenty Centuries was rerouted to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.1 As if to underscore the importance of this change in programming, Rockefeller, who wielded a great deal of influence in running of the museum, communicated to Alfred Barr that the entire exhibition space of the newly built museum—three floors and the outdoor garden—be given over to the exhibition.2 Similar to other early exhibitions at MoMA, Twenty Centuries was an important curatorial testing ground. But it is unique in both its vast temporal scope and its organization. The exhibition attempted to make a case for the longevity and vitality of art produced in Mexico, incorporating objects as ancient as Olmec jade figures and heads (c. 1000–350 BCE) alongside the work of more contemporary artists such as José Clemente Orozco, who famously painted a multi-paneled mural (Dive Bomber and Tank) on the premises of MoMA in full view of museum visitors.3 Aspects of Twenty Centuries show up in subsequent exhibition programming as well—for example the success of Orozco’s “live” painting was followed by the Diné artists who completed a sand painting for museum visitors as part of the exhibition Indian Art of the United States (1941); additionally, the construction, exhibition, and sale of plans for a Marcel Breuer house situated in MoMA’s garden in 1948 echo the garden as market in Twenty Centuries.4 This essay considers the curatorial scene of Twenty Centuries, tracing its historical precedents and its reception. This nomenclature stems from queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s discussion of “scenes of relationality,” which she applies to everything from a traditional scene in a movie to the effects of an artwork and other forms of relationality (most specifically, sex).5 I am using the term to consider the development, organization, and reception of the curated relationship—a mediated spatial, phenomenological, and affective experience with things and between things. My conception of the curatorial scene certainly rhymes with Tony Bennett’s notion of the “exhibitionary complex,” which describes how knowledge and power are coordinated in the formation of a viewing public.6 Yet I would propose that curatorial scene might better name the centrality of curatorial and exhibition design work as a baseline relational form of authorship that puts makers, institutions, and publics of various sorts into coordination with one another. The effects of these arrangements rarely result in deep and lasting changes within the power relationships at the center of Bennett’s work; more often they feed into more temporary knowledge structures such as fashion trends.

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Twenty Centuries is an ideal exhibition to think through such relations, as it was curated by a host of Mexican art professionals in dialogue with the curatorial staff at MoMA. But before delving into the administrative structure and logics of the exhibition it is useful to first describe Twenty Centuries’ installation and its historical precedents. Installation photographs of Twenty Centuries reveal an exhibition that deployed an eclectic mix of display techniques to cleverly fill MoMA’s new Goodwin/ Stone building with over five thousand objects. John McAndrew, the supervisor and lead designer of the exhibition, installed the Ancient and Pre-Columbian works as they might appear within a contemporaneous anthropology or ethnographic museum— with dark walls and dramatic lighting (Figure 4.3). Smaller items in this section were grouped according to media or subject matter and placed in well-lit cases set flush with the wall. In displaying the Colonial arts of Mexico, McAndrew selectively used velvet wall coverings, connecting that section’s material with its ecclesiastic origins and purpose. The modern art section featured light-colored walls (white or near-white), with two-dimensional and small sculptural works hung on a consistent median line. This style of hang was typical of some of Alfred Barr’s installations at MoMA previous to Twenty Centuries and quickly became something of a “house style” for the museum. In this way the various floors of MoMA evoked an array of spaces: an ethnographic museum, a church, and in a self-affirming, if not self-reflexive move, MoMA itself.

Figure 4.3  Installation view of the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (May 15– September 30, 1940). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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The layout of Twenty Centuries included Ancient and Pre-Columbian art on the first floor galleries and in the garden (where large plaster casts of Coatlicue and Chac Mool joined the modernist sculpture already on display), Colonial art in portions of the second floor, and popular art in the rest of the second floor as well as part of the third floor and the garden. Modern art took up the remaining space in the third floor, with a small gallery set aside for Mexican children’s art, installed by Anne Stevens, under the supervision of MoMA’s director of education, Victor d’Amico. But Twenty Centuries was not the first large-scale exhibition of Mexican art in New York or even the United States. Wittingly or unwittingly, MoMA replicated many of the display strategies of two earlier exhibitions. The first of these, Exposición de Arte Popular, was initially held in Mexico City in 1921 and directly inspired a similar show that opened in Los Angeles the following year. The second is Mexican Arts, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1930, which went on to tour thirteen other venues throughout the United States. These are somewhat buried trails as art historian Anna Indych-López notes, because Nelson Rockefeller failed to mention either exhibition in his remarks about Twenty Centuries.7 Rockefeller instead positioned Twenty Centuries as “something that has never been done, even in Mexico, on so comprehensive a scale.”8 Looking at these earlier exhibitions proves otherwise and provides an important counter to the origin myths often promulgated around discussions of MoMA’s exhibitions—one that Rockefeller was clearly invested in promoting. Instead these two exhibitions reveal MoMA’s early curatorial scene, at least as it concerned the arts outside of Euro-American traditions as the outcome of a complex, and sometimes asymmetrical, dialogue with earlier exhibitions and institutional display practices. This requires us to eschew the typical question of how MoMA influenced the world, and instead consider how the world influenced MoMA. Commissioned for the centennial year of Mexican independence, Exposición de Arte Popular was organized by artists Jorge Enciso and Robert Montenegro. It was accompanied by a handsome two-volume catalogue, written and organized by Gerardo Murillo, working under the penname of Dr. Atl.9 In his working definition of arte popular, Atl included “all the manifestations of the skill and ingenuity of the people of Mexico,” items that range from “purely artistic” to “industrial” in character.10 Nor was Atl’s definition limited to art, for he included literary and musical works, yet even as his text celebrated the diversity of artistic expression it also homogenized, claiming all the arts of Mexico branded with the same “seal of vigor” of Mexico’s indigenous populations.11 In describing the photographs of Exposición de Arte Popular’s installation, art historian and curator James Oles rightly notes that the display “creates a visual space more appropriate to the realm of commerce than art,” and he further surmises that this was either a holdover of a “Victorian sensibility” or a “simple mirroring of the curio shops of the capital where folk art was most frequently displayed.”12 If this was true in Mexico City, the Los Angeles incarnation of the exhibition went one step further. Writer Katherine Anne Porter, one of the co-organizers of the US exhibition, relates how the exhibition’s objects were bought outright at the Mexico/California border by a Los Angeles dealer in order to avoid duty the US government attempted to levy.13 When the exhibition went up, everything on display was for sale.14

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Clustering objects of similar media on a variety of surfaces—on the wall, on tables, and on the floor—is the most important display legacy of the Exposición de Arte Popular in both Mexico City and Los Angeles and was certainly an early model for how the popular arts section of Twenty Centuries was eventually displayed. Indeed, shortly after the close of Exposición de Arte Popular Montenegro became the first director of a new institution in Mexico City dedicated exclusively to the popular arts in Mexico. This in turn marked him as the ideal candidate to head up the presentation of these works for Twenty Centuries.15 The fact that Montenegro was involved in the curatorial decisions in both Exposición de Arte Popular and Twenty Centuries substantiates a direct lineage between the display strategies of the two exhibitions. In both Mexico City and Los Angeles, the effect of the curatorial scene, comprised as it was of the display of thousands of objects (yet another similarity with Twenty Centuries), resulted in an exhibition where the relationship between region and material specificity was compressed, and a historical accounting, or critical enframing, of such objects was all but absent.16 Display techniques used at Exposición de Arte Popular reappeared at the Mexican Arts exhibition as well. The latter show was organized under the sponsorship of Dwight Morrow, then American Ambassador to Mexico, and curated by René d’Harnoncourt

Figure 4.4  General view of Mexican Arts: An Exhibition Organized for and Circulated by the American Federation of Arts (October 14–November 9, 1930). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

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with assistance from Homer Saint-Gaudens (director of fine arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh). Installed into one large hall in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, d’Harnoncourt constructed partial walls to define three spatial “bays,” marking divisions between the artes populares, Colonial art, and modern art (Figure 4.4). While not as densely hung as the earlier Exposición de Arte Popular, this exhibition of Mexican art utilized similar strategies of clustering and aggregating objects on the walls and floors. This was especially true of the popular arts section of Mexican Arts, where several low table/platforms were floated in the middle of the space, holding dozens of small sculptural items. One was even built as a stepped pyramid, explicitly linking the objects on display to ancient Mayan and Aztec temple architecture. Underneath the pyramid a few sculptures of animals were placed directly onto the floor, some straddling the wooden planks at the pedestal’s base. Akin to how Oles positions the earlier Exposición de Arte Popular, Indych-López remarks that the Metropolitan Museum’s “installation was a cross between a European curiosity cabinet and a Mexican Mercado.”17 Thus, in both these precursors to Twenty Centuries the market was a central organizational metaphor for each curatorial scene.

Ceiling, Wall One key way that MoMA’s presentation differed from its two predecessors was in the administration of curatorial roles. Whereas Mexican Art and Exposición de Arte Popular were conceived and installed by a single curator or a collaborative pair, respectively, the curatorial authorship was split several ways in Twenty Centuries, and likewise each section of the exhibition employed different display strategies. This segmented, division-like approach to curating, while novel, was later criticized by Monroe Wheeler, MoMA’s Director of Publications, in a letter sent to Rockefeller.18 Wheeler’s complaint revolved around what he perceived to be the absence of “a director to devote his entire time to forming a general concept and supervising, from day to day, the inter-relation of the four groups.”19 To wit, the gathering of the exhibition’s contents was overseen by four different Mexican experts—Alfonso Caso, Manuel C. Toussaint, Robert Montenegro, and Miguel Covarrubias—but it was left to John McAndrew to supervise the exhibition’s overall design.20 Per agreements between the Mexican government and MoMA, Caso was to “superintend” the selection of “Ancient or Pre-Columbian” art, Toussaint “Colonial Art,” Covarrubias “Modern Art,” and Montenegro “Popular Art.”21 Each curator had a particular scholastic proficiency with the art of their assigned area, with the exception of Miguel Covarrubias, who was identified primarily as a “caricaturist and painter.”22 While this arrangement drew upon the expertise of each person involved, it makes the attribution of curatorial agency difficult, if not impossible. Exhibition documents seem to point to McAndrew as the consistent contact for the realization of major installation components and issues—but whether these were strictly McAndrew’s ideas remains vague. Many of the reviews of Twenty Centuries attribute the authorship of the exhibition’s design to McAndrew, and to him alone.

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Popular art was the only category of the exhibition installed on almost every floor of the museum, and it served as a kind of ongoing visual accompaniment to the periodizing of MoMA’s galleries. Its spread throughout the museum pointed to popular art’s ability (at least in the mind of Montenegro and McAndrew) to be a catchall for a truly diverse group of objects: toys, bedspreads, trays, vases, masks, wooden chests, candelabras, retablos, furniture, clay vessels, ex-votos, leatherwear, clothing, and lacquerware. This heterogeneity was matched by an ambitious exhibition design, which utilized every possible surface of the museum’s interior galleries and its outdoor sculpture garden. A preview in Women’s Wear Daily reflects this wild conceit, as the author marvels, “They’re hanging things from the ceilings, and letting them overflow out into the gardens up at the Museum of Modern Art.”23 A sense of novel disorder circumscribes this account, and most other reviews of this exhibition, describing a museum turned upside down and inside out by its own exhibition. Several items were hung from MoMA’s ceiling; the most consistently commented upon was a Judas figure (a ritual effigy burned at Easter) floated above the stairway leading to the third-floor galleries. Loaded up with fireworks, more than one review reassured its readers that it would not be set ablaze anytime during the exhibition. Elsewhere in Twenty Centuries clothing such as serapes, sandals, hats, and scarves dangled from the ceiling, appearing to drape invisible bodies. Plants and other natural materials appeared throughout the installation of the popular art sections. Bespoke biomorphic display tables were left partially unpainted, visually aligning some folk art objects with the “natural” grain of the plywood. In another display nearly two dozen masks were hung on a copse of vertical bamboo poles, some strung between as though floating in air. One particular mask was given pride of place—described by one review: At the entrance to the third-floor galleries is one of Mr. McAndrew’s most ingenious devices, a black wooden fiesta mask, crowned with a headdress of silver, green and red tinsel flowers, in which a gold tinsel bird has built its nest. From the headdress flow dozens of long, brightly colored streamers. The mask revolves on a pedestal behind a screen of fiesta pinwheels which are blown and whisked about by an invisible wind machine.24

Delight at the novelty of Twenty Centuries’ installation was in no way limited to this review, nor to this particular object, but most reviewers and writers saved their most colorful descriptions for the installation in MoMA’s sculpture garden, which McAndrew designed in imitation of a Mexican market.

Garden, Market The objects in the popular art division of Twenty Centuries were not only differentiated in terms of their installation, but also in terms of their institutional status. The Caso/ Rockefeller agreement makes clear that unlike the other artworks included in Twenty Centuries, the objects of popular art were to be bought outright with monies supplied

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by Nelson Rockefeller and with Roberto Montenegro serving as expert buyer and museum proxy, instead of being borrowed, piece by piece, from lenders. This was because Rockefeller and MoMA’s intentions were to travel some of these objects for a few years after the close of the exhibition, and so this method of acquisition offered the most flexibility and allowed MoMA to recoup some costs through the sale of these items at the close of the exhibition.25 I mention this because, like the Los Angeles presentation of the Exposición de Arte Popular, it suggests the way in which the objects in the popular arts section were already outside the administrative logics of a museum as we tend to think of it today and instead placed within the realm of the marketplace, even before the installation process began. One could, in other words, ostensibly purchase an object that had been on display in the museum after the close of Twenty Centuries. MoMA’s sculpture garden has an incredible history all its own, as it arguably pioneered a form of outdoor exhibition-making.26 Intended to be an extension of the design sensibilities of the new 1939 building (and initially designed by Edward Durrell Stone), the garden was expanded and redesigned within two weeks of MoMA’s reopening by Alfred Barr and John McAndrew following a last-minute donation of additional land by the Rockefellers.27 Architectural historian Mirka Beneš describes the outcome of the Barr/McAndrew collaboration as consisting of: lightweight walls of plywood and wood basketry, some curvilinear, some rectilinear in shape, thereby creating a series of outdoor rooms in which the sculptures and slender trees were placed. […] In sum, it was as though Jean Arp had designed the ground planes and Aalto the vertical panels and curving ground forms, with Mies informing the selection and placement of the (primarily figurative) sculptures.28

For Twenty Centuries McAndrew added to his original design “seven pavilions of plywood, with Mexican straw raincoats doing duty as walls.”29 In these pavilions hung pottery, huaraches, and sombreros. Part of this installation can be glimpsed in a photo from a fashion spread appearing in Vogue entitled “Manhattan Holiday … Mexican Fiesta,” wherein two models pose in the garden installation (Figure 4.5). One model is framed by a hanging textile and a large floral pot. From this vantage point the magazine reader takes up the position of the vendor, looking out at their potential customer. The second photograph makes the connection between art and commerce much more clear: in it the model, outfitted in a polka-dotted dress and wide-brimmed straw hat, picks up a small pot with one hand and rests her purse on the stall table with the other. She is positioned as if examining a potential purchase. In this photospread the consumable goods of fashion are coupled with those on display. The fashion spread’s text embellishes these two scenes further, remarking on “the vivid carnival of the Modern Museum’s Mexican garden—with its shrill parrot colours, tawny terra-cottas, tinsel and spangles.”30 It joins the sentiment of another contemporaneous review that praised the exhibition’s “romantic gamut of color.”31 Indeed it was the polychromic stalls, and the goods displayed therein, that served as inspiration for New York’s fashionable department stores. As one writer slyly observed, “Fashion industries and retail stores will gather both creative and merchandising

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inspiration from this exhibition.”32 That same season Macy’s ran a campaign that parlayed New Yorkers’ interest in Twenty Centuries into consumable fashion and home goods, all realized in vibrant “Mexicolors.”33 In both its printed advertisement, and in its in-store displays, Macy’s deployed a much more aggressively stereotypical sense of what it meant to consume Mexican goods: its store at 34th street and Broadway featured “enormous white [cactuses] that stand like sentinels all over the store and are

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Figure 4.5  Spread from Vogue magazine, Vogue, July 1, 1940 (pages 42–43) © Condé Nast

visible from every angle of the floor. Impressive sentinels, each one ‘wearing’ a gallant Mexican sombrero and draped with a magnificent scarf.”34 In this scene of commerce, where desert flora takes on anthropomorphic significance and is literally white-washed in the process, the political exigency of pursuing US consumers is placed at odds with situating these goods within any regional, historical, or social context.

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This connection between the market in MoMA’s garden and the merchandising opportunities arising from Twenty Centuries was actively sought out by Sarah Newmeyer, the museum’s publicity director. In a letter to Rockefeller, Newmeyer requested to be sent to Mexico, admitting that she was “not in the slightest degree interested in visiting that country or any other.” Newmeyer continued: I hate travel and dislike foreign food. But I want to put this exhibition over in a big way and I do not see how I can realize to the full its unequalled opportunities for exploitation unless I get right on the ground as soon as enough of the material has been gathered together to make it worth my while.35

Other letters suggest that an important part of Newmeyer’s responsibilities was to surreptitiously inform retailers of upcoming exhibitions, with the hope of aligning fashion trends with MoMA’s programming. In this instance Newmeyer’s efforts paid off. In a Vogue article entitled “New York Goes Mexican,” Frank Crowninshield, erstwhile editor of Vanity Fair, projects his own version of a curatorial scene—this one attached to everyday encounters in and around the streets of New York: If, during the summer months, you should see the great ladies of New York, in sizeable coveys, flitting in and out of cocktail parties, carrying a chihuahua, wearing a china poblana, a mustard-coloured sarape, a silken rebozo, and a pair of leather guaraches; and if, at the smarter sidewalk cafés, debutantes should ask for tortillas, or a snack of huachinango, a pony of tequila, or a chaser of jugo de naranja; or if, at a week-end fiesta on Long Island, middle-aged matrons should, along about midnight, insist upon one more tango, or a final rumba, or start prancing about, however ineptly, on the brim of a gigantic straw sombrero (with, of course, a darkskinned masculine partner, wearing a machete in his cinturon), you need register no sign of surprise, since New York, in its upper social stratum, has definitely gone Mexican.36

Filled with debutantes, great ladies, and middle-aged matrons, Crowninshield was not simply inventing women to demonstrate how many Spanish words he knew (although one would be forgiven for ending their analysis at that); rather such florid rhetoric was an outgrowth of MoMA’s efforts to market its exhibition to a New York consumer. That all aspects of Mexican life and culture (including the placement of a “dark-skinned” man as a necessary accoutrement) were assumed to be available to the “great ladies” of New York only underlines the expansive limits in which the Mexican commodity was enframed. The text’s many errors (rumba is Cuban, tango Argentinian, to name only two) are indicative of its facile, and racist gloss on Mexican culture, which in turn serves as an entrée into Crowninshield’s consideration of Twenty Centuries’ installation (“beautifully arranged and miraculously lighted”) and its success (“immediate”) and influence (“immense”). The delight with which he described the various cultural products of Mexico approximates a list, or catalogue, of goods, services, and experiences—all placed at the fingertips of New Yorkers with disposable incomes.

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But not everyone was as delighted with the installation. Alfonso Caso, who was Twenty Centuries’ commissioner general (McAndrew’s Mexican counterpart), only saw the exhibition after it had been fully installed (lending credence to the notion that many of the installation decisions were McAndrew’s). Yet, upon arrival to the United States, he did not hesitate to relay his concerns about the installation to Monroe Wheeler—who then dispatched them to his superiors at MoMA. While Caso was “well pleased” with the way popular art was displayed inside the museum, the outdoor market gave him particular pause. As Wheeler conveys: [Caso] said that the garden display of these things seem to him extremely meagre [sic] in contrast to the profusion of these objects in Mexican markets, thus minimizing the effectiveness of the bazaar idea. He said that the garden installation looked like market displays from which all the good objects had already been purchased.37

If MoMA’s sculpture garden was meant to be a Mexican market, it was in the end a poor imitation of one, as Caso’s commentary indicates. For Caso the horror vacui of the market stall (something that can be glimpsed in the photograph of the sombrero vendor in Frances Toor’s Guide to Mexico) remained at odds with MoMA’s attempt. This failure is predicated on the same curatorial strategies that gained MoMA critical praise in the years before and after Twenty Centuries; namely, its curatorial approach of carefully selecting and editing the visual and design histories it purported to present. What this suggests is that the curatorial scene of Twenty Centuries, while based on approaches extant at least two decades prior, was caught between the display, interpretation, and consumption of a heterogeneous mix of cultures, which could only, in the end, be understood within the architecture of the market stall.

Notes 1

2

3 4

Anna Indych-López’s chapter on Twenty Centuries describes this process in more detail—as she was able to consult not only MoMA’s archives but also the Nelson Rockefeller family archives. Her extensive research points to the fact that the exhibition was discussed in meetings between President Cárdenas and Rockefeller in the president’s hometown Jiquílpan—meetings that mostly covered the state of USMexico oil negotiations. Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 163, 228 n.23. “Nelson feels committed to giving whole building Mexican exhibition. I agree Salute.” Telegram from Alfred Barr to Jhon [sic] E Abbot [sic], January 30, 1940. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.8. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. A discussion of Orozco’s participation is not my focus here, but, again, I would guide readers to Indych-López, Muralism without Walls. For more on The House in the Museum Garden, see Catarina Flaksman in this volume.

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Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or, the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 25. 6 Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 76. 7 Indych-López, Muralism without Walls, 158–9. James Oles observes that the positive reevaluation of indigenous artistic production in Mexico, usually labeled as “folk art” in the United States and “artes populares” in Mexico, was an outgrowth of some of the key political principles of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–17, which articulated mestizaje as a core identifier of Mexican culture, thereby attempting to resituate how indigenous people were made visible and valued within a new political order. James Oles, “For Business or Pleasure: Exhibiting Mexican Folk Art, 1820–1930,” in Casa Mañana: The Morrow Collection of Mexican Popular Arts, ed. Susan Danly (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 18. In this signifying system value was accorded to what Harper Montgomery calls a “mythical work ethic” and the idea that indigenous people “possessed both an innate impulse to work and an involuntary affinity for their materials.” Harper Montgomery, “From Aesthetics to Work: Displaying Indian Labor as Modernist Form in Mexico City and New York,” Modernism/modernity 21, no. 1: 231–51. For more on these two exhibitions also see the chapter entitled “The Mexican Art Invasion” in The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935, ed. Helen Delpar (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1992). 8 “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art Being Assembled for the Museum of Modern Art” [press release] (February 21, 1940). https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_pressrelease_325182.pdf. 9 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), Las Artes Populares en México [2nd ed.] 2 v. (México: Editorial Cvltvra, 1922). 10 Ibid., 11 [author’s translation]. 11 Ibid. [author’s translation]. 12 Oles, “For Business or Pleasure,” 19. 13 Katherine Anne Porter, “A Country and Some People I Love,” Harper’s 231, no. 1384 (September 1965): 62. Porter was involved in the earliest efforts to organize the show, eventually writing a catalog essay for it. It was officially organized by Adolfo BestMaugard, with help from a fifteen-year-old Miguel Covarrubias and a few others. Manuel Gamio and Jorge Enciso, who organized Exposición de Arte Popular, served in an advisory role. 14 Ibid. 15 It was also this exhibition that inspired Frances Toor to change the direction of her life and move to Mexico: “Textiles, pottery, lacquer work, gold and silver jewelry, had been collected by artists from the entire republic. I saw the exhibit many times; and I grew ever more enthusiastic over the beauty of an art produced by a humble and practically enslaved people and also over the work of the modern artists, so alive, virile, passionate.” Frances Toor, “Mexican Folkways,” Mexican Folkways 7, no. 4 (October–December, 1932): 207–8. Also see, Frances Toor, Mexican Popular Arts (México: Frances Toor Studios, 1939), 11. 16 These shortcomings were overshadowed, however, by the appearance of arte popular as a category of object suitable enough for display in the first place, outside of the homes of wealthy Mexicans who might have a “Mexican Room” hung with indigenous objects, thereby tracking a heterogeneous group of objects alongside entrenched racialized and classed categories in both Mexico and the United States. 5

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Montgomery, “From Aesthetics to Work,” 237; Toor, Mexican Popular Arts, 11; as quoted in Oles, “For Business or Pleasure,” 20. 17 Indych-López, Muralism without Walls, 117. For another account of Mexican Arts I would point readers to Mireida Velázquez, “La construcción un modelo de exhibición: Mexican Arts en el Metropolitan Museum of Art,” available via https:// tinyurl.com/ycqbq4uz. There she writes, “[L]ike his contemporaries, Mexican and foreign, René d’Harnoncourt failed to transcend a look that idealized popular art and craftsmen as a symbol of artistry, purity and ingenuity, parameters that he sought to characterize the so-called Mexican ‘people’” [author’s translation]. 18 The letters from Wheeler to Rockefeller and John Abbott are worthy of an article all on their own—as Wheeler details the “general treachery and buck-passing and irresponsibility” of having the exhibition’s catalogue printed in Mexico (Wheeler to Abbott, April 24, 1940). Wheeler’s letters reveal a person frustrated by the vagaries of Mexican bureaucracy and, perhaps, also, the deep unknowingness of just being a foreigner in another country. But Wheeler is also able to wink at himself, as he recounts in a letter dated May 1, 1940, to Nelson Rockefeller, he was introduced by one Mexican contact as “the American with a peculiar mania for having things on time.” All letters quoted here from the Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.12. MoMA Archives, NY. 19 Letter from Monroe Wheeler to Nelson Rockefeller, March 6, 1940. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.12. MoMA Archives, NY. 20 Caso, Toussaint, Montenegro, and Covarrubias were appointed to the exhibition with the blessings of an executive committee consisting of John Abbott and Eduardo Hay, who was Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Cárdenas’s government. The agreement between the Mexican Government and MoMA was formalized in two documents, one a memorandum detailing points of agreement between Alfonso Caso, who was designated Commissioner General for the exhibition, and Nelson Rockefeller, and the other a contract signed by Hay and Abbott. “Memorandum covering points agreed upon between Dr. Caso, Director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, and Mr. Neslon A. Rockefeller of the Museum of Modern Art, regarding proposed exhibition of Mexican Art in the U.S.” October 19, 1930, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.6. MoMA Archives, NY, and “Bases for collaboration between the Mexican Government and the Museum of Modern Art of New York, U.S.A., to hold an Exposition of Mexican Art in this Museum,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.9. MoMA Archives, NY. 21 This is a shift from how the exhibition was initially segmented for the Jeu de Paume. Caso was also appointed commissioner general of that exhibition, Montenegro the head of “Folk Art,” and Toussaint the head of “Mexican Colonial and Native Painting.” Painting and sculpture were given their own discrete sections, overseen by José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera, in the case of painting, and Ignacio Asúnsolo, in the case of sculpture. 22 “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 7, no. 2/3 (May 1940): 9. 23 “Twirl-style: Mexican Holiday,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 10, 1940, 3. 24 “Record Exhibit of Mexican Art to Open Today,” New York Herald Tribune, May 15, 1940, 25. 25 “In view of the immediate necessity of ordering and purchasing the material for the Popular Art division (it will be impossible to borrow this material) and because of the difficulty, owing to the lack of time in obtaining funds for this, Mr. Nelson

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Modern in the Making A. Rockefeller has agreed to buy this material […] he will place at the disposal of Mr. Montenegro 16,000 pesos […] Handling the collection in this way will have the advantage that the collection of Popular Art can be kept in the United States, which will enable the Museum of Modern Art to send the exhibition to other museums in this country as one of its traveling exhibitions for a period of two or three years, with the result that it should have an important influence on the American public’s understanding and appreciation of the popular arts of Mexico and should indirectly have some influence in increasing tourist travel to Mexico.” “Memorandum Covering Points Agreed upon between Dr. Caso, Director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, and Mr. Nelson A. Rockefeller of the Museum of Modern Art, Regarding Proposed Exhibition of Mexican Art in the U.S.,” October 19, 1938. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.6. MoMA Archives, NY. Mirka Beneš, “A Modern Classic: The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden,” in Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art, ed. Barbara Ross (Studies in Modern Art no. 6) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 111. Ibid., and Dominic Ricciotti, “The 1939 Building of the Museum of Modern Art: The Goodwin-Stone Collaboration,” The American Art Journal 17, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 50–76. Ibid., 112–13. “Twirl-style: Mexican Holiday,” 2. “Manhattan Holiday … Mexican Fiesta,” Vogue, July 1, 1940, 42–3. Frank Crowninshield, “People and Ideas: New York Goes Mexican,” Vogue, June 15, 1940, 81. “Color and Design Inspiration from Mexico in Exhibit at Museum of Modern Art,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 16, 1940, 4. “Mexico in Manhattan” [advertisement: Macy’s] New York Times, May 19, 1940, K20. “Twirl-style: Mexicana at Macy’s,” Women’s Wear Daily, May 21, 1940, 3. Letter from Sarah Newmeyer to Nelson Rockefeller, November 8, 1939. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.8. MoMA Archives, NY. Crowninshield, “People and Ideas,” 38. “Memorandum of Meeting with Dr. Alfonso Caso in the Office of Mr. Abbott, May 21, 2940. From Monroe Wheeler to Messers. Barr, Rockefeller, Abbott and McAndrew.” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 106.9. MoMA Archives, NY.

Part Two

New Mediums for a New Museum: Photography, Dance, Architecture, and Design

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Aesthetic versus the “Mere Historic”: Civil War and Frontier Photography at MoMA Sarah Kate Gillespie

In the summer of 1942, New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell summed up the preceding art season by declaring, “art went to war.”1 He devoted a sprawling, multicolumned article to the topic, detailing exhibitions from almost all of the city’s major museums and galleries that addressed the theme of war in some fashion. The Museum of Modern Art was no exception, mounting several exhibitions responding to the nation’s new status after the December 7, 1941 bombing of the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The most famous MoMA show from this season was Road to Victory (May 21–October 4, 1942), organized by US Navy lieutenant commander and photographer Edward Steichen, who would later become director of the photography department at MoMA. Jewell labeled this show, well known for providing an immersive experience of massive photo murals, as “the supreme war contribution,” calling it “magnificent” and “the season’s most moving exhibition.” Road to Victory was not the only show MoMA mounted in the first half of 1942 that addressed Americans at war. Jewell acknowledged others in his article but failed to discuss them in depth, noting, “[T]he Museum of Modern Art put on so very many shows [relating to the war] that, frankly, I have lost track of some of the smaller ones.” One of these smaller exhibitions was Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier, which is rarely discussed in contemporary literature.2 This absence is somewhat surprising, given that late twentieth-century debates concerning nineteenth-century photography, particularly of the American West, form a large part of the historiography of the medium. One exhibition that sparked much of this controversy was MoMA’s 1981 Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, which featured, among other nineteenth-century works, several photographs of the American West and at least one of the Civil War.3 Contemporary scholarship concerning MoMA’s treatment of nineteenth-century photography generally posits that various curators, particularly those in the mid-to-late twentieth century, imposed their own, modernist standards that removed works from their historical context entirely. The resulting criteria placed photographs in an invented trajectory of formal quality that largely ignored questions concerning why or how individual prints were originally produced.4

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Related criticism has fallen on Ansel Adams, who, along with curator and photohistorian Beaumont Newhall, organized Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier.5 Newhall, the first curator of photography at MoMA (in fact, the first such curator ever appointed at an American institution), helped establish the department during the preceding years. Adams was an advisor to the department from its formation, eventually becoming vice-chairman of the Committee of the Department of Photography. Given the import of MoMA’s photography department, and its oftencontroversial use of nineteenth-century photography, it seems worthwhile to revisit some of its earliest uses of these works. An examination of Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier offers insight into early curatorial efforts to grapple with questions of how to treat and display nineteenth-century photography and why such issues were addressed in a museum devoted to “modern” art. When MoMA’s department of photography was formed, in 1940, the medium itself was barely one hundred years old, and its histories were still in the process of being formed, written, and revised.6 Too often, current scholars have relied upon the retrospective statements of curators like Newhall and Adams regarding the aesthetic link between photography in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries that hinge upon formal similarities. Such analysis typically disregards how the works were displayed and discussed within the context of the exhibition in question. The consideration of such factors can perhaps upend some of the existing narrative of a purely aesthetic motivation behind MoMA’s early interest in and display of nineteenth-century photography, particularly American photography, and offer greater insight into how this influential department functioned. The curators’ choices in Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier did not seek to insert the displayed photographs into a preexisting trajectory of modernism, but rather attempted to stress the historical value of the works in order to establish a tradition of particularly American photographic excellence. This tradition was, in turn, meant to remind viewers of triumph achieved during past adversity in light of the nation’s very new status as one at war. The formation of the department of photography at MoMA in 1940 has been well covered.7 Briefly stated, the department was underwritten by Chairman David H. McAlpin, an investment banker and patron of the museum, who provided funds for acquisitions and enlisted Adams as an advisor.8 Newhall, who had been hired as the museum’s librarian in 1935, had long been interested in photography and was a practicing photographer himself. When the trustees officially decided to form the department of photography, Newhall, having already established himself as one of the experts in the medium, was the logical choice for curator. Under Newhall and Adams, the department promoted the aesthetic qualities of photography to justify its inclusion within the institution, regardless of the circumstances surrounding works’ creation.9 Though the museum’s first major photographic exhibition, Photography, 1839–1937 (March 17–April 18, 1937), presented a historic overview curated by Newhall, the inaugural installation of the department of photography, Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics (December 31, 1940–January 12, 1941), emphasized the artistic possibilities of the medium.10 Speaking of the formation of the new department, Newhall reiterated this agenda by differentiating from photography produced by the masses and photographs

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that are “a personal expression of their makers’ emotions, pictures which have made use of the inherent characteristics of the medium of photography,” noting, “[T]he newly founded Department of Photography is a center where this type of photography can be seen and studied.”11 Reference to the “inherent characteristics” of the medium reflects Newhall and Adams’s commitment to “straight” photography or prints created without technical manipulation, such as practiced by Adams and colleagues such as Edward Weston and Berenice Abbott. Adams was deeply invested in promoting a specifically American tradition of photographic excellence and wanted the department to disseminate this idea through its exhibitions and collecting.12 Indeed, in his catalogue essay for A Pageant of Photography, he states, “It is encouraging to observe concrete evidence that America has brought forth superior photography; photography is, in fact, a decisive American art.”13 This claim of photography as inherently American, even though it originated in Europe, dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when photographic journals rebranded daguerreotyping (a French invention) as the “American process.”14 Adams was most enthusiastic about nineteenth-century photography of the American West, seeing in the prints of Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carlton Watkins a “direct, simple” approach he termed “liberated” and that he believed presaged the “straight” photography he and others practiced.15 This conflation of historical photographs with art has distressed contemporary scholars, who have assumed that Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier, which included some of the same photographers as Sixty Photographs, fell victim to strictly aestheticizing ideals. “These Civil War and early western photographs were brought together at MoMA two years later,” states one art historian, referring to Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier, “beginning their long rehabilitation as independent, self-contained aesthetic objects.”16 In the words of another scholar, the photographs were aestheticized to the point that “these curators and practitioners concealed any historical interests that [the photographs] may have once served.”17 Newhall’s and Adams’s very real interest in the medium as an art form did not, in fact, preclude a frank recognition and celebration of the historical circumstances under which the photographs were made, circulated, and experienced by nineteenthcentury viewers, nor did it preclude an effort to adequately convey those circumstances to the viewing public. It was important for Newhall and Adams to stress the original context of production for the works in order to shore up Adams’s notion of a tradition of American photographic excellence, one that was maintained even in the face of limited physical and economic resources and to remind exhibition-goers that despite those hardships, these early photographers excelled. It is uncertain how the idea for Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier came about, but it appears Adams made the suggestion sometime before the United States entered the war, in early to mid-1941.18 Existing correspondence suggests that the show originally emphasized Mathew Brady and the photographers who trained under him, including those who traveled West. Throughout the fall of 1941, when Newhall was in New York and Adams in various parts of the West, their correspondence consistently referred to the exhibition as the “Frontier” show. Relatedly, it is listed as such on MoMA interdepartmental memos. As Ellen McFarlane has demonstrated,

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Adams was more interested in the ameliorative social effects of art photography than has been previously discussed.19 The fall of 1941 was already a perilous time politically; Congress had repealed parts of the Neutrality Act in March, and British and American military officials began discussing strategies for the US potential involvement in war, which was beginning to seem all but inevitable. Adams’s desire to showcase a specifically American subject, particularly one as loaded and mythologized as the American West, at such a politically unstable moment seems significant and consistent with his insistence that landscape photography could be socially and politically beneficial.20 Imagery of the American West has long been utilized to serve as a standin for America as a whole, and such a specifically nationalistic-themed exhibition was particularly timely.21 The exhibition’s development was in full swing by early September of 1941, when Adams began contacting potential lenders. He reassured Jesse Nusbaum of the National Park Service in Santa Fe, New Mexico, “The exhibit will be small, but will cover considerable ground. No one man will have many prints to his credit, but you may be certain that both [William Henry] Jackson and Brady will have as much, or more, than anyone else.”22 Newhall must have already been pondering various installation ideas, as a few weeks later he wrote to Adams, “I feel that several albums should be shown together in a case, and that every few days a new page revealed to view. The O’Sullivan album, the Sketch-books [presumably Alexander Gardner’s 1866 Photographic Sketch Book of the War], and the Jackson album would make a fine trio.”23 Despite Newhall’s suggestion to feature the Gardner album, the inclusion of Civil War material was undecided for many months. By late fall, Newhall had become a bit frustrated with his co-curator, pleading for materials and information: “It would be a great help to me if you could let me have an outline of the general scheme of the exhibition—not a physical plan but the type of material and general organization. People are asking about the show and I am not able to give them much information.”24 A few weeks later, in early December, the question of what, exactly, the show would include still had not been settled, as again a frustrated Newhall wrote, “I am worried for the title of the exhibition. ‘Frontier Photographs’ does not seem explicit enough, as we are including (or are we?) Civil War material.”25 Five days after Newhall wrote that letter, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, and America was suddenly at war. This event apparently shifted the focus of the exhibition; a mere two days after the attack, Adams suggested to Newhall two possible titles, “Photographs of the Civil War and of the American Frontier” or “The Rebellion and the Frontier,” indicating that the show would definitely include material from the Civil War.26 Though this letter is undated, Adams noted it was “post-blackout period # 2, San Francisco, Tuesday AM” and described the effects of the blackout. Blackouts started in San Francisco immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with a second set occurring on Tuesday, December 9.27 “It is actually the real thing here,” Adams wrote. “Two alerts last night. City blacked out. Sirens all over, Cops, Home guards, Soldiers with steel hats, all kinds of things moving about on wheels. Planes actually over the Bay area. Los Angeles worried. Pacific northwest more so. People are profoundly affected by the Hawaiian episode, and are sore as hell.”28 As Jewell would note in his later review, everyone’s attention turned to war. By the time publicity was being organized for the exhibition in late February of 1942, MoMA

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made an explicit connection between the works shown in Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier and the nation’s current conflict, as the press release for the show demonstrates: Deceiving the enemy with such devices as dummy tanks, periscopes, false air fields and gun emplacements to draw enemy fire and distract attention from actual concentration of supplies and weapons is a trick that did not originate either with the Allies or the Axis forces in this second world war. It is a military stratagem that probably goes back at least as far as the Trojan Horse. It was also used very effectively in our own Civil War when the Yankees would sometimes take an apparently well guarded position such as at Centreville, Virginia, and find that it had been guarded only by “Quaker” guns: large tree trunks set up as cannons in false emplacements.29

The press release went on to note that a photograph featuring the “Quaker” guns could be viewed at the upcoming MoMA exhibition, referring to a photograph by George Barnard and James F. Gibson that appeared in Gardner’s Sketch Book of the War (Figure 5.1).30

Figure 5.1 Alexander Gardner. George Barnard and James Gibson. Quaker Guns, Centreville, Virginia (March 1862). Albumen silver print, 12 7/16 x 16 15/16˝. Portfolio Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War, vol. 1 (1865), The Museum of Modern Art, Anonymous Gift. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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Beyond connections to current events, this correspondence demonstrates that Adams was worried about where the show would be located within the museum. Adams, anxious to receive the museum’s full support, fretted over the exhibition’s initial placement in a lower-level hallway outside an auditorium, which had been proposed in order to have the works viewed in conjunction with a screening of Western films starring William S. Hart.31 “We have worked hard to get photography in a top place in the Museum and it deserves, at least, a dignified presentation,” he complained to Newhall.32 Adams had an overriding desire to see photography treated in the same manner as painting and sculpture within the institution. After some complaints regarding Sixty Photographs, Newhall had hastened to reassure Adams that MoMA was committed to giving photography “a favorable space—favorable not alone in size, but in relationship to the other departments. Thus it will not be adjacent to the architecture section, where photographs are used for a purely documentary purpose.”33 Newhall’s reassurance underscores both men’s interest in fostering viewer appreciation of the works as aesthetic as well as historic documents, wanting to exhibit the pieces in a location far from where photography was considered ancillary. The series of films was eventually canceled, and the exhibition moved to different galleries, but the mere proposal to showcase Western films along with the repeated labeling of the exhibition as the “Frontier” show underscores Adams’s, and the institution’s, interest in promoting American-themed photography by American artists.34 The checklist of fourteen photographers and around eighty works wound up including one-third Civil War subjects. Adams and Newhall considered the installation very carefully and designed it to showcase the works’ aesthetic qualities and to highlight the contexts of their historical production. These contexts were varied: some were meant for public consumption and some were not, some of the works were reproduced as lithographs and circulated in newspapers, some were inserted into albums, and some were displayed in photography studios. Newhall and Adams attempted to address these contexts, and the resulting installation was a mix of wallmounted, matted photographs, often behind glass; cases holding albums; and a row of six stereoscopic viewers mounted to a wall with images arranged beneath.35 Following an introductory placard, the exhibition was divided into four sections: “Civil War,” “Photographing the American Frontier,” “Stereoscopic Photographs,” and “Brady” (Figure 5.2).36 The “American Frontier” and “Stereoscopic Photographs” sections had introductory text; each section was also subdivided into groups of related works, placed together to underscore both visual and historical relationships. The subgroups were often placed in a row underneath eight-foot-long sheets of glass mounted on the wall, creating subtle divisions between objects.37 These individually mounted photographs were installed near five photographic albums: Gardner’s Sketch Book of War; O’Sullivan and William Bell’s Photographs of the Western Territory of the United States (likely Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, from 1871, 1872, and 1873); William Henry Jackson’s Photographs of the Yellowstone National Park and Views in Montana and Wyoming Territories (1873); Charles G. Johnson’s History of the Territory of Arizona (Part I, 1868); and Pacific Coast Scenery (1872) published by Thomas Houseworth & Co., San Francisco. Album pages were turned frequently, if not daily, so visitors had a chance

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Figure 5.2  Installation view of the exhibition Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (March 3–April 5, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

to see the entire volume. Adams also wanted the preface of Johnson’s album shown, calling it a “key-note of the whole exhibition” and insisting “BOTH PRINT AND TEXT SHOULD BE SHOWN TOGETHER” [emphasis original].38 These curatorial choices belie later assertions that Newhall and Adams removed any historical context from the works; clearly, they wanted viewers to not only understand how some of these albums originally might have been encountered, but they wanted all of the images within the albums to be seen, despite potential aesthetic disparities among the included prints. Related curatorial concerns emerged in discussions concerning how the display of individual volumes would impact a viewer’s experience in the exhibition. Adams wrote, “I think the albums should be displayed in an almost square case, so that they can be seen both horizontally and vertically.”39 Installation shots reveal several square glass cases, with plenty of room to circulate around them so as not to restrict viewer access (Figure 5.3). The viewer’s ability to get close to all the works was of utmost importance to the curators, as Adams wrote, “I think the cases can be placed in one corner, and the [stereoscopic] viewing machines in another corner, always leaving circulation space. I am glad of anything that will urge people to come close to photographs!”40 Newhall and Adams left enough space around the cases so that visitors could examine works from

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Figure 5.3  Installation view of the exhibition Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (March 3–April 5, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

multiple angles, regardless of how the photographs were mounted. This choice opened different potential viewer experiences, as opposed to removing the photographs from the albums and mounting them on a wall. This installation, which emphasized the albums’ status as objects, was underscored by the use of six viewers through which visitors could view stereographs. Mounted in a shallow case above these viewers were at least six more stereographs, though exactly how many remains uncertain (Figure 5.4). The suggestion to show stereographs seems to have come from Newhall, who used stereoscopes to the same effect in his 1938 Three Centuries of American Art show in Paris. Concerned that several rare stereographs on loan from noted photo-historian Robert Taft would suffer damage if handled by the public in the viewers, Adams asked that they “suitably mount the more valuable ones, and use less important examples for public use.”41 Additionally, the choice to have some stereographs installed beneath viewers and some mounted in the case above allowed visitors to experience the stereographs as they originally might have been encountered in a home. In order to make the point that these works, when viewed through a stereoscope, would appear three dimensional, Adams expressed interest in installing a series of enlarged reproductions that would replicate a similar illusion of depth: “How about making three identical copies, about five or six feet long; then

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Figure 5.4  Installation view of the exhibition Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (March 3–April 5, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

cutting out the middle and near foreground from one, and the near foreground from another, and mounting these about three inches apart and away from the third full enlargement?”42 It does not appear that these plans were borne out, but the very idea of trying to emphasize the stereograph’s defining feature, its illusion of depth, again underscores both curators’ wishes that the works be understood in their original context.43 Finally, as it was their praise of the aesthetic qualities of the works of photographers of the American West that landed Newhall and Adams in trouble with later scholars, it is necessary to note the wall text that appeared in the exhibition. Apparently written by Adams, it is dry, informative, and factual. Printed on a gray background, it notes the various auspices under which these photographs were taken: geological surveys, “ethnological, geographic and commercial motives,” and railroad construction, listing photographers and specific expeditions by name. Nowhere does it seek to reduce or conceal the original means of production for these photographs, and nowhere does it equate the photographs with modern art, as later scholars claimed. It notes that many of the photographers had “proven creative capacities” and that “their perceptive and technical standards were very high.”44 The only time the text strays from these parameters is toward the end, when, noting how many nineteenth-century photographs

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had disappeared due to carelessness and neglect, it pleads with visitors to “seek and protect the fast-dwindling reserve of the achievements of the past.”45 This plea again underscores Adams’s desire to preserve and promote an American photographic past in order to justify and expand the department’s (and his own) photographic present. Relatedly, both Adams and Newhall made no secret of their admiration for the aesthetic qualities of nineteenth-century photography. Adams, in particular, was keen to align historical work with that produced more recently, including his own work. In a “[s]uggested statement for the exhibition,” which was slightly altered and then quoted in the press release, Adams makes this connection explicit: In this exhibition we have made no effort to give historical evaluations or to make a comprehensive selection of the work of fifty years; it is planned to suggest the product of a most vital era of American photography. Above all these photographs indicate the positive value and importance of the simple, straightforward approach to the medium, and will undoubtedly give encouragement and confidence in contemporary photographers who, possessing miraculous equipment and materials, seek expression of their experiences in a difficult and uncertain time.46

Encouraging photographers “in a difficult and uncertain time” surely refers to the nation’s still-new status as one at war. The text preceding this paragraph reminds the reader of the difficulties early photographers faced and that “the severities of the environment and the limitations of equipment and materials only served to strengthen and clarify the photographic concept.” This seems a direct call to contemporary photographers—and perhaps to everyday citizens—to remember that obstacles can be overcome and challenging situations met with fortitude. The early winter and spring of 1942, when this exhibition was organized, mounted, and displayed, would have been a good time to issue such a reminder, as recent events, including the Battle of Baatan, had resulted in heavy US losses. Thus, at the time of their viewing, photographs of the Civil War were not ancient relics but instead symbolic links to the contemporary fight that reminded viewers of another conflict in the not-too-distant past, a conflict in which history declared the right side had won.47 Additionally, the subsequent reunification of the nation in 1865 spurred enormous geographic expansion toward the West, the imagery of which was surely used to its fullest mythologizing effect. Shortly after the exhibition, Adams stressed the show’s artistic side in a letter to museum director Alfred Barr. Adams wrote that he considered Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier his “most important contribution”: My intention in preparing this exhibit was to concentrate on the esthetic aspects of this phase of American photography rather than on the historical aspects. Again there were certain criticisms based on historical paucity. I believe that the quality of this exhibit, handsomely hung by Mr. Newhall, justified the elimination of some well-known historical pictures which do not achieve an artistic significance.48

It is unknown what these criticisms were or which pictures some thought ought to have been included; reviews of the exhibition in the press appear to have been

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overwhelmingly favorable. It is possible some visitors expected the exhibition, based on its title, to be more of a sweeping retrospective of Civil War photography, which the show was not and never claimed to be. Adams continued in this vein: “I would like to consider this exhibit merely as a forerunner of a series of American photography, always stressing the esthetic and emotional qualities of the work rather than the mere historical value.” The key phrase in his statement to Barr, I believe, is “mere historical value.” Just as later scholars did not want to see nineteenth-century works utterly removed from their historical context, Newhall and Adams did not want to see these works used simply as props to relay a historical tale. As McFarlane has noted, Adams believed “that art photography was enormously important to humanity’s ability to withstand hardship.”49 In this exhibition, the curators wanted the works to straddle a fine line, one that appreciated the aesthetic qualities they valued in the pieces and conveyed the circumstances of their original production and circulation in order to make them approachable and relatable to a contemporary audience newly at war. In his 2007 book on nineteenth-century survey photography, photo-historian Robin Kelsey summed up the balance between these two seemingly divergent approaches: Both modernist artists and survey practitioners addressed the inadequacy of pictorial conventions as they worked the boundary between art and practical disciplines, such as cartography or engineering. Both addressed picture making as a modern problem of finding means adequate to new social circumstances …. The motivations … certainly diverged, but whether they were unrelated depends on the history one wishes to write.50

Newhall and Adams’s insistence on maintaining the context of the works’ production within the exhibition’s installation—through the use of stereoscopic viewers, maintaining albums in their original presentation, and the language employed in the wall text and labels—belies Adams’s own words that the show concentrated on “esthetic aspects” of the works. Rather, it reveals they were trying to find the balance between aesthetic appeal and history, context and beauty, content and form.

Notes 1 2

Edward Alden Jewell, “Season Just Closing Stressed War,” New York Times, June 7, 1942, X5. Road to Victory has come, in contemporary times, to serve as a stand-in for the museum’s exhibition programming during the war years. It has also come to represent a shift in the museum’s department of photography from what is often conceived as the anesthetizing approach of Beaumont Newhall versus the popularizing approach of Steichen. See Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 (Autumn 1982): 27–63. Other more recent examples include artist Fred Wilson’s use of Road to Victory as the inspiration for an online, interactive piece for MoMA in 1999. Also, the 2004 volume Art in Our Time: A

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Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art names the chapter discussing the years 1940–53 “Road to Victory.” See Art in Our Time, ed. Harriet S. Bee and Michelle Elligott (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004). 3 See Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” Art Journal 42 (1982): 311–19. Respondents included Joel Snyder, “Aesthetics and Documentation: Remarks Concerning Critical Approaches to the Photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan,” in Perspectives on Photography, Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, ed. Peter Walch and Thomas F. Barrow (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 125– 50, and Miles Orvell, The Real Thing, Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 99. Robin Kelsey sums up the debates nicely in Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U. S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–18. 4 Specifically, see Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces” and Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography.” 5 See Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” 34–40, and Kelsey, Archive Style, 9–14. 6 What is defined as a “photograph” is continually changing, particularly with the advent of digital photography, necessitating shifts in how museums, curators, and scholars treat the medium. See, for example, Geoffrey Batchen, “Ectoplasm,” in Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 128–45. 7 David H. McAlpin, “The New Department of Photography,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 8 (December–January, 1940–1): 2–3. Phillips also provides an overview, as does Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993), 56–65. 8 See copy of a letter from Ansel Adams to David McAlpin, transcribed by Beaumont Newhall, September 9, 1940, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.1, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 9 For example, the December 1941 exhibition American Photographs $10 was an experiment in producing and selling high-quality works by artists such as Walker Evans, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbot, and Adams at an affordable price. 10 The pair first began corresponding in 1936, when Newhall asked Adams for some prints to exhibit in the Photography, 1839–1937 show. Adams lent his own, as well as several prints of the American West from the 1870s by Timothy O’Sullivan (Newhall, Focus, 50). Newhall returned the favor, helping Adams locate American daguerreotypes to include in the 1940 show A Pageant of Photography, part of the Golden Gate International Exposition at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, curated by Adams. Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, letter of April 20, 1940, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.1, MoMA Archives, New York. As the pair had already been assisting each other with curatorial efforts it must have seemed logical to join forces for Sixty Photographs, particularly given that Adams was an official advisor to the department, and over the years they developed a strong friendship. 11 Beaumont Newhall, “Program of the Department,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 8 (December–January 1940–1): 4. 12 “I think one of the real tasks of this program will be to make a thorough investigation of American photography; I am certain there must be lots of magnificent work hiding in obscurity,” copy of a letter from Ansel Adams to David McAlpin, transcribed by Beaumont Newhall, September 9, 1940, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.1, MoMA Archives, NY.

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13 Ansel Adams, “Introduction,” in A Pageant of Photography (San Francisco: San Francisco Bay Exposition Company, 1940). 14 See Sarah Kate Gillespie, The Early American Daguerreotype, Cross-currents in Art and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 15 Ibid. See also Ansel Adams, “An Appreciation,” in T. H. O’Sullivan, Photographer, ed. Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 1966), 5. 16 Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” 38. 17 Kelsey, Archive Style, 13. Though Kelsey is specifically referring to O’Sullivan’s survey photographs, he is speaking directly about Newhall, Adams, and later MoMA curators such as John Szarkowski. 18 Nancy Newhall notes in her unpublished manuscript “An Enduring Moment” that Adams proposed the exhibitions. Cited in Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams, A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 170. 19 Ellen McFarlane, “Group f.64, Rocks, and the Limits of the Political Photograph,” American Art 30 (Fall 2016): 27–53. 20 Ibid. 21 The controversy surrounding the exhibition The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (National Museum of American Art, now Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1991) reinforced just how ingrained this conflation was in mid-to-late twentieth-century American culture. The literature surrounding this topic is too voluminous to list, but see, for example, “Showdown at ‘The West Is America’ Exhibition,” American Art 5 (Summer 1991): 2–11. A more recent article that addresses this trend in American popular culture overall is Stephen Aron, “The History of the American West Gets a Much-needed Rewrite,” Smithsonian.com, August 2016. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-american-west-getsmuch-needed-rewrite-180960149/ 22 Ansel Adams to Jesse Nusbaum, September 4, 1941, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.2, MoMA Archives, NY. 23 Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, September 22, 1941, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 24 Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, November 25, 1941, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.2, MoMA Archives, NY. 25 Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, December 2, 1941, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.2, MoMA Archives, NY. 26 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, undated letter probably December 9, 1941, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 27 Sam Whiting, “SF at War: A Time of Air Raids, Blackouts, and Joining the Effort,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 7, 2016. 28 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, undated letter probably December 9, 1941, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 29 “Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition of Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.1, MoMA Archives, NY. 30 George Barnard apparently made several other views of these “Quaker” guns, so named because, as Jeff L. Rosenheim states, they “can never be fired, no one gets hurt.” See Rosenheim, Photography and the American Civil War (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 78–9.

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31 On O’Keeffe and Steichen’s criticisms of the show, see Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, March 21, 1941, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.2, MoMA Archives, NY. 32 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, December 16, 1941, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 33 Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, March 21, 1941, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.1, MoMA Archives, NY. 34 Even a casual survey of pre-1945 exhibitions at MoMA reveals the vast majority of exhibitions that included or were exclusively devoted to photography featured American rather than European works. Non-European or non-American photography was rarely, if ever, shown. Some exceptions include Newhall’s 1937 photographic survey, Photography 1839–1937, which included European and American works, and of course the 1938 exhibition Bauhaus, 1919–1928 included European photography created at the school. The first show dedicated exclusively to a non-American photographer (or, in this case, pair of photographers) was 1941’s Photographs by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, showing nineteenthcentury Scottish works. There had already been multiple exhibitions devoted to various aspects of American photography at this point. 35 Extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, a stereograph has two nearidentical prints displayed side by side. When viewed through a stereoscope, the two images merge into one, mimicking natural human binocular vision, and give an illusion of three-dimensionality. 36 See “Installation List,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 37 Several Andrew J. Russell photographs depicting the construction of the UnionPacific railroad, for example, were grouped under one sheet of glass, as were five Ben Wittick photographs relating to Native American life. 38 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, regarding the Pacific Coast Scenery album: “Show in Case, Turning Pages Frequently,” February 15, 1942, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 39 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, February 12, 1942, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 40 Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, February 12, 1942, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Adams also explicitly tried to distinguish between modern versus vintage prints in the installation. He asked for an L-shaped panel in the center of the room to hold modern prints, noting, “The old and modern prints simply cannot be shown together; the isolation as planned will be entirely logical” (Ansel Adams to Beaumont Newhall, December 16, 1941, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY). A label differentiated between new and old prints. (“Photographing the American Frontier,” typed draft of wall text with handwritten corrections, The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.3, MoMA Archives, NY). 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 “Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition of Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 172.1, MoMA Archives, NY.

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47 At least two of the featured photographers were still living. One of them, William Henry Jackson, loaned works to the exhibition and was widely celebrated during its run. Newhall, Focus, 67–8. 48 Ansel Adams to Alfred Barr, September 5, 1942, Beaumont Newhall Papers II.3, MoMA Archives, NY. 49 McFarlane, “Group f.64, Rocks, and the Limits of the Political Photograph,” 50. 50 Kelsey, Archive Style, 9.

6

An Exact Instant in the History of the Modern Jason E. Hill

Accounts of the MoMA’s early entanglement with the medium of photography tend to privilege two exhibitions as exemplary: Beaumont Newhall’s landmark survey of 1937, Photography: 1839–1937, which for the first time sanctioned photography as an internally unified phenomenon suitable to art historical consideration; and, more frequently, The Family of Man of 1955–, Edward Steichen’s most fabled deployment of that same medium as an instrument of global communication and utopian unity and which, as the subject of a virtual industry in academic and critical publishing, has probably carried more than its fair burden insofar as it might illuminate the scope of MoMA’s remarkably varied photographic pursuits.1 To measure the museum’s disposition toward photography exclusively by the metrics of “the first” or “the most fabled” will carry that helpful advantage of conjuring for the then “minor” medium of photography its own “major history” (even if only, as has been the tendency, to tear it down).2 The present essay proposes that we might gain too by attending to early MoMA’s engagement with photography in its then more provisional register to better honor the medium’s generatively unsettled position within the museum decades before it met any full and convincing institutionalized ordering as a field of practice. And so we begin by turning our attention not to any grand institutional photographic utterance by the museum, but rather to a snapshot from a scrapbook, cut from the February 10, 1949 edition of the New York Daily Mirror and long ago filed away among Edward Steichen’s papers (Figure 6.1). This old and yellowed newspaper photograph, credited to the Mirror’s Jack Downey, shows Steichen—then in his second year as curator and director of the museum’s Department of Photography—with his hand around the shoulder of a young woman. He gestures warmly, directing her attention (and ours) toward some aspect of the large picture before them: a blown-up photograph of a fedora-ed man who, owing to the picture’s low position and life-sized proportions, appears, mid-step, to be climbing all at once into the back of a police wagon and up and into the gallery, through a low door, as if to meet them. A scene of spatial displacement and ambivalent introduction, this scrapbook news picture makes an unlikely invitation to critical visual discernment. But what exactly does the curator Steichen invite into the field of vision here? What or who, exactly, is being introduced to whom or what? And across what threshold?

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Figure 6.1  Clipping, photograph of Edward Steichen and his granddaughter, Linda Martin, looking at a picture of Eli Shonbrun during the exhibition The Exact Instant (February 8– May 1, 1949), published in the New York Daily Mirror (February 10, 1949). Edward Steichen Archive, V.A.6. The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

The Mirror’s caption offers clues: Doomed slayer Eli Shonbrun entering police wagon is one of Mirror pictorial masterpieces in Museum of Modern Art Show, “The Exact Instant.” Director Edward Steichen shows it to grand-daughter, Linda Martin. Mirror’s Chief Photographer John Reidy made it from inside the wagon.3

Newsphoto captions are definitionally succinct. They provide clear word of place, time, players, and action. The Mirror’s caption delivers our place and time: a MoMA show entitled The Exact Instant, “a large exhibition,” according to the museum, “of American news photography assembled from all over the country.”4 The museum—and this is the news here—asks its public in early 1949 to look upon news photographs with some level of care. But the caption struggles for clarity in its description of the players and their action. We have Steichen and Martin plain as day, but what or whom Steichen “shows” to Martin—whether the doomed slayer Shonbrun or the photograph “made”

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by Reidy—stands unresolved. The caption’s tangled syntax (its central pronoun “it” drifts in reference from a man to a picture of a man) is compelling here because it is so suitable to the then wholly unsettled questions at hand. Will a news photograph act as an unauthored instantiation of the thing it contains, or will it be a made and authored thing? Downey’s picture presents Steichen’s own staging of a threshold condition: that very moment—the “exact instant” where the “decisive moment” had not yet been codified as a criterion of photojournalistic value—of introduction; that crossing wherein some entity is politely escorted from a condition of obscurity to one of nominal recognition, where some thing will first be this and then that: a killer to be jailed; a Daily Mirror news picture to inform; finally a John Reidy photograph to admire. In Downey’s photograph the “doomed slayer” Eli Shonbrun is a cipher. Briefly and locally infamous as a murderer in 1942, by 1949 he was almost certainly forgotten, reduced by then to a mere marker of spectacular tabloid criminality.5 Downey’s photograph would appear to obtain its charm in the seemingly startling passage of this photographic ambassador—some weird amalgam of the murderer and Reidy’s photograph of him—up from the tabloid crime picture’s pulpy lowbrow station and into its loftier new digs in the modern art museum, where its courier, Steichen, welcomes it as a masterpiece. The Mirror’s hyperbolic assertion on behalf of Reidy’s picture is playfully overstated, a knowing riff on a cynic’s theory of art that conflates the art gallery with the alchemist’s cauldron as a space for conjuring value by magic. That caption makes light of a premise taken more seriously by critics when they encountered Reidy’s picture in MoMA’s galleries a second time, twenty-four years later, in John Szarkowski’s 1973 exhibition From the Picture Press.6 In his review of the 1973 show for the New York Times, A. D. Coleman singled out Reidy’s picture “as taut and concise a study of madness as the medium has ever produced” but wonders at the assumptions informing the wider exhibition. Apparently unacquainted with Steichen’s earlier effort, Coleman marveled at the “snobbishness inherent in the Museum’s belated certification of this vernacular tradition as worthy of curatorial attention”—attention bestowed by MoMA, Coleman notes, upon pictures “qualitatively [indistinct] from those displayed in the annual showings of the New York Press Photographers Association.”7 Coleman’s premise echoes that developed in Hilton Kramer’s more tepid review, published in the same newspaper eight days earlier. For Kramer, “The exhibition is, in effect, an act of esthetic reclamation—an effort to salvage something significant and permanent from the ephemera of pictorial journalism.”8 Whether “snobbish … certification” or “esthetic reclamation,” Coleman’s and Kramer’s agreement here announces in the 1970s a new common sense: that the introduction of the news photograph into the modern art museum’s cultural order can only amount to the cynical institutional transmutation of objects from one class of quotidian (and frequently ideologically pernicious) things into another, “aesthetic” and therefore high-brow one. But if this was the cultural machinery that Reidy’s Shonbrun stepped up and into in Szarkowski’s 1973 exhibition, when “photography,”

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as the editors of October would soon observe, was only just then “coming into view” as a matter of art world and art market interest, it does not follow that the case was the same in 1949.9 The Exact Instant’s contemporary reviewers tracked no such suspect agenda. One admiring critic for U.S. Camera went so far in the other direction to remind readers that “no where has [Steichen] said, ‘These are the greatest news photographs of the past century.’”10 Most papers were, like the Mirror, merely pleased to see their own ephemeral work staged for the art gallery’s more patient culture of looking.11 Steichen cast a wide net, including 300 objects drawn from countless archives and press morgues to cover a century’s journalistic photographic activity, with objects ranging “in size and in time [from] small original daguerreotypes [showing] sailing vessels from all over the world abandoned in 1849 in the San Francisco Harbor during the rush for California gold” to a “vast mural of the atomic bomb” in the instant of its explosion at Bikini Atoll, photographed in 1946.12 In 1949 it would have been clear already to attentive observers that MoMA’s inclusion of a newspaper photograph within its exhibitionary system necessitated no reassignment of that object’s value within any hierarchical cultural order. Steichen’s tenure as director, which ossified for most later observers in his 1955 opus The Family of Man, has long and rightly been associated by critics and advocates alike with just this sort of promiscuous acquisitiveness and immersive installation design.13 Famously giving not “a hoot in hell” about photography as a fine art, Steichen’s curatorial ethos aimed instead to honor the breadth of photography’s communicative, commercial, and humanist applications on their own inherently interesting terms.14 For all this, Steichen’s welcome toward Reidy’s picture will retain some provocative charge, especially where measured against the more rarefied sensibility imposed by his influential predecessor Beaumont Newhall.15 But it would be a mistake to overstate the force of this provocation. The department’s brief history up to The Exact Instant had been marked as much by institutional convulsion and thematic voraciousness as by any focused tendency toward epicurean distinction. Nancy Newhall, the museum’s acting curator from the time of Beaumont Newhall’s enlistment in the Air Force in 1942 until his brief return to MoMA in 1945, was at least the latter’s equal in her commitment to “creative” photography’s potential as a modern art form, but visitors to her dozen exhibitions were as likely to encounter Eliot Porter’s “color flashlights” of birds (1943) or Ansel Adams’s Manzanar document of Japanese-American internment (1944) as they were surveys of the more convincingly aesthetic “abstract” or “lyric” modes of Edward Weston (1945) or Paul Strand (1946).16 Steichen’s predecessor and Nancy Newhall’s boss, Willard Morgan, a commercial photographer, encyclopedist, and former LIFE magazine contributing editor later described by Beaumont Newhall as “a man with no real understanding of the art of photography,” is most (if not best) remembered for his 1944 survey of the “folk art” of the American snapshot.17 For the brief duration of Morgan’s directorship in 1943, the department moved from its unsettled position within MoMA’s W. 53rd St. building to a promising but short-lived “Photography Center” at 9 W. 54th St., where a democratic conception of the medium as “the casual pleasure of millions and the career of thousands” held sway, only to return to W. 53rd St. less than a year later.18 The “judgment seat of photography” as Christopher Phillips acerbically

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described the department in 1982 was less a throne in the 1940s than a folding chair, with the location of the department’s galleries shifting more or less apace with the vagaries of its curatorial and directorial leadership and philosophy.19 We might say that MoMA shared something of the “doomed slayer” Shonbrun’s tentative and transitional condition, fixed as it was photographically in a state of steady transformation for much of the decade. For all this, news photography had remained a constant priority in the department’s programming. Already in 1937, before its founding in 1940, Beaumont Newhall had included a slight but significant twenty-seven prints (out of a total of 841) in the category “press photography,” as part of his landmark and remarkably inclusive Photography 1839–1937, including a few, notably (in light of Coleman’s later remarks), which he had discovered at the first annual exhibition of the New York Press Photographers Association.20 His influential catalog-cum-textbook likewise dedicated a whole section to the practice, ascribing it its own evaluative framework.21 More than Steichen, Newhall saw in the press photographer a kind of modern artist, locating the form’s interest in the photographer’s professionally distinctive techno-temporal aptitude, shifting critical focus away from the press photographer’s untoward subject matter and onto the skillful management of equipment: “Sensing the exact instant to release the shutter,” Newhall argued, “is the most important factor in the making of any photograph. With press photographers, this sense becomes so acute as to become instinctive.”22 While increasingly invested in what he called “creative” photography of the Stieglitz/Weston/New Vision tradition, Newhall would sustain press photography’s slim ratio in his new department’s inaugural Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Aesthetics of 1940–1, which included two smartly paired news pictures—one of police beating strikers with rods, the other of the modern industrial sublime—among its three score. MoMA only solidified press photography’s position within its curatorial cosmos in the interval leading up to The Exact Instant, whose plainest predecessor was Nancy Newhall and Ansel Adam’s Action Photography of 1943.23 Less committed to the news than to photography’s technical “recording of action,” Action Photography’s curators echoed Newhall’s emphasis on the mastery of the camera operators. While exhibition publicity flagged the innovations of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Harold Edgerton, the exhibition itself set these grand masters of photographic instantaneity into a historical continuum that also included the speedy shutter’s more prosaic and pervasive applications to include “such famous [newspaper] photographs as … the Hindenburg explosion, four photographs by Weejee [sic] and a magic-eye sequence of the Dodgers.”24 More topical photojournalistic exhibitions prevailed in this moment, including those by Steichen mentioned above, but also Thérèse Bonney’s photographic chronicle of the Finnish-Soviet war in December 1940, William Vandivert’s LIFE pictures of wartime England in 1942, Eliot Elisofon’s Tunisian Triumph of 1943, and W. Eugene Smith’s reporting on the Pacific front in 1944.25 All of this might be said to amount to a sort of immersive photographic news annual, a more or less regularly updated news-photographic surround posting visions of a world at war in the course of its very unfolding—MoMA’s photographic task now as much journalistic and editorial as properly curatorial.

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No, any categorical reassignment allegorized by the killer Shonbrun’s thresholdcrossing in Downey’s picture will not have concerned the relative position of Reidy’s picture within any stratified matrix of “brows” such as Russell Lynes famously mapped for Harper’s readers that same February.26 This department assumed for itself no such elevating function, at least not programmatically. Certainly no auratic value could be located in the Reidy artifact itself: today the museum maintains no record of it, past or present, and while Reidy’s Shonbrun was featured again in Szarkowski’s later exhibition, this picture was, as a thing, distinct; another, smaller enlargement, pulled from who knows what negative.27 Value adheres here not within the object, but within Reidy’s image and the spectator’s perceptual transaction with it. Steichen’s aggrandizement of Reidy’s picture will be better taken as more literal, which is to say scalar, than connoisseurial. Just larger than life in Steichen’s iteration, Reidy’s picture had first come to popular visibility seven years earlier, in the pages of the Daily Mirror, as a markedly miniature (if more numerous) thing, perhaps 1½ x 3˝—the intended object of the inky-thumbed subway rider’s merest passing glance.28 Its enlargement from the Mirror page to the MoMA wall marks a shift “in time and size,” as Steichen had it in his press release, but with a twist: to introduce not only a more readily visible scale but to prolong a condition of careful attentiveness as well. This is fitting. One does not gain in prestige by stepping up into a police wagon. But one does thereby enter (for better or worse) into a rather more focused field of visual and institutional scrutiny. Likewise, Steichen’s act of curatorial enlargement invites Reidy’s “doomed slayer” not so much into the ennobled domain of advanced art but, more generatively, into that special atmosphere “of attentive viewing” atypical to the tabloid but customary to the museum.29 The picture rewards the attention (Figure 6.2). Reversing Weegee’s then already familiar operation of shooting into police wagons to capture the freshly jailed bodies within, Reidy has preceded his subject into the wagon to shoot outward, producing a jarring instant of invasive and tense physical proximity with the freshly incarcerated killer. The viewer can only imagine Reidy’s quick and clumsy exit past Shonbrun, caught in a moment of disorienting, flashbulb blindness in his passage from freedom and shadowy obscurity to prison and tabloid infamy. Reidy’s photograph traps Shonbrun immediately following his arraignment in New York City on March 10, 1942, hours after his arrest for his role in the lurid murder of the wealthy Polish refugee Flora Reich at the Hotel Sutton a week before. We can see that he has just escaped the perp walk’s media gauntlet, but Reidy robs Shonbrun of whatever small refuge he may have sought within the confines of the wagon. Reidy with his camera at once confirms and establishes Shonbrun’s public identity as a criminal.30 This otherwise slow, complex, and multi-institutional passage (from innocence to incarceration) is isolated by press photography as a single given instant, and this strange but pervasive process is rendered formally. Shonbrun’s knee and leading hand outpace Reidy’s shutter in their blurry passage across the wagon’s threshold, marking this medium’s built-in inadequacy to its assigned task of stilling a dynamic process into a static and printable “signal” event.31

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Figure 6.2  John Reidy, photograph of Eli Shonbrun from the New York Daily Mirror, 1942.

Aiding the viewer in their measurement of the killer’s progress across that threshold’s limit, a retoucher at the Mirror had in 1942 with ink carefully delineated the frame of the police wagon’s doorway. This clarifying detail, just shy of visibility in the Mirror’s halftone, is reclaimed to legibility, even given priority, in Steichen’s enlargement.32 In its act of clarifying enlargement and display, MoMA thereby restores the architecture of this transitional moment’s coming into view. The Museum asserts this otherwise overlooked business—of the blurry passage of hand and knee in the exact instant

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of their movement into journalistic and juridical vision, precisely as given by photography—as a suitable object of careful and considered visual and historical (if not aesthetic) inquiry, such that this particular exposure time and not some other, this depth of field and not some other, this slick surface and not some other, might express a world.33 We’d be reaching to credit Reidy’s photograph with such an insight, had the exhibition around the picture not labored so carefully to endow press photography’s “exact instant” with its own proper identity as a distinctly modern “form of knowledge.”34 The Exact Instant advanced according to the logic of the Benjaminian maxim that perception (and so knowing) is necessarily “conditioned not only by nature but by history.”35 The emphatically photographic character of Shonbrun’s path to public visibility—elsewhere operationally invisible—is made present, in the museum’s gallery, as historical, and so as an active force in the ordering of experience. Recall from the press release the pictures bookending Steichen’s show “in size and in time”: the small 1849 daguerreotypes of abandoned ships off San Francisco and the vast mural of the 1946 picture of an atom bomb exploding at Bikini Atoll. These photographs describe different Pacific worlds, to be sure, but they also account for their given presents differently as photographs. Their exposure times differ by orders of magnitude. The daguerreotypes, insured and shipped from the Smithsonian, are singular, unique, irreplaceable, and bound inextricably to the size and surface of their support. Printed as a job and rolled out like wallpaper, conversely, the Bikini test picture, for all its awesome iconographic force, is and was indistinct and ubiquitous, instantly iconic, endlessly reproducible, and, as an image, indifferent to the proportions of its lucid negative. These different photographic dispositions comport in myriad ways with the radically distinct historical conditions they describe, associatively assigning to 1849’s events temporal, distributive, and scalar properties radically distinct from those prevailing in the same seas a century later. The exhibition attended to press photography’s determinant force as a complex and heterogeneous photographic class, striving against a then (and maybe still) prevailing cultural logic that insisted precisely upon the medium’s presumed operational invisibility and neutrality in its journalistic application.36 Steichen expressed something of his exhibition’s media-archaeological concerns in a letter to the Mirror’s Joseph Costa, then president of the National Press Photographer’s Association, a year before his show opened. Explaining his intention to “postpone the Press Photography show so as to give us more time for adequate research,” Steichen observed, fourteen years after its initial conception, that he had been “spending so much time on the early historical aspect that it would be ridiculous to cover the last decade in the slam-bang hurry that would be necessary.”37 For Steichen in 1949, it seems, any full understanding through press photography’s spectacular present necessitated some setting-into-historical-relief of that medium’s otherwise sublimated determinant force. Reidy’s photograph hangs adjacent to a tight cluster of thematically related crime pictures that span the unruly development of press photography in its passage from clumsy invention to slick maturity, from Harold Warnecke’s 1910 snapshot of the photo-op assassination attempt on New York Mayor William Gaynor to William Vandivert’s surreptitiously secured view of an execution at Joliet Prison in 1935, to Frank Cushing’s 1947 chance capture of a small boy, hostage in arms, engaged

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in a back lot shootout with police. Each of these reflects a fundamentally distinct set of technological capabilities, journalistic mores, and editorial protocols. Cumulatively they express a historical spectrum of possibility for the photographic expression of an event that had otherwise largely eluded historical accounting.38 Reidy’s picture was to be understood as a point along this continuum. Reviewers recognized all this. U.S. Camera’s critic observes Steichen’s lesson that “the panorama of this nation’s history in photographs also traces the parallel development and improvement of photography down through the period.” The Times’ Jacob Deschin detected an emphasis on the question of how “changing photographic techniques have affected the final result.” Deschin is precise in his account, noting the importance of “the advent of high-speed panchromatic emulsions” in bringing “candid photography under poor lighting conditions into wide use”; the change introduced by the move from “flash powder discharged in a pan to today’s flash lamp sealed in glass”; and the opportunities opened by the “introduction of roll and sheet film not available to users of the early wet plate and its successor dry plate.”39 Steichen does not offer press photography as any clean and clear first draft of history. His exhibition instead announces it as a technology never not in flux, whose historically variable operations necessarily inflect our sense of past and present alike by its very work of depiction. Steichen’s exhibition design invited this recognition. In one room, a floating wall offered an array of recent, mostly tightly cropped candid snapshots of faces in the news: Sam Caldwell’s nighttime flash exposure of a grief-stricken woman at an Illinois mine disaster in 1948; Bernard Nagel’s undated but recent view of Henry Ford sharing a private word with Thomas Edison; a tense and ominous moment between U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov at the Paris Peace Conference in May 1946, caught close-up from afar by Emil Reynolds. These assemble into a compelling portrait of the modern industrial world and its nascent Cold War. But by virtue of the spatial organization of these pictures’ staging, they also announced their situatedness within an unfolding process of technological and epistemological transformation enumerated in Deschin’s inventory above. The wall supporting these candid blowups floats just in front of a second wall whose recessed display case yields a jewel box survey of the daguerreotypists’ slower and more distant newsy efforts a century before, from the San Francisco pictures already mentioned to a survey of Civil War portraits from the studios of Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner. This spatial juxtaposition all but implores the viewer to carefully consider how distinct photographic media foster distinct descriptive potentials: a Civil War appears as if won with the deliberate aspect of a patient and steely general before the slow immediacy of his wet collodion portraitist and a Cold War appears as if launched in the stolen 35 mm snapshot of some swift and obscure diplomatic intrigue.40 “Changing techniques” have, as Deschin surmised, “affected the result.” This media-archaeological ethos is echoed and clarified in a long hallway nearby, where The Exact Instant shifts its focus from the capabilities of the camera to those of the printers and editors charged with distributing the camera’s pictures as news (Figure 6.3). This remarkable section opens with a close comparison staging a print from the Brady studio’s iconic portrait of Grant at Point Harbor, Virginia in early June 1864 against that same picture as it was painstakingly remediated and made news

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as a woodblock engraving by Harper’s Weekly five weeks later, decades before the invention and widespread application of the halftone method.41 This hallway’s carefully researched survey proceeds through a near-century’s long process of reprographic experimentation and refinement, pausing at the New York Daily Graphic’s December 2, 1873 illustration of Steinway Hall, listed in the checklist as the “First photo-mechanical reproduction of a photograph in a newspaper.” The hallway’s story proceeds from there

Figure 6.3  Installation view of the exhibition The Exact Instant (February 8–May 1, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 6.4 Len Morgan, photograph from the New York Journal-American with commentary on The Exact Instant exhibition, 1949.

along to the exhibition’s present, featuring everything from the exemplary to the banal in the routine work of LIFE, Look, PM, and Ladies Home Journal, even including a “typical AP [Associated Press] picture page, sent to all AP-serviced papers.” The New York Journal-American reported on The Exact Instant, with a fullpage photograph by Len Morgan that ably captures the didactic spirit of Steichen’s proceedings (Figure 6.4). I defer to the Journal-American’s caption: Attracting attention in the collection of newspaper photographs at the Museum of Modern Art are pages from the New York Journal of 1898 and the New York Journal-American of 1949. At the left is a page from the memorable issue of the Journal—a memorable page that features the first news-photo ever used in the newspaper. The recently published page, the right, featured photographs of scenes in present-day Shanghai. A visitor to the Museum exhibit, Rhoda

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Diamond, of Brooklyn, is interested in the progress shown in the use of pictures in newspapers.42

How could Diamond have overlooked what this installation labored to make so plain: a historicizing contest of media that denaturalized the otherwise rhetorically transparent form of her own moment’s news, itself displayed in a “special panel … updated daily,” elsewhere in the exhibition?43 The Journal’s “memorable” “first” of 1898 emerges as distinct from the Daily Graphic’s Steinway Building of 1873 as the latter was from the earliest San Francisco daguerreotypes on view, of twenty-five years before, as each of these were from 1949’s image of the news, almost a hundred years hence. Journalism’s photographic picture of the present, Diamond discovers, has a history all its own. Subject to constant processes of reimagining and remediation, Steichen’s news photography is shown to be as variable in its progress as those other modernisms elsewhere animating the museum’s galleries—as variable a modernism perhaps as that of Georges Braque, whose first American retrospective, shown concurrently at MoMA, treated his art in “all phases.”44 In Diamond, Steichen, and thus MoMA, had found their ideal viewer. Where his predecessors, the Newhalls, were concerned principally with the location of a certain kind of genius in the press photographer’s mastery over their equipment, and where subsequently Steichen himself may have settled into some too-comfortable knowledge of photography’s persuasive power, my sense is that in this instant Steichen was more concerned with a reckoning of the place of photography—a potentially dangerous medium—within a modern conception of a dangerous present. He had, after all, declined to name his exhibition Great News Photographs, as he’d earlier intended, instead giving it the less-aggrandizing title, The Exact Instant: Events and Faces in 100 Years of News Photography.45 It was not the primacy of some aesthetic disposition that was at stake here, but rather the more difficult idea that the modern understanding of any given present will be fundamentally shaped by news photography’s concurrently prevailing and always unsettled powers of inflection.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

While space does not permit an inventory of the literature on MoMA and photography, this can be said to originate in Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 (1982): 27–63. On “minor” arts and “major history,” see Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Cambridge: Zone, 2011). Jack Downey, “Doomed Slayer,” Daily Mirror, February 10, 1949, 21, Edward Steichen Papers, Folder V.A.6, Museum of Modern Art Archives. Edward Steichen, “The Exact Instant, Events and Faces in 100 Years of News Photography—Preliminary Background Release,” February 4, 1949, MoMA Press Release Archives. Shonbrun appeared in thirty unique stories in the New York Times between the commission of his crime in March 1942 and his execution a year later in April 1943. Then he all but disappears.

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For a classic account of the museum’s role in the crafting of photographic value see Rosalind Krauss, “Landscape/View: Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 311–19. A. D. Coleman, “Recognition for the News Photo,” New York Times, February 11, 1973, 160. Hilton Kramer, “225 Press Photos Shown at Museum,” New York Times, February 3, 1973, 21. Introducing their 1978 special issue on photography, October’s editors point to 1973 as a milestone year in a noxious conspiracy of photographs, institutions, scholarship, and markets. See The Editors, “Photography: A Special Issue,” October 5 (1978): 5. For the place of Steichen’s slippery oeuvre therein, see Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks, 1973–1983, ed. Allan Sekula (Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 33–51. “The Exact Instant,” U.S. Camera, May 1949, n.p. Perhaps Coleman’s characterization of MoMA’s 1973 snobbish press-photographic “certification” as “belated” was no mistake; more likely he knew of Steichen’s earlier effort but understood that it was satisfied to honor press photography’s “low” station. See, for example, “Prints Are in Style,” New York Daily News, February 14, 1949, n.p., Museum of Modern Art Archives, MoMA Exh., Folder 399.9. Steichen, “The Exact Instant.” See, for example, Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America,” Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 55–84; and Phillips, “Judgment Seat,” 41–5. Quoted from Phillips, “Judgment Seat,” 41. Newhall founded the department in the spirit of establishing “a foundation by which the significance of photography as aesthetic medium can be more fully grasped.” Beaumont Newhall, Photography: A Short Critical History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 9. Eschewing the language of “modernism,” Nancy Newhall proposed for “creative photography” an analytical lexicon consisting of “the abstract image, the lyric image, and the objective image.” See Nancy Newhall, Art in Progress: A Survey Prepared for the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1944), 148. See also Erin O’Toole, “Nancy Newhall and the Museum of Modern Art, 1942–1946,” in Nancy Newhall: A Literacy of Images, ed. Deborah Klochko (San Diego: Museum of Photographic Arts, 2008). Morgan’s achievements are many and under-sung. For a tantalizingly brief biography, see “Museum of Modern Art Opens Photography Center on West 54th Street,” Museum Press Release, October 27, 1943, Museum of Modern Art. The quotation is from Newhall’s Focus 101. John E. Abbott, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Photography Center on West 54th Street,” MoMA Press Release details TK; Bruce Downes, “The Museum of Modern Art’s Photography Center Will Be a Mecca for America’s Cameramen,” Popular Photography, February 1944, 25. Phillips, “Judgment Seat,” 27–63. On Newhall’s engagement with press photography, see Jason E. Hill, “Snap-shot: After Bullet Hit Gaynor,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015: 190–6. On his landmark exhibition Photography: 1839 to 1937, its attending catalogue, and the

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25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35

Modern in the Making textbook it later yielded, see Sophie Hackett, “Beaumont Newhall, le commissaire et la machine: Expose la photographie au MoMA en 1937,” Études Photographiques 23 (2009): 150–76 (English translation, 177–91); and Francois Brunet, “Robert Taft dans l’ombre de Beaumont Newhall,” Études Photographiques 30 (2012): 6–44 (English translation, 45–69). Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937), 80. Ibid., 79. “Exhibition of Action Photography Opens at Museum of Modern Art,” Museum Press Release, August 13, 1943, Museum of Modern Art. Nancy Newhall and Ansel Adams, “Action in Photography [exh. proposal],” Museum of Modern Art Archives, Reg. Exh. 240. See also, “Museum of Modern Art Shows ‘War Art’ Sequel,” Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, n.d., MoMA Archives, Cur. Exh. 240. See Kristen Gresh, “An Era of Photographic Controversy: Edward Steichen at MoMA,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, eds. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 259–65. See Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s Magazine 198, no. 2 (February 1949): 19–28. Author’s e-mail correspondence with MoMA Photo Department Collection Specialist Tasha Lutek, August 1, 2017. A photograph of Shonbrun’s girlfriend and coconspirator Madeleine Webb dominates the page. “Of Crime and Glamour,” Daily Mirror, March 12, 1942, 16–17. The quotation is from Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1991), 26. On the work of press photography in the construction of criminality as a public concern, see, for example, Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, eds., The Manufacture of the News: Deviance, Social Problems & Mass Media (London: Constable, 1973); and Carol Squiers, “‘And so the Moving Trigger Finger Writes’: Dead Gangsters and New York Tabloids in the 1930s,” in Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, ed. Sandra Phillips (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1997), 41–9. On the “signal” event in modern journalism, see Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922) 348. On the promise and limits of photographic enlargement, see Jordan Bear, “Blowing up the World: On the Evidentiary Cultures of Enlargement, ca. 1893–1917,” in Photography and Doubt, ed. Sabine T. Kriebel and Andres Mario Zervigon (New York: Routledge, 2016), 45–58. On the historical logic of the instantaneous view, see Andre Gunthert, “Esthétique de l’occasion: Naissance de la photographie instantanée comme genre,” Études Photographiques 9 (2001): 65–87. On news as a form of knowledge in “the modern world,” see Robert E. Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology 45, no. 5 (1940): 669–86. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23.

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36 See Barbie Zelizer, “Journalism’s Last Stand: Wirephoto and the Discourse of Resistance,” Journal of Communication 45, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 78–92. 37 Edward Steichen, letter to Joseph Costa, March 1, 1948, MoMA Exh. Files, 399.6, MoMA Archives, NY. MoMA’s press release indicates that Steichen first conceived of the show in 1934. Op cit. On media archaeology and the historicization of new media, see Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, eds., Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California, 2011). 38 In his 1947 bibliography of books on press photography, Roland Wolseley could list only four entries under the heading “History”: two from Magazine World focused on individual magazines (Look and Time, Fortune, and LIFE, respectively); Robert Taft’s Photography and the American Scene (which cuts off at 1900); and his own 1943 volume, Exploring Journalism, which, he observes, “emphasizes an aspect usually overlooked: the historical.” Roland E. Wolseley, “Photo-journalism: An Annotated Bibliography,” Journalism Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1947): 243–9. 39 U.S. Camera, “Exact Instant” and Deschin, “Exact Instant.” 40 Walter Benjamin developed a complementary theme in his “Little History of Photography [1931],” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume Two, 1927–1934, ed. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge: Belknap, 1999), 506–31. 41 For a carefully observed recent treatment of this image’s remediation, see Thierry Gervais, “Shifting Images: American News Photographs, 1861–1945,” in Circulation, Terra Foundation Essays Volume 3, ed. François Brunet (Chicago: Terra, 2017), 82–4. 42 “Journal—Yesterday and Today,” New York Journal-American, February 10, 1949, n.p., [P1 MF 13, 695], MoMA Archives. 43 The “special panel” is mentioned in Jacob Deschin, “The Exact Instant,” New York Times, February 13, 1949, X13. 44 “Museum to Open Largest Retrospective Exhibition of Work Georges Braque [sic],” Press release for the exhibition Georges Braque, March 29–June 12, 1949. Museum of Modern Art. 45 Preliminary correspondence offers an array of discarded working titles for the exhibition. See MoMA Exh. Files, 399.2 and 399.5, MoMA Archives, NY.

7

Remediating the Body: Performance, Photography, and the Dance Archives at MoMA Swagato Chakravorty

In her introduction to the inaugural 2016 volume in the Museum of Modern Art’s Modern Dance series,1 the museum’s associate director, Kathy Halbreich, presents a brief survey of the “long, if discontinuous” history of performance art—specifically, dance—at the museum. Although she underscores the affiliation between performance and the museum, she acknowledges the irregular and sparsely documented nature of that relationship before concluding with a hopeful gesture toward the future: the museum’s plans for further expansion will, for the first time in the institution’s ninety-year history, provide a space specifically designed to support the demands of performance art. Halbreich notes that this “space will be located in the middle of a sequence of galleries containing contemporary painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, design, architecture, video, and film,” before reaffirming her view that “the history of modern dance, music, and theater will be intimately and routinely connected to that of other art forms.”2 While the new space will dramatically expand the possibilities for performance and other forms of “live” art at the museum, in this chapter I look at how MoMA negotiated the challenges issued by performance art in the 1930s and 1940s, before there existed any coherent critical discourse on the subject. The extant critical literature on the subject of performance at MoMA in the institution’s early years remains sparse.3 My own research in this area takes as its guiding principle a definition of performance proposed in 2016 by a cross-departmental group of MoMA Collection Specialists that understood performance as “an event [or events] that could include a diverse range of actions, movements, gestures, and choreography occurring in real time, often later represented through various forms of video, photo, objects, or written documentation.”4 Based on this categorization, the history of performance and live art at the museum, when more thoroughly documented and historicized, holds significant potential for radically revising both critical and vernacular accounts of the institution’s participation in, and contributions to, discourses on the histories of modern art. I focus here on one exhibition from 1942: Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili (January 13–April 9), which exemplifies competing disciplinary discourses, intermediality, and at its most expansive offers an opportunity to understand how

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performance came to be itself through mediation and remediation, rather than disappearance.5 Such connections between performance and the plastic arts emerge clearly in Dancers in Movement, a relatively small installation of photographs that, like no other MoMA exhibition before, emphasized the centrality of the performing body to the fact of performance. In its radical visualization of bodies in movement— achievable through recent photographic technological advancements—this exhibition succeeded in making performance legible within the space of the art museum beyond performance-as-spectacle. Specifically, I argue that the exhibition was more than just a photographic survey of performance; it marked a crucial point in the history of the museum that inaugurated a new horizon in the institutional acknowledgment of performance as art.

Imaging Performance/Performance as Image The photographs by Gjon Mili that comprised the Dancers in Movement exhibition brought together several questions crucial to making performance visible—tangible even—within the institutional space of an art museum that, until then, mostly observed performance as ancillary to the other arts: how might an art museum ordinarily concerned with objects acknowledge an object-less art? What if this art, despite its objectless-ness, is remediated through documentation into object forms? And what of the spectator’s encounter with the artwork, which traditionally has taken the form of sustained attention granted to specific objects? Examining Dancers in Movement against its broader institutional context (particularly the founding of the Dance Archives in 1939), we can see how the exhibition, fugitively perhaps, foregrounded performance within the museum’s purview. Understanding the remediating function of documentation further offers some indications on how performance might continue to be addressed today not just by MoMA, but by art museums in general. “Exhibition of Ultra-speed Photographs of Dance Movements …” so runs the title of the press release announcing the opening of Mili’s exhibition in MoMA’s Auditorium Gallery on January 13, 1942.6 The sentence is striking, drawing within its orbit an intersection of art, technology, and the latest developments in science, as well as elements of performance. Curated by Paul Magriel, who until 1942 oversaw the Dance Archives at the museum, the installation surveyed Mili’s photographic work from 1938 through 1941 by organizing the images into three general groups. The individual photographs that made up the exhibition, thirty-five in all, are not dated in the checklist, which provides brief descriptive titles (“Group #2 12. Alicia Markova I; Down Beat—Franziska Boas,” etc.). The lack of specificity and didactic material concerning individual photographs (and individuals photographed) is suggestive. The emphasis appears to have been on the photographic documentation of performances, on the aesthetic appeal of these innovative photographs themselves. This exhibition, built around photographs that each documented some musical or dance performance, and curated under the auspices of the Dance Archives, adroitly triangulated key elements of liveness, documentation, and spectatorship. At a time when dance and performance were simply not acknowledged—formally—by the museum as belonging

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within its galleries, by the terms of Dancers in Movement, spectators encountered performance as art, within the space of the gallery. The photographs were complimented by just three introductory placards (Figure  7.1). No wall text accompanied individual images, and no mention appears to have been made of details including which specific performances were represented, much less the dates of their production. Overall, the exhibition spanned Mili’s photographs of noted dancers and performers of the day: Martha Graham, Irina Baronova, Franziska Boas, as well as brief excursions beyond the Western context (i.e., “Group #1 5. Hindu Dance—Bhupesh Guha”). From the exhibition press release, we know that the photographs included “all phases of the dance: folk, social, and theatrical.”7 Following the exhibition’s tenure at MoMA through April 9, 1942, the Department of Circulating Exhibitions sent the exhibition on tour across the United States. An unsigned memo (likely written on behalf of Magriel) addressed to Mili gives an indication of how widely the exhibition traveled: museums and galleries in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Columbus, and other cities.8 The exhibition’s uniqueness was further advanced by the relatively unknown (within fine art circles) identity of the photographer whose work formed the basis of the installation. Gjon Mili was born in Albania and had come to the United States

Figure 7.1  Installation view of the exhibition Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili (January 13–April 9, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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in 1923 at the age of nineteen, training as a photographer under Harold Edgerton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Edgerton, though a specialist in electrical engineering, had already received popular attention for photographs such as Milkdrop Coronet (1936; Figure 7.2), which relied on a stroboscopic lighting technique and modifications to the photographic apparatus to capture the crown-like splash of a falling milk drop. His technological innovations had reduced photographic exposure times to less than one-millionth of a second. At MIT, Mili helped develop

Figure 7.2  Harold Edgerton (1903–1990). Milk-Drop Coronet, 1936, photographic print / © MIT, courtesy Palm Press, Inc.

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Edgerton’s research, focusing particularly on artificial lighting and its applications in ultra-high-speed photography. Following his training with Edgerton, and for most of his professional life, Mili worked as a freelance photographer for Life magazine. His subjects varied widely and included artists, athletes, musicians, actors, and dancers. Although his work often captured movement, Mili’s approach does not merely recall the chronophotographic work of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge from the turn of the century. Rather, Mili’s photographs—whether they freeze movement into a singular, crystal-clear image or whether they (more characteristically) convey a tremendous rush of motion—seem to magnify time itself.9 We can see how this plays out in two photographs from Dancers in Movement. First, consider Mili’s photograph of the dancers José Limon and Charles Weidman (Figure 7.3).10 The two figures are caught midair, arms and legs extended

Figure 7.3  Gjon Mili (1904–1984). José Lion and Charles Weidman, c 1939, photograph. Getty Images / Bettmann / Gyon Mili.

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in near-identical but mirrored poses. Their arrangement in three-dimensional space suggests a clockwise rotation, left to right: each dancer has one leg extended and the other bent inward such that the contraction of the one seems to meet the extension of the other in space. Spread across the frame of a two-dimensional photograph, the dancers’ bodies echo each other: Limon’s right knee juts out toward the left edge of the frame, and Weidman’s left knee likewise gestures to the right edge. Their dark costumes mostly blend into the black background (always featureless in Mili’s photographs and thus ever suggestive of an uncanny absence or void that, in turn, emphasizes the obdurate physicality of the performing body or bodies before it). Strobe lighting illuminates the dancers’ bodies along the edges, lending them a kind of cut-out quality. Were it not for the beholder’s intimate, almost haptic, understanding of how fleeting such a pose—body stretched in midair, probably two or three feet off the floor—would be in reality, it would be easy to imagine these bodies in repose. The sharp overall clarity of the photograph with its stark lighting, those edge-lit forms, and the pure flatness of the background together produce an impression not merely of stillness, but

Figure 7.4  Gjon Mili (1904–1984). Down Beat – Franziska Boas, c 1940, photograph. Getty Images / The LIFE Picture Collection / Gyon Mili.

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rather of suspension. Even more acutely, the photograph reads as an instant of time unnaturally stretched out—magnified—and made available for scrutiny. At the other end of the spectrum lies his photograph of Franziska Boas, the pioneering dancer and percussionist (Figure 7.4).11 In sharp contrast to the clearly delineated forms of Limon and Weidman, it is difficult to even locate Boas precisely within this photograph. The initial impression is of a blurred sweeping arc of movement. Upon closer inspection, forms begin to reveal themselves, including a brief arc of ghostly faces—Boas caught in a spasm of motion. Similarly, a wide swathe marked out by the descent of shapes is produced by the rims and surfaces of a drum. Linking the vagueness of Boas’s torso and face to the lower left and this prominent arch of the musical instrument is a delicate filigree of spindle-like forms: her arm and the drumstick it holds. Mili’s photograph tracks the full exuberance of face, body, hands, and drumsticks as it unfolds in space and time. In a single photograph, Mili compresses a range of movement that is ordinarily invisible but is here laid out, at once sequential yet a continuous whole. Here we find the third way through movement analysis that Mili carved out between Marey and Muybridge. Unlike Muybridge’s serialized photographs that undid the continuous flow of movement by separating its phases and delinking them from each other, and unlike, too, Marey’s distanced, analytical images, Mili’s technique here arrests the flash of performance in the moment of its passage, rendering it a tangible object available to our gaze. If these “chronophotographs” (to indulge an anachronism) convey the energetic physicality of performance, then at the other end, they equally drive home the absolute precision required of those same physiques. And yet both perform a crucial materialization of what is otherwise ephemeral. Mili’s ultrahigh-speed photography allows us to read performance as image. In her landmark essay “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” Peggy Phelan avers that “performance’s only life is in the present.” Any documentation of performance “becomes something other than performance.” She further argues that no document or record of performance can ever amount to the performance itself, but only ever remains “an encouragement of memory to become present.”12 And yet this particular exhibition, at this precise historical moment—when no critical history of performance art, including what forms of spectatorship it activated or what genealogies of display it interrupted had yet been articulated—offers an opportunity to explore an alternative to Phelan’s strict binary of performance/not-performance. Perhaps the life of performance is not limited to the time of its unfolding. I have been arguing that the “new media” of Mili’s photographic practice, combined with the exhibition installation’s lack of context for the subjects of his photographs, in effect reorganized the terms of its spectatorial encounter as one with the image of performance itself. My argument draws on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s groundbreaking work on contemporary new media, in which they propose that “the representation of one medium in another” is a process of “remediation.” As new media remediates older media, it seeks to “get past the limits of representation and achieve the real.” However, this is a very specific definition of the real “in terms of the viewer’s experience.” As Bolter and Grusin put it, “[The real] is that which evokes an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response.” In order to do so, new media reaches

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toward excessiveness—they cite the audiovisual surfeit of early MTV video culture by way of example—as the very process by which remediation reconfigures the terms of encounter between audiences (or spectators) and media. This excess “becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that it corresponds to an external reality, but rather precisely because it does not feel compelled to refer to anything outside itself.”13 The sparse installation aesthetics of Dancers in Movement should not be viewed as a curious lack of curatorial attention, but rather an occasion for the elusive “stuff ” of performance—the variable temporality of bodies in movement—to come to the fore, unconstrained by narratives that would ordinarily limit each photograph to the status of a specific document of a specific performance. The new media of Mili’s ultra-highspeed photography, together with the exhibitionary structure of Dancers in Movement, remediated performance itself, seeking in the very excessiveness of that photography to evoke a different relation of spectator to performer (and to performance): an “authentic experience” that did not “refer to anything outside itself.” These photographs were the very image of performance, made available to the spectator as never before. Nonetheless, Phelan’s account of the ontology of performance leaves open an obvious question: what happens after the event? Here we must return to the question of documentation, which continues to make available the material of performance art after the performance itself is over. For it was photographic documentation, after all, that made possible Mili’s remediation of performance, spanning the extremes from minute scrutiny of precise slices of movement in space and time to encompass the wholeness of motion itself. The results allowed MoMA the unprecedented opportunity to (re-)present performance within the gallery space. The work of the Dance Archives—founded three years prior to Dancers in Movement—allowed for a radical institutional reconfiguration of performance in relation to other, more established arts. And finally, Dancers in Movement enabled audiences to access “performance’s being” in its range and complexity, considering it alongside, and in tension with, the forms and vocabulary of the other arts. But to have a clearer sense of how this exhibition mattered beyond showcasing advanced technological developments in photography, to understand why these photographs of performance amounted to more than the sum of their parts, we must consider Dancers in Movement against the broader context of performance history in MoMA’s earliest years.

The Dance Archives Surveying art museums today, one readily notes the prominence of programming, exhibitions, and discursive spaces constructed around performance art and other forms of “live” media practices. However, if today the general public flocks to highly visible performances and live events exhibited within museum walls, and if critics can speak of performance’s “institutionalization,”14 it is surely because we now have a certain critical purchase on what counts as performance. We have a vocabulary with which to think of, and write about, performance. This is a sensibility informed by the histories of Happenings, expanded cinema, postminimalism, and other avant-garde practices.

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In the 1930s, however, the situation was very different. In fact, one may trace another, less material history—call it an underground history—of distinctly different museological interests that traveled well beyond traditional mediums. This history begins hesitantly, somewhat alongside the institution’s official curatorial program as special events or accompaniments to other, more primary events. As early as December 1932, for instance, Edna Thomas and Gale Huntington performed street cries and folk songs to accompany a lecture on American folk art delivered by Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. This event accompanied Holger Cahill’s exhibition, The Art of the Common Man.15 Likewise, the singer Concha Michel performed “native songs of Mexico” to accompany a stereopticon lecture on ancient American art, presented by Herbert Spinden of the Brooklyn Museum in conjunction with the 1933 exhibition American Sources of Modern Art.16 It was not until 1936 that live art appeared at MoMA in a self-contained, freestanding manner with the famous exhibit of Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums (June 24–July 1). This exhibition was considered so unusual by the museum that the press release announcing its opening contained remarkable wording: “[T]o avoid confusion, it should be noted that the actual delphiniums will be shown in the Museum—not paintings or photographs of them. It will be a ‘personal appearance’ [sic] of the flowers themselves.”17 The amusing language of personification indicates something else, namely, that while Steichen was known as a photographer, the institution considered his horticultural work—a living medium—wholly distinct from other exhibitions organized under its curatorial purview. Live art was not, on this account, admissible within the museum. You couldn’t dance in the gallery. This adjunct status of performance in relation to MoMA’s curatorial program fundamentally changed with the foundation of the Dance Archives in 1939. Lincoln Kirstein, a member of the museum’s Advisory Committee who would later found the New York City Ballet, donated to the museum’s library a large amount of material comprising “1,515 volumes, 1,631 prints, 1,212 photographs, 238 stereopticon views, 6 sculptures, 780 lantern slides, 19 films, 200 programs, music-covers, etc. and miscellaneous items that cannot be readily classified.”18 This material, supplemented by numerous further additions, soon took the form of the Dance Archives under the custody of Paul Magriel.19 In 1942, he was succeeded by George Amberg, who helped transform the Dance Archives into a full-fledged curatorial department: the Department of Dance and Theatre Design. By 1946, this would become the Department of Theatre Arts, before being dissolved by the museum in 1948. At the time of its dissolution, the institution cited unsustainable costs of operating the department and distributed its holdings across the library and other curatorial departments.20 The founding of the Dance Archives marked a crucial shift in MoMA’s relation to performance in two clear ways: first, the sheer mass of documentary material provided by Kirstein allowed the institution to recognize a tangible corpus that gave historical evidence of an art that was otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to make legible within the walls of an object-centered art museum. Second—and following from this—it provided a path toward developing a curatorial program that might facilitate future performances in ways that encouraged greater visitor engagement. Until this point, visitors to the delphinium exhibit or a musical performance could—by the terms the

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museum had set for itself—only experience them as novelty programs that either constituted a deviation from the institution’s official curatorial operations or else as supporting some other “main” exhibition. One primary reason why performance before the founding of the Dance Archives remained ancillary within the museum’s institutional purview was the lack of material infrastructure. Archival records relating to the founding and brief existence of the Dance Archives include one substantial document likely composed in mid-1940, which offered a full articulation of the vision of the Dance Archives, including a summary of the remarkable rapidity with which its activities moved across curatorial and disciplinary lines.21 In the section titled “Purpose,” which was likely composed by Paul Magriel, the author notes that: the Museum of Modern Art Dance Archives … will serve primarily as a bureau of research and information on the art, theory and practice of dancing. Consistent with the essential functions of the Museum of Modern Art, the emphasis on the collection housed here will be the dance in modern times and will stress particularly the body of information which concerns itself with the dance as a visual art.22

A memo written by George Amberg in 1944 summarized the newly designated Department of Dance and Theatre Design, not only outlining its curatorial vision and operational details, but also arguing that the “collection is considered as part of the Museum collection, administered accordingly, with acquisitions submitted to the Acquisitions Committee.”23 In 1947, Amberg wrote a lengthy letter to René d’Harnoncourt, who had that year become the museum’s Director of Curatorial Departments, once again mounting a spirited defense of the department. He concluded by insisting that “it should be appreciated that a curatorial department of this specific character is without precedent and parallel. Owing to its scope and definition, the Department is of a comparatively modest size, but … it proves the capacity to function on the same level of significance and achievement as the Museum’s other departments.”24 Across these writings, what emerges is a conviction—shared by Magriel and Amberg—that the holdings and activities of the Dance Archives amount to endowing performance (dance, in particular) with status on par with the other arts. They were not unjustified in this belief, for in 1935, the creation of the Film Library at MoMA had already achieved something similar for critical and vernacular attitudes to cinema. Film historian Haidee Wasson in her groundbreaking book Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Cinema writes, “[W]hen the Film Library formed, no material infrastructure had been successfully built to secure lasting and studied attention to films themselves as had been done for paintings, sculptures, books, music, plays, and even photographs.” Most importantly, the Film Library “declared film a modern art with an important history. It provided cinema a prominent institutional home alongside other traditional and emergent aesthetic forms … MoMA asserted that this new modern art should be collected, saved, studied, and, most important, seen.” To be sure, the history of MoMA in relation to cinema, and vice versa, has its own

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nuances that I don’t mean to overlook. The histories of MoMA’s relations to cinema and performance are not isomorphic, given that performance has a much longer history than cinema. Yet there is some shared congruence: the Film Library was founded just three years before the Dance Archives; both were—somewhat surprisingly— founded before MoMA had a dedicated department of photography; both cinema and performance have confounded and continue to challenge art history, historiography, and the institutions of art.25 It is in this sense that the founding of the Dance Archives enabled performance art to become more than a sideshow at the museum. Supported by the range of material infrastructure it constituted, and making use of documentary material, the museum could now exhibit photographs, prints, stage set designs, and other objects relating to performance within galleries in a manner that evoked the installation of more traditional media.26 In a very elementary and yet fundamental sense, the Dance Archives permitted MoMA to begin rethinking the place of performance within the space of the museum. Relatedly, the archives unveiled opportunities for audiences— from the most disinterested visitor to the passionate critic or scholar—to apprehend performance, or the material traces thereof, alongside “the other arts.” Although short-lived, under its different nomenclatures the Dance Archives produced a surprisingly diverse series of exhibitions that ranged fluidly across lines of media and geography, cutting through the institution’s discipline-specific sense of programming. Through exhibitions like Dance and Theatre Design (1944), Modern American Dance (1945), Stage Design by Robert Edmund Jones (1945),27 Boris Aronson: Stage Designs and Models (1947), and others, the Dance Archives contributed or directly exhibited objects including drawings, miniature models, projected slides and film reels, shadowboxes and transparencies, photographs, prints, ballet and costume sketches, and plans for stage lighting. This heterodox approach to exhibition design is typical of MoMA’s early history. Presciently—if by necessity—operating across media, and foregrounding the documentation of performance as a means for making legible performance itself, the curatorial practice of the Dance Archives advanced the critical proposition that performance must be approached as always already a conversation between epistêmê and technê: between art, science, and technology. These exhibitions showcased the intrinsically multimedia character of performance, its spectatorship, and its modes of recording, storage, and display while openly acknowledging the difficulties performance presented to ordinary museological practices of collection, archiving, and exhibition. The early work of the Dance Archives, in short, laid the groundwork for a vocabulary and a politics of performance within the art museum.

Dancing in the Museum Aside from the Mili exhibition, no other exhibition in which the Dance Archives played a part focused as singularly on the human body—the body that remains at the indisputable center of all performance art. Although previous exhibitions did include photographic documentation of dance, they did not constitute any systematic discourse

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on the body and movement in relation to performance and spectatorship. The very abstraction of Mili’s photographs ungrounded the performers from the spatiotemporal specificity of the event of their performance. Against the black void, with time either expanded or compressed, it was the sheer conceptual mass of performance that took center stage. This effect was very likely enhanced by the organization of the photographs within the exhibition. As installation images show, the photographs were simply mounted on the wall in more or less linear fashion without accompanying wall text to identify details of individual events (Figure 7.5). No instruction appears to have been provided as to how visitors were expected to navigate the exhibition. Although later exhibitions certainly showcased the importance of technology, design, and architecture to performance art, they leaned mostly toward the apparatus of performance rather than the performing body. While stage sets, lighting plans, and proscenium design (exhibited, for instance, in 1948’s World of Illusion: Elements of Stage Design) are certainly crucial to the theatrical arts, such exhibitions—befitting the operation of the Dance Archives by that point as the Department of Theatre Arts—did not focus on performance qua performance. The questions of physicality, stillness and motion, perception, the spectator’s relation to performance, and the difficulties of representing performance that recur throughout Gjon Mili’s work, and which in their

Figure 7.5  Installation view of the exhibition Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili (January 13–April 9, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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range make Dancers in Movement so compelling, do not figure in most of the other exhibitions during the brief life of the Dance Archives. From its inception and by virtue of the nature of the material donated by Lincoln Kirstein, the Dance Archives conceived of dance (and in a larger sense, performance) as something that resisted medium-specific definitions. We can trace this sensibility in the range of documentary material and other performance-related objects that, in exhibition after exhibition, gestured to the fact of performance, circled around performance, while also never quite displaying performance itself as an art to be seen in the gallery alongside the other arts. This was a sensibility that would develop slowly and in dispersed fashion across the museum.28 Dancers in Movement came closest to an exhibition of performance itself, exceeding its material form as photographs of performance through sheer abstraction and the aesthetics of installation. At a time when the flattening tendencies of digital technologies of art making, exhibition, and circulation threaten the specificities of media even as they open up exciting opportunities for conversations across disciplines, performance art— conceived at MoMA as inherently interdisciplinary and a counterpoint to the more object-based operations of its curatorial departments—now returns forcefully as a site from which the museum, and all who care about the unfolding histories of modern and contemporary art, may rethink the still-pertinent questions of performance and its afterlives. Between the moving body that was the subject of Gjon Mili’s photographs and Dancers in Movement, which exhibited the indexical traces of that movement across the spectrum of animation, it is documentation that most compellingly remediates performance for the institutional spaces of the art museum. Visitors today attend, by the hundreds, major performances staged at prominent museums (the sensationalism that surrounded Marina Abramović’s 2010 MoMA retrospective The Artist Is Present is a case in point).29 And yet much of their appeal lies largely in audience documentation of the event; as Hal Foster remarks, “[W]hat is staged is less a historical performance than an image of that performance; the performance appears as a simulation, one destined to produce more images for circulation in the media (perhaps it is partly designed to do so).”30 In this very novelty lies the danger of resurrecting the sideshow aspect that afflicted some of the earliest performances at MoMA, when neither curator nor visitor (nor, it must be said, trustee or board member) knew how to negotiate performance art. Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili successfully argued that the documentary remediation of performance is as crucial to acknowledging the challenge of performance art as is witnessing the performing body in its liveness. It did so at a time when the Museum of Modern Art did not accord equal status to performance art; generally, live events and performances were presented as accompaniments to exhibitions and were frequently cordoned off or otherwise marked as “separate.”31 In this regard, the lesson of 1942 remains a guideline as the Museum of Modern Art ambitiously expands and reaffirms its commitment to better accommodating performance art within its walls. For it was not in presenting the specific spectacle of Martha Graham, or Alicia Markova, or any other dancer performing live, in a given place at a given time, that the exhibition broke new ground; rather, following the lead of the Dance Archives’ curatorial commitments, it presented the documentation of

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performance—Mili’s photographic remediation of the performing body and his abstraction of the material of performance itself—alongside artworks across the museum’s galleries. It is this connection that must, in the end, sustain the lives and afterlives of performance art within museological practice.

Notes 1 2 3

4

5

6

7 8 9

Kathy Halbreich, “Shall We Dance at MoMA? An Introduction,” in Ralph Lemon: Modern Dance, ed. David Velasco and Thomas J. Lax (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2016), 11. Ibid., 11–16. The museum’s Chief of Archives, Michelle Elligott, has done tremendous work in this area, but beyond her efforts, just two prior chronologies exist of performance at MoMA: one ends with the year 1979, while the other omits certain key moments in the institution’s history in addition to relying on a fairly narrow understanding of performance. The chronologies in question were compiled by Ruth Perez-Chaves (2004) and Matthew Breatore (2009). Both are available in the museum’s archives. This essay would not have been conceived without the support of the Mellon Foundation–Museum Research Consortium Fellowship. I am also grateful for the many discussions with Athena Holbrook, Collection Specialist in MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance Art, on conserving time-based media. This chapter is largely informed by archival research I conducted as the Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow at MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance Art in 2015–16. In the course of my research, I compiled what is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive chronology of performance or live art at the museum, surveying the period 1929 through 2014. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Remediation,” Configurations 4, no. 3 (1996): 311–58 and Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) and Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Representation,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, ed. Peggy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 146. MoMA press release, “Exhibition of Ultra-speed Photographs of Dance Movements Opens at Museum of Modern Art,” January 9, 1942. https://www.moma.org/ documents/moma_press-release_325289.pdf and “Dancers in Movement,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 9, no. 30 (February 1942), 10. MoMA press release, “Exhibition of Ultra-speed Photographs of Dance Movements Opens at Museum of Modern Art,” January 9, 1942. https://www.moma.org/ documents/moma_press-release_325289.pdf Unsigned memo to Gjon Mili, May 10, 1943, MoMA Archives, NY. In his autobiographical work, Mili recalls having encountered a column by G. K. Chesterton in the London Illustrated News in which Chesterton describes the cinematograph as a Zeitlupe (“time magnifier”). Mili writes: “Chesterton’s ideas were eye-openers for me.” Later, addressing his work with Edgerton, Mili notes that the latter’s ultra-high-speed photographs of objects and small animals in motion “shook me. For the first time, I realized that time could truly be made to stand still, texture could be retained despite sudden, violent movement.” Gjon Mili, Gjon Mili: Photographs & Recollections (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980), 18–20.

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10 Lacking available documentation, one would need to comb Mili’s entire oeuvre and attempt to match up individual photographs with the often-unspecific titles from the exhibition checklist to reconstruct the exhibition. This is made more complicated given that several photographs existed in multiple versions, as in the seven photographs of Martha Graham’s work, most of which are simply titled “Martha Graham I …, etc.”. 11 After founding the Boas School of Dance in New York in 1933, she created the first Western all-percussion orchestra in the early 1940s. Boas would remain actively engaged in dance, teaching, and studying at Anna Halprin’s studio as well as Stanford University, the Universities of Wisconsin, Washington, and other academic institutions. 12 Phelan, Unmarked, 146. 13 Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation,” 17–21. Their initial essay (later expanded in a 2003 book) is wide-ranging in its analysis of how mediation operates across media. Crucially, theirs is not an analysis limited to digital new media, but rather studies it as a test case for operations of remediation across all media. 14 Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London; New York: Verso Books, 2017), 127. 15 MoMA press release, December 10, 1932. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/ pdfs/docs/press_archives/95/releases/MOMA_1932_0032_1932-12-10.pdf?2010 16 MoMA press release, May 13, 1933. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/ pdfs/docs/press_archives/126/releases/MOMA_1933_0026_1933-05-13.pdf?2010. Another example would be the Navajo sand painters who worked in MoMA’s galleries in conjunction with the Indian Art exhibition of 1941. 17 MoMA press release, June 22, 1936. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/ pdfs/docs/press_archives/331/releases/MOMA_1936_0027_1936-06-18_18636-17. pdf?2010 18 MoMA press release, “Museum of Modern Art Establishes Dance Archives,” March 6, 1940. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/588/ releases/MOMA_1940_0019_1940-02-29_40229-15.pdf?2010 19 “The Dance Archives,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 8, no. 3 (February– March 1941): 4. 20 In her notes for Another Modern Art: Dance and Theater, an exhibition she curated in 2009, MoMA Chief of Archives Michelle Elligott wrote, “[T]hough the Museum issued a statement indicating that the department was disbanded due to the institution’s rising operating costs, Amberg, probably rightly, understood the underlying cause to be the lack of a clear realization of its function within the Museum’s structure.” 21 One measure of this is the fact that less than a full year since its founding, the archives had contributed material to no less than seven major exhibitions. Furthermore, an overview of the archives mentions that the richness and breadth of its holdings were at the time second only to those of the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra in Paris. 22 “The Museum of Modern Art Dance Archives” held in Dance Archives, I.14 “Kirstein—Foundation of Dance Archives,” The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. This series (“Series I. Departmental Matters”) provides a reasonably clear picture of the institutional life of the archives through its dissolution. 23 “The Museum of Modern Art Dance Archives” held in Dance Archives, I.6 “Correspondence and Departmental Report,” MoMA Archives, NY.

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24 “The Museum of Modern Art Dance Archives” held in Dance Archives, I.6 “Correspondence—René d’Harnoncourt,” MoMA Archives, NY. 25 Both performance and cinema ultimately resist ready categories and threaten disciplinary boundaries. That MoMA so presciently, and so early in its history, chose to engage systematically with both contradicts prevailing notions of the institution as a conservative bastion of so-called high modernism. See Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4–5. 26 For instance, in 1940 the Dance Archives contributed material and chronological research for the ballet and stage sections of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art. 27 This exhibition also marked the opening of a permanent gallery space for the Department of Dance and Theatre Design. MoMA press release, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Theatre and Ballet Design Gallery,” April 9, 1945. https:// www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/984/releases/ MOMA_1945_0018_1945-04-09_45409-15.pdf?2010 28 Crucially, the numerous programs of musical performances, such as Jazz in the Garden (established 1960), Summergarden (established 1971), and others, would play a key part in elevating the visibility of performance. Before these, John Cage’s concerts at MoMA (from his debut in 1943 onward) would also play a significant role. 29 Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present (March 14–May 31, 2010). Organized by Klaus Biesenbach. 30 Foster, Bad New Days, 129. 31 One example is the 1941 exhibition Indian Art of the United States, which included demonstrations of Navajo Indian sand-painting techniques. These demonstrations, as indicated by exhibition installation photographs, were set off by barriers and obviously coded as adjunct to the primary exhibition, not a part thereof.

8

Architecture on Display: Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden Catarina Schlee Flaksman

In its first two decades, the Museum of Modern Art continuously experimented with a variety of display methods in order to explore how architecture could be interpreted, experienced, and even consumed.1 A particularly innovative example, The House in the Museum Garden (1949), challenged previous physical and institutional limits by introducing new possibilities for the display of architecture in the museum through the commission and construction of an original architectural work that was installed in the museum’s garden. On view for six months, the exhibition attracted over 80,000 visitors eager to experience a new way of living.2 The House in the Museum Garden consisted of a full-sized, fully furnished modern house and landscaped garden designed by Marcel Breuer (1902–81). Built from an insulated wood-frame structure covered with plywood panels, the house stood out amid the tall buildings of Midtown Manhattan, in particular due to its straight, elegant lines and butterfly roof (Figure 8.1). The exterior of the house was covered with narrow vertical cypress siding, which provided the façade with a bright, almost orange tone that contrasted with the neutral colors of its surroundings. The interior featured furnishings either designed or selected by Breuer, which were also available for purchase in a retail store in Midtown.3 Drawing from the legacy of the museum’s first director Alfred Barr Jr., the exhibition continued MoMA’s long-standing engagement with housing issues that included an effort to promote modern and affordable design. Additionally, The House in the Museum Garden introduced a new approach to the exhibition of architecture. By commissioning and constructing an original, full-scale house in the museum’s garden, MoMA blurred traditional distinctions between architectural practice, the display of architecture, and a commercial showroom.4 As the first museum of modern art to establish a curatorial department dedicated to architecture, MoMA significantly contributed to the development of new modes of display while also relying upon historical installation methods. Early exhibitions demonstrated influences from eighteenth-century study museums and fine arts academies, nineteenth-century world’s fairs and period rooms, and particularly from early twentieth-century exhibitions of European avant-gardes. At the same time,

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Figure 8.1  Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. © Ezra Stoller / Esto.

MoMA proved that the modern art museum could become a site for the production, display, and experience of new architecture. Exhibitions such as The House in the Museum Garden challenged the idea that most architecture exhibitions face a “double absence,” as Barry Bergdoll suggests, lacking both the original work (the building) and its context (the site and its surroundings).5 Consisting of an original, full-scale house purposefully sited in the museum’s garden (then transformed into a landscaped, suburban setting), the exhibition provided what one might label a “double presence” of architecture. Although temporarily on display, The House in the Museum Garden was fully present as an original work meant to exist in the museum context. Even though entire buildings constructed for exhibition purposes had existed since London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, it was only after MoMA’s early exhibitions that the museum (and, more

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specifically, the art museum) became a possible site for the commission, construction, and display of new architecture.6 Established in 1932, MoMA’s pioneering Department of Architecture represented the ambitious goals of the museum, which founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. envisioned would consist of diverse departments devoted to design, architecture, photography, furniture, stage design, typography, and film. However, the museum’s board of trustees initially restrained his extensive plans and, in 1929, MoMA opened with a single department dedicated to painting and sculpture.7 Eventually Barr’s persistence resulted in the creation of a multi-departmental institution in the following decade. Particularly influenced by the synthesis of art and craft at the Bauhaus, Barr envisioned the display of architecture (and, later, design) alongside traditional fine arts, establishing what was then an innovative approach for an art museum. In 1930, Barr invited 23-year-old Philip Johnson—then a philosophy student at Harvard who, by his own admission, knew little about architecture—to join the museum as the head of the Department of Architecture.8 The pioneering Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932), curated by soon-to-be-architect Philip Johnson and art historian Henry-Russel Hitchcock, set the standards for most of MoMA’s future architecture exhibitions.9 The exhibition catalogue highlighted the importance of a comprehensive exhibition of modern architecture by stating that “the hope of developing intelligent criticism and discussion depends upon furnishing the public a knowledge of contemporary accomplishments in the field.”10 The curators believed exhibiting modern buildings to the public could give “incalculable” direction to contemporary architectural thought and practice, including new modes of building that fit “into our methods of standardized construction, our economics and our life.”11 MoMA’s early exhibitions of modern architecture were educationally oriented, oftentimes defining emerging figures and movements such as the International Style. The Modern Architecture exhibition relied on models and enlarged photographs in order to bring projects by American and European architects to the museum. Johnson, who noted that “the art of exhibiting is in itself a province of modern architecture,” invited Mies van der Rohe to design the installation, which was the final exhibition at the museum’s first location, on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue.12 Johnson believed that the Mies-designed furniture and fixtures— mostly chairs and partition screens of glass and metal—could “show to some extent in actual objects what has been achieved in modern architecture,” even in the limited four rooms of gallery space.13 Despite Johnson’s effort, the exhibition’s installation remained similar to the salon-style exhibitions from the past. Subsequent exhibitions demonstrated how MoMA curators continued to seek innovative solutions to the display of architecture that at times included an examination of the relationship between domestic spaces and social concerns. By 1934 the museum had relocated to a townhouse on West 53rd Street that allowed curators to provide visitors with more creative, direct architectural experiences. For example, Housing Exhibition of the City of New York stressed contemporary housing concerns with a striking installation.14 In order to prove the need for slum clearance and the possibilities of modern low-cost housing, the exhibition displayed a full-scale, intact

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furnished apartment from a tenement house recently demolished, where hanging clothes and piles of dirty dishes emphasized the poor conditions in which over two million New Yorkers lived.15 In contrast, a modern apartment of the same size, with furniture readily available in stores at a relatively low cost, illustrated a modern housing development for rent at a price similar to or lower than the inhospitable older dumbbell-shaped flats.16 The exhibition, described in a press release as “the most comprehensive and elaborate housing exhibit ever held in this country,” also presented informative graphic material on the topic, models of housing projects, and an accompanying book, America Can’t Have Housing, which reinforced MoMA’s commitment to social issues during the 1930s. The book was not intended to serve as a simple guide to the exhibition, but as a broader statement on the far-reaching factors that led to the housing crisis.17 The exhibition created a somewhat immersive architectural experience while continuing to rely on the display of objects and furniture in order to present fullsized interiors inside the museum galleries. The next step was for exhibitions to break free from the confines of the building. In 1939, to mark MoMA’s tenth anniversary, museum trustees inaugurated a new building that became the museum’s permanent home. Designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone as an attempt to embody the International Style in architecture, the project improved and expanded the museum galleries while also providing an outdoor sculpture garden adjacent to the building.18 The new museum kept some of the characteristics of the preexistent townhouse, preserving a domestic feeling both inside the galleries and in the garden. Although primarily used for sculpture, the garden also brought new possibilities for the display of architecture and design. Organic Design in Home Furnishings (1941) was the first design exhibition to extend into the new building’s garden via a temporary additional gallery that showed outdoor furnishings in their proper setting. But it was the following year that the museum would make use of the garden to display a full-scale architectural structure.19 Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit was comprised of two connecting cylinders of corrugated steel that could “be used for defense housing, evacuation dwellings, army barracks, or in peace time use[d] as beach or guest house.”20 The mass-produced structure—which took advantage of airplane technology and materials developed for the war—was demountable and could thus be shipped and easily assembled anywhere as an emergency shelter.21 Initially presented as a prototype for the Division of Defense Housing Coordination in Washington in preparation for a possible American entry into the war, the structure was presented in MoMA’s garden for two months, where visitors could experience its fully furnished interior.22 Seen from the outside, however, Fuller’s structure looked like an alien object that landed amid the sculptures on display in the garden. The museum continued to organize architecture exhibitions during the 1940s, but none was more ambitious than The House in the Museum Garden, the first project commissioned by MoMA that featured a full-scale design in the museum’s garden. The exhibition allowed visitors to experience a fully furnished modern house that any contractor could build. Representing MoMA’s commitment to the housing issues of the postwar economy, the exhibition attempted to offer a “custom-built, architect-

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designed solution for a middle-income family.”23 In order to address “the need for adequate housing, quantitatively, structurally, and aesthetically,” Bauhaus émigré Marcel Breuer was invited to design a house for a hypothetical middle-class family living in a suburban site of approximately 1 acre.24 MoMA trustees already recognized Breuer as “one of the formulators of modern architecture along with Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe”—all of whom had already exhibited their work at the museum.25 An interim report from 1948 reveals that the museum trustees had long discussed organizing an exhibition of Breuer’s architecture and furniture.26 However, Breuer’s expertise in building moderate and low-cost houses led the trustees to decide that he was better equipped to address affordable housing in a new program organized by the museum. Records indicate that in 1948 the museum “initiated a program to exhibit built structures, specifically model houses, in order to expose the public to the work of well-known modern architects in a format other than that of photographs, plans, and drawings.”27 Recognizing the limitations of these traditional modes of architectural representation, MoMA officials clearly hoped to persuade the public of the viability of modern architecture by immersing them in an architectural experience. Philip Johnson, recently appointed director of the Department of Architecture and Design, worked with a committee of trustees to plan what would become The House in the Museum Garden. Johnson, then busy with the construction of his Glass House, appointed Peter Blake as architecture curator, who during his two years at MoMA would also write the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue (and Breuer’s first monograph), Marcel Breuer: Architect and Designer.28 On view from April 12 to October 30, 1949, The House in the Museum Garden was accessible through the museum building and also through a separate entrance located on 54th Street. The public was required to pay the museum admission fee of 35 cents.29 Upon entering on 54th Street, a court led visitors to the main door of the house. Once inside, visitors found themselves in the spacious living room facing glass panels looking at the southern garden area. Living room, dining room, and kitchen were all connected by the high sloping ceiling covered with cypress siding, forming the central core of the house. To the east, visitors found a utility room adjacent to the kitchen, a bathroom, playroom, and two bedrooms at the end facing an intimate garden area. The west end, on the other side of the living room, consisted of stairs leading to the master suite, which sat on top of the ground-floor garage. The house’s plan, structure, and furnishing reflected Breuer’s quest for flexibility. In order to accommodate the major cycles that a typical family goes through, the construction of the house was divided into two stages.30 In the first phase, the onestory rectangular structure had only the two bedrooms on the east end, intended for the parents and the children. The second phase, on display at MoMA, incorporated a bedroom suite and a garage on the west end, taking advantage of the butterfly roof ’s upward sweep to add a second story to the house. With the completion of the second phase, the house was almost divided into two “apartments”: the living room and master bedroom on one end became the parents’ apartment, while the ground-floor bedrooms and playroom on the other end turned into the children’s apartment. Both “apartments,” however, continued to share the kitchen area, which acted as a kind of “central service core” of the then “bi-nuclear” house, as Blake described it.31

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Alongside flexibility, Breuer also aimed to provide the small house with a sense of openness. While the spatial subdivisions created “different zones of privacy and activity,” Blake writes that “the house as a whole never loses the sense of spaciousness and lightness characteristic of the best modern architecture.”32 The sloping ceiling resulting from the butterfly roof became one of the house’s main features, emphasized by the use of partitions that did not reach the ceiling. The kitchen was particularly designed as a space that accentuated the open character of the house: a wooden cupboard with sliding doors reached approximately three-quarters of the ceiling’s height (about 7 feet) in order to separate the kitchen from the dining room without the need of walls. With this feature, Breuer managed to keep the living room, dining room, and kitchen connected by the high sloping surface of the ceiling, “with the result that you are always conscious of larger spaces beyond the room you happen to be in,” as Blake writes (Figure 8.2).33 In addition, the master bedroom was also visible from

Figure 8.2  Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. © Ezra Stoller / Esto.

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the living room, only partially covered by the white-brick chimney rising above the rustic-stone wall of the fireplace. Even though the master bedroom was on the other end of the children’s rooms, it did not provide much privacy—as Eleanor Roosevelt pointed out in a review of the exhibition published in the New York-World Telegram.34 A tensioned rope served as railing for the stairs, creating an interesting yet light element in the living room—which also displayed bluestone floors along with gray and blue accent walls. Thus, the core of the house was marked by the contrast of different textures, materials, and colors, which created an interior space that was at the same time modern, open, and inviting (Figure 8.3). The connection between interior and exterior spaces provided another fundamental strategy that increased the structure’s feeling of spaciousness. Indeed, the surrounding landscape design was one of the most remarkable attributes of the exhibition, which transformed MoMA’s sculpture garden into a domestic suburban setting. According to a visitor survey conducted by MoMA at the time, the landscaped garden was one of the most popular features of the house alongside its butterfly roof and expandable design.35 Breuer opened each interior area to the garden, creating outdoor spaces for different uses: an entrance patio, a service yard, a play yard, and covered terraces. The areas were delimited by louvered screens and low bench-like stone walls in order to achieve the desired degrees of privacy and accessibility. By extending the interiors into the garden, Breuer was able to expand the somewhat small house beyond its limits (Figure 8.4). The museum’s garden, therefore, played a pivotal role in the display of this modern house by facilitating the connection between interior and exterior spaces, which simply could not be achieved in the museum’s enclosed galleries.

Figure 8.3  Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. © Ezra Stoller / Esto.

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Figure 8.4  Marcel Breuer, architect. Installation view of The House in the Museum Garden (April 12–October 30, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. © Ezra Stoller / Esto.

MoMA trustees’ decision to commission and build a modern house was likely a reaction to the influence of the Case Study House program initiated in California in 1945 by Arts & Architecture magazine. This program, designed to address postwar housing in Southern California, had a reverberating effect that later influenced architects, real estate developers, and furniture designers on the East Coast to explore alternative ways of living.36 As in the modern houses from the Case Study Program, Breuer promoted outdoor living highlighting the connection between indoor and outdoor spaces—though unlike California, the exhibition in New York had to be somewhat strategically timed during warmer months.37 Using MoMA’s garden as a site, he was able to create a garden within a garden and thus display his house in what felt like an authentic domestic setting. The interior of the house further reflected Breuer’s interest in modern efficiency through his meticulous selection of cutting-edge furniture, equipment, and

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accessories. Apart from the built-in kitchen cupboard and other built-in desks and shelves, furnishings also included Breuer’s own designs, such as bent plywood nesting tables and cane dining chairs with birch plywood frame. In addition, a one-of-a-kind cocktail table with a panel of dials provided remote control for a freestanding radiophonograph-television set, a novelty at the time.38 Breuer’s selections included Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair (1946) and Grasshopper armchairs (1946); a walnut dining table (1945) and molded plywood chairs (1946) by Charles and Ray Eames; a Butterfly Chair designed by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy (1938); and textiles designed by Naomi Raymond and Marianne Strengell. The furnished interior provided a dynamic mix of exhibition and showroom, pushing the museum’s institutional limits and turning visitors into potential consumers. Most of the furniture, fabrics, glassware, ceramics, and other accessories on display were available for purchase at New Design Inc., a retail store at 33 East 75th Street. New Design provided a folder at both the store and the museum that included information on the exhibited designers and object prices along with the “complete details on the furnishings of the house, room by room.”39 Through the display of a domestic interior furnished with a selection of relatively affordable pieces available for purchase, MoMA addressed “the hunger of the American public for consumer goods denied during the war years, for new technological gadgets to improve the quality of life, and for new ways for family life to be comfortable and informal.”40 Selected by Breuer for their good design, the furnishings and objects represented a new way of living made possible with the end of the war, characterized by the rise of a consumer culture. The focus on consumer goods seen at The House in the Museum Garden likely resulted from the merging of MoMA’s Department of Architecture, created in 1932, with its Department of Industrial Design, officially created in 1940. In 1949 both were consolidated as the Department of Architecture and Design under the directorship of Philip Johnson—who, by then, had been Breuer’s student at Harvard.41 Breuer’s house, therefore, reflected the connection established between the museum and the commercial sphere during the preceding years. In previous efforts to influence the architecture and design industry, MoMA exhibitions such as Useful Objects (1938) addressed designers, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers.42 The first installment of an annual exhibition, this installation included a selection of objects under five dollars that finally increased to objects under a hundred dollars by 1947. Since the inaugural exhibition, which displayed objects alongside their prices and retailers, MoMA continued to collaborate with retail stores in order to promote everyday affordable objects characterized by an excellent design.43 The exhibition catalogue further demonstrated the affordability of good living and good design by providing the cost of construction for four variations of Breuer’s house: the three-bedroom expanded house similar to the one on display would cost $27,475 (with alternate finishes it could cost $25,110), and the smaller two-bedroom version would cost $21,960 (with alternate finishes the price could be reduced to $19,975).44 These costs, however, became the focus of most criticism since they were still quite high and beyond the reach of most low- and even middle-income families at the time.45 Eleanor Roosevelt’s review stated her position plainly in its headline, “Museum Model

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Home Is New but Expensive,” commenting that “the price seems too extravagant for most people who would live in it.”46 The museum responded that “a house of this size would have cost half its present price not so very long ago,” acknowledging its expense and pointing to the low market value that mortgage bankers still assigned to modern houses, which did not allow aspiring homeowners to get the necessary loans to build them.47 The letter goes on to say that the museum’s goal was to indirectly influence the large American building industry, hoping that modern houses would be increasingly affordable in the near future. But another letter, this time from a museum visitor, asked Philip Johnson if there was no hope for a modern house on a moderate cost—between $10,000 and $15,000—and suggested that the museum should address the problem of the minimum house more directly.48 In this spirit, The House in the Museum Garden addressed the needs of postwar America—marked by a housing shortage—by taking advantage of a strong public interest in exhibitions, publications, and all things housing-related.49 Breuer had specifically been commissioned to “design a moderately priced house” for a man who commuted from his job in a large city to the outskirts where he resided with his family.50 Owning one’s own house became central for middle-class Americans who sought a better, suburban life predicated by the automobile and the highway. Breuer’s house successfully embraced the ideals of the time—such as “informality, outdoor living, family unit, special attention to children”—and promoted a new way of living that was desired by many Americans, including himself.51 The House in the Museum Garden inaugurated new possibilities for the display of architecture and design at MoMA, bringing them together in a full-scale, architectdesigned domestic environment. By displaying a complete house with modern plans, structure, materials, and equipment, the exhibition demonstrated how readily “good design and good living” could be purchased by providing visitors not only with the cost of the furniture and objects on display, but also with a detailed price of the construction of the house itself.52 In doing so, it expanded the goal of the Useful Objects exhibitions and anticipated the Good Design program initiated in 1950 by Edgar J. Kaufmann Jr., which aimed to “influence the buying habits of American consumers and the selling practices of retailers.”53 The term “good design” emerged in the postwar era and was defined by MoMA’s program selection committee chaired by Kaufmann as “design intended for present-day life, in regard to usefulness, to production methods and materials and to the progressive taste of the day.”54 By the mid-1940s, then, MoMA’s mission had evolved from advancing the acceptance of modern architecture, as was the case in earlier exhibitions, to directing consumers’ taste toward good design, which became the shared goal of many architecture and design exhibitions at the time.55 This emphasis on good design, however, broke down the distinction between commercial product and work of art, as well as between visitor and consumer, thus unsettling the conventions of a traditional art museum. Ultimately, by commissioning, building, and displaying architecture in the museum context, MoMA became a site for both the production and display of architecture. Turning the exhibition space into an architectural site, MoMA presented an alternative to the usual absence that characterizes most architecture exhibitions, achieving a “double-presence” of architecture in the museum—with both the house and its context

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on display. In the following years, however, MoMA’s institutionalization would limit the museum’s ability to welcome large-scale projects of this kind, especially due to the increasing formalization of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden after Philip Johnson’s renovation project from 1953 that defined permanent uses for the garden.56 The domestic scale characteristic of MoMA’s garden prior to renovation was crucial to the success of the 1949 The House in the Museum Garden. Similar to a suburban backyard, the garden allowed visitors to experience Breuer’s concept of indoor/outdoor living in a house built for a museum but still evoking a feeling of home.

Notes Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 291. 2 The Museum of Modern Art, Modern Architecture Favored in Poll: Survey of Visitors to House in the Museum Garden Reveals Majority Like New Designs, Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, October 1949). 3 The unfurnished house itself was on sale for $5,000 plus moving and re-erection costs, totaling $27,475. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 405.4. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. At the close of the exhibition, the house was purchased by John D. Rockefeller Jr., and driven upstate to Pocantico Hills. Since 2007, the house has been administered by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. 4 Barry Bergdoll, “At Home in the Museum?” Log 15 (Winter 2009): 40. 5 Barry Bergdoll, “Curating History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 3 (September, 1998): 257. 6 The House in the Museum Garden was influential in the creation of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, established in 2000. 7 David A. Hanks, ed., Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson (New York: Monacelli Press, 2015), 15. 8 Ibid., 14. In the following years, Johnson and Barr would embark on multiple trips abroad to experience first hand the accomplishments of modern architects in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Russia (ibid., 113). 9 Translating the complexity of architecture through photographs and threedimensional models became the preferred mode of display until the 1970s, when archival material—mostly original drawings—began to be valued and also displayed to the public. See Jean-Louis Cohen, “Exhibitionist Revisionism: Exposing Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (September 1999): 320. 10 Philip Johnson, Built to Live In, exhibition catalog (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1931), n.p. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Organized by the New York City Housing Authority, the Museum of Modern Art, Columbia University Orientation Study Lavanburg Foundation, and the Housing section of the Welfare Council, the exhibition was supervised by Johnson, then Chair of the Architecture Department, and directed by G. Lyman Paine, Jr., of 1

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the New York City Housing Authority. The Museum of Modern Art, “Housing Exhibition of the City of New York,” Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1934). 15 The Museum of Modern Art, “Housing Exhibition of the City of New York.” 16 Ibid. 17 The publication compiled articles by renowned figures including Walter Gropius, Lewis Mumford, Catherine Bauer, and Carol Aronovici, eds., America Can’t Have Housing (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1934). 18 For more details on the building’s construction, see Dominic Riccioti, “The 1939 Building of the Museum of Modern Art: The Goodwin-Stone Collaboration,” The American Art Journal 17, no. 3 (Summer, 1985): 50–76. 19 The Museum of Modern Art, “Museum of Modern Art to Present Entirely New Type of Chair in Exhibition of Organic Design Opening September 24,” Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1940). 20 The Museum of Modern Art, “Museum of Modern Art Exhibits Portable Defense Housing Unit and Bomb Shelter Made from Steel Grain Bin,” Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941). 21 Thomas Hine, “The Search for the Postwar House,” in Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, ed. Elizabeth A. T. Smith (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: The Museum of Contemporary Art; MIT Press, 1989), 168. 22 Alastair Gordon, “War Shelters, Short-lived Yet Living on,” The New York Times, December 31, 2013. 23 Peter Blake, “The House in the Museum Garden,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin XVI, no. 1 (1949): n.p. 24 The Museum of Modern Art, “House Designed by Marcel Breuer Being Built in Museum Garden,” Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949). Born in Hungary in 1902, Breuer joined the art academy in Vienna in the hope of becoming a painter and sculptor. Unsatisfied with the academy’s approach, Breuer joined the newly established Bauhaus school in Weimar in 1921, then directed by its founder Walter Gropius. At the Bauhaus Breuer decided to become an architect and furniture designer, and after graduating he became a master of the carpentry workshop in Dessau—where, in 1925, he built his groundbreaking tubular-steel chair. Breuer left the school in 1928 and went on to design several houses, stores, exhibitions, and pieces of furniture in Germany, Switzerland, and England in the following years. With the start of the war, Breuer accepted Gropius’s invitation to teach at Harvard, where the former Bauhaus director had been appointed Chair of the School of Architecture in 1937. In the same year, Breuer moved to the United States. After teaching at the school for nine years and designing several houses in partnership with Gropius, in 1946 Breuer moved to New York in order to establish his own practice. Jean Fitzgerald, “Biographical/Historical Note,” Marcel Breuer papers, 1920–86, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www. aaa.si.edu/collections/marcel-breuer-papers-5596 25 “The Museum of Modern Art Builds a House,” Pamphlet. MoMA Exhs., 405.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 26 The Museum of Modern Art, Interim Report (May 12, 1948), Henry-Russel Hitchcock Archive, Department of Fine Arts, New York University. 27 The Museum of Modern Art, Interim Report (May 12, 1948), Henry-Russel Hitchcock Archive, Department of Fine Arts, New York University.

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28 A German émigré, Blake had studied in England at the time that Breuer was practicing there. See Peter Blake, Marcel Breuer: Architect and Designer (New York: The Museum of Modern Art and Architectural Record, 1949). 29 In June, 1949 the admission fee increased to 44 cents (which today would be equivalent to 4.69 dollars). The Museum of Modern Art, “Museum to Increase Admission Charge,” Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949). 30 Blake, “The House in the Museum Garden,” n.p. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Museum Model Home Is New but Expensive,” New York WorldTelegram, June 24, 1949: n.p. MoMA Exhs., 405.8. MoMA Archives, NY. 35 The Museum of Modern Art, “Modern Architecture Favored in Poll.” 36 The houses initially promoted a new lifestyle that would soon become typical of the Southern California region, based on “a new, relaxed, and open kind of domestic life” and extensively relying on the use of new appliances and technologies that represented modern living. By then, California was at the forefront of postwar house construction. Hine, “The Search for the Postwar House,” 172–3. 37 Modern appliances, furniture, and even entire houses had already been on display in New York City department stores and house expositions during the 1940s, including a display of seven full-scale furnished rooms at Bloomingdale’s in 1947 and a full-scale prefabricated house designed by Donald Deskey and displayed at Grand Central Palace for the National Modern Homes Exposition of 1946. See Mary Roche, “Exhibit Will Open for Home Planner: Architectural Models, Interiors, and New Furniture to Be Shown at Bloomingdale’s,” The New York Times, February 7, 1947. Mary Roche, “Designers Exhibit New Type of House: Prefabricated Dwelling Has Plywood Walls and Is to Use ‘Utility Core’,” The New York Times, May 2, 1946. 38 Exhibition review. MoMA Exhs., 405.11. MoMA Archives, NY. 39 New Design Inc. folder. MoMA Exhs., 405.15. MoMA Archives, NY. 40 Isabelle Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 127. 41 David A. Hanks, Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson (New York: Monacelli Press, 2015), 21. 42 See Terrance Riley and Edward Eigen, “Between Museum and Marketplace: Selling Good Design,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994). 43 See Jen Padgett’s essay in this volume for more on MoMA’s early design exhibitions and their relationship with the commercial sphere. For more on this history, see Carol Duncan, “Museums and Department Stores: Close Encounters,” in High HighHigh Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, ed. Jim Collins (London: BFI, 2002), 129–54. 44 Today, the three-bedroom house would cost the equivalent of $288,000. See Blake, Marcel Breuer, n.p. 45 Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 127. 46 Roosevelt, “Museum Model Home Is New but Expensive.” MoMA Exhs., 405.8. MoMA Archives, NY. 47 Since modern houses were a novelty, mortgage bankers were afraid to assign a higher value to them lest they end up losing money, so they did not provide enough loans

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to cover their cost of construction. Draft of letter addressed to Eleanor Roosevelt. MoMA Exhs., 405.8. MoMA Archives, NY. 48 Stephen P. Taylor, letter addressed to Philip Johnson. MoMA Exhs., 405.8. MoMA Archives, NY. 49 “The Museum of Modern Art Builds a House,” Pamphlet. MoMA Exhs., 405.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 50 Blake, “The House in the Museum Garden,” n.p. 51 Hyman, Marcel Breuer, Architect, 124. 52 Blake, “The House in the Museum Garden,” n.p. Following the exhibition, a few houses were built based on Breuer’s project for The House in the Museum Garden in Princeton, NJ; Red Bank, NJ; and Chappaqua, NY. 53 Kaufmann’s interest in promoting good design likely resulted from his family’s business: his father was the chief executive of Kaufmann’s Department Stores in Pittsburgh. Terrance Riley and Edward Eigen, “Between Museum and Marketplace: Selling Good Design,”151. 54 The Museum of Modern Art, “First Showing of Good Design Exhibition in New York,” Press release (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1950). 55 “The Museum of Modern Art Builds a House,” Pamphlet. MoMA Exhs., 405.2. MoMA Archives, NY. 56 In the early 1950s, however, MoMA would display two more houses in its garden: a modern house by Gregory Ain in 1950 and a traditional Japanese house by Junzo Yoshimura in 1954–5.

Part Three

Mobilizing Modernism

9

Reproducing Art and the Museum: Ancestral Sources in and beyond the Museum of Modern Art Rachel Kaplan

Shortly after opening in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) developed a program for circulating exhibitions outside of New York. Reaching across the country and later abroad, these traveling exhibitions constituted a system of outreach that exemplified the museum’s “‘missionary’ responsibility for promoting an understanding of what [MoMA] regards as the most vital art being produced in our time.”1 Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting, a key example of the museum’s missionary zeal that traveled across the United States, Canada, and Britain from February 1941 through September 1946, advanced understandings of modern painting by comparing recent artwork to earlier precedents dating as far back as the late second millennium BCE. In so doing, Ancestral Sources made use of a strategy curators employed often during the museum’s early years whereby visual and material “sources”—works beyond the temporal scope of modernism—provided historical context for contemporary art. Ancestral Sources thus offers a valuable case study of this comparative approach, which, in addition to reaching a broad audience, also successfully reframed earlier art in the service of a modern narrative. In addition, the exhibition is emblematic of the instructional projects that originated from the Education and Circulating Exhibitions departments in the museum’s early decades, emphasizing the educational impulse present in MoMA’s greater program to familiarize the lay public with modern art. By juxtaposing recent artistic production with historical precedents, Ancestral Sources sought to initiate a broad, geographically diverse audience that was potentially resistant to modern art. The exhibition included sixty-five color reproductions and black-and-white photographs that compared works by sixteen modern artists with sources from seven categories: European painting, ancient art (specifically of Greece and Egypt), decorative art, medieval art, primitive art (including Italian primitives as well as prehistoric pictographs and African sculpture), Japanese prints, and photography.2 An introductory panel laid out the exhibition’s intention to demonstrate the influences of previous works on modern art, while supplementary labels explained the visual links between specific modern paintings and earlier precedents. The initial

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text clarified that the sources on display “are only small threads in the web of influences which determine the character of a painting. The artist’s social, political and economic ideas as well as his heredity and aesthetic environment are all factors in the formation of a painting.”3 With this acknowledgment, the exhibition established a primary focus on formal relationships. However, the introduction also emphasized that the comparisons were based on “actual evidence of kinship” and not “mere analogies.”4 Accordingly, the text labels often relied on artist’s statements or biographical details in order to describe a direct relationship between a modern work and its source. While the cues for the sources came from the artists themselves, they fit within broader programs of MoMA’s efforts in creating a longer history of modern art. Ancestral Sources exemplified the public outreach goals of the Department of Circulating Exhibitions and the Educational Project (as the education department was known at the time). These two offices had firmly established the museum’s circulating exhibitions program by February 1941, when Ancestral Sources opened at its first venue at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. The museum’s initial traveling shows, first organized in 1931, offered two models for future exhibitions. To help finance the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, which opened at MoMA in February 1932, the museum invited other institutions to help pay costs in exchange for hosting the traveling exhibition.5 A second model, aimed at educational institutions with limited budgets, began in 1931 following the successful tour of a series of sixty color reproductions through New York public high schools. Titled A Brief Survey of Modern Painting, this mobile exhibition included statements written by museum director Alfred H. Barr, Jr.6 The exhibition’s success led to a nine-year national tour that not only included stops at schools, colleges, and community organizations, but also set a precedent for packaged exhibitions of reproductions. In order to strengthen the museum’s outreach, officials founded the Department of Circulating Exhibitions in 1933. The importance of such programming was detailed in a 1936 report published by the museum that cites the success of the circulating exhibitions as the “most valuable educational service now being provided by the Museum.”7 This study, known as the Packard Report, encouraged the continuation of didactic shows assembled from reproductions to meet the need for inexpensive traveling exhibitions.8 Similar efforts included an exhibition of color reproductions of Diego Rivera’s Mexican murals, initiated in 1933, and an exhibition of twenty reproductions of watercolors and pastels in 1934. These were followed in 1935 and 1937 by exhibitions reproducing works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, respectively, that complemented exhibitions of original works held at the New York museum. The Rivera exhibition included framed introductory texts while the Cézanne checklist came with instructions to hang the reproductions in a clearly listed order, establishing precedents for more formalized packaged exhibitions.9 The founding of the Educational Project led by Victor D’Amico in 1937 furthered the museum’s instructive initiatives. D’Amico quickly launched the Young People’s Gallery, a space dedicated to educational programs at the museum.10 A group of exhibitions in 1941, including Ancestral Sources from August 26 through September 15, featured color reproductions and explanatory labels on numbered panels hung in a specified order. This installation strategy allowed the exhibition to be easily replicated

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in local schools and was shared by the Circulating Exhibitions department.11 As the department’s founding director Elodie Courter later explained, such packaged exhibitions required minimal effort from host institutions, facilitating the circulation of “first-rate exhibitions” and extending educational opportunities.12 In addition to situating Ancestral Sources within a pattern of preassembled exhibitions of color reproductions, its presence in the space of the Young People’s Gallery underscored the explicitly instructional function of the exhibition. The use of color reproductions in museum programs had precedents in the teaching practices of Alfred Barr, who had employed such strategies during the previous decade. When Barr taught his first course in modern art at Wellesley College in 1927, he utilized large color reproductions in his lectures to better present the material, as slides at the time were black and white.13 Many of these reproductions came from a 1923 portfolio published by the Dial magazine titled Living Art: Twenty Facsimile Reproductions after Paintings, Drawings and Engravings and Ten Photographs after Sculpture by Contemporary Artists. Harvard’s Fogg Museum displayed the portfolio in October 1926, a recent gift from graduate students Jere Abbott and Barr.14 In January 1927 Barr then installed the portfolio as an exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum at Wellesley.15 Reviewing the original folio, Thomas Craven praised the facsimiles themselves: “By a process perfected in Germany it is now possible to duplicate in inks not only the colours of the original media, but the technical minutiae of the artist’s handiworks: the delicate transparencies, the flat tones, the charcoal interpolations, and even the pencillings of the preliminary sketch are all faithfully preserved.”16 The highquality color reproductions represented technical feats as well as acceptable substitutes for original works of art. Barr’s introduction of facsimiles in classroom and gallery settings further underscored his understanding of their educational value, both for college students and a greater public. Despite the fineness of the reproductions available and the possibilities for instruction  and mobility that they provided, the use of facsimiles had inherent shortcomings as well, as famously theorized by Walter Benjamin. Written after A Brief Survey and before Ancestral Sources, Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduction fits squarely within the period MoMA was developing its program of circulating exhibitions. As Benjamin wrote, “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” or the “concept of [the original’s] authenticity.”17 Even as he embraced color reproductions, Barr would have agreed with Benjamin. Writing for the Wellesley Alumnae Magazine in 1929, Barr proposed the need to encounter a wide spectrum of visual sources to understand the modern artist’s inspiration. He suggested, “For this purpose, museums are valuable, but they’re not always available. Fortunately, like the artists, we can own books, and look at reproductions and enrich ourselves.”18 While Barr here presents the copy as a worthy substitute, he still privileges the museum and the experience of viewing original works of art.19 For Benjamin, the reproducibility of art was linked to “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things,”20 a desire that similarly drove MoMA’s circulating exhibitions. As a Brief Survey toured, its catalogue noted that many of the reproductions used in the exhibition were available for purchase, bringing art from the museum into

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the domestic setting.21 A decade later, MoMA’s Director of Publications, Monroe Wheeler, noted: [Color reproductions]are a means of familiarizing a large public with the esthetic pleasures of art; their purpose is that of initiation and education. To be sure, some quality of the original is always lost, and perhaps one of their greatest merits is that, in the end, they teach one not to be satisfied with them or any substitute for an original work of art.22

Wheeler and Barr both recognized the promises and pitfalls of the reproduced work of art—echoing the theories of Benjamin—in the museum context. As facsimiles circulated, they allowed broader publics to encounter MoMA’s programs. At the same time, the presence of the reproductions themselves signaled the absence of the original works in question, many to be found at the New York institution. In addition to using reproductions in A Brief Survey of Modern Painting, Barr established a model later formalized by the Department of Circulating Exhibitions that hinged on a predesignated order of objects.23 By arranging the reproductions in a sequence along with accompanying texts, preassembled circulating exhibitions such as Ancestral Sources presented clear narratives that could be approached and read chronologically as if in a book. The organization and dissemination of these exhibitions preceded André Malraux’s Le musée imaginaire of 1947, in which he too took advantage of reproductions to bring an array of art to a public beyond the boundaries of a fixed institution, imagining the published result as a “museum without walls.”24 Writing in 1954 (the same year the third installment of Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale was published), Porter A. McCray—Courter’s successor—invoked Malraux in his discussion of MoMA’s “extramural” circulating exhibitions: The Museum of Modern Art, too, might be considered a “museum without walls.” For while through text and illustrations in its publications it offers thousands of people in distant places the means to understand and enjoy art, to many other thousands in remote and scattered communities it brings original works of art through its loans and, more especially, through its circulating exhibitions.25

McCray continued that the museum should serve not just as a repository, “but as a center for disseminating actual works of art, as well as knowledge about such work.”26 Within the goals of MoMA’s circulating exhibitions program, the distribution of facsimiles—or carriers of knowledge about the originals that they reproduced— performed a missionary function in the service of modern art beyond the physical confines of the museum. Thus, Ancestral Sources followed the ideological underpinnings and physical composition of earlier prepackaged exhibitions. The individual reproductions and explanatory texts traveled already mounted on twenty numbered birch plywood panels, which required a total space of just 100 running feet (Figure 9.1).27 Between February 1941 and April 1945 Ancestral Sources journeyed to thirty-four colleges and community centers.28 From Seattle’s University of Washington to the Civic Art

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Figure 9.1  Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (August 26–September 15, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Institute in Jacksonville, Florida, to the YMCA in Sudbury, Ontario, organizations across the United States and Canada could rent the exhibition for two to three weeks for $25 (around $350 today).29 In addition to schools and community centers, in a few instances the exhibition also appeared in department stores (Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago) and U.S.O. Clubs (Madison, Wisconsin), demonstrating a breadth of audiences and the ease of installing the panels in diverse physical spaces.30 Despite these unusual examples, the majority of the host institutions were colleges and universities, underscoring the exhibition’s educational aim. By comparison, only six of the venues were institutions dedicated solely to the arts. The educational aim of Ancestral Sources was to create a base of understanding for “painting in our time” by building on presumably familiar periods of historical art.31 The premise of displaying art of older periods within MoMA’s programs finds an early institutional precedent in Barr’s outline for developing the museum’s collections. In November 1933 he presented his “Report on the Permanent Collection” to the board of trustees, which included guidelines not only for building a collection of modern art but also for two small “background” or “supplementary” collections. In the famous torpedo diagram that accompanied the report, these background collections were illustrated as the torpedo’s propellers and identified as “prototypes and sources” or

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works that predated the museum’s collecting focus, which began in the late nineteenth century (Figure 9.2). Barr’s report detailed what the two background collections would entail; one was conceived to represent European sources and the other, non-European sources. While prototypes and sources ultimately did not enter MoMA in the form of supplementary collections, they appeared in numerous exhibitions over the course

Figure 9.2  Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Torpedo” Diagram of Ideal Permanent Collection, 1933. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Papers, 9a.7A. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (1933). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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of the museum’s first twenty years, demonstrating a persistent interest in their use to shape the reception of modern art in the United States.32 Ancestral Sources offers a mobile continuation of Barr’s original conceptualization of prototypes and sources that demonstrates the lasting impact of this aborted idea. Ancestral Sources included reproductions of a Fayum portrait from Greco-Roman Egypt, a French woodcut by Robert Gobin from around 1500, and paintings by Titian, Botticelli, and an unknown fourteenth-century Italian painter. Barr had suggested similar works for the background collection demonstrating “the character, variety, and continuity of the European tradition.”33 Similarly, examples of Coptic textiles, Japanese prints, and African sculptures in Ancestral Sources referenced the influence of these traditions on European and American art of the past fifty years.34 Barr’s insistence on “continuity” and “influence” points to the understanding that modern art was not an abrupt break with the past, but a dynamic engagement with it. The envisioned collections of prototypes and sources not only evidence Barr’s desire to situate modern art within a longer tradition, but were also a tactic that would become helpful in introducing contemporary production to new audiences. Barr’s 1933 report emphasized the educational functions of the proposed background collections, one of which was “[t]o destroy or weaken the prejudice of the uneducated visitor against non-naturalistic kinds of art.”35 This goal resonated with the organization of Ancestral Sources and its comparative format. Because the exhibition focused mainly on formal comparisons, the exhibition addressed the “prejudice” toward recent European paintings through historical examples that were generally more representational. The accompanying text also granted visitors the retrospective distance to understand changing receptions to modern art. Following the introductory panel, in the section devoted to sources from historic European painting, the first two mounts presented reproductions of works by Édouard Manet as examples of modern painting (Figure 9.3). The exhibition began by juxtaposing Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) with Titian’s Le Concert champêtre (1509) and Marcantonio Raimondi’s Judgment of Paris (c. 1510–20).36 The didactic label recounted the direct relationship of these earlier sources to Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as well as the “profoundly shocked” response of the Parisian public at the 1863 Salon des Refusés upon seeing Manet’s painting of a nude woman casually seated at a picnic with two fully dressed men.37 This panel advanced a guiding theme: despite the immediate jolt of a new mode of visual expression, the underlying roots of the modern work demonstrated a continuity with tradition. The contemporary visitor attending Ancestral Sources at a local university or community center constituted a parallel art-viewing public, but perhaps one more enlightened by the knowledge that shock would pass into acceptance. The second panel emphasized the nineteenth-century public’s ridicule of Manet’s Le Bon Bock (1873) and acceptance of Frans Hals’s Malle Babbe (1633–5), despite similarities in the subject and brushwork.38 Again the works were framed in terms of public reception, with the “new” Manet eliciting disdain from uninitiated audiences for its perceived lack of detail. Purposefully, at the time of Ancestral Sources—organized almost seven decades after the creation of Le Bon Bock—Manet was an accepted avantgarde artist. By beginning the exhibition with references to the initial uproar over “the now celebrated” paintings and their maker, Ancestral Sources primed the modern

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Figure 9.3 Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (August 26–September 15, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

public to be open-minded while demonstrating how works once derided by their contemporaneous audiences could eventually be embraced by, and even foundational for, future generations.39 Subsequent panels explored the various sources of inspiration that modern painters claimed within their practice, demonstrating ideas of continuity across time. The section on European painting—the largest in the exhibition—showed the lessons Paul Cézanne took from Nicolas Poussin, the Surrealists’ (represented by Salvador Dalí) interest in the fantastical paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and Pablo Picasso’s debt to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in his line drawing portraits of the mid-1910s. As all of the modern artists included in the exhibition were European as well, the temporal

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designation of ancestry became important in determining what was understood as modern and what was a source within the discrete category of European painting. However, upon closer inspection the temporal relationship between source and modern painting exhibited flexibility when viewing the exhibition as a whole. While the introductory panel to the exhibition defined “ancestral” simply as belonging to earlier periods, promotional materials for the exhibition made specific reference to modern artists’ interest in ancient art, from Egyptian to Renaissance painting.40 In practice, the exhibition included more recent predecessors. For example, Ingres’s drawing The Archaeologist Désiré-Raoul Rochette (c. 1830) was introduced as a source for Picasso’s Portrait of Madame Wildenstein (1918). Here, the nineteenth-century precursor was completed just a few decades before the Manet images at the start of the exhibition. The introductory panel had also suggested that the modern paintings would correspond to “art of the past fifty years.”41 When presented in 1941, Manet’s paintings would have fallen beyond the scope of this parameter. Together, the temporal proximity of Ingres and Manet suggested a more continuous narrative in time between modern paintings and their sources. Similarly, the inclusion of the drawings by both Picasso and Ingres also undermined the exhibition’s purported focus on “paintings,” demonstrating a greater interest in illustrating clear ties between sources than focusing on medium specificity. As the exhibition relied on reproductions of the works, the distinction of artistic mediums was not a pressing concern. In addition to medium specificity, the insistent use of reproductions compromised Benjamin’s authentic original and its irreproducible aura. On a practical level, this concession allowed the exhibition to reach broad audiences. Extending to a conceptual level, in “[detaching] the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition”42—to quote Benjamin—perhaps this decision enabled the exhibition organizers to reinscribe the reproduced works within Ancestral Sources’ specific narrative of modern art. A section dedicated to Japanese prints introduced sources from an even more recent history and hinted toward ongoing networks of artistic exchange. Actual woodblock prints by Utagawa Toyokuni and Andō Hiroshige shared their panels with reproductions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Camille Pissarro. While the Van Gogh text focused on the use of color, the Pissarro passage explored the use of perspective, tracing an extended lineage from the Italian Renaissance to Japanese artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the French Impressionists. This panel not only acknowledged expanded geographies of artistic circulation but also introduced questions of time and distance in the designation of ancestral sources. Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897) was separated from its ancestor, Hiroshige’s Night View of Saruwaka-machi, by only forty-one years. Completed in 1856, Hiroshige’s print preceded Le Dejeuner, the earliest “modern” painting in the show, by six short years. These disparities in temporal distance demonstrate flexibility in determining ideas of modernity and emphasize the exhibition’s Eurocentric focus, where the French painters were identified as modern while the near-contemporary Japanese artists remained sources, outside of the narrative then developing at MoMA. Conceptual shifts also extended to groupings devoted to the histories of collecting. These arrangements—whether organized by artists, institutions, or private individuals—invoked systems of art circulation in the reception and consumption of

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works. In the ancient art section, a marble head of the Goddess Hera was compared to Picasso’s Woman in White (1923). One of the exhibition’s few works that belonged to MoMA’s collection, the painting’s inclusion alluded to the museum’s own presence in forming the history of modern art.43 A following panel in the section compared the aforementioned Fayum portrait to a portrait by André Derain. The label explained that Derain in fact owned a Fayum portrait, emphasizing the direct relationship between sources that the exhibition’s organizers endeavored to show. The decorative art section, featuring “Oriental and early Christian traditions and pictorial devices,” compared Coptic textiles to a Henri Matisse odalisque and a nude by Georges Braque.44 Noted dealer and collector Dikran Kelekian lent actual textile fragments to the show, as opposed to the reproductions that represented most of the material on display. Kelekian also owned the original of the reproduced Braque nude. The written description cited Kelekian, who reported that Braque had visited his collection of textiles, again making a direct connection between source and artist but also referencing private collections as a conduit in the process of artistic influence and acknowledging networks of reception and dissemination.45 Presenting works as sources, the exhibition removed such pieces from the circumstances of their creation and reframed them in relation to their contemporary contexts, the collections that made the works available, and their formal appeal for artists of the day. The exhibition’s final panel departed from the model of direct evidence of visual sources while further blurring the temporal distinction between modern art and its precedents (Figure 9.4). This panel introduced photography as an “ancestral” source by comparing a plate from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1887) to Edgar Degas’s Jockeys in Training (c.1885–7).46 The accompanying text acknowledged that “actual influence here is questionable” while explaining that Degas’s “absorption with the problem of depicting arrested motion may have led him to study photographs of this period showing figures in motion such as the horses of Muybridge’s records.”47 The pairing disregarded not only the reliance on specific sources claimed by modern artists but also the temporal conceit of the exhibition by comparing two exact contemporaries. While on the one hand Ancestral Sources created a hierarchy within the exhibition that privileged modern painting over photography, this juxtaposition simultaneously served to disrupt painting’s favored status by acknowledging influence from a medium that itself was just coming into acceptance within MoMA as an institution.48 Elsewhere in the exhibition photography was employed as a means of reproducing art, yet this single plate introduced photography independently as an artistic source. By presenting Muybridge as a source for painting, this final panel proposed that technological innovations in the democratic medium of photography were relevant to what some might have assumed was an insulated history of fine art. Press announcements and comments from host venues indicated the exhibition’s success in presenting modern art to general audiences in New York and across North America. Toronto’s Globe & Mail explained the exhibition’s educational goal “to give the average uninitiated person an idea of how modern art developed and what the modern artist is seeking” while C. J. Bulliet at the Chicago Daily News invited “those who still feel they ‘don’t know what it is all about’” to drop in to the exhibition at Marshall Field’s.49 As Ancestral Sources circulated, host institutions sent MoMA comments on

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Figure 9.4  Soichi Sunami (1885–1971). Installation view of the exhibition Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (August 26–September 15, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

the show as well. Overall, they indicate that the show was well received, with some criticism directed at the exhibition’s heavy reliance on text. Robert O. Park, Director of Art Activities at Purdue University, wrote, “I was surprised to find such an objective and tolerant interest in the exhibit on the part of our Layman public.”50 Park’s stated surprise in the receptiveness of the Purdue community, located in a small college town northwest of Indianapolis, suggests perhaps a lack of exposure to modern painting by the “average exhibit visitor” and “Layman” that he mentions. As an exhibition that reached far-flung audiences, Ancestral Sources’ focus on the reception of art by the

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public must have resonated as deeply as its more overt message that modern painting, while appearing novel, was part of a temporal continuum. Host comments also demonstrate the positive reception Ancestral Sources had at some of its locations with audiences less familiar with modern art. For example, writing from Sudbury, Ontario, “a small town that is not accustomed to having art exhibitions,” Lionel H. Burgess of the YMCA expressed his amazement at the exhibition’s “steady stream” of visitors.51 From Madison, Wisconsin, K. D. Aurner wrote of the special trips that servicemen made just to see the exhibition and the progress made toward the local public viewing the U.S.O. Club as a cultural center.52 These responses attest to the exhibition’s effectiveness not only in bringing art exhibitions to unlikely venues and audiences, but in presenting modern art in a relatable context for these visitors and fulfilling the democratic ambitions of MoMA’s circulating exhibitions. In 1946 the exhibition crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and in so doing, its reception transformed. Following its circulation to venues in the United States and Canada, Ancestral Sources embarked on a British tour with nine additional venues organized by the State Department’s Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC).53 While the Department of Circulating Exhibitions began sending warthemed exhibitions abroad during the Second World War, the postwar era opened the possibility for a wider array of installations. Comments published in the British Division Monthly Report of the OIC stated that Ancestral Sources was well received in part because it “shows that the U.S. is cognizant of achievements in the field beyond its own borders.”54 (In fact, not only did the exhibition look beyond the borders of the United States, it failed to include a single American artist.) This comment suggests a show of goodwill in demonstrating the cultural awareness of the United States (via MoMA) as the organizer of this presentation of European painting, even as the exhibition acknowledged the skepticism of North American audiences as it took on the task of promoting modern art. The successful reception of Ancestral Sources may have contributed to a return to the display of sources within MoMA’s walls as well. In 1948, one year after the final presentation of Ancestral Sources, the museum inaugurated a series of exhibitions to celebrate its twentieth anniversary.55 These exhibitions included Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, curated by René d’Harnoncourt, which expanded upon the ideas presented in Ancestral Sources. With its goal to “relate modern art to the arts of other epochs and to clarify its place in our century,”56 Timeless Aspects brought the comparative model into a fully realized museum exhibition with original works of art. While featuring original works in the museum, the Department of Circulating Exhibitions created a teaching portfolio based on the exhibition.57 Titled Modern Art Old and New, the portfolio included gravure plates with a text by d’Harnoncourt and was made available to teachers for classroom use, continuing the educational ideals embedded in Ancestral Sources but marking a clear delineation between the use and setting of the original and reproduced works of art. In a review for the New York Times, Aline B. Louchheim noted that the New York public seemed to accept the juxtapositions made in the exhibition and agree that “modern art is not ‘out on a limb’ but a branch of an aristocratic family tree.”58 By the end of the 1940s, then, MoMA’s audiences—both in New York and at the venues of circulating exhibitions—were receptive to the museum’s message that

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developments in modern art occurred within a larger historical context. By extension, these audiences became open to modern art itself. By pairing centuries-old pieces with modern works, Ancestral Sources looked back to move forward, simultaneously recontextualizing the past in contemporary terms and historicizing the present. And yet even in 1946, MoMA’s decision to show modern art from the nineteenth century was debated—both internally and externally—as a hindrance to the museum’s continued contemporaneity. Ancestral Sources revealed this tension, as nineteenth-century works found themselves framed as both ancestral sources and modern paintings, dependent on broader interpretation and comparative pairs to determine context. In the twenty-first century, the museum’s decision to remain committed to modern art itself provides a historical basis for more contemporary work, exhibiting an expanded field of recent ancestral precedent.

Notes Porter A. McCray, “Circulating Exhibitions 1931–1954,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 21, no. 3/4 (Summer 1954): 4–5. 2 These categories align very closely with those of a similar exhibition organized by Boston’s Institute of Modern Art (originally an affiliate of MoMA and now the Institute of Contemporary Art) in 1939. Boston’s Sources of Modern Painting included European painting, primitive art, ancient art, Japanese prints, decorative arts, and the mechanical world and was featured in a special number of Art News 37, no. 24 (March 11, 1939). 3 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting,” Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records, III.12.1mf 07:521. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (hereafter CE, MoMA Archives, NY). I am grateful to Jason Dubs for obtaining this and other files from the Department of Circulating Exhibitions Records for me. 4 Ibid. 5 McCray, “Circulating Exhibitions 1931–1954,” 4. 6 Ibid. 7 Artemas Packard, Report on the Development of the Museum of Modern Art: Introduction and General Considerations, 1935–36 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 40–1, as cited in Jennifer Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series, 1938–1969” (PhD diss., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2012), 14. 8 Ibid. 9 The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Archives, https://www.moma.org/ documents/moma_master-checklist_332968.pdf and https://www.moma.org/ documents/moma_master-checklist_333053.pdf 10 The Young People’s Gallery first opened in MoMA’s temporary quarters, before moving to a designated space when the museum inaugurated its 11 West 53rd building. See “The Museum of Modern Art Establishes Young People’s Gallery,” Press release, No. 371129–40, November 29, 1937. The Museum of Modern Art, NY [https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325098.pdf]. 11 A report on the department from September 1940 explains the instructions sent with many circulating exhibitions: “These outline in detail the methods of display used at 1

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the Museum and explain the intention behind certain groupings and sequences. As much of the graphic material as possible is mounted on uniform panels, each group labeled and numbered according to the intended sequence of the exhibition.” See “Circulating Exhibitions,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 7, no. 5, Art for the Nation (September 1940): 9. 12 Elodie Courter Osborn, Manual of Travelling Exhibitions (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 12. 13 Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series,” 89, and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 101. 14 Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013): 77–80. The portfolio was drawn from Dial editor Scofield Thayer’s art collection of modern works from Europe and the United States. 15 Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?, 74, and Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 131. Kantor and Tobias suggest that Barr installed the portfolio at the Fogg and Farnsworth before donating it alone to the Fogg. Meyer however cites an announcement of the gift by Barr and Abbott published in the Christian Science Monitor on October 23, 1926 (Meyer, What Is Contemporary Art?, 80, 303 note 67). 16 Thomas Craven, “Living Art,” Dial, February 24, published in Gayle L. Brown, The Dial: Arts and Letters 1920s (Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 1981), 75. Tobias identifies the facsimiles as collotypes. See Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series,” 92. 17 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 104. 18 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Understanding Modern Art,” Wellesley Alumnae Magazine, June 1929, 304, quoted in Meyer, What Is Contemporary Art?, 160–1. 19 Interestingly, Barr presents a parallel equation in which not only is the reproduction substituted for the original artwork, but the viewer becomes a surrogate for the artist in the study and appreciation of past cultures. 20 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 105. 21 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., A Brief Survey of Modern Painting (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1934), 1. 22 “New Technique of Multiple Circulating Exhibitions on Display at Museum of Modern Art,” Press release, No. 45306–10, March 6, 1935. The Museum of Modern Art, NY [https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/978/ releases/MOMA_1945_0012_1945-03-06_45306-10.pdf?2010]. 23 Tobias has noted the lasting archival presence of color reproductions in MoMA’s circulating exhibition records, which include a card file and ledger recording reproductions owned by the department for use in exhibitions. Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series,” 89 note 275. 24 For more on the relationship between Benjamin and Malraux’s ideas regarding reproductions, see Walter Grasskamp, The Book on the Floor: André Malraux and the Imaginary Museum, trans. Fiona Elliott (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 40–5. 25 McCray, “Circulating Exhibitions,” 20. 26 Ibid. 27 “Catalog 1944–45,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:508. MoMA Archives, NY. 28 “Itinerary,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:495. MoMA Archives, NY.

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29 Ibid., III.12.1mf 07:495–8. These documents note that before 1942 the duration of the rental was two weeks for $25, while in 1944 and 1945 institutions had the option to take the show for two weeks for $20 or three weeks for $25. 30 Several well-known department stores had gallery spaces in which to host exhibitions. Other MoMA circulating exhibitions traveled to department stores as well, as did exhibitions organized by other museums, demonstrating a common practice. 31 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:521. MoMA Archives, NY. 32 Several exhibitions that displayed “prototypes and sources” occurred at MoMA in the preceding years. For discussions of the implications of these different modes of reproduction in the museum context, see Meyer, What Is Contemporary Art?, 128–9, 137–46, and 155–60. 33 “Report on the Permanent Collection,” November 1933, published in “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art,” Kirk Varnedoe, in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: Continuity and Change, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 21. Barr’s list included “a Fayum portrait, a Byzantine panel, Romanesque miniatures, Gothic woodcuts, a Giotto school piece, a Florentine panel of the XVth century, a follower of Masaccio or Piero della Francesca, a Venetian XVIth century figure composition (Titian or Tintoretto), a Bruegel school piece, a Rubens, a Poussin, a Greco, prints by Rembrandt, Blake, Pirenesi [sic], etc.” 34 Ibid. This group included “Coptic textiles, Scythian bronzes, Japanese prints, Chinese paintings, African and pre-Columbian objects.” 35 Ibid. 36 Ancestral Sources attributed Le Concert champêtre to Giorgione, as was accepted at the time. The work has since been attributed to his student, Titian. 37 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Art,” III.12.1mf 07:523. MoMA Archives, NY. 38 Ibid., III.12.1mf 07:524. 39 Ibid., III.12.1mf 07:523. 40 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:521 and “Catalog 1944–45,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:508. MoMA Archives, NY. 41 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:521. MoMA Archives, NY. 42 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 104. 43 In 1951 Woman in White was transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an agreement between the two institutions. 44 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Art,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:532–4. MoMA Archives, NY. 45 Ibid., III.12.1mf 07:533. 46 This pastel drawing, now in the collection of the Kunsthaus Zürich, is titled The Racecourse. 47 “Labels for Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:542–3. MoMA Archives, NY. 48 MoMA’s Department of Photography was founded under the leadership of Beaumont Newhall in 1940, the year before Ancestral Sources began circulation. 49 Press Clippings, CE, III.12.1mf 07:570 and III.12.1.mf 07:567–8. MoMA Archives, NY.

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50 “Comments about the exhibition,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:574. MoMA Archives, NY. Underscore in the original. 51 Ibid., III.12.1mf 07:577. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., III.12.1mf 07:498. The Department of Circulating Exhibitions began working with the Office of War Information during the Second World War to send exhibitions abroad. Following the dissolution of the OWI in 1945, some of its activities continued within the State Department as the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC). 54 “Comments about the Exhibition,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:587. MoMA Archives, NY. 55 After its last tour stop in September 1946 in Warrington, England, the exhibition materials were sold to the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in November 1947. “Itinerary,” CE, III.12.1mf 07:497–8. MoMA Archives, NY. 56 “Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, First of the Museum’s 20th Anniversary Exhibitions,” Press release, No. 111248–44, November 12, 1948. The Museum of Modern Art, NY [https://www.moma.org/d/c/press_releases/ W1siZiIsIjMyNTYyOSJdXQ.pdf?sha=b7345302e42a9617]. 57 McCray, “Circulating Exhibitions 1931–1954,” 10. The MoMA exhibition included a cast of the Venus of Willendorf on loan from the American Museum of Natural History as well as a replica of the Venus of Lespugue, installed together in a vitrine. 58 Aline B. Louchheim, “Modern Art? Not so Modern,” The New York Times, November 21, 1948.

10

The Great Gallery Goes to New York: Ancient American Rock Art, MoMA, and the New York Avant-garde James Farmer

The exhibition Indian Art of the United States, held at the Museum of Modern Art from January 22 through April 22, 1941, revolutionized American perceptions of traditional North American Indian art forms and had a profound impact on a rising generation of modern painters in New York.1 The focus of this essay is a large oil painting on canvas now known as the Barrier Canyon Mural, commissioned specifically for inclusion in the exhibition.2 The mural depicts a section of a large ancient painted rock art panel known today as the Great Gallery from Horseshoe Canyon, a remote sandstone canyon in southeastern Utah. The exhibition was designed and curated by René d’Harnoncourt, future director of MoMA, but at the time, general manager of the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB). D’Harnoncourt’s principal mandate in this position was to promote the integrity and vitality of North American Indian art. Based on its size, the circumstances of its creation, its placement in the exhibition, and documented statements by d’Harnoncourt, the Barrier Canyon Mural was clearly intended to serve as a most spectacular visual and philosophical centerpiece of the entire exhibition. Yet the circumstances of its creation and its context within the exhibition galleries of such a major and historically significant exhibition raise questions regarding the purpose and impact of the mural. Specifically, the mural is a modern painted reproduction, not an original object or photographic rendering, of an otherwise virtually unknown work of Native American art; though it depicts a work of ancient American antiquity, it was produced on commission specifically for its predetermined role in the exhibition, and it was created by a team of non-Native American artists working for the New Deal Federal Arts Project, led by a non-Native painter more closely associated with the American Regional style. Despite its prominence, the mural (as opposed to the actual rock art imagery it depicts) would seem to contradict d’Harnoncourt’s core IACB mission. This essay investigates the specific circumstances of the creation and installation of the mural in the MoMA exhibition and suggests that the mural in fact served two related but distinctly different motivations: d’Harnoncourt’s mandate to promote the

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previously unacknowledged artistic integrity of Indian art and the broader goal of Alfred Barr, then Director of MoMA, to establish definitive links between modernist styles and earlier, so-called pre-modern work, such as prehistoric, non-Western, or even Italian Renaissance. With these dual motivations, MoMA used the exhibition to both highlight native North American art and establish a deeper historical tradition for the emerging New York avant-garde. D’Harnoncourt’s goals were publicized broadly, but little scholarly attention has been accorded to MoMA’s mission as it relates to this mural, the intended “star” of the exhibition. Exhibitions and museum displays highlighting North American Indian art were nothing new in the United States, and intense archaeological excavations during the 1920s and 1930s had brought to light a wealth of ancient American artworks. Anthropologists of the time were rapidly developing more accurate chronologies and cultural models that reflected the advanced sophistication of these ancient American civilizations.3 The MoMA exhibition presented over 1,000 original Native American objects in various forms and mediums, representing a broad cross section of prehistoric and historic cultures from the United States, Canada, and Alaska.4 Many of these objects were already familiar to the general public and Native American scholars from archaeological and ethnographic collections and publications, but they had never before been presented or curated as objects worthy of consideration within the evolving modernist context of the mid-twentieth-century art world and MoMA, and rock art imagery of the Americas had never been included as a substantial component of such presentations. In 1971, the section of Horseshoe Canyon containing the Great Gallery was added to Canyonlands National Park and today attracts thousands of visitors and rock art specialists annually from around the world. However, in 1941, probably less than 100 non-Native Americans had ever heard of, much less seen, the actual Great Gallery rock art site. Only a handful of local ranchers, miners, and drillers, perhaps two dozen total, are documented as having visited the site during the previous two centuries. Prior to the MoMA show, virtually none of the show’s visitors, including d’Harnoncourt, had ever seen the actual Great Gallery; as considered below, the primary sources of Great Gallery imagery were early black-and-white photographs, meaning no one was in a position to critically question the accuracy or validity of the reproduced mural imagery.5 The actual Great Gallery is widely regarded by scholars as the premier example of an ancient, painted Native American rock art style known as the Barrier Canyon Anthropomorphic Style.6 The Great Gallery measures approximately 200 feet long and consists of over 200 individual figures and motifs ranging in size from a few inches to almost 7 feet tall (Figure 10.1). Figure 10.2 presents the only known photograph of the entire Barrier Canyon Mural as installed in the Indian Art exhibition. The mural measures 65 feet long by 8 feet tall, depicting approximately one-third of the entire original rock art panel.7 The mural displays approximately fifty abstract, red anthropomorphic figures varying in height from a few inches to approximately 5 feet, seemingly floating across the canyon wall. The figures are rendered in life-sized, one-to-one scale to the original rock art panel, and the placement and composition of the figures accurately reflect the relative positions of the original scene. The identity or any associated iconography of

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Figure 10.1 Central section of the Great Gallery, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, from the Donald Scott Collection, 1930. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Photograph courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Cat. 2004.24.10462.

Figure 10.2  Installation view of the exhibition Indian Art of the United States (January 22–April 27, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modem Art Archives, New York Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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these figures was unknown at the time and is still debated in modern rock art studies. However, a consensus does exist among scholars that the figures generally relate to ideas regarding spiritual transformation or related shamanic beliefs, suggesting that the canyon site may have been considered sacred in ancient times.8 D’Harnoncourt commissioned the mural while still serving as general manager of the IACB. Established in 1935 within the Department of the Interior, the IACB was primarily responsible for the promotion of the artistic and economic vitality of Native American art and culture of the United States. In 1939, d’Harnoncourt organized the first significant exhibition of North American Indian Art in the United States as part of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.9 D’Harnoncourt’s displays focused primarily on historic and contemporary Indian arts of the United States, Canada, and Alaska. Based partially on the success of this exhibition, d’Harnoncourt subsequently accepted an offer from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA’s director from 1929 to 1943, to organize an expanded version of the show in New York City. The resulting installation, Indian Art of the United States, retained the basic concept of the Golden Gate Exhibition, but d’Harnoncourt added an extensive section dedicated specifically to “prehistoric” Indian art. With this addition, d’Harnoncourt sought to link the more recent Indian traditions to a deeper tradition of American Indian art stretching well into a prehistoric past, establishing an antiquity comparable to other Precolumbian and Old World counterparts. The significance accorded the Indian Art of the United States exhibition by MoMA officials is evidenced by the fact that museum administrators allocated all three main gallery floors of the recently expanded museum to d’Harnoncourt.10 The exhibition was designed to be viewed starting on the third floor and descending through the subsequent two floors in a broad chronological sequence. Each floor focused on a different though linked theme regarding Native American art; “Prehistoric Traditions” on the third floor, “Living Traditions” (historic and modern cultures) on the second floor, and “Indian Art for Modern Living,” devoted to Native American-inspired twentieth-century fashion and design, on the first floor. Visitors entered the third floor through a small introductory gallery displaying some of the oldest dated ancient Native American objects, such as Paleolithic Clovis spear points, before encountering the first of eleven galleries or “units,” as d’Harnoncourt labeled them. Each unit was dedicated to a specific prehistoric Native American style or culture and contained various displays presented on podium-style bases or cabinets with glass enclosed cases, or wall mounted panels for vertical displays, with individual pieces highlighted and dramatically lit. Using these techniques, d’Harnoncourt intended to present Native American objects as sophisticated works of art. He was widely praised by critics for his exhibition design and installations, his use of dramatic lighting, and his spatial arrangements, yet the obvious non-Native reproduction at the heart of the exhibit generated no noticeable negative critical response on this particular point. Overall, the range of prehistoric objects presented in the third-floor prehistoric galleries was culturally diverse and comprehensive in both age and geographic distribution. But the design of the third floor was also intended to subliminally prepare the visitor for a rather dramatic introduction to the Barrier Canyon Mural installation in the final gallery. Units I through X presented objects from the tribes of

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the Northeast, the Northwest Coast, the Southeastern Woodlands, and the American West and Southwest, with the last, Unit XI, dedicated solely to “Pictographs.” Before entering Unit XI, the visitor passed through Unit X, displaying reproductions of polychrome fresco kiva murals from the ancient Hopi site of Awatovi, near the Hopi mesas of northern Arizona, recently excavated by the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.11 The original fresco remains were so fragile that the museum employed Hopi artist Fred Kabotie during the excavations to direct the creation of the life-sized reproductions for conservation purposes, examples of which were subsequently selected by d’Harnoncourt for inclusion in the show. Neither d’Harnoncourt nor MoMA had any direct involvement in the production of these reproductions. Unit X was darkly lit with dramatic spotlighting to emulate the original dark kiva interior and to visually (but theatrically) prepare the visitor for a dramatic transition into Unit XI, which was brightly lit with natural daylight streaming in from clerestory windows.12 Units X and XI thus established the antiquity and long duration of mural painting as a significant art form in ancient Indian culture and presented these forms for the first time in a major art exhibition in context with the other objects of the show. Upon entering Unit XI, the visitor was confronted with a large curved amphitheaterlike space, much larger than any of the previous units. Unit XI is clearly distinguishable in d’Harnoncourt’s original plan for the third-floor gallery (Figure 10.3). Along

Figure 10.3  Drawing of the plan of the third-floor galleries of the 1941 Indian Art of the United States exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, based on René d’Harnoncourt’s original plan currently held in MoMA Archives. Drawing by James Farmer.

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one side wall to the visitor’s left were mounted three photographs of well-known and previously published rock art sites from around the Southwest, each averaging approximately 2 feet by 2 feet square, apparently intended to present comparative examples of other rock art imagery. Otherwise, Unit XI was empty except for the Barrier Canyon Mural suspended along the long curving wall directly across from the visitor’s path. The giant canvas was intended to overwhelm the viewer in both its scale and visual power, providing a dramatic conclusion to the third-floor section. It was impossible for the visitor to avoid or miss the mural, which was the culmination of the third floor’s display.13 The importance of the mural is underscored by the fact that MoMA officials often used this portion of the exhibition as the backdrop for major promotional events. In some cases, Native Americans in native attire were brought to New York from the appropriate culture area or state and photographed in front of the Barrier Canyon Mural. In addition, live native performances and presentations were routinely scheduled in Unit XI, such as the creation of a Navajo sandpainting by Navajo painters. All of these events occurred with the Barrier Canyon Mural looming in the background. In this context, the mural was intended to lend an air of authenticity to the setting of the performances, and simultaneously, the performances invested the mural imagery with a sublime sense of sacredness or spirituality; whether the original Great Gallery imagery was intended to invoke a similar response is still a matter of current debate. The mural itself is attributed to Lynn Fausett, an artist from Salt Lake City with a modest national reputation as a Regionalist-style mural painter who had spent considerable time in New York City during the interwar years. In 1940, he was commissioned by d’Harnoncourt, through the local Utah branch of the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project to paint a reproduction of the mural specifically for the MoMA exhibition.14 However, the history of this massive reproduction actually begins about ten years earlier. Between 1928 and 1931, the Harvard Peabody Museum sponsored a series of expeditions to Utah, known as the Claflin-Emerson Expeditions, to document and excavate ancient archaeological sites, including rock art. In 1930, they visited Horseshoe Canyon, representing the first accredited researchers to view the Great Gallery panel. Donald Scott, then a Harvard graduate student, oversaw the photography team, which produced the first black-and-white photos of the Great Gallery, still housed at the Peabody Museum.15 Despite this recognition of the significance of the Great Gallery rock art imagery, however, the Great Gallery remained essentially unpublished, and thus unknown, to the outside world. Precisely how d’Harnoncourt first became aware of the Great Gallery and what spurred his motivation to include it in the MoMA exhibition is not clear. His expertise in Precolumbian art was well established largely through his experience as IACB manager and the 1939 Exposition in San Francisco. But rock art imagery was never a significant component of any of these endeavors. D’Harnoncourt’s interest may have arisen through his association with Donald Scott, who served as Director of the Peabody Museum in the 1930s. D’Harnoncourt included objects from the Peabody Museum in the exhibition Mexican Arts, presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1930, as well as the 1939 Golden Gate exhibit. Scott could have introduced d’Harnoncourt to the photos of the Great Gallery. However, Alfred

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Barr may also have suggested inclusion of the rock art imagery in the show. Prior to becoming director, Barr was enrolled as a doctoral student at Harvard University in the late 1920s and thus would also have been familiar with Scott and the Peabody Museum activities. In addition, Barr may have had a somewhat different motivation for including such a mural based on his role as MoMA director and his established interest in contemporary rock art reproductions, discussed in greater depth below. No other known sources of Great Gallery imagery were available to d’Harnoncourt in the 1930s. Regardless of exactly how he first became aware of the Great Gallery, in May of 1940, d’Harnoncourt reportedly borrowed some of the Great Gallery photographs from the Peabody Museum and showed them to Elzy J. Bird, then Director of Utah’s WPA Federal Arts Project.16 D’Harnoncourt asked Bird for a full-scale reproduction of the Great Gallery for the MoMA show, informing Bird that the mural was to be the “dominant piece of art in the [MoMA] show.”17 D’Harnoncourt never visited Horseshoe Canyon and never saw the actual Great Gallery in person. He apparently based his decisions entirely on the Donald Scott photos. Rushing, quoting a 1940 letter by d’Harnoncourt now in the IACB archives, asserts that d’Harnoncourt selected the Barrier Canyon pictographs because he considered them “important aesthetically.”18 Bird assembled a team of seven WPA artists including himself, New York photographer Robert Jones, and painter Fausett, who was to oversee production of the final mural. Bird’s team of WPA artists conducted their initial exploratory trip to the Great Gallery in July of 1940, though it is unclear whether Fausett was a part of that trip.19 Bird’s full team conducted a second extended trip to the Great Gallery in August 1940, producing field sketches and photographs of the Great Gallery to be used for the final mural, but Fausett did not make this second trip as he was briefly hospitalized due to illness in Salt Lake City in late July. What this means is that Fausett quite possibly never saw the Great Gallery in person. He created the mural with Bird’s WPA team in Salt Lake City between August and October 1940, working solely from photographs and drawings compiled separately by Bird’s WPA team without his direct supervision. In a 2016 interview, Bird even suggests that Fausett merely laid out the grid lines on the canvas for scale, and the other WPA team artists did most of the actual painting.20 Although the overall composition of the painting appears to replicate the specific photograph from the Donald Scott collection presented in Figure 10.1, the photograph could not have been the direct source for the painting as it lacks substantial detail displayed in the final painting and the original rock art panel. The completed mural was shipped to d’Harnoncourt in New York City in November 1940.21 The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue contained the first-ever published color photograph of the actual Great Gallery by the WPA team photographer Robert Jones, rather than a photograph of the mural displayed in the show.22 The catalogue dates the original Great Gallery rock art panel to c. 1200 CE, but modern scholars now date the rock art site much earlier, between c. 2000 BCE and 1000 CE. Again, however, the lack of accurate archaeological data for the Great Gallery itself was probably of little concern to d’Harnoncourt; for him, its presumed antiquity and the visual expressiveness of the imagery as reflected in the mural painting were the important qualities.23

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After the MoMA show closed in April 1941, a scaled-down version of the exhibit traveled to seven other venues around the United States from 1941 to 1945. Despite the logistical problems of transporting and reinstalling the large canvas at each venue, the mural was considered important enough to be included in subsequent venues. In 1945 the exhibit went to Mexico City, its final venue, but the Barrier Canyon Mural did not travel there because of concerns with international security during the war, as well as the logistics of transporting and installing the mural outside of the United States. A Spanish-language version of the catalogue, cowritten and coedited by the esteemed Mexican artist, writer, and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias, accompanied the Mexico exhibition. However, instead of a color photograph of the actual Great Gallery, it contained a black-and-white photograph of a detail of the reproduced canvas mural.24 In the catalogue, Covarrubias notes that Great Gallery rock art “shows a certain resemblance to Stone Age rock art paintings from the Old World.”25 His comment was based solely on either his viewing of the mural canvas in the exhibition in New York or possibly the photograph in the original catalogue, for Covarrubias also never saw the actual Great Gallery. By the conclusion of the entire run of the show, through its 1945 final Mexico City venue, at least five different reproductions of the original Great Gallery site were in circulation: the Donald Scott/Peabody Museum black-and-white photographs, the WPA field sketches, the Robert Jones color photographs, the blackand-white photograph of the Barrier Canyon Mural in the Mexican catalogue, and Fausett’s Barrier Canyon Mural. It is unclear whether Fausett ever saw the Donald Scott/Peabody black-and-white photographs, but depending on how one chooses to evaluate the role each version played in the production of the final painting, Fausett’s mural is a reproduction of at least two, and possibly three previous reproductions. In an exhibition overtly intended to promote the artistic merits of authentic Native American art, the oil on canvas mural operates oddly as a focal point. D’Harnoncourt’s motivations for the Indian Art of the United States exhibit, however, extended well beyond his mandate as IACB manager; social and political events of the time were also in play. By 1940, with the US involvement in the war in Europe looming, d’Harnoncourt was particularly keen on emphasizing the artistic sophistication and native antiquity of Indian art specifically of the United States (as opposed to the Americas at large), as indicated by the title of the exhibition, which avoided using phrases such as “Native American” or “American Indian.”26 This nationalist aspect was a central thematic issue in both American Regionalist painting and Mexican mural art of the 1930s. While Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood explored the potential of mural scale painting, critics noted the medium’s perceived limitations, including a traditional close association with architectural decoration and the somewhat erroneous yet widely held belief that great mural painting was a foreign import, particularly from Mexico or Europe.27 Mexican muralists such as Orozco, Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, as well as other Latin American artists such as Covarrubias, also living in New York, had been especially prominent throughout the 1930s.28 D’Harnoncourt was well familiar with these artists from his earlier professional years in Mexico City and his friendship with John D. Rockefeller. In addition to this, many New York reviewers and visitors noted parallels between objects in the Indian Art show and “surrealist” imagery.29

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Led by Alfred Barr, MoMA had established a strong exhibition record during the 1930s not only of modern art movements such as Surrealism and Cubism, but also of shows on prehistoric and so-called art of the “Other,” a broad reference to art styles from assorted non-Western or non-academic traditions.30 In 1937, MoMA presented Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa, consisting of over 150 life-sized drawings and reproductions of Paleolithic rock art from Europe and Africa. In 1940, one year before the Indian Art show, MoMA presented Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, which established a lineage between ancient Precolumbian and modern Mexican art.31 Combined with the mural movement, art historian Robert Hobbs suggests that by 1940 there was a sense that the “triumph of North American painting had already occurred—but in Mexico, not the United States.”32 The inclusion of the Barrier Canyon Mural in the 1941 Indian Art show may have thus served two overlapping but distinctly different purposes: d’Harnoncourt’s mission to promote the antiquity and legitimacy of North American Indian art as distinct from Mexican (aka. “Precolumbian”) traditions and Barr’s ongoing mission to establish ties between modern or contemporary styles and older even ancient predecessors, sometimes via modern reproductions of ancient imagery. Based on Rushing’s assertion that MoMA’s Indian Art show influenced the New York avant-garde and ultimately Abstract Expressionism, it is curious that Fausett’s Barrier Canyon Mural is accorded only passing consideration. Despite his Utah upbringing, Fausett was quite familiar and well connected with the contemporary New York art world. Fausett attended the Art Students League in New York City between 1922 and 1927, served as an administrator for the school from 1927 to 1933, and served as its president between 1933 and 1936.33 He was certainly aware of the burgeoning avantgarde movement in New York and knew many of the young artists who attended the Art Students League in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb. Assigning specific influences on early Abstract Expressionist works is necessarily speculative as the associated artists are notorious for routinely denying such direct inspirations and the formal qualities of their mature styles often defy categorization. Yet Fausett’s Barrier Canyon Mural may constitute a rare instance in which a singular work can indeed be cited as just such a source. Its prominence in the MoMA show established a sort of critical validation of the legitimacy of (very) large-scale, yet portable canvas murals for a new modern form. Pollock, Gottlieb, and Richard Pousette-Dart, among others, famously made multiple visits to the Indian Art show.34 Following the close of the MoMA show in April 1941, Pousette-Dart began work on Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental, now regarded as the first large-scale canvas in the developing Abstract Expressionist movement.35 Around that same time, Gottlieb, who had lived in Arizona and was familiar with Native American rock art, began work (perhaps not so coincidentally) on his long-running abstract series called “Pictographs.”36 In The Terrors of Tranquility, the large central rectangular figure with a featureless knoblike head is remarkably similar to the red anthropomorphic figures in the Barrier Canyon Mural.37 And in 1943, Pollock produced his first large-scale abstract painting, the now legendary Mural (Figure 10.4) for Peggy Guggenheim,38 in which images of dark, abstract human-like forms dance or float through the composition in a manner

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Figure 10.4  Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956). Mural, 1943, as displayed at the Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, Iowa, October 2014. Oil and casein on canvas, 7΄ 11˝ x 19΄ 10,˝ gift of Peggy Guggenheim, 1959.6. University of Iowa Museum of Art, reproduced with permission from the University of Iowa. Photograph by James Farmer, all rights reserved, 2014.

vaguely reminiscent of those seen in the Barrier Canyon Mural. Perhaps even more striking is the clear similarity in the way both works redefine the visual relationship between viewers and the canvas, envisioning the painting as an immersive space that encompasses the viewer. Such expanded size and scale would of course become hallmarks of mature Abstract Expressionism. Since neither Pousette-Dart, Pollock, nor Gottlieb ever visited the actual Great Gallery, these similarities seem more likely attributable to Fausett’s Barrier Canyon Mural. Because of its privileged place in the exhibition’s installation, d’Harnoncourt clearly intended to maximize the Barrier Canyon Mural’s impact. He purposely emphasized the importance of the ancient Great Gallery imagery in order to promote the idea that ancient Indian mural painting was indeed the most American of all American art, which made it a perfect inclusion in Indian Art.39 In a 1941 interview he stated, “The Indian arts and crafts are the oldest and most American of any we have in this country.”40 Reviews of the Indian Art show were overwhelmingly positive, but reviews of the Barrier Canyon Mural itself were mixed and, though often favorable, generally lacked critical focus. An uncredited reviewer in the Ogden, Utah Standard Examiner who saw the mural in Salt Lake City prior to its transfer to New York proclaimed, “These Fausett murals are ones that will never be forgotten by those who have the privilege of

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seeing them.”41 Emily Genauer reporting in the New York World Telegram described the painting as “the sprightly, colorful, decorative murals,”42 and Anne Stevens Hobler in the Sarah Lawrence College Alumni Magazine wrote, “There he [d’Harnoncourt] has hung a mural twelve by sixty feet in dimensions, curving it from wall to wall, so that its animal and figure drawings are as impressive as in the originals of thousands of years ago.”43 Today, the mural is not widely regarded as a great work, nor is it considered an accurate reproduction by modern standards. In 1964 an aging Elzy Bird commented: “It is not a great work of art—it never was intended as such. It was made as well as we could make it in the time we had to do it.”44 Bird’s comment implies that detailed accuracy or verisimilitude with the actual rock art panel was of less importance than an overall general similarity, perhaps due in part to a perceived time constraint in the production schedule. Donald Hague, Fausett’s biographer and former student, didn’t label the mural as art, but instead as a “crucial historical document.”45 And perhaps most ironically, despite d’Harnoncourt’s mandate as IACB general manager, the Barrier Canyon Mural, the centerpiece of this important exhibition, was in fact the only work in the entire exhibition not created by a Native American artist.46 This point alone illustrates the unusual role that this painting plays in an exhibition overtly dedicated to promoting Native American art. However, motivation for the commission and display of the mural may have originated from MoMA director Alfred Barr, rather than d’Harnoncourt. Barr had long been a staunch advocate for the use of accurate copies, reproductions, or facsimiles of major or important works as both teaching aids and exhibition pieces, when quality examples were available and originals were not.47 Indeed, the 1937 Prehistoric Rock Pictures exhibition consisted not only of reproductions of original rock paintings, but specially commissioned copies of unavailable reproductions—so-called thirdgeneration copies-of-copies.48 This aspect of the exhibition met with little criticism given the generally understood limitation of displaying original rock art imagery and the well-documented accuracy of the exhibition reproductions. Barr also argued that such reproductions, as “modern” creations, engaged the viewer in a distinctly modern experience and as such established a dialectic regarding the definition of modern art that superseded or bypassed the generally accepted (and in his view outdated) chronologically determined understanding of modern art.49 Art of any age or style could thus be contextualized within a modern perspective.50 The Great Gallery imagery could have been presented just as accurately (and probably more so) through large-scale photography, which would have equally served d’Harnoncourt’s mission. As Rushing notes, the commission for the mural and its subsequent production were no small task.51 The logistics of procuring such an unusual, custom-made addition for a major art exhibition of this nature were extraordinary for the time. They required elaborate administrative coordination and planning between d’Harnoncourt’s IACB, MoMA, and the Utah WPA. But perhaps the Barrier Canyon Mural better represents Barr’s intention to frame the reception of prehistoric American Indian art through a distinctly modern lens. No doubt d’Harnoncourt had complete autonomy in the development and staging of the Indian Art exhibit, but Barr may have wanted to ensure that an exhibition that included significant prehistoric material engaged its audience

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from a modern perspective. Whereas other instances in which MoMA presented exhibitions of premodern work were typically accompanied by simultaneous (though often smaller) shows of modern works, no such contrasting exhibit was installed during the Indian Art show. Beyond both its dramatic visual presence and its intended or perceived relevance to prehistoric Indian art, the mural itself may also be seen as an object of mediation between d’Harnoncourt’s efforts to promote indigenous art and culture from the United States and Barr’s interest in promoting modern art that exceed established cultural or period boundaries. From this perspective, the issues of archaeological authenticity, accuracy, and authorship would therefore be of marginal concern. As a contemporary reproduction, the mural established both a formal and theoretical artistic dialog between d’Harnoncourt’s archaeological “past” and Barr’s modern “present.” What survives today, then, is a work of peculiar historical merit. It was produced on special commission to serve as the centerpiece of a major exhibition by a major American museum and likely played a role in the development of Abstract Expressionism. Yet it is a not-particularly accurate reproduction based on copies of the original work, which was viewed in person only briefly, or possibly never at all, by the artist credited with its production (himself a non-Native American), and never by the exhibition curator or the director of MoMA. Excluding the Great Gallery Mural, the historic impact of the exhibition and its catalogue is evident throughout later scholarship on North American Indian art. A majority of specific pieces first presented in the exhibition continue to appear or be specifically cited in both contemporary general art historical surveys and focused monographs on the subject. Many of the very same examples of Hopi prehistoric pottery and the Awatovi kiva reproductions, Mimbres pottery, Woodlands pipes, and worked copper plaques, among many others, are routinely included in more specifically focused major museum exhibitions of North American Indian art.52 This rather extensive list of “key” objects and styles has come to define the stylistic and intellectual core of contemporary scholarship on North American Indian art. But the original MoMA exhibition itself is rarely noted, and neither the original Great Gallery rock art site nor the Barrier Canyon Mural receives any further critical or scholarly mention after the MoMA show, until several decades later.53 The mural is reused in 1964 (prior to its acquisition by the Utah Natural History Museum) as a large curtainlike backdrop for a traveling exhibition entitled “Standing Up Country: The Canyon Lands of Utah and Arizona,” but the associated catalogue offers no discussion of the mural.54 Perhaps reflective of its fraught legacy, as of this date the Barrier Canyon Mural is currently displayed in the entrance foyer adjacent to the admissions counter of the University of Utah Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City, rather than in a dedicated art museum or collection. It is regarded primarily as an archaeological replication, better befitting the natural history museum’s mission, rather than a work of true artistic merit, and its original commission for Indian Art of the United States does not seem to have been noted by the museum until 2016.55

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Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6 7

This essay builds on the significant initial scholarship on this subject by W. Jackson Rushing, who first brought the importance of the d’Harnoncourt Indian art show to the attention of the scholarly community. See “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: René d’Harnoncourt and ‘Indian Art of the United States’,” in The Early Years of Native American Art History, ed. Catherine Berlo (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1992), and Native American Art and the New York Avant-garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). Although the mural bears no official title, the name Barrier Canyon Mural is used by Donald Hague in his 1975 biography of Fausett and is therefore applied here. Donald Victor Hague, The Life and Work of Lynn Fausett, Master’s Thesis (Salt Lake City: Department of Art, University of Utah, 1975), 75. Hague’s biography of Fausett is the single primary source for details of Fausett’s involvement with the Barrier Canyon Mural project. American archaeological scholarship was widespread during the 1920s and 1930s, but particularly relevant to the American Southwest and its rock art imagery were Alfred Kidder’s An Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, with a Preliminary Account of the Excavations at Pecos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), and Noel M. Morss’s The Ancient Culture of the Fremont River in Utah: Report on the Explorations under the Claflin-Emerson Fund, 1928–29 (Cambridge: Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1931). In addition, results of excavations conducted between 1936 and 1939 by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University had recently revealed an extensive prehistoric tradition of ancient American mural painting, though not yet widely disseminated in popular scholarship, and Helen Gardner had cited Kidder’s 1927 Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archeaology in her seminal and still widely used art historical survey text Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its History & Significance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936). Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 105. It is possible that two early photographers of the Great Gallery living in or near New York City at the time of the exhibition may have visited the actual Great Gallery panel prior to the exhibition; Robert Jones, a professional photographer who often worked in Utah but maintained a studio in New York City, and Donald Scott, then Director of the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, who produced the first black-and-white photographs of the Great Gallery in 1930. But no records exist of either one attending the show. Polly Schaafsma, The Rock Art of Utah (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971), 65–83. Although the dimensions of the Barrier Canyon Mural are frequently noted as 60 feet long by 12 to 12.5 feet high, first hand inspection of the present-day mural reveals a true height of only 8 feet, and a comparison of the present mural with the 1941 MoMA exhibition photograph in Figure 10.3 clearly shows that the mural size has not been altered from its original installation. Bird’s WPA Report (n.14 below) and Hague’s biography (Hague 1975:79) list the height at 12 feet; no explanation for this discrepancy has been identified.

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Sally Cole, “Origins, Continuities, and Meaning of Barrier Canyon Style Rock Art,” in New Dimensions in Rock Art Studies, ed. Ray T. Matheny (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 2004), 15–39; David Sucec, Leslie Kellen, and N. Scott Momaday, Sacred Images: A Vision of Native American Rock Art (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 1996), 18–47. 9 W. Jackson Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: René d’Harnoncourt and ‘Indian Art of the United States,’” in The Early Years of Native American Art History, ed. Catherine Berlo (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1992), 200–6. 10 Harriet S. Bee and Michelle Elligott, eds., Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 54–60. MoMA had moved into a newly constructed modern museum facility in 1939, subsequently referred to as the “New Museum.” 11 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 208–10. 12 Ibid., 210. 13 Upon exiting Unit XI, the visitor would immediately proceed down to the second floor to continue the exhibition. 14 Michael Mozdy, NHMU’s Barrier Canyon Mural, Natural History Museum of Utah, web: https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2016/10/03/nhmus-barrier-canyon-mural, accessed June 10, 2017. 15 Schaafsma, The Rock Art of Utah, xvii–xix, and James H. Gunnerson, The Fremont Culture: A Study in Culture Dynamics on the Northern Anasazi Frontier, Including the Report of the Claflin-Emerson Expedition of the Peabody Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum, 1969). 16 E. J. Bird, “The Federal Art Project as It Applied to Salt Lake City and Utah,” undated report on file, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Marriott Library Archives, MS 639, Box 1, pp. 4, and 12, and Hague 1975:76–7. 17 Robert M. Jones, Barrier Canyon Remembered (Stamford, Connecticut: Glad Hand Press, 1989), 2–3. It is unclear whether the intended purpose of the mural as the “dominant piece of art in the [MoMA] show” was relayed to Jones directly by d’Harnoncourt or Elzy Bird. 18 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 211. 19 Hague, quoting Bird correspondence, The Life and Work of Lynn Fausett, 76–8, and Jones, Barrier Canyon Remembered, 2–3. Hague reports that Fausett never visited the Great Gallery in person, whereas Jones states that Fausett accompanied the first visit to the Great Gallery in July, contradicting Hague’s biography, though Jones concedes that his memory of the events might not be reliable. 20 Barry Scholl, “The Barrier Canyon Expedition of 1940 …,” The Canyon Country Zephyr: Planet Earth Edition, August 2, 1916, http://www.canyoncountryzephyr.com/ tag/elzy-bird/, accessed June 6, 2017. 21 Hague, The Life and Work of Lynn Fausett 80. Fausett actually produced two murals of different sections of the Great Gallery panel, the larger Barrier Canyon Mural under consideration here, and a second smaller mural of the now-famous “Holy Ghost Panel,” a section of the Great Gallery on the canyon wall to the left of the larger mural. The Holy Ghost panel has since become the most famous and widely published Barrier Canyon-style image, but it is unclear whether this second panel was intended for the MoMA exhibition, or if it was ever actually shipped to New York with its larger counterpart. This smaller Holy Ghost Mural did not appear in

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the MoMA exhibition and currently hangs in the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah. 22 Frederic H. Douglas and René d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941), 25. 23 In 1941, no clear archaeological dates for the Great Gallery paintings had yet been determined; their approximate dates were based on their general archaeological proximity to other better dated Ancient American cultures, specifically the Basketmaker culture. Douglas and d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, 24. 24 Miguel Covarubbias and Daniel F. Rubin de la Borbolla, eds., El Arte Indigena de Norteamerica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economico, 1945), 69. 25 Ibid., 23, “que muestra cierto parecido con las pinturas rupestres de la Edad de Piedra del Viejo Mundo.” 26 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 207. Despite the well-documented evidence supporting this nationalist position, it is ironic that pieces were included from Canada and Alaska. 27 Randall R. Griffey, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and Stephanie L. Herdich, Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 17 (Reprint of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Winter, 2015). 28 Anna Indych-Lopez, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), and Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 103–4. 29 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 117–18, 207–8. 30 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 192–3. 31 Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox, Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1937). Museum of Modern Art, 20 Centuries of Mexican Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940). 32 Robert Carleton Hobbs and Gail Levin, Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978), 14. 33 Hague, The Life and Work of Lynn Fausett, 17–28. 34 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 118. 35 Robert Carleton Hobbs, and Joanne Kuebler, Richard Pousette-Dart (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University Press, 1990), 110. 36 Evan Maurer, “Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs and Primitivism,” in The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, ed. Hirsch Sanford et al. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1994), 36–7. 37 Sanford Hirsch et al., The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb (New York: Hudson Hills Press and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 1994), 116. 38 Yvonne Szafran, Laura Rivers, Alan Phenix, Tom Learner, Ellen G. Landau, and Steve Martin, Jackson Pollock’s Mural: The Transitional Moment (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2014), 1–5. Another tie between Pollock and the Barrier Canyon Mural may exist via Lee Krasner’s employment at MoMA through the WPA in 1941 (one year before meeting Pollock). According to art historian Gail Levin, Krasner helped install the Barrier Canyon Mural for the exhibition. Gail Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, Publishers, 2011), 156–7, and Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 169–70. Levin’s cited sources are personal interviews with former associates of Krasner, and thus difficult to confirm, and MoMA records provide no information regarding Krasner’s participation in the MoMA Indian Art

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show installation. But the very possibility of Krasner’s first hand experience with the Barrier Canyon Mural implies another link between Pollock and the mural. 39 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and The Modern,” 211–18. 40 Anonymous. The Art Digest, “All-American Art,” New York, January 1, 1941. The Museum of Modern Art microfiche archives, MoMA file number P1 mf 12:739. 41 Uncredited. “Fausett Mural on View,” Ogden, Utah Standard Examiner, December 15, 1940. 42 Emily Genauer, “Museum’s Exhibit of Indian Art Most Exciting and Stimulating,” New York World-Telegram, January 25, 1941. 43 Anne Stevens Hobler, “They Gave Manhattan Back to the Indians,” Sarah Lawrence Alumni Magazine, March, 1941, 18. 44 Michael Mozdy, NHMU’s Barrier Canyon Mural, Natural History Museum of Utah, web: https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2016/10/03/nhmus-barrier-canyon-mural, accessed June 10, 2017. 45 Brian Maffly, Barrier Canyon Mural: Utah Treasure Back Home, Salt Lake City Tribune, December 5, 2011, web: http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/sltrib/ entertainment/52946343-81/mural-utah-museum-art.html.csp, accessed June 10, 2017. 46 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 210–11. 47 Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2013), 74. Meyer’s book provides extensive analysis of this aspect of Barr’s teaching and curatorial philosophy. 48 Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?, 146. 49 Ibid., 145. 50 Barr’s tenure as MoMA director is punctuated either by numerous exhibitions that juxtaposed pre-nineteenth-century works against so-called modern displays or by exhibitions that focused entirely on pre-nineteenth-century styles, extending as far back as prehistoric rock painting. During the 1937 Prehistoric Rock Pictures exhibition, Barr had simultaneously mounted two smaller companion exhibits entitled Twelve Modern Paintings, showcasing individual abstract works by twentiethcentury artists and Paintings by Paul Cézanne from the Museum. 51 Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” 211. 52 The 1941 Douglas and d’Harnoncourt exhibition publication does not present an item-by-item description or illustration of every object in the exhibition, but rather chapters devoted to each major area or culture, with only about 207 total objects illustrated, meaning that the vast majority of objects were only seen by exhibition attendees. It is mainly the objects illustrated in the catalogue that have exerted the most direct impact on subsequent scholarship. See Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, 15th Edition: A Global History (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2016); Marilyn Stokstad and Michael W. Cothren, Art History, Fifth Edition (Upper Saddle river, New Jersey: Pearson Education); David W. Penney, North American Indian Art (New York and London: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 2004); Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art (Oxford History of Art) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); or David W. Penney and George Horse Capture, North American Indian Art (World of Art) (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). Important exhibitions include David S. Brose and James A. Brown, Ancient Art of the American Woodland Indians (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1985), and Richard, Townsend, ed. Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian

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Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Several of these publications are routinely used as college-level survey textbooks. 53 It took over forty years, between the 1930 Harvard expedition and Schaafsma’s groundbreaking 1971 publication The Rock Art of Utah, before the actual Great Gallery would receive any serious critical analysis in rock art scholarship. It would be over fifty years, between the 1941 MoMA exhibition with its attendant catalogue (brief as it is) and Rushing’s cited 1992 essay “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern,” that the Great Gallery mural itself would receive any scholarly notice at all. 54 C. Gregory Crampton, Standing up Country: The Canyon Lands of Utah and Arizona (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, and Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1964). 55 Mozdy, NHMU's Barrier Canyon Mural, https://nhmu.utah.edu/blog/2016/10/03/ nhmus-barrier-canyon-mural

11

“Toward a Happier and More Successful Life,” or When Veterans Made Art in the Modern Museum, 1944–1948 Suzanne Hudson

Even within revisionist accounts of the Museum of Modern Art, the employ of therapy for veterans of the US Armed Services and Merchant Marines during the Second World War remains a little-studied aspect of the institution’s history and mandate for civic engagement. It was, to be sure, a brief episode, as the museum relinquished such assistance to other aid organizations before the decade’s end. But it is far from negligible that the establishment of the War Veterans’ Art Center, operative from 1944 to 1948, confirmed ideas about the edifying mission of the museum that had originated in the years before the war. Moreover, the center provided a template for the museum’s postwar educational programming that strived to meet individual needs and foster expression through making art, irrespective of demographic. This focus derived from progressive educational reform as much as the fields of occupational and art therapy.1 Under Victor D’Amico, whom Alfred Barr hired in 1937 as the first director of the pilot-program that became the Department of Education, the War Veterans’ Art Center offered classes in commercial and fine art.2 Having directed programs in settlement houses in New York, D’Amico’s education programs at MoMA translated John Dewey’s ideas of creative education into a curriculum for art instruction predicated upon participatory experimentation, or what Dewey considered learning by doing. D’Amico was further shaped by Dewey’s claim that “the work of art has a unique quality, but that it is that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences.”3 The combination of Dewey’s experientialist thrust and understanding that art was coterminous with life undoubtedly contributed to D’Amico’s work with a broad public, including non-artists. D’Amico’s commitment to inclusivity resounded within an institution founded on a desire to make art culturally intelligible and popularly legible. MoMA first articulated this stance in its 1929 State of New York educational charter, which declared that its mission was one of “encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life, and furnishing popular instruction.”4 Barr and D’Amico envisaged MoMA less as a storehouse of

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masterpieces—a permanent collection as such did not coalesce until 1953—than as a serious educational institution. As Barr wrote in 1944, restating the mission: “The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand and use the visual arts of our time.”5 Fortunately for D’Amico, although the “why” of the museum was well described, the “how” of this mission was malleable enough to accommodate change. Responsive to the exigencies of growth, the museum’s first decades were marked by conscious acclimatization at the levels of theory and practice. It operated under the provisos outlined in Barr’s 1933 long-range collection plan and given pictorial form in a now-infamous accompanying diagram of a torpedo advancing through time, proposing that a collection necessarily evolve continuously. So, too, would its educational programs adapt to internal and exogenous pressures. The philosophical and practical continuity between the War Veterans’ Art Center and the People’s Art Center that supplanted it resulted from then-contemporary understandings of the value of creative work. When the People’s Art Center emerged in 1948 from the War Veterans’ Art Center, it was hailed in museum press materials categorizing the transition as a “logical development,”6 with the new venue relatively unchanged except in name and serviced population: “Here the veteran will be welcomed as a civilian along with non-veteran civilians rather than as a special member of society.”7 On the event of the opening of the People’s Art Center, the museum described the transition as follows: Because of the vital function of a creative arts center in the community and society as a whole, the Museum of Modern Art is opening a People’s Art Center not only as a continuation of the children’s classes, conducted for several years, but also for adult recreational and professional needs, employing also the outstandingly successful techniques developed with the veterans over the past four years.8

But earlier in the decade, the War effort was of chief concern.9 Institutional support for the Allied cause was swift thanks to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who, along with Stephen C. Clark, then chairman of the Board of Trustees, suggested and paid for free art classes for veterans (an optional materials fee was suggested for those who could pay).10 On June 12, 1944, the museum began pilot programming with just under twenty men, and by that October opened the War Veterans’ Art Center at 681 Fifth Avenue. Although the Center operated offsite (the museum was by then at 11 West 53rd Street, in the Goodwin-Stone Building), the museum maintained significant oversight through an advisory committee to the War Veterans’ Art Center.11 Beyond Rockefeller and Clark, this committee consisted of James Thrall Soby, a collector and curator who joined the museum staff; René d’Harnoncourt, a curator and later the director of the Museum of Modern Art; and a number of medical professionals including a psychiatrist. D’Amico directed the center and conservationist Kenneth Chorley, a friend of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was also the president of Colonial Williamsburg, served as committee chairman. Waldo Rasmussen, who later directed MoMA’s International Program, detailed the museum’s wartime agenda, which encompassed thirty-eight contracts for various governmental agencies (e.g., Office of War Information, Overseas Division, and the

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Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, headed by Nelson Rockefeller). Rasmussen stressed the collaboration between government agencies and the museum in the guise of the Armed Services Program (ASP, 1942–5), which was established under Soby’s guidance following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Its tasks included sending patriotic materials and exhibitions to the Armed Services and providing therapy programs for disabled veterans; it also erected a canteen for servicemen in the museum’s garden.12 Related exhibitions from these years were already serving an explicitly patriotic purpose, as in the case of a national photography competition that solicited images celebrating American life and liberty, interpreting freedom in abstract terms. This resulted in Image of Freedom, held from October 1941 to February 1942, with its ninety-five submissions drawn from a range of amateur and professional photographers showcasing patriotic scenes of rallies and parades: “the spirit of our thoughts, our ways, our homes, our jobs.”13 Still more combined the work of children with war-related thematics. Installations of children’s work extended from Children of England Paint, mounted in 1941 (following MoMA’s exhibition Britain at War), to others from China and the Soviet Union. The 1948 Art Work by Children of Other Countries included a section devoted to “Art Work by Young People Released from Concentration Camps,”14 while later examples included work by children from Japan, Sweden, and Italy. The museum also created fifty-six exhibitions and seventeen slide talks with such materials that were sold to outside agencies for circulation. Within MoMA’s spaces, still other war-themed exhibitions were devoted to camouflage and designs for military shelter. This was the milieu in which the Armed Services Program found an audience, or rather, built one. Soby’s initial intentions clearly echoed Rasmussen’s broader enumeration: “1) To provide facilities and materials for soldier-artists in Army camps through the U.S. Army’s Soldier Art Program; 2) To utilize the talents of American artists for therapeutic work among disabled soldiers and sailors; 3) To provide entertainment for enlisted men in the Army, Navy and Merchant Marine services of the United States.”15 As early as 1942, the Armed Services Program solicited donations from artists, dealers, and collectors for an art sale of modern paintings, drawings, and prints, priced from well under $10. That May, a massive benefit sale offered dozens of these works offered for sale with profits devoted to the Armed Services Program. The sales from the museum’s garden party and auction established seed money for the War Department to use studio activities as morale-boosting recreation in Army camps, whilst the collection of materials for use in therapeutic work would come to fruition the next year in The Arts in Therapy exhibition. While this major topic of MoMA’s war effort activities cannot be fully addressed here, it bears mentioning that the work undertaken at military camps was compatible with what came to be practiced inside the museum. For example, museum communications concerning art supplies sent to USO camps turned on the possibility for active engagement with materials; e.g., “thousands of people who have been uprooted from normal living and, bewildered and lonely, cast into dislocated communities can take part in creative recreation …. Even the small art shows are designed not merely to be looked at but to stimulate participation in spare-time painting, sculpture, making of

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models and toys.”16 These other activities—the film programs, art competitions based on the war, and the generation of jingoistic exhibitions of photos of American life generated to be circulated across the world—comprise the broader context for this essay, though they necessarily remain outside of its scope.17 Here, I focus on The Arts in Therapy, one of two installations the museum organized in 1943 that suggested the therapeutic potential of art making as linked to occupational therapy and creative therapy (Figure 11.1).18 To generate interest in The Arts in Therapy, Soby, together with the American Occupational Therapy Association and the New York chapter of the Junior League, sent out a call for a juried exhibition in late 1942. The project was co-sponsored by the museum, Artists for Victory, and the American Occupational Therapy Association. Exhibition organizers sought “designs, actual working models and ornamental motifs submitted to American artists for use in therapy for wounded or disabled soldiers and sailors.”19 As Soby explained in a radio broadcast in 1942, occupational therapy is “work to keep convalescent patients busy and interested. It also serves sometimes to help restore injured members—a broken hand, a paralyzed arm, and so on”—an uninformed gloss, as letters of objection in the museum archive admit.20 Soby clarified the exhibition’s purpose in the Museum Bulletin the next year: Its purpose was to provide a fresh supply of designs and objects in the crafts, to be utilized wherever needed by those in charge of therapeutic work for the armed

Figure 11.1  Installation view of the exhibition The Arts in Therapy (February 3–March 7, 1943). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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forces … Our purpose has been broader than this: we have hoped to stimulate and strengthen the curative potentialities of the crafts by calling upon the manifestly suitable talents of American artists and craftsmen.21

The Arts in Therapy collected furniture, toys, textiles, rugs, lace, loom-work, and other “miscellany” for this unit on occupational therapy. A separate section assembled by the Committee on Art in American Education and Society was devoted to psychotherapy, by which they intended a direct encounter with “the function of the ‘free media’—painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.—in therapy conducted from the psychiatric viewpoint and also in purely recreational activities.”22 Alongside art made by patients from local institutions and categorized according to mental illness, a film by D’Amico and his colleagues showed men at work making comparable items. Importantly, there was also a “work table at which visitors to the exhibition will be able to experiment with free media under the supervision of an artist every day (except Saturdays and Sundays).”23 Soby went on to advocate for the value of art making as a vehicle of self-expression capable of achieving “psychological release and as a partial guide in the diagnosis of mental disturbances and conflicts.”24 Also: “In recent years doctors have come increasingly to believe that physiological and psychological illnesses are interrelated. The ‘free’ media in art would seem to offer a limited but nonetheless considerable aid in the cure or alleviation of both.”25 The show sought to bring to public awareness both the development in art-based therapeutic approaches and the production of physical objects in treatment plans, but it did not fully appreciate the incommensurability of the positions on view. Indeed, the show did not adequately explain the radically dissimilar therapeutic techniques represented therein, something psychodynamic art therapist Margaret Naumburg unsurprisingly found problematic. Naumburg, who served as an advisor on the exhibition, asked that the museum provide clear labels outlining her approach within the section, “Creative Therapy (or Psychotherapy),” and was unsatisfied with the result.26 The exhibition did not dwell on interpretive mechanisms of diagnostic criteria; nor did it really explain why and how such projects made by the artists and craftsmen might, if attempted, aid in restoring one’s condition. A letter Soby drafted in the aftermath of one attack on the credibility of the show concludes with him offering by way of explanation: “All of us would prefer to do exhibitions on subjects we understand more completely and on which we’ve had training. But war shows need doing too, and I don’t see why you can’t put up with the attendant trial-and-error process if the rest of us can.”27 If there was equivocation on the virtues of the show as such, it did not diminish the museum’s steadfast determination to engage veterans directly. Instead, the museum doubled-down and opened the War Veterans’ Art Center in the summer of 1944. In so doing, museum officials erected a more stable platform through which to celebrate the importance of making work beyond the exhibition’s drop-in work table. To this end, the center started to offer formalized classes in sculpture and ceramics; drawing and painting; woodworking design; jewelry; metalwork; book illustration; wood engraving; graphic arts; silkscreen printing; lettering; layout and typography; and weaving. Students met on weeknights “in three-hour sessions, for a period of three

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months for either one or two evenings a week, the former totaling 36 hours, the latter, 72 hours.”28 Museum materials unilaterally celebrated the veteran as an exemplary maker, not despite but because of the robust experience that each contributed to his work. D’Amico noted: The veteran is a unique individual in the history of art teaching. He is both young and old—young in his development in art, and old in his accumulation and intensity of human experience. He is deadly serious and works with an enthusiasm and concentration that is rare in younger art students. Art holds something of life which the veteran feels he has missed.29

The examples he offers show a return to—or assumption of—individuality in what is a kind of clinical version of modernist’s fantasy of coming into contact with obdurate material and in the process of wresting comparably autonomous form from it, finding the self. This notion of subjectivity achieved through material manipulation moves far from both Soby’s characterization of occupational therapy and Naumburg’s formulation of art therapy (where art functions within a tightly structured psychodynamic model as opposed to the art making as such being therapeutic), and in fact shifts closer to a Deweyan pedagogy of creative experimentation. The results are based on live experience, with the learning, recognition, and consolidation of the above necessary in order to begin again. D’Amico explained: At the beginning, most veterans use art as a means of getting rid of disturbing experiences, which they try to project onto paper or canvas. A former Navy man paints a vivid recollection of an experience at Pearl Harbor …. Happily, after this period of emotional release the veteran relinquishes his preoccupation with the war. The war themes of the sailor disappeared from his canvas, and he began to use his own environment, drawing freely on his imagination for ideas … By first expressing his disturbance through an art form, the veteran recreates it and divorces it from himself forever. Then he is ready to recognize the characteristics which set him apart from others, and to take pride in expressing this difference creatively.30

Nevertheless it remains unclear the extent to which the population that the museum served was wounded physically, mentally, or both, to say nothing of its grasp of what the implications of this would be for the appropriateness of various modalities of occupational or art therapy. By museum accounting in 1945, 256 of the 439 veterans that participated in the first year of operation had physical afflictions of some kind.31 But a 1946 report by Chorley states that “relatively few of [the students in the classes in the prior two years] have been disabled veterans.”32 The issue might be partly semantic in this period of fervent debate around the definition of disability and also mental health (1946 was also the year that President Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, which called for the establishment of a National Institute of Mental Health). To further confound the issue of diagnoses and prevalence, D’Amico mostly skirted

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around the fact of trauma, only in 1948 writing in a retrospective report that “in the first year most of the veterans who applied had been discharged as neuropsychiatric cases. The succeeding years brought some physically disabled veterans, but emotional disturbances were still common to most.”33 The center’s goals remained aspirational: Whether these men use it for recreation or for professional development directed toward new or better positions in the various fields of applied arts and crafts, the underlying purpose of the Veterans’ Art Center will be not only to bridge over the difficult gap between service and civilian life but to give the veteran impetus and aid toward a happier and more successful life than he had before the war.34

The War Veterans’ Art Center stressed process over product, and to this end offered material-based therapy, to “use art for healing.”35 Its tenets were oriented toward personal gratification, and were meant to help soldiers return or inure themselves to civilian life and assumedly some kind of professional, and economically productive, labor. As Chorley’s report later detailed: “While relatively few of the veterans who have attended the Center have shown any outstanding artistic ability, there can be no doubt that the large majority have received therapeutic aid or personal satisfaction of inestimable value. In a few cases the Center has been a great aid from the standpoint of pre-vocation training.”36 Although the center partially served to provide training for those “few” wishing to pursue a creative career, it also enabled veterans to see creatively, think independently, and gain knowledge of the manual crafts that are necessary to complete a work of art. These transmissible skills encouraged the integration of the production and consumption of art into everyday life. Personal satisfaction was the watchword, the result of individual instruction that cultivation of creativeness through introduction to the basics of art that could, in time, be modified into more complicated projects born of interest and ability, or what D’Amico described in this way: “By starting with simple projects, concrete results are attained in a minimum of time, and thus the veteran is quickly reassured of his ability to go ahead.”37 There was neither a set curriculum nor a series of lessons; there were explorations of media and experimentation. By 1945, enough work had been made for D’Amico to proudly take charge of Art for War Veterans, a didactic exhibition about the work and methods behind the center (Figure 11.2). The exhibition, held in the Auditorium Galleries that fall, also used images of veterans in classes in related promotional materials (Figure 11.3). As the exhibition text panels announced, and as his text in the accompanying issue of the MoMA Bulletin expounded, D’Amico built his program on four durable principles: personal satisfaction, individual instruction, creativeness, and fundamentals. As a press release trumpeting work done at the center put it: “The primary function of the center is not to find artists, but to help veterans find themselves.”38 As it happened, Art for War Veterans opened in late September 1945, mere weeks after the end of the Second World War. It proved both a summary and a proposal for work to be done in its stead. When the War Veterans’ Art Center gave way to the People’s Art Center, its accent remained.39

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Figure 11.2  Installation view of the exhibition Art for War Veterans (September 26– November 25, 1945). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

In this passage, too, the importance accorded exhibitions diminished ever more, at least where this work for veterans was concerned. Exhibitions ultimately were not the cornerstone of the veterans’ programs, or—by express design—a dominant feature of their legacy. In 1944, James Johnson Sweeney, who would become director of MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture a year later, suggested as much in a report on the museum’s exhibition programming to the Exhibitions Policy Committee. He bluntly stated that exhibition standards needed to be rethought in light of “the peace to come.”40 This is a bald acknowledgment of the internal bias shared by some staff against the aesthetic exceptionalism permitted by the period of active combat. Priorities skewed to ideological commitment and, for a time, away from the ostensibly disengaged evaluative criteria of the historically occasioned but ultimately transcendent art, which Sweeney saw fit to restore to rightful preeminence, ameliorating the problems of quality control inherent in such wartime shows. A cynical reading of the center might be located here, in Sweeney’s relief at the salve of art making structurally decoupled from the category of the masterwork. More broadly, the whole effort might be seen as little more than a publicity gambit. But the measure of success on the terms the center modeled was asynchronous with short-range appraisals. Foremost was something less concrete than the completion

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Figure 11.3  Victor D’Amico “Art for War Veterans.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13, No. 1 (September 1945). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

of a particular piece of art or even the temporary exhibition of its accomplishment. The prospect was rather more durational: the elusive attainment, through prolonged engagement with art making, of that “happier and more successful life.”41 When the War Veterans’ Art Center opened in the summer of 1944, making art supplanted viewing it to a significant degree, with process—of habituation to life even beyond the

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instantiation of a picture—the goal. Critically, the War Veterans’ Art Center established art making as a principal activity for adults within the institution’s programming. To be clear, the center prioritized art making inspired by objects on view down the block (or later, down the hall) over art viewing, seeing art in person. The work done at the center started just off-site, and assumedly, as per Sweeney, did best to remain there. Nevertheless, it was integrated into the museum in 1951, when— in a moment of reconsolidation and expansion that saw two floors of Philip Johnson’s design dedicated to classrooms—the People’s Art Center had a designated space with permanent studios in the new “21” building. At that juncture they could boast teaching close to five hundred children and three hundred adults a week in seventyseven different classes.42 Even then though, completed work was framed within the context of the center, and museum records do not reveal curriculum built around ingallery events or programming. Generating and understanding the meaning of one’s own creative work might be the center’s most enduring legacy, one precipitated by war, but applicable, even urgently necessary, as per D’Amico, in peacetime. If the culture of learning at MoMA in the 1940s was directed to the needs of a specific population of citizen-soldiers newly returned to noncombatant life, by the next decade what shifted was neither the principles nor methods of engagement, but rather the vast publics to whom such activities were to be directed. MoMA’s programming for veterans was discontinued in 1948. Allston Boyer, who produced an account of arts programs for returning veterans at Chorley’s request, noted that the center was phased out for its “inability to meet demand and its relative anonymity within the greater field of veteran services,”43 as Laurel E. F. Humble summarizes. Boyer recommended closer cooperation with veterans hospitals and service organizations to raise awareness about the center and a kind of missionary impulse to train others to spread this work elsewhere. In addition, Boyer recommended that the center organize a traveling version of the Art for War Veterans exhibition, and that it produce a series of how-to manuals to further the reach of this work. As this report acknowledged, there had emerged a medical-complex of services targeting this population in health centers far beyond the museum and it was there that veteran needs were more comprehensively being met. But this was not the end, as the data from 1951 supports. In 1947, D’Amico addressed the report, noting: “Even men who had been out of the Center for two years were still enthusiastic. The general recommendation was that we should expand our facilities, and all men asked to return for more classes.”44 Given that the center operated at full capacity throughout its tenure, and ran a wait list of over four hundred veterans until the final year when people became aware of its imminent shuttering, it makes sense that the museum saw fit to extend this work beyond the war effort.45 There was not a lack of interest, but a surfeit. Chorley announced the transition away from serving veterans exclusively to a heterogeneous adult population and also children—novices, all, of other kinds. The message was one of continuity in the face of superfluity. Before the expansion in Johnson building, the People’s Art Center opened in late 1948 the same space that the War Veterans’ Art Center had occupied, when, in museum language, the “need which motivated the Veterans’ Center was being met by other organizations.”46 In an instance of another lag that also served as a bridge, it was inaugurated by a second

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exhibition of artwork (a capacious array of painting, sculpture, design studies, jewelry, furniture, and ceramics) that had been produced at the War Veterans’ Art Center. These connections between the People’s Art Center and the War Veterans’ Art Center, changed in name but not strategy, are evident in other forms beside classroom instruction. For example, a score of contemporaneous museum publications—including the textbook Creative Teaching in Art (first published in 1942, reprinted seven times by 1951, and revised in 1953) and the Art for Beginners series of books inaugurated in the late 1940s—are exemplary in this regard. With titles like How to Make Objects of Wood and How to Draw and Paint, these arts and crafts primers grew out of D’Amico’s educational programs. The series introduction, as reproduced in How to Make Modern Jewelry, states that the “books are intended as self-instruction manuals for persons working on their own, and as aids to the trained teacher in directing large groups.”47 Projects begin with something appropriate for the novice and proceed in order of difficulty. They require a minimum of tools (even the jewelry-making guide, the most utensil-heavy of the bunch, stresses that most of its requirements are “simple and not expensive with the exception of a blowtorch or kiln in Projects XIII and XIV”).48 As with the center programs, as experience allows, students work on increasingly complex projects without needing supplementary materials. That the museum was engaged in such concerns of material experiment yoked to well-being matters a great deal, underlining the explicitly functional aspects of its educational agenda. It might profitably be expanded into a conversation regarding the postwar culture of creativity in non-artist populations and art as entertainment.49 Far from mandating a rarified version of modern art, D’Amico fostered making within the museum long after the Second World War. Thereafter, its pursuits were promulgated for other patrons, its reasons for doing so no longer exclusively linked to the ideals for rehabilitation that had justified it.

Notes 1

Carol Morgan, “From Modernist Utopia to Cold War Reality: A Critical Moment in Museum Education,” in Studies in Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art at Midcentury: Continuity and Change, vol. 5, ed. John Elderfield (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 151–3. 2 Victor D’Amico, “Art for War Veterans,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13, no. 1 (September 1945): 6. 3 John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigree, 1980), 84. 4 Alfred H. Barr Jr., ed., “Chronicle of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture,” in Painting and Sculpture in the Museum of Modern Art, 1929–1967 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 620. 5 Ibid., 629. 6 The Museum of Modern Art, “Exhibition of Work from the Veteran’s Art Center and Inauguration of a People’s Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art,” press release no. 48827–34, August 27, 1948. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

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As Briley Rasmussen notes: “The museum’s focus on contemporary art, its broad definition of art, and its emphasis on innovation made its engagement with the war effort a natural progression of its program.” One might qualify the notion of a “natural progression” here, though many stakeholders within the museum did seem to believe this to be so. See Briley Rasmussen, Pedagogy for the Modern: Victor D’Amico, MoMA and Modernism (unpublished dissertation, University of Leicester, 2015), 115. See also: “Circulating Exhibitions 1931–1954,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 21, no. 3–4 (Summer 1954): 12. 10 A memo dated September 1946 notes that the “original idea of an Art center for the rehabilitation of veterans was introduced by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in the early days of World War II. “War Veterans Art Center.” MoMA Archive MW II. 53. 11 See Laurel E. F. Humble, Response and Responsibility: The War Veterans’ Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art (1944–48) (M.A. thesis, City University of New York, 2016), 16. 12 Harriet S. Bee and Michelle Elligott, eds., Art in Our Time: A Chronicle of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 76. 13 See Miriam Gianni and MacKenzie Bennett, “The Museum and the War Effort: Artistic Freedom and Reporting for ‘The Cause,’” The Museum of Modern Art, See: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/wareffort/ 14 See Children of England Paint [MoMA Exh. #156, November 6–30, 1941]; Britain at War [MoMA Exh. #130, May 22–September 2, 1941]; Children’s Painting and the War [MoMA Exh. #206, November 18–December 13, 1942]; Chinese Children’s War Pictures [MoMA Exh. #257, April 5–May 4, 1944]; Soviet Children’s Art [MoMA Exh. #260, September 19–November 19, 1944]; Paintings by French Children [MoMA Exh. #366, January 13–March 21, 1948]; Paintings by Japanese Children, Aged 6–12 [MoMA Exh. #428, November 2– 27, 1949]; Art Work by Swedish Children [MoMA Exh. #472, March 13–May 20, 1951]; Paintings by Italian Children [MoMA Exh. #571, February 16–March 20, 1955]; Art Work by Children of Other Countries [MoMA Exh. #374, April 23–May 23, 1948]. Later, D’Amico mounted Creative Art by Children from Many Nations [MoMA Exh. #552, March 17–May 2, 1954]. 15 The Museum of Modern Art, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Art Sale for the Armed Services,” press release no. 42504–30, April 30, 1942. 16 The Museum of Modern Art, “Art shows for USO centers,” press release no. 43802– 42, August 2, 1943. 17 I write more about these topics in my current book project, Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process. 18 Occupational Therapy: Its Function and Purpose, a subsequent installation held from June to October 1943, expanded on and refined themes introduced in the first show. 19 The Museum of Modern Art, “War Dept. Approves MOMA Solider Art Program,” press release no. 42416–27, April 16, 1942. 20 James Thrall Soby, October 15, 1942, radio broadcast transcript. MoMA Archives, NY. EMH. I. 3. J. See also MoMA Archive REG 216. 21 The Museum of Modern Art, “Arts in Therapy,” press release no. 43201–8, February 1, 1943. 22 Ibid. 23 James Thrall Soby, “The Arts in Therapy,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 3 (February 1943): 3. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

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26 Jackson Davidow, “Art Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and American Modernism,” American Art 32, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 95. 27 James Thrall Soby letter to Miss Hawkins and Miss Ulrich. June 11, 1943. MoMA Archive. EMH I.3.a. 28 D’Amico, The War Veterans’ Art Center, 1944–1948, VDA, III.A.12, MoMA Archives, NY, 7. 29 D’Amico, “Art for War Veterans,” 7. 30 Ibid., 5. 31 The Museum of Modern Art, “Exhibit of First Year’s Work at War Veterans’ Art Center,” press release no. 45921–30, September 21, 1945. 32 Kenneth Chorley, “Memorandum, February 19, 1946.” MoMA Archive. EMH I. 3 P. 33 D’Amico, The War Veterans’ Art Center, 1944–1948, VDA, III.A.12, MoMA Archives, NY, 7. 34 The Museum of Modern Art, “Art Center for War Veterans Established,” press release no. 441030–36, October 30, 1944. 35 Victor D’Amico, “Art Therapy in Education,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 3 (February 1943): 9. 36 Chorley, “Memorandum.” 37 The Museum of Modern Art, “Exhibit of First Year’s Work at War Veterans’ Art Center,” press release no. 45921–30, September 21, 1945. 38 The Museum of Modern Art, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition of First Year’s Work at War Veterans’ Art Center,” press release no. 45921–30, September 21, 1945. 39 Robert Ryman was singularly successful in this regard, with more established artists teaching in the Center than learning to make art through it. See Suzanne P. Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 40 Gianni and Bennett. 41 The Museum of Modern Art, “Art Center for War Veterans Established,” press release no. 441030–36, October 30, 1944. 42 Victor D’Amico, “Creative Art for Children, Young People, Adults, Schools,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 19, no. 1 (Fall 1951): 15. 43 Humble, 24–5. 44 D’Amico, Report of the Director on the War Veterans’ Art Center, EMH, I.3.p, MoMA Archives, NY, 3. 45 Humble, 18. See also D’Amico, The War Veterans’ Art Center, 1944–1948, VDA, III.A.12, MoMA Archives, NY, 9. 46 D’Amico, “Creative Art for Children, Young People, Adults, Schools,” 5. 47 Charles J. Martin and Victor D’Amico, How to Make Modern Jewelry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 5. 48 Ibid. 49 See Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Mid-century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Part Four

MoMA’s Global Vision

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Occidental Arrangements: MoMA’s Emerging Global History of Art at Midcentury John Ott

“The arrangement is occidental—the objects themselves are foreign.” Gregory Bateson, review of Arts of the South Seas (1946)1 Over the last decade scholars invested in a more global history of art have intensified their efforts to expand or explode the art historical canon. But the discipline’s global turn actually dates at least as far back as MoMA’s earliest years, even as the critical orthodoxies currently under attack began to coalesce. Decades before its notorious 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, shows like Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (1948) juxtaposed modern Western paintings and sculpture with objects that spanned centuries and continents in order to argue for a shared universal language of abstraction. And the museum was hardly alone. Blockbuster events at MoMA and elsewhere that imagined a kind of global artistic community had become so commonplace that the Christian Science Monitor could complain in 1948 that “educators keep stressing the sources of the past of modernistic device and we are all well familiar by now with the parallels.”2 The Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing endeavor to legitimate contemporary abstraction through a global genealogy has met many challenges and failures. At first, during the prewar era, shows like American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan) (1933) and African Negro Art (1935) simply presented non-Western objects as masterpieces that had and could continue to inspire modernists in the West. Many contemporary reviewers, however, considered these comparisons between the arts of the Global North and South dubious, superficial, or misguided. In response, after the Second World War the museum’s new Director René d’Harnoncourt abandoned arguments about direct cross-cultural artistic inspiration in exhibitions like Arts of the South Seas (1946) and Timeless Aspects of Modern Art.3 Instead, he sought to convince audiences that they could experience art in the same way as makers and viewers from around the world. But while MoMA’s global shows indisputably enlarged the art historical canon, they also perpetuated a conventionally hierarchical view of culture that maintained the Occident’s place on top and at center. Other period critics, by contrast, attacked the institution for its inattention to the troubling histories of Western

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colonialism in ways that anticipated scholarly reaction to the museum’s Primitivism in 20th Century Art four decades later.4

Against Dead White In the prewar era, MoMA’s exhibitions argued first and foremost for the aesthetic excellence of non-Western art. “Ancient American art,” wrote Holger Cahill in the catalog for American Sources of Modern Art, “has come to be looked upon as one of the great arts of the world,” while James Johnson Sweeney asserted in the introduction of African Negro Art (1935) “today the art of Negro Africa has its place of respect among the aesthetic traditions of the world.”5 Departing from the denser and more artifactual presentation typical of natural history museums, these curators’ spartan and capacious staging (Figure 12.1) invited sustained delectation and successfully persuaded viewers of these works’ high worth.6 Critic Edward Alden Jewell, for example, lauded African Negro Art as “superbly installed” in the New York Times. “The material,” he continued, “has been arranged to the utmost advantage against dead white … there is nowhere evidence of crowding …. This factor … bulks large in the success of an installation as fine, no doubt, as any museum has to its credit.”7 Of course, MoMA’s endorsement

Figure 12.1 Installation view of the exhibition African Negro Art (March 18–May 19, 1935). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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of an expanded pantheon of artistic masterworks and its staging of non-Western art as fine art rather than as ethnographic artifact depended upon important precedents like the art criticism of Roger Fry and the exhibitionary practices of Stewart Culin and Herbert Spinden at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.8 MoMA’s curators readily admitted that aestheticization through display in white cubes that emphasized works’ formal properties came at the direct expense of cultural context. “It is not the tribal characteristics of Negro art nor its strangeness that are interesting,” proclaimed James Johnson Sweeney in his catalog essay. “It is its plastic qualities.”9 Moreover, he rationalized this decontextualization by alleging the fundamental impenetrability of non-Western art for Western audiences. “We can never hope to plumb its expression fully,” he claimed, and even maintained that “historical and ethnographic considerations have a tendency to blind us to its true worth.”10 Thus absolved from any responsibility to provide visitors with information about the objects’ function or meaning, MoMA could concentrate solely on their visual properties. Wall labels offered only basic data in American Sources of Modern Art and were entirely nonexistent in African Negro Art. Visitors to these shows likewise encountered no reference to the histories of colonialism, including the means by which these artworks had been acquired. To their credit, print catalogs did briefly mention and even condemn these fateful legacies. Sweeney, for instance, noted in his text for African Negro Art that many Benin artworks were spoils from the British punitive expedition that sacked Benin City in 1897.11 But gallerygoers could transit the globe unsullied by any evidence of Western domination, which at times prompted a strangely inverted conception of cultural imperialism in press coverage: the Philadelphia Public Ledger headlined its review of American Sources of Modern Art “The Red Man’s Culture Seen Conquering the White,” while Pan-American opened its commentary on Modern Cuban Painters (1944) with the declaration “The Cubans Have Invaded New York!”12 So total was the contextual vacuum of MoMA’s installations that it could transform the white settlers of North America and the invading forces of the Spanish–American War into the culturally colonized. Rejecting matters anthropological and historical, MoMA instead called attention to Western modernists’ varied debts to these artistic traditions, whether explicitly within the boundaries of a single exhibition, or more implicitly in proximity to concurrent shows of modern art on site. Cahill intended American Sources not only “to show the high quality of ancient American Art” but also “to indicate that its influence is present in modern art in the work of painters and sculptors, some of whom have been unconscious of its influence, while others have accepted or sought it quite consciously.”13 For American Sources and Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937), the museum simultaneously hung in adjacent galleries modern painting and sculpture that bore visual resemblance to these non-Western artworks in order to secure these cross-cultural connections in the minds of visitors. And the institution’s most famous expression of its embryonic genealogy of abstract art, Alfred Barr’s iconic chart for Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), incorporated within its bounds “Japanese Prints,” “Near-Eastern Art,” and “Negro Sculpture.”

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But even as they wove webs of transoceanic affinity, these exhibitions maintained evolutionary cultural hierarchies that classified non-Western societies as less civilized. Thus, on the one hand Cahill declared in American Sources that “ancient American art cannot, in its best periods, be called primitive”; on the other, he reminded readers that “these works were made with the implements of primitive man.”14 Organizers accented the otherness of these communities by consigning them to distant and irretrievable antiquity. Sweeney declared that “the art of Africa is already an art of the past” and failed in the catalog to assign dates for specific artworks, even when made during the twentieth century.15 Note too how “Negro Sculpture,” boxed off from the triumphant forward march of abstract art, effectively exists outside of time in Barr’s art historical diagram. The selective installation of monoliths outside the formal exhibition galleries, and in dialogue with the building’s International Style architecture, further figured these varied cultures as indelibly premodern, and hence subordinate. During Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940) a cast of an eight-foot Aztec statue of the Goddess Coatlicue presided over both the courtyard sculpture garden and Miguel Covarrubias’s illustration of opening night for Vogue. The magazine’s writer found this “cannibalistic ogress” even more “menacing and shuddery” than the ladies in Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), who had just recently graced the galleries during the exhibition Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (1939).16 This heightened discomfort suggests that, for some at least, non-Western art felt irrevocably alien inside the building in ways that even the most challenging modern art did not. And even though Haida artist John Wallace created a thirty-foot totem pole the very same year that Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone completed MoMA’s building, the display of the monumental carving outside the museum for Indian Art of the United States (1941) obliged viewers to observe a series of oppositions between Native artwork and modern façade: organic and industrial; ornamental and functionalist; intricate and streamlined; in sum, old and new (Figure 12.2).17 For Twenty Centuries MoMA likewise embellished its marquee with a silhouette lifted from the Mexican coat of arms: an eagle with a snake in its mouth. Drawn from Aztec mythology, this icon categorized “Mexican Art” as fundamentally prehistoric and indigenous in character. The forceful appearance of premodern, non-Western art alongside Western modern artists at MoMA met with mixed reviews upon which the institution would later try to improve following the Second World War. To begin with, most in the art press, whatever their sentiments regarding modern art, supported the museum’s sacrifice of cultural significance for aesthetic revelation. By critic Elizabeth McCausland’s estimation, the artworks on view for African Negro Art “speak movingly and powerfully to the beholders of another time and race, who have not the remotest conception of the religious ideals embodied in the masks, but to whom a harmonious relation of line and plane and mass speaks through the complex psychic and mental network.”18 Even a vocal opponent of modernism like Royal Cortissoz agreed that MoMA had properly presented the material. “Everywhere amongst these curios,” he wrote in the New York Herald-Tribune, “hangs the fog of the Dark Continent. They are so many keys, as it were, to so many complicated locks. To turn them however, is a matter of ethnology, not of art.”19 For these reviewers, art museums were not the proper venues for exploring the original meanings of African artwork.

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Figure 12.2  Installation view of the exhibition Indian Art of the United States (January 22 – April 27, 1941). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

Others considered the relationship between these objects and mainline modernism far too tenuous to merit sustained inquiry. “The [modern] American canvases included,” wrote critic Jewell of American Sources of Modern Art in the Times, “would scarcely indicate relationship to ancient South and Central America sources were not such relationship italicized by pointed juxtaposition.”20 As curator Sweeney would later recall, the institution would come to recognize that, in this instance at least, they

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Figure 12.3  E. Simms Campbell, “Harlem Sketches,” New York Amsterdam News, June 1, 1935, 5A.

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had overstated their case and so changed the show’s title to Aztec, Incan, and Mayan Art for subsequent print editions of the catalog.21 But if for Jewell the institution had exaggerated modernists’ aesthetic debts, other observers felt that non-Western art simply shared nothing substantive with the modern artworks that emulated them. In his review of African Negro Art, art historian Robert Goldwater asserted that “primitivism, as it is embodied in modern painting, has little similarity … with the chronologically, the culturally, or the aesthetically primitive in the arts,” a critique later expanded upon in his landmark book Primitivism in Modern Painting (1938).22 A suite of satirical illustrations similarly lampooned MoMA’s determination to associate arts and cultures across hemispheres. E. Simms Campbell’s cartoon for the African American newspaper New York Amsterdam News (Figure 12.3), for one, offers uncanny visual rhymes between artworks in and visitors to African Negro Art: not just the dapper African American patron and a Congolese figure in the foreground, but also the society ladies in furs with the statue of the Dahomey King Glèlè at far right. While at first glance the caricature seems to ratify the exhibition’s alignment of premodern Africa and contemporary America, Campbell draws these parallels to comic effect. Despite apparent formal kinship, the central gallerygoer hunkers toward and stares blankly at the sculpture in confused incomprehension.23 For still other observers, the arts of the Global South simply did not belong in MoMA’s sleek and bare interior. Critic Laurie Eglington contended that the pieces in African Negro Art (Figure 12.1) “suffer in the alien setting of austere white walls” in her Art News appraisal: Hundreds upon hundreds of little figures, wrenched from the warm soil of native Africa, seem for the first time aware of their nakedness as they stand silhouetted against the bare whitewashed walls … in such an atmosphere of the scientific laboratory, unrelieved by the slightest hint of growing things, little of the turgid warmth of Negro art is able to make itself felt.24

By evoking the expulsion from Eden, she characterized the transplantation of African art to 53rd Street as an unnatural corruption of the works’ integrity, and typecast the continent as a wilderness untouched by modern technology. Another segment of respondents, more culturally nationalist in sentiment, denounced these exhibitions’ underlying proposition that Western artists might seek inspiration in world art.25 The Philadelphia Public Ledger frowned at the pairing of pre-Columbian art with paintings by the likes of Max Weber and William Zorach for American Sources of Modern Art. “For us the throw-back is somehow artificial and negligibly ethnological. We are not in the same race and our gesture is an effort of escape rather than a development of the resources of our own civilization; a borrowing rather than a progression.”26 “Whatever the charm of the untutored native and his ways,” agreed Antiques of African Negro Art, “the white man who ‘goes native’ is a mess.”27 Some critiques of this order openly bristled with nativist overtones. The Brooklyn Eagle castigated “the bastard art that results when another people attempts to impose the ideals and traditions of an alien race on its own.”28 For this camp, the modernist appropriation of art from the continent amounted to misguided cultural miscegenation and decline.

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All out for the South Seas This uneven public response to MoMA’s project to situate modern art within a broader geographic purview and a longer chronological arc compelled the institution to revise its approach after the war. In particular, the curatorial experiments of René d’Harnoncourt allowed the institution to successfully present non-Western art as simultaneously timeless and historic, aesthetic and functional, universal and culturally specific. D’Harnoncourt first served as guest curator for Indian Art of the United States and, shortly after full-time appointment as director in 1944, developed Arts of the South Seas and Timeless Aspects of Modern Art. These shows would come to define his legacy. As Barr recalled at a memorial tribute in 1968, “in the mid-1930s the Museum had held three exhibitions of ‘primitive’ art—pre-Columbian, African, and prehistoric cave painting—but excellent as they were, they seem in retrospect primitive themselves by comparison with René’s magnificent later achievement.”29 So ingenious was Arts of the South Seas as dramaturgy that in its profile Architectural Forum declared that the show exemplified the “staging of museum exhibitions as an art in its own right.”30 The most significant and remarked-upon aspect of d’Harnoncourt’s installations was his attempt to reproduce the original conditions of viewing through a generalized reconstruction of the natural environments of the South Seas. Museum press releases stated this proposition plainly. “Since in all so-called ‘primitive’ societies objects are made to fit the locale in which they are to be seen, it was essential for their adequate display to give consideration to the natural characteristics of the various islands.”31 In particular, the orchestration of light, color, and spacing variously summoned “the dark green of the jungle, the clearing where the sun filters in, the yellow sand color and red rock of the Australian desert land, and the brilliant white light of the coral islands.”32 A surviving color transparency of the section devoted to Papuan Gulf communities (Figure 12.4) shows artifacts amid the deep hues of a tropical forest. D’Harnoncourt also selectively evoked indigenous architecture through abstract design elements. The gope boards visible in this same installation shot, for example, appeared “on a bamboo framework representing the partitions inside the ceremonial house on which originally these objects hung in their native land.”33 Altogether, these features gestured toward the materials’ original physical setting. Through these contrivances, Arts of the South Seas circumvented many of the criticisms that had plagued MoMA’s prewar global art initiatives. Housed in spaces that approximated the ecologies of Oceania, these artworks no longer seemed selfconscious of their nudity, as the pieces in African Negro Art had to Eglington. Instead of imprisoning world arts in a desolate white cube, the exhibition purported to dispatch Western viewers across the globe—the museum’s elevator operator even announced “all out for the South Seas” upon depositing visitors on the second floor.34 Many contemporaries indeed felt transported, especially in the Papua New Guinea segment (Figure 12.4). “Standing at the end of the room,” wrote Carlyle Burrows in the New York Herald Tribune, “one needs no effort of self-hypnosis to imagine himself looking into an aboriginal lodge, rigged with the mysterious appurtenances of tribal rites.”35 Moving through this same section, Robert Coates of the New Yorker “half expected to

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Figure 12.4  Installation view of the exhibition Arts of the South Seas (January 29–May 19, 1946). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

hear drums begin beating and see an arrow flash past my head and stick, quivering, in a nearby tree trunk.”36 To many, this curious exhibitionary tourism represented an appropriate way to experience non-Western art. But the show stopped well short of fabricating the kind of cultural habitats found in natural history museums, as many reviewers observed. Indeed, anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s review of Arts of the South Seas reported that d’Harnoncourt had “decided to ignore the anthropological literature and to trust rather to his own artistic sensibilities” in his selection, grouping, and staging of objects.37 With its catalog still in press during its run, the show offered little in the way of cultural context. “The labels are not specific enough to give us a clear picture of the life of these people,” complained the Daily Worker, and “the spectator can usually only make a dim guess at the nature and uses of the things displayed,” noted Bateson.38 Period anthropological installations, by contrast, highlighted the function and significance of artifacts by presenting them within diorama-like tableaux known as “life groups” that featured manikins arrayed in native dress and performing rituals or more quotidian social tasks.39 But most commentators seemed to prefer the MoMA director’s approach. For critic Emily Genauer, the inventive South Seas arrangements rendered the archaeological

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presentation style of ancient Egyptian art at a concurrent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “deader than the mummified body of an Egyptian” in comparison.40 But d’Harnoncourt fostered close aesthetic delectation of Oceanic artworks even as he staged them in an atmosphere that affirmed their makers’ primitive character. By positioning pieces in loose clusters—such as the gope boards on the bamboo lattice (Figure 12.4)—he helped patrons alternatively “achieve easy individual or group appraisal,” in the words of Architectural Forum. This arrangement allowed visitors to consider artworks as either timeless aesthetic masterpieces or culturally specific antiquities. As Architectural Forum reported the curator’s aims, “the exhibition  … presents each object at its best advantage and at the same time … imbues the spectator with the historic, geographic, climactic and social conditions of its origin.” It was precisely this inventive exhibitionary triangulation, which d’Harnoncourt had introduced in a more limited way in Indian Art of the United States, that most inspired Barr’s admiration: “He avoided both the purely aesthetic isolation and waxworks of the habitat group.”41 By this, non-Western art became at once universally appreciated and culturally alien. South Seas’ quasi-environmental installations, finally, strove not only to conduct viewers overseas but also to help them experience artworks as their original makers and users had, and in so doing render them less irretrievably unfamiliar. “The objects are so lighted and arranged,” wrote Bateson, “that they carry with them … something of the emotions which underlay the various cultural conventions which governed their making.”42 Other reviewers confirm the creation of bonds between artifact and museum patron; even the skeptical Daily Worker felt the exhibition demonstrated how the material “has the ability to move us profoundly even though our cultures are so far apart.”43 Instead of arguing for the influence of non-Western art on modern artists, d’Harnoncourt impelled art consumers in the Occident to empathize with their counterparts in the Global South. His subsequent and most radical experiment, Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, entirely abandoned considerations of culture, history, and even ecology to focus exclusively on the phenomenology of art viewing shared by observers across oceans and epochs. Instead of making “a dogmatic statement” or “tracing … influences, derivations or traditions,” the show was “an invitation to the visitor to undertake his own explorations” as she encountered objects from across millennia and continents in close physical proximity (Figure 12.5).44 In the section devoted to “Structure and Abstraction,” for example, Picasso’s Painter and His Model (1928) hung between pieces from Gabon and the Sudan (Figure 12.6). Dramatic gallery lighting not only encouraged visitors to recognize analogous formal elements but also proposed that a cubist painting and a wooden African figure provoked a comparable somatic response. By this, cross-cultural identification occurred thanks to the very physical experience of the gallerygoer rather than the arguments of the anthropologist or the efforts of the modernist painter.45 With objects from the Venus of Willendorf to a Modigliani sculpture plotted on the same Mercator projection, the map that greeted visitors to Timeless Aspects emblematized MoMA’s compelling midcentury fantasy of smooth and unrestricted passage across the globe, which patrons effectively enacted as they cruised through

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Figure 12.5 “Plan of the Exhibition,” from the exhibition catalog Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (November 16, 1948 – January 23, 1949). The Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

Figure 12.6  Installation view of the exhibition Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (November 16, 1948 – January 23, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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the galleries. Such effortless navigation between cultures was only possible, of course, with the erasure of the histories of colonialism, including the means by which these artworks had been acquired.46 This vision of cross-continental interchange innocent of conflict or subjugation facilitated efforts to promote the arts as a force for global harmony. D’Harnoncourt had long espoused this doctrine; near the end of the Second World War, for example, he addressed the United Nations Club in Washington, DC on the topic of “Art as a Key to International Relations.”47

The Shadow of the White Man My attention to MoMA’s productive colonial amnesia is not simply a presentist reproach, since many contemporaries both before and after the Second World War challenged or complicated the museum’s promise of a small, carefree, and congenial world united in art appreciation. The institution’s sharpest critics along these lines were ethnic or racial minorities, or hailed from leftist publications. First, they praised the sophistication of non-Western arts without insinuating makers’ primitive, alien disposition. “The current exhibition,” wrote Alain Locke of African Negro Art, “reveals [African art] for the first time in its own right as a mature and classic expression.”48 His substitution of terms like “classic” for more primitivizing diction reconsidered the continent’s art as a cultural tradition alternate but not subordinate to the Occident’s. These partisans also emphasized that comprehension of cultural significance, which MoMA had largely forsaken, was an essential precondition for full aesthetic appreciation. Reflecting on African Negro Art, Goldwater insisted that “a minimum of ethnology must … be the basis of an understanding of the product of the native artist,” while the Daily Worker reprimanded Timeless Aspects for its “attempts to divorce art from its historical background and raise it to a plane independent of other human activities.”49 These arguments, furthermore, rejected the premise that the societies responsible for these masterworks were hopelessly mysterious and unknowable. By carefully enumerating the various functions of African sculpture in ceremonies related to initiation, ancestor worship, funerals, divination, and fertility, a reviewer from the Baltimore Afro-American handily dispelled the fog that reviewers like Cortissoz believed enveloped material from the continent.50 Most of all, these dissenters to MoMA’s “occidental arrangements” consistently underscored both the annals and legacies of Western colonialism. Black publications like the Afro-American noted how “the heavily-wrought Benin bronzes [were] stolen in punitive expeditions,” in sharp contrast to the mainstream press, which tended to characterize these looting campaigns as rescue missions that liberated artworks from backwards, bloodthirsty savages.51 In its report on the same show, for instance, the New York Times relied heavily on City of Blood (1897), the memoir of a British lieutenant who had taken part in the Benin campaign, in order to denigrate the African capital as an “infected place … notable for barbaric splendor.”52 Observers on the left were no less attentive to the dark colonial histories that brought these arts to Western audiences. Not surprisingly, the Daily Worker was both most direct and most caustic in its take on

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Arts of the South Seas: “But the shadow of the white man has fallen across these cultures just as it fell across those of Africa and the American Indian … Colonial exploitation has destroyed the roots of these cultures … It has ripped these people out of the context of primitive life and dumped them as serfs into an imperialist economy.”53 Here the writer objected not just to the displacement of objects from their native soil, as had Laurie Eglington for African Negro Art, but also to the underlying processes of Western imperialism that enabled the collection of non-Western art. These counter-narratives effectively implicated MoMA’s exhibitions of the art of the Global South as the bitter harvest of colonialism. And at times enduring colonial politics erupted through cracks in MoMA’s smooth and borderless world map. Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias was one of the very few reviewers to invoke the recent events of the Second World War, which barely flickered across the pages of South Seas’ catalog, during his discussion of Oceanic art and culture published in Vogue magazine. Not only did he praise these indigenous peoples for their support of the Allies in the Pacific Theater, but he also addressed the war’s impact on the region: “There is a touching contrast between the simplicity of these peoples—innocent bystanders in the most destructive conflict in history—and the complex issues that made of their beautiful lands a battleground.”54 Covarrubias here narrated against the grain of South Seas’ popular reception, both by emphasizing that Pacific Islanders still thrived and by documenting how they continued to suffer enduring colonial legacies. In other cases, indigenous peoples openly objected to or resisted the expropriation of their cultural patrimony to museums in the West. While many domestic newspapers covered the long journey of Mexican art treasures by train to New York for MoMA’s 1940 show, only two touched upon one of the chief reasons for the large escort of armed troops: Zapotecs and Mixtecs from Oaxaca had protested the transport of antiquities from Monte Alban to the United States and “had threatened to use force, if necessary, to prevent removal of the treasure.”55 Or, in the course of his brief on South Seas, Gregory Bateson recounted the infelicitous tale of his acquisition of “secret flutes” from the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea.56 Though he ultimately supplied this anecdote in order to applaud d’Harnoncourt’s manner of presentation, his story unwittingly revealed local villagers’ hesitation and misgivings about the sale: first because the flutes would be seen by the uninitiated, and second because they would never be used again. These eruptions of native agency, generally ignored by both the museum and the mainstream press, attest to the continued relevance of these objects to societies hardly lost to posterity. The disputes over MoMA’s exhibitions of non-Western art during the institution’s adolescence expose rival conceptions of a nascent global art history at midcentury, from the utopian account of the museum itself, to the cultural nationalist rejection of “bastard art”57 by some critics, to anticolonial interventions by still others. Close examination of these debates does not simply remind us that conventional art historical narratives are fundamentally partisan and hierarchical. It also, and more importantly, demonstrates that present-day attempts to renegotiate disciplinary boundaries and topographies have a long history that predates Primitivism in 20th Century Art by decades. Revisiting these projects, furthermore, not only discloses and critiques the

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particular mechanisms by which canons are formed and enforced, but also helps us envision compelling alternatives. MoMA’s early ventures, finally, serve as a cautionary tale for art historians composing global narratives today. Timeless Aspects of Modern Art and its brethren exemplify the tantalizing promise of a flat and frictionless world, against which art historian Christopher Wood has warned in a recent roundtable on global art history: I think it is striking how little art historians resist this network model … Everyone wants to work on the circulation of objects. When you describe something that’s nonlinear or rhizomatic, everyone’s delighted. There’s a facility in this model that’s troubling: objects communicating with one another under the radar of politics and ideology, serving as surrogates for people who, in reality, are always at odds with one another while these things in motion are idealized almost as our better selves.58

Writing across cultures, we should not try to magically transport readers to the moody interior of a Papuan lodge, as it were, but to direct their attention to the mechanisms of international transmission and the underlying power dynamics which govern them.

Notes

I offer my thanks to Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman for their incisive feedback on an early draft of this essay.

1 2

Gregory Bateson, “Arts of the South Seas,” Art Bulletin 28, no. 2 (June 1946): 119. Dorothy Adlow, “Timelessness of Modern Art: American at Whitney Museum,” Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1948, 18. By my reckoning, MoMA hung twenty-one exhibitions of non-Western art in its first twenty years, but for clarity and concision I center on these four. Indian Art of the United States (1941) generally falls out of my analysis since it concerned settler rather than exploitation colonialism; so does Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937) for its great chronological distance from the present. I also leave aside nonWestern shows that featured single artists (exhibition nos. 24a, 103, 108, 181, 227), media beyond the “fine arts” (nos. 201, 213) and children’s art (nos. 257, 374, 428). Finally, as a collaboration between MoMA and the Mexican government, Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940) is a singularly complex case. On Twenty Centuries, see Holly Barnet-Sanchez, “The Necessity of Pre-Columbian Art in the United States: Appropriations and Transformations of Heritage,” in Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Center, 1993), 178–92; Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 157–86; and Andy Campbell in this volume. On Prehistoric Rock Pictures, see Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 115–16, 138–60. On Indian Art of the United States, see James Farmer in this volume.

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Among others, Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 45–70; and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189–214. 5 Holger Cahill, “American Sources of Modern Art,” in American Sources of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1933), 8–9. James Johnson Sweeney, Art of Negro Africa (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1935), 11. 6 On the photographic presentation of African material as fine art, see Wendy A. Grossman, Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 44–9. 7 Edward Alden Jewell, “African Negro Art on Exhibition Here,” New York Times, March 19, 1935, 19. On the exhibition’s formalist display, see Christa Clarke, “From Theory to Practice: Exhibiting African Art in the Twenty-first Century,” in Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 166–8; Kate Ezra, “Collecting African Art at New York’s Museum of Primitive Art,” in Representing Africa in African Art Museums, ed. Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 125–6; and B. Blake Koh, “The Display of the Work of Art: Exhibitions of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum, 1923, and the Museum of Modern Art, 1935,” The Journal of Art Management, Law, and Society 25, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 272–3. 8 See, for example, Roger Fry, Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920), 71. On this larger museological shift, see Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, esp. 215–51; W. Jackson Rushing, “Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: René d’Harnoncourt and the ‘Indian Art of the United States,” in The Early Years of Native American Art History, ed. Janet Catherine Berlo (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 195; Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of the Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 98–9; and Christopher B. Steiner, “The Taste in Angels in the Art of Darkness: Fashioning the Canon of African Art,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 132–45. 9 Sweeney, Art of Negro Africa, 21. 10 Ibid., 11, 21. 11 Cahill, 5–6. Sweeney, 12–13. [Alfred Barr, Jr.], “Foreword of the Museum of Modern Art,” in Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (New York: The Museum of Modern art in collaboration with the Mexican Government, 1940), 11. 12 Dorothy Grafly, “The Red Man’s Culture Seen Conquering the White,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 28, 1933, 8; H. Felix Kraus, “Cubans Storm New York with Color,” Pan-American 5, no. 1 (April 1944): 53. 13 Cahill, “American Sources of Modern Art,” 5. On the importance of purely formalist appreciation to the modernist appropriation of non-Western art, see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 68–72. 14 Cahill, “American Sources of Modern Art,” 9. 15 Sweeney, Art of Negro Africa, 13. On the association of non-Western art with the past, see Indych-Lopez, 184; Koh, 276–7; and especially Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 16 Frank Crowninshield, “New York Goes Mexican,” Vogue 95, no. 12 (June 15, 1940): 40–1, 82. 4

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17 “Indian Totem Pole,” Christian Science Monitor, March 5, 1941, 8. See also W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York Avant-garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 109. 18 Elizabeth McCausland, “African Negro Sculpture at Museum of Modern Art,” Springfield Republican, March 31, 1935, 6E. 19 Royal Cortissoz, “Negroid Sculpture at the Modern Museum,” New York HeraldTribune, March 24, 1935, 5:10. 20 Edward Alden Jewell, “Very Plump Lean Year,” New York Times, June 4, 1933, XX4. 21 James Johnson Sweeney, “Mexican Painting and Ours,” New Republic 102, no. 26 (June 24, 1940): 858. 22 Robert Goldwater, “An Approach to African Sculpture,” Parnassus 7, no. 4 (May 1935): 25; Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 191. 23 E. Simms Campbell, “Harlem Sketches,” New York Amsterdam News, June 1, 1935, 5A. See also William Sharp, “Demonstrating That All Is Not Art at an Art Museum,” New York Evening Post, April 6, 1935, 5; “Don Freeman’s Newsstand Goes HeadHunting at the Museum of Modern Art,” PM, February 10, 1946, M16. 24 Laurie Eglington, “Modern Museum Now Exhibiting African Negro Art,” Art News 33 (March 23, 1935): 1. My interpretation of this review derives from Jennifer Jane Marshall, Machine Art, 1934 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 100–1. 25 At least one contemporary attacked these critiques as cultural nationalism akin to the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini. See Anita Brewer, “The Tail Wags the Dog,” The Nation 136, no. 3547 (June 28, 1933). 26 “Old Indian Art Fathers Work of Modern Sculptors,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 28, 1933, 8. 27 “Art from Darkest Africa,” Magazine Antiques 27, no. 5 (May 1935): 195. 28 Helen Appleton Read, “Modern Art’s Ancestors,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 14, 1933, B-C 13. 29 Alfred Barr Jr., in René d’Harnoncourt, 1901–1968: A Tribute (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), n.p. 30 “Art of the South Seas,” Architectural Forum 84, no. 5 (May 1946): 98; for more on D’Harnoncourt’s exhibition practices, see Michelle Elligott, Rene D’Harnoncourt and the Art of Installation (New York: MoMA, 2018). 31 Museum of Modern Art, press release, January 29, 1946, 2. 32 Museum of Modern Art, press release, January 22, 1946, 1. 33 Bateson, “Arts of the South Seas,” 119. 34 The elevator operator was reported in Robert C. Ruark, “Dear Old Isles,” New York World-Telegram, February 19, 1946, 12. 35 Carlyle Burrows, “Art of the Week,” New York Herald Tribune, February 3, 1946, 5:7. 36 Robert M. Coates, “The Modern Museum and Other Problems,” New Yorker 21, no. 52 (February 9, 1946): 64. 37 Bateson, “Arts of the South Seas,” 122. On the alleged unknowability of African Art as, see Steiner in Mansfield, 136–9. 38 Marion Summers, “Art Today: Record of a Magnificent Culture,” Daily Worker, March 10, 1946, 11; Bateson, “Arts of the South Seas,” 119. 39 On period anthropological display conventions, see Ira Jacknis, “Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method in Anthropology,” in Objects

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and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George Stocking Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988), 75–111. 40 Emily Genauer, “Egyptian Show Poorly Mounted,” New York World-Telegram, March 30, 1946, 9. 41 “Art of the South Seas,” Architectural Forum, 98, 104. Barr in René d’Harnoncourt: A Tribute, n.p. On d’Harnoncourt’s earlier installation efforts with Indian Art of the United States, see Rushing, Native American Art, 111; and Staniszewski, 94–6. Other scholars have noted MoMA’s equivocation between universally aesthetic and culturally specific modes of display, but have only partly accounted for its productive discursive effects. See Rushing in Berlo, 222–3; and Koh, 276–8. 42 Bateson, “Arts of the South Seas,” 119. 43 Summers, “Art Today,” 11. See also Elizabeth McCausland, “Arts of the South Seas at Modern Museum,” Springfield Union and Republican, February 3, 1946. 44 Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), n.p. 45 On the radical decontextualization of Timeless Aspects, see Ezra, 125–6; and Staniszewski, 84, 124–5. 46 Robert Foster has also argued that South Seas ignored how the exhibited material came to the West. “The object comes to stand for or symbolize a discrete culture rather than the intercultural circumstances and interactions through which the object has moved.” Robert J. Foster, “Art/Artefact/Commodity: Installation Design and the Exhibition of Oceanic Things at Two New York Museums in the 1940s,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 23 (2012): 149. 47 “United Nations Club to Have Forum on Art,” Washington Post, May 7, 1944, S4. See also René d’Harnoncourt, “Art as a Universal Language,” Arts in Childhood 3, no. 4 (1948): 14. 48 Alain Locke, “African Art: Classic Style,” American Magazine of Art 28, no. 5 (May 1935): 271. 49 Goldwater, “An Approach,” 26; Charles Corwin, “Modern Art Museum’s Anniversary Exhibit,” Daily Worker, December 10, 1948, 5. 50 “Priceless Native Art Collection from Paris Exhibited in N.Y.,” Baltimore AfroAmerican, March 23, 1935, 12. 51 Ibid. 52 H. I. Brock, “Black Man’s Art: From Africa Come Primitive Objects That Reveal a Story of Culture,” New York Times, May 5, 1935, SM10, 23. 53 Summers, “Art Today,” 11. 54 Miguel Covarrubias, “Art of the South Seas,” Vogue 107, no. 1 (February 1, 1946): 128, 131. 55 “Mexicans Oppose Loan of Rare Gems,” New York World-Telegram, March 13, 1940, 19. 56 Bateson, “Arts of the South Seas,” 119. 57 Read, “Modern Art’s Ancestors,” B-C 13. 58 Christopher Wood, in David Joselit, eds., “Roundtable: The Global before Globalization,” October 133 (Summer 2010): 6–7.

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Exhibiting Italian Democracy in 1949: Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art Antje K. Gamble

At the close of the Second World War, MoMA laid the foundations for Twentieth Century Italian Art, an exhibition that would be the museum’s first to focus on artwork produced by artists from a former Axis nation.1 Co-curated by Alfred H. Barr, Director of Collections, and James Thrall Soby, Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, 1949’s Twentieth Century Italian Art was one of several surveys of modern art designed to celebrate the museum’s twentieth anniversary, though the only one to have a national focus (Figure 13.1).2 This showcase of Italian art from the previous four decades emphasized both Barr’s curatorial and scholarly interest in European modernism and Soby’s specific interest in Italian modern art.3 At the same time, larger transatlantic politics framed this exhibition, offering a glimpse into MoMA’s role in the so-called Cultural Cold War.4 In this light, Twentieth Century Italian Art presented a new Italian democracy to the American public while deemphasizing Fascist influence in earlier forms of modernism. Despite Italy’s recent past in the Axis Alliance, Director of Exhibitions Monroe Wheeler did not hesitate to recuperate plans for an exhibition of contemporary Italian art that Barr had abandoned in the 1930s.5 The exhibition’s revival was sparked by Charles Rufus Morey, Barr’s former mentor at Princeton, who had become the American Cultural Attaché in Rome.6 He wrote to Barr in 1945 urging him to resurrect the earlier proposal that would “carry through as part of our program of cultural cooperation.”7 The exhibition was expected to play a central role in Morey’s diplomatic program. Institutions like MoMA were often partners in post–Second World War diplomatic initiatives. Rhetoric such as Morey’s “cultural cooperation” framed the perception of the “free” culture of democracies, implying that culture functioned outside of the political arena.8 Public intellectuals, including MoMA curators, played a pivotal role in the successes of the official US Cold War initiatives. By using culture to strengthen ideals of liberalism and democracy, Barr, Soby, and their collaborators hoped to use art in the larger ideological fight against Communism.9 While previous scholars have emphasized the postwar exhibition of American art in Europe, this study looks at the

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Figure 13.1  Installation view of the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (June 28– September 18, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

support of foreign art exhibited on American shores.10 I argue here that Twentieth Century Italian Art attempted to strengthen trans-Atlantic political alliances by presenting Italy as a democratic ally in the Cold War. It is no coincidence that MoMA planned an exhibition focused on Italian art. In the emerging Cultural Cold War, American elites attempted to associate US culture with Italy’s long humanist tradition in order to reject Soviet attacks.11 In fact, Soby wrote explicitly that the Italian show would “offset the widespread European theory, carefully fed by [Soviet] propaganda, that as Americans we are not interested in cultural matters.”12 Italian artists too had a stake in presenting their work in the United States.13 A number of exhibitions of art and craft similar to Twentieth Century Italian Art nurtured a new market for Italian art in the United States.14 Accordingly, this cultural capitalism also strengthened Italy’s place as a modern democracy and helped to rehabilitate Italy’s image internationally.

MoMA and Its Role in the Cultural Cold War As the locus of a network of public and private institutions, the museum actively worked to convince the American people to support the renewed Italo-American

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alliance. This relationship, vital in the fight against Communism, allowed Barr and Soby the opportunity to rewrite Italy’s Fascist past while positioning Italian art in line with other Euro-American cultural developments.15 This served the objectives of both the Cultural Cold War and also Barr’s developing vision for modernism. Thus, Twentieth Century Italian Art simultaneously positioned Italian art as vital to the development of modernism while also promoting Italy as central to the stability of European democracy. In aligning Italian modern art to the country’s new political democracy, MoMA’s program was allied with the larger objectives of postwar US diplomacy that included a focused effort to push the first 1948 Italian democratic elections away from the Communists.16 Similar to many other cultural organizations of the period, MoMA’s administration had clear ties to the US government and actively participated in the Cultural Cold War.17 The lines between private institution and government agent were often blurred. For example, Nelson A. Rockefeller, museum president (1939–41 and 1946–53) and son of one of the museum’s founders, was at the center of US international relations from the 1930s onward.18 Likewise, John Hay Whitney, trustee and museum president (1941–6), participated in covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cultural programs in the 1950s.19 Archival correspondence between US Ambassador to Italy James C. Dunn and Rockefeller notes that Twentieth Century Italian Art was intended to “help our relationship with other countries, and … [give] to those who are really trying to improve their own situation and that of their respective countries.”20 As MoMA held clear connections to the US State Department, Barr and Soby realized the necessity to obfuscate the exhibition’s federal support; support which is absent in the public exhibition texts. As art historian Robert Burstow explains, postwar public intellectuals needed to be opaque about state support in order to “preserve the illusion that governments in the ‘Free World’ did not exploit culture for political gain, unlike their Cold War adversaries.”21 Analogously, the culture war playing out in Congress meant that MoMA began to back away from their official connections to government officials.22 Initially, MoMA did receive direct state support for Twentieth Century Italian Art from the Office of International Information and Cultural Relations (OIC).23 The OIC authorized a state-funded exploratory mission to Italy for the curators; and, with help from the State Department, fulfilled the initial planning of the exhibition in Italy.24 Yet, not long after, the curators endeavored to distance the curatorial program from government support. In 1948, Barr wrote to Morey: We have always organized our exhibitions with complete independence of government supervision[.] … we have decided to keep the matter to private institutions for reasons which I think will be clear to you who are so experienced in these matters. Although we hope that the exhibition will promote sympathy and understanding between Italy and the United States on a cultural level, … if it were to appear that the exhibition was officially sanctioned or supported it would immediately be discounted by artists and critics everywhere.25

Barr’s insistence on autonomy served two purposes. First, it freed the curatorial choices of exhibition organizers, thereby allowing for the inclusion of individual artists

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and works that might be perceived as outside the ideals of democratic liberalism. For example, the inclusion of artists with suspect political connections—like the socialist painter Renato Guttuso (1912–87)—became less of a potential liability.26 Second, it reinforced the idea of MoMA’s professional objectivity, presenting an important sense of cultural authority, unsullied by partisan politics or government influence.27 Above all, Barr and Soby constructed a naturalizing view of Italian culture as akin to American culture, suggesting that if American culture is democratic then so too is Italy’s.

Exhibiting Italian Modern Art As the first major survey of modern Italian art at a prominent American museum, Twentieth Century Italian Art presented a narrative of aesthetic progress. With almost 250 pieces of sculpture, painting, and works on paper, by forty-four artists, the ambitious exhibition provided an expansive view of the developments of Italian art since the turn of the century. Though expansive in the number of objects shown, Twentieth Century Italian Art offered a more narrow interpretation of Italian modernism that relied largely on a formalist, apolitical lens.28 Since half of the Italian twentieth-century history to date had been Fascist, the curators could not ignore the influence Italy’s dictatorship had on Italian modernism.29 As art historian Raffaele Bedarida describes, Barr and Soby’s curatorial choices for Twentieth Century Italian Art relied on Fascist State precedents as a kind of roadmap for understanding Italian modern art.30 In fact, MoMA had previously collaborated with the Fascist regime to bring the 1940 Italian Masters show, which Barr had used to present the Italian Renaissance as the precursor to modernism.31 The previous exhibition created an important precedent for the latter by offering a larger narrative of modernism as connected to Italian Renaissance humanism.32 Moreover, Twentieth Century Italian Art presented Italian modernism as a new renaissance after Fascism. This message presented a chronological challenge since, as conveyed in didactic text, the included artworks “had been supported and widely exhibited under the Fascist regime.”33 Italian Fascism lacked a clear state-sponsored aesthetic style that, as the catalogue rightly pointed out, “did not emulate the harsh Nazi persecution of ‘modern’ artists until after the outbreak of the recent war.”34 MoMA exhibited the diversity of Italian modernism that had not been suppressed, save for the late stages of the war.35 Yet, at the same time, the museum intended to rewrite the recent Fascist past for both American and Italian audiences.36 According to Barr and Soby, Italian artists had “provided extremely important contributions to the development of art in our time.”37 By linking Italian modernism to broader cultural advances in democratic Euro-America, MoMA’s exhibition simultaneously legitimized Italian postwar democracy. The exhibition opened with a large section showcasing Italy’s most wellknown contribution to the international avant-garde: Futurism (Figure 13.2). The catalogue entry on Futurism was an entire third of the text, written by Barr, which likened Futurism to Cubism in its importance. In what would become the dominant narrative of Italian Futurism, the exhibition and the catalogue focused

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Figure 13.2  Installation view of the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (June 28– September 18, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New  York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

on the movement’s prewar moment (c. 1909–14).38 This curatorial editing distanced the avant-garde group from its deep ties to Mussolini’s regime.39 In so doing, the exhibition presented the movement as a pure artistic pursuit. One reviewer clearly reiterated this reading, saying that the “decline [of Futurism] marked by the end of the period, which naturally died with the [Great] war.”40 Moreover, Barr’s discussion of Futurism in 1949, which largely suppressed connections to Fascism, departed from his seminal 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art.41 Reflecting the still positive view of the regime in the United States at the time, Barr described Futurism as “protoFascist,” having “flourished among the younger generation.”42 In Twentieth Century Italian Art, however, the movement’s connections to Fascism had to be expunged because of the outcome of the Second World War. This shift played a significant role in MoMA’s presentation of postwar art. Following the presentation of Futurism, the exhibition surveyed the Scuola Metafisica, including Giorgio De Chirico (1888–1978), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), and Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964); and Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), who represented the French school. As with the Futurist section, these artists were represented almostexclusively by their pre-First World War production. De Chirico, Carrà, and Morandi’s interwar work was briefly considered in another section titled “Painting and Sculpture since 1920.”43 This work represented a new engagement with classical types, often

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described as a return to order.44 These interwar developments were harshly judged by Barr and Soby as not entirely forward thinking, even if these artists’ connection to the regime was not highlighted.45 Art more directly characterized as Fascist was exhibited in subsequent rooms devoted to the Novecento group, which Barr described as a “revival of more traditional subjects and techniques.”46 The Novecento artists often rendered pictorial scenes, demonstrating a contemporary interest in figuration—their style was most enthusiastically cultivated by curator and critic Margherita Sarfatti, Benito Mussolini’s first biographer.47 The Novecento artists were characterized in the MoMA catalogue text as protectionist, cutting “cultural ties with the outside world.”48 By presenting the Novecento group as Fascist “unquestionably affected [sic] by the Regime,” Barr and Soby served to divorce other interwar artistic developments from any political agenda.49 This strategy allowed Fascist art to be shown as diverse in style and subject matter while simultaneously marginalizing the political significance of the Novecento group in order to erase Fascism’s contribution to postwar aesthetic developments.50 In Twentieth Century Italian Art, the Novecento group served as an interlocutor between prewar and postwar progressive modernism. Modern art outside these Fascist parentheses, in turn, represented a free Italian culture. Following cues from their contemporaries in Italy who “felt that Fascism should be regarded as an historical ‘parenthesis,’” MoMA curators presented postwar Italian art as a renewed avant-garde.51 Barr and Soby’s decision to frame Futurism as formalist, in opposition to Novecento’s politicism, facilitated this rhetorical maneuver. Using Futurism as the formalist, apolitical archetype to the contemporary post–Second World War moment, Barr and Soby declared a new postwar liberation of culture. As Fascist art of the Novecento became the generative ashes from which democratic art would rise, familiar avant-garde military rhetoric was used to describe the process. For example, when introducing the artists of the recently formed Fronte nuova secessione artistica italiana (1946–50), headed by artist Renato Birolli (1905–59), Soby described their new style as a further “insurrection against the Novecento.”52 Since the Fronte artists worked in a variety of styles, from Guttuso’s expressive realism to the fractured abstraction of Armando Pizzinato (1910–2004), aesthetic differences were not necessarily correspondent to ideological ones. For example, Guttuso’s The Maffia used vibrant colors in a semi-cubist style, indicative of his work of the 1930s and 1940s. In this work, he depicted an ominous dark figure hiding behind a tree, rifle raised, pointing at the farm laborer working unawares. In the catalogue, Guttoso’s social justice subject matter is reduced to stereotype, secondary to his formal achievements.53 As with the description of pre–First World War Futurism, formalist qualities were paramount. The seemingly apolitical framing of Twentieth Century Italian Art presented postwar art as a democratic triumph. As Soby writes: The climate for art is propitious in Italy just now, with the shackles of Fascist isolationism rusting empty on the ground, and we have sought—again without claim to finality—to indicate what directions the newer creative impetus is taking.54

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Figure 13.3  Installation view of the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (June 28– September 18, 1949). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New  York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

MoMA likewise presented American curatorial intervention as fanning Italian postwar artistic resurgence. The US protection and cultivation would save Italian modernism from obscurity: The traditional interest of the United States in Italy’s great heritage has already been evidenced by contributions to the restoration of war-damaged historic monuments and towards the development of markets for arts and crafts. According to Mr. Soby, the Museum feels that it has a responsibility towards the artists of Europe to recognize work done under difficult war and post-war conditions and to establish an understanding relationship with them.55

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Barr and Soby claimed that postwar painters and sculptors “made a valiant attempt to regain the progressive momentum which had died out in their country.”56 This of course ignored the fact that most of these young artists had been productive and had garnered acclaim under the Fascists. For example, sculptor Marino Marini (1901–80) had won the grand prize for sculpture in the Fascist 1935 Rome Quadriennale.57 Without reference to this, Marini was presented as “an extraordinary asset” to postwar contemporary artists.58 Marini’s Horse and Rider (1947), loaned from Blanchette Rockefeller’s collection, was one of two works in the MoMA show that represented the artist’s important Cavaliere series (Figure 13.3). Marini’s “knight” (the literal translation of cavaliere) reflected an anti-monument, with its awkward nude figure astride his equally inelegant steed. The Cavaliere also showcased the sculptor’s inventive postwar use of canonical media, bronze with pre- and post-casting manipulations. Artists like Marini reflected Italy’s cultural rebirth that connected Italy’s past and future.59 Just as Barr had previously presented the Italian Renaissance as a foundation from which modernism arose, Twentieth Century Italian Art showed that apolitical Futurism, nurtured by the ashes of Fascism, was the foundation of a new Italian modernism reborn democratic.60

A Paradoxical Democratic Italy The narrative fostered by Twentieth Century Italian Art was further complicated by the postwar Italian context. Since “the king and his government [had] fled Rome to escape the Nazis, … the fate of the monarchy” was already sealed before armistice.61 After the end of the war, a “new order in Italy would be built upon the ‘values of the Resistance’: democracy, freedom, honesty, accountability, openness, and modernity.”62 However, this anointing of the Partisan ideals starkly contrasted with the realities of postwar justice. The majority of the perpetrators of Fascist atrocities received amnesty, while Partisans were prosecuted in huge numbers for their activities.63 Italian postwar ideals of democracy overshadowed the reality, in order to fabricate a new sense of Italian culture. The regime’s influence on postwar Italian culture and artistic networks was extensive. Many Italian curators and collectors had ties to the late-Fascist Salò regime, which directly participated in Nazi atrocities on Italian soil.64 Even with the new Italian Republic, the Fascist infrastructure remained intact on many levels.65 These wellestablished Fascist cultural networks provided a means by which exhibition organizers could identify artists and facilitate loans. Local Italian collaborators to Twentieth Century Italian Art included the Milanese contemporary art collectors and gallerists connected with Monroe Wheeler’s friend and gallerist Angelo Toninelli. Headed by Toninelli, the Milanese group Circolo delle Arte made up the majority of the Italian collaborators who helped with selecting artists, especially with regard to younger emerging artists.66 The Circolo delle Arte group included the Ghiringhelli brothers (Peppino and Gino), directors of the prominent Il Milione gallery in Milan. From the beginning of

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exhibition planning, they were pivotal contacts. Before the Second World War, their gallery had exhibited important Italian and international abstract artists from Lucio Fontana to Wassily Kandinsky; the gallery remained a crucial hub for national and international art from the 1930s through the 1960s. Yet, in the contemporary moment, the brothers had been embroiled in scandal. They had been charged, though acquitted, of helping Nazi occupiers deport resistance fighters during the Salò Republic after the liberation of Rome by the Allies. Barr and Soby thus worked closely with accused Nazicollaborators.67 MoMA’s collaboration with the Ghiringhelli brothers was questioned at the time by invested parties on both sides of the Atlantic.68 A confidential museum memo outlined objections brought against the Italian-based collaborators by noting that “the chief resentment against the Ghiringhellis is not their Fascism, but the fact that they denounced two artists who were working in the underground,” who were subsequently sent to concentration camps; yet “I [Barr] do not feel sure [their political implications] are sufficient to cause us to give up our communications with Toninelli.”69 The brothers’ connection to the Fascist regime did not immediately disqualify their participation, likely because most of the artists included in the exhibition had similar connections. The Italian architect and scholar Bruno Zevi expounded upon the complex contemporary context in a lengthy correspondence with Barr on the subject: Let us suppose that [the Ghiringhellis] are really guilty (if they were not Fascist criminals, Fascists they certainly were, and to be Fascists in 1944, when the Allies were in Italy, is certainly showing little political sensitivity; at that time nobody could make such mistakes honestly). Well, a lot of people are making business also with the States, who have [sic] a dirtier past than the Ghiringhellis.70

Zevi understood that the Ghiringhellis’ connection to Fascist atrocities was not unique and that the Fascist legacy would remain unresolved even if Barr chose to exclude these important gallerists from the organizing committee. In the end, the Ghiringhellis remained important for the exhibition organizers, who designed a presentation of “Italy under a democratic regime” divorced from politics in the service of the Cultural Cold War.71 Barr and Soby thus constructed a democratic Italian culture concurrent to similar constructions by Italian intellectuals and artists. MoMA curators negotiated these ever-shifting political terrains alongside Italian artists and intellectuals, who were likewise redefining Italian postwar cultural norms, within lasting Fascist networks.72

Message Received: Italian Art Represents Italy’s Democratic Triumph over Fascism Reviews of the exhibition by American critics elicited a reading of Italian art that mirrored the organizer’s intention.73 For example, New York Times art critic Howard Devree introduced the work in similar avant-garde terms to postwar art:

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It brings home anew the old story of rebellion against the mortmain of tradition, starting in violence, exaggeration and eccentricities and proceeding through various ramifications and reactions until, as the dust of combat settles, certain valuable contributions are seen to emerge and much that was superficial and inessential is seen to have fallen away.74

At the same time, Devree’s review situated the works in the exhibition as part of the larger modern “art panorama.”75 It is clear that critics received the message that Italian modernism was firmly seated within the museum’s developing ideals of EuroAmerican modern art. Though the exhibition did not travel, its message was amplified both nationwide and globally in the art press. In the United States reviews of the exhibition catalogue appeared in a number of regional newspapers, which were often receptive of MoMA’s thesis.76 In one telling review, art historian John Rosenfield described the catalogue as providing “an inescapable feeling that this Italian art is indeed a familiar phenomenon,” and that the postwar artists were similar to “Americans of like status.”77 Importantly, Rosenfield’s reading picks up on Barr and Soby’s desire to project postwar American values via culture.78 The Italian press likewise praised the exhibition. In a lavishly illustrated article for the Milanese magazine Il Tempo, art critic Raffaele Carrieri lauded the show’s popularity, declaring that “200 thousand Americans” visited.79 Carrieri clearly understood the show’s importance in re-framing Italian cultural production to the American people in spite of Italy’s Fascist past, recognizing that the MoMA exhibition would help Italian democratic culture reach wider audiences. As Barr and Soby had calculated, the perception that Twentieth Century Italian Art was objectively curated, free of state funding or political allegiances, further strengthened the exhibition’s import. Twentieth Century Italian Art produced a convincing image of the postwar Italian nation as a modern democracy as much as it presented a survey of Italian modernism. Bringing this message to audiences in the United States, MoMA strove to strengthen trans-Atlantic cultural and political ties. Italy’s modern art, despite its very real ties to Fascism, served as MoMA’s symbol of both nations’ free democratic cultures.

Notes 1 2 3

The next would be German Art of the Twentieth Century (1957). Raffaele Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance: Italian Art at MoMA, 1940–1949,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 2 (2012): 147. Alfred H. Barr, Jr, “Memo to Monroe Wheeler and James Thrall Soby,” May 23, 1945, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers. Museum of Modern Art, New York; microfilmed by Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. MF3153. Barr and his wife Margaret Scolari Barr likewise had scholarly interests in Italian art. See Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance,” 154. Barr notes Soby’s particular interest in Italian modern art. See Barr, “Memo to Monroe Wheeler and James Thrall Soby,” May 23, 1945, AHB. MF3153.

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See Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999); and Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht. “Culture and the Cold War in Europe,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 398–419. Barr had proposed an exhibition of Italian contemporary art in 1933, which he abandoned in 1940. Barr, “Letter to Charles Rufus Morey,” April 24, 1948, AHB. MF3154. 1; and “Memo to Monroe Wheeler and James Thrall Soby,” May 23, 1945, AHB. MF3153. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 19–20. Charles Rufus Morey, “Letter to Alfred Barr,” May 15, 1945, AHB. MF3153. Barr wrote to Morey in 1947 asking for “official approval.” Barr, “Letter to Charles Rufus Morey,” April 22, 1947, AHB. MF3153. Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in A New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), 322–59. A letter between two diplomats, Paul Hyde Booner and William Averell Harriman outlines this sentiment regarding a show of Italian painting at MoMA—“the underlying purpose would be, (1), to promote friendly relations between the two countries; and, (2), to demonstrate the revitalization of the creative force in Italy under a democratic regime.” Paul Hyde Bonner, “Letter to William Averell Harriman,” July 29, 1947, AHB. MF3153. For an overview of the literature see Robert Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War’: Reassessing the Unknown Patron of the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner,” Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1 (1997): 68–70. For the earliest study, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Antje K. Gamble, “Buying Marino Marini: The American Market for Italian Art after WWII,” in Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying “the Knot,” ed. Sharon Hecker and Marin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018), 155–71. James Thrall Soby, “Letter to William A. M. Burden,” October 1, 1948, AHB. MF3154. A number of artists in the MoMA show lamented at the poor economic situation in Italy for artists. See Aline B. Louchheim, ”Tradition and the Contemporary,” New York Times, February 19, 1950, X9; and Sharon Hecker, “‘Servant of Two Masters’: Lucio Fontana’s Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino (1948),” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 3 (2012): 337–61. A number of exhibitions were funded by the Marshall Plan, for example, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (Rome: The Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana, 1950). The CIA focused early postwar efforts on Italy. In 1947, executive secretary of the National Security Council wrote a memo recognizing “the need for psychological warfare operations to counter Soviet-inspired Communist propaganda, particularly in France and Italy.” David F. Rudgers, “The Origins of Covert Action,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 250–1. Also, as I have recently argued elsewhere, the very exhibition design of Twentieth Century Italian Art served the purpose of connecting Italian modern art to larger modernist trajectories in the US and Europe. See, Gamble. “Exhibiting Italian Modernism after WWII at MoMA in

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24 25 26 27 28 29

Modern in the Making ‘Twentieth Century Italian Art’,” in Italian Modern Art, no. 3. January 2020, https:// www.italianmodernart.org/journal/articles/exhibiting-italian-modernism-afterworld-war-ii-at-moma-in-twentieth-century-italian-art/ David Ellwood, “The 1948 Elections in Italy: A Cold War Propaganda Battle,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13, no. 1 (1993): 19–33. The history of MoMA as an agent of the US government is highly contested, see, Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 30–84; Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale 1948–64: Italy and the Idea of Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 1–10; and Michael Kimmelman, “Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War,” in The Museum of Modern Art at MidCentury: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 39–55. Helen M. Franc, “The Early Years of the International Program and Council,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, ed. John Elderfield (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 110. Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art,” 72–6. “Press Release: John Hay Whitney Announces Museum of Modern Art Will Serve as Weapon of National Defense,” February 28, 1941, MoMA Press Release Archives. Museum of Modern Art, New York. James C. Dunn, ”Letter to Nelson A. Rockefeller,” April 28, 1948, AHB. MF3153. Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art,” 76. Emphasis original to text. Franc, “The Early Years,” 115–16. Also, by the 1950s, MoMA’s connection to state programs exporting art abroad was ramped up under the direction of Porter A. McCray; see Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 125–33. Monroe Wheeler, “Memo to Alfred Barr and James Thrall Soby,” April 17, 1946, AHB. MF3153. Under the Marshall Plan, it is important to remember that Italy was a beneficiary of almost 11 percent of all funds from the United States. See Paolo Scrivano, “Romanticizing the Other? Views of Italian Industrial Design in Postwar America,” in The Italian Legacy in Washington DC: Architecture, Design, Art and Culture, ed. Luca Molinari and Andrea Canepari (Milan: Skira, 2007), 157. Wheeler, “Letter to Charles Rufus Morey,” February 24, 1947, AHB. MF3153; Bonner, “Letter to Monroe Wheeler,” October 8, 1947, AHB. MF3153. Barr, “Letter to Charles Rufus Morey,” March 25, 1948, AHB. MF3153. A sentiment Barr follows up on in another letter one month later: “Letter to Charles Rufus Morey,” April 24, 1948, AHB. MF3153. The majority of Americans at the time did not see the difference between socialists and communists, in terms of the Cold War. See Thomas W. Braden, “I’m Glad the CIA Is ‘Immoral,’” The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967, 10. “It was up to American ‘objective’ (namely non-political) scholars to write the history of recent Italian art.” Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance,” 154. The progressive view of Italian modernism resembled Barr’s diagrams from the 1930s “Cubism and Abstract Art” and the torpedo of MoMA’s collecting program. For more on Fascist era art and visual culture see Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture & Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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30 Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance,” 149. 31 Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 170–81. 32 Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance.” 33 Ibid., 149. 34 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 27. Quotation marks original to text. Barr wrote the section on Futurism, while Soby wrote the remaining catalogue text, including this quotation. Soby was originally assigned to write the whole catalogue text but asked for Barr’s contribution because of the latter’s expertise. See Soby, “Letter to Nelson A. Rockefeller,” March 5, 1949, AHB. MF3154. The top state-sponsored Fascist exhibition, the Rome Quadriennale, had refused to exhibit by style or group, in order to show the diversity of Fascist Italy’s contribution to modern art. Claudia Salaris, La Quadriennale. Storia della rassegna d’arte italiana dagli anni Trenta a oggi, trans. Felicity Lutz, ed. Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2004), 12. 35 For more on Fascist-era art, see Emily Braun, “L’Arte dell’Italia fascista: il totalitarismo fra teroria e pratica,” in Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano, trans. Sandro Liberatore and Roberto Cincotta, ed. Emilio Gentile (Rome: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 2008), 85–99. 36 Soby spoke, in Italian, on the radio there; Soby, “Voice of America Transcript,” June 28, 1949, AHB. MF3154. 37 Barr, “Twentieth Century Italian Painting and Sculpture: A Proposal for an Exhibition to be held at the Museum of Modern Art,” c. 1949, AHB. MF3153. 1; and Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 5. 38 Save for a few examples, most exhibitions and publications about Futurism separated an essentialist pre–First World War avant-garde, and the “late” Futurism of Fascist Italy. See Enrico Crispolti, “The Dynamics of Futurism’s Historiography,” in Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, trans. Stephen Sartarelli and Marguerite Shore, ed. Vivien Greene (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014), 50–7. 39 Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996). 40 Margaret Lowengrund, “Movements & Manifestos,” Saturday Review, October 1, 1949. 41 Futurism was the only Italian modern movement represented in Cubism and Abstract Art. However, with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (1935–6), resulting in sanctions from the League of Nations, many who had initially supported the modernizing dictatorship began to distance themselves. See Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance,” 150. Before the war, a number of Futurist works were already part of the Museum’s collection. For example, Umberto Boccioni’s 1911 triptych States of Mind (pencil on paper) entered the MoMA collection in 1941. Boccioni’s painted triptych of the same title entered the collection in the 1970s. 42 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936, 56, 61. The ambiguous feelings about Mussolini can be seen in: “DUCE DERIDES IDEA OF ‘ETERNAL PEACE’,” New York Times, October 26, 1936, 8. 43 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 25. 44 Picasso’s similar move toward classical types was not discussed in the catalogue, even though he created works of a similar style during the period. See On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, ed. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 201–2.

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45 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 25. For Morandi’s connection to Fascism, see Braun. “Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi’s Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese,” Modernism/modernity 3, no. 3 (September 1995): 89–116. 46 Barr and Soby, ibid., 27. 47 The first exhibition of the group was in 1929. See Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism. Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90–112. 48 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 27. 49 Barr and Soby, ibid. 50 The Thirties: The Arts in Italy beyond Fascism, ed. Antonello Negri (Florence: Palazzo Strozzi and Giunti, 2012). 51 Christopher Duggan, “Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism,” in Italy in the Cold War: Politics, Culture and Society 1948–58, ed. Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff (Oxford & Washington DC: Berg Publishers Limited, 1995), 3. 52 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 32. 53 Barr and Soby, ibid. 54 Barr and Soby, ibid., 5. 55 “Press Release: Museum of Modern Art Officials Undertake European Survey,” MoMA Press Release Archives, 1948. 56 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 32–3. 57 Lamberto Vitali, Marino Marini: 33 tavole, ed. Giocanni Scheiwiller, Arte Moderna Italiana N, 29 (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1937), 20. 58 Barr and Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, 33. 59 Gamble, “Buying Marino Marini,” 155–72. 60 Bedarida, “Operation Renaissance,” 157–8. 61 Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 240. 62 Ibid., 244. 63 Filippo Focardi, “Reshaping the Past: Collective Memory and the Second World War in Italy, 1945–55,” in The Postwar Challenge. Cultural, Social, and Political Change in Western Europe, 1945–58, ed. Dominik Geppert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41–63, 57. 64 Their choices of collaborators and artists were hotly contested among Italian intellectuals; see Soby, “Memo, re: Italian Show to Monroe Wheeler,” December 9, 1949, AHB. MF3154. 65 Italy had been a constitutional monarchy since 1861, becoming a democratic republic after a 1946 referendum. Free election was held in 1948. Duggan, “Italy in the Cold War Years and the Legacy of Fascism,” 2–3. 66 Angelo Toninelli, “Letter to Monroe Wheeler,” December 27, 1946, AHB. MF3154. 67 Unsurprisingly perhaps, Barr championed the architect and curator Philip Johnson, his friend and colleague at MoMA; Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer and was also at the fore of American modernist architecture. For details on Johnson’s political and architectural allegiances, see Kazys Varnelis, “"We Cannot Not Know History": Philip Johnson's Politics and Cynical Survival,” Journal of Architectural Education 49, no 1 (November 1995), 92–104. 68 Wheeler, “Letter to Charles Rufus Morey,” February 24, 1947, AHB. MF3153. 69 Barr, “Confidential Memo to Monroe Wheeler and James Thrall Soby,” January 29, 1947, AHB. 2.

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70 Bruno B. Zevi, “Letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,” February 17, 1947, AHB. MF3153. 1–2. 71 Quotation from Bonner, “Letter to William Averell Harriman.” 72 A number of art historians have likewise highlighted the functional contradictions within postwar democratic Italian culture, see Hecker, “‘Servant of Two Masters.’” 337–61; and Silvia Paoli, “Milano 1943: la fotografia ‘moderna’ tra cronaca e reportage,” in Bombe sulla città: Milano in guerra 1942–1944, ed. Rosa Auletta Marrucci, Massimo Negri, Achille Rastelli and Lucia Romaniello (Milan: Skira, 2004), 79–87. 73 For example, see “Modern Art Museum Buys Italians’ Works,” New York Times, September 14, 1949, 29. 74 Devree, “Italian Modernism: Futurism to the Present in Museum Show,” New York Times, July 3, 1949, X6. For similar language, see “Italian Art Goes on Display Here: 250 Examples of Work since 1900 at the Modern Museum,” New York Times, June 29, 1949, 25. 75 Devree, “Italian Modernism.” 76 For example, “Books on Art,” Enquirer, Cincinnati, OH, September 24, 1949; “Modern Italian Art,” Times Herald, Dallas, TX, October 23, 1949; and “TwentiethCentury Italian Art,” Graphics 5, no. 27 (New York: 1949). 77 John Rosenfield, III, “Italian Resurgence in Fine Art.” News, Dallas, TX, September 11, 1949. 78 The effort to take the exhibition abroad failed. See Porter McCray, “Memo to Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,” July 14, 1949, AHB. MF3153. 79 Raffaele Carrieri. “200 mila Americani per l’arte italiana contemporanea.” Il Tempo, September 17–24, 1949, 18–19. Translation by the author. Corroborating tallies of visitor numbers were not found by the author in the MoMA archives.

14

American Exceptionalism at the Modern, 1942–1959: Dorothy Miller’s Americans Angela Miller

The Museum of Modern Art has long been associated with the establishment and promulgation of a canon of international modernism, often linked to its first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.1 Such an emphasis on MoMA’s role in canon formation however, belies the flux, uncertainty, and pragmatic experimentalism that characterized the first two decades of its institutional life, an uncertainty most evident in its collecting of twentieth-century American art.2 Students of the Modern have commented— then and up to the present—on a double standard applied to European art on the one hand and twentieth-century American art up to Abstract Expressionism on the other. European modernism was measured by developmental laws and rigorous formal imperatives, and was also accorded historical authority and weight. Twentieth-century American art by contrast was assessed on the basis of individual achievement; claims for its modernism were at best muted in favor of broad somewhat generic categories such as “realism,” “magic realism,” and “expressionism” that constituted unsystematic tendencies rather than movements. The contributions of American realism, sophisticated expatriate art, and eccentrics that had shaped the Modern’s narrative of American painting before 1900 gave way to a far more varied and uneven field of painterly production often resistant to European stylistic rubrics. This situation helps explain MoMA’s markedly eclectic approach to exhibitions of twentieth-century American art. This chapter explores the role and influence of exhibitions that emphasized American art at MoMA during and after the war years in relation to a more established European “tradition of the new.” Twentieth-century American art exhibited at MoMA—collecting patterns notwithstanding—revealed a striking range and variety in terms of subject matter, stylistic approach, and regional origin. As the nation’s premier modern art museum, the Modern’s exhibition of American art—a responsibility met primarily by Dorothy Miller, an energetic and open-minded curator of painting and sculpture—posed something of a challenge.3 An indispensable collaborator of Barr’s, Miller’s importance at MoMA remains slighted even though she was on the front lines of shaping curatorial decisions about what to exhibit and how to represent the evolving corpus of American art.

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An analysis of Miller’s curatorial decisions provides a revealing look into the unfolding debate over the virtues and pitfalls of the exhibition of American art in relation to the more fully historicized and aesthetically organized forms of European modernism. Eclecticism was more than a pragmatic response to the challenge of representing an artistic tradition still in flux; it was a primary ideological and exhibitionary instrument through which to assert the exceptionalist character of American art in relation to the shifting context of European modernism in the years between the wars. By exceptionalism, I have in mind a cultural belief system that understood the United States to be governed by a different and less deterministic set of historical and material circumstances shaping its history than those governing Europe. During its first twenty years, the Modern rejected any prescriptive definition of American art. The democratically and regionally representative national art that was placed on view by Miller and others was shaped by the commitments of the government-funded art programs of the 1930s, in particular, the Federal Art Project (1935–43). In the wartime and postwar years, the eclecticism that was such a marked expression of this regional diversity in turn would become a demonstration—geared to both a national and an international audience—of the fundamentally pluralistic and democratic character of the nation’s culture and arts. It was highlighted as the most distinguishing feature of US art, in pointed contrast to a studio-based and arcane if aesthetically powerful tradition of modern art in the metropolis of Paris, or what Francis Taylor, director of the Met, dismissed in 1945 as “the pre-war introspection of an hysterical and defeated Europe.”4 Eclecticism would however encounter increasingly vocal opposition after the Second World War, faced by pressures to crystallize a powerful, rigorous, and branded identity for American art as the nation rose to global ascendency.5 The debates surrounding the problem of eclecticism offer a glimpse into a situation of aesthetic instability that recasts the significance of when and why New York school abstraction emerged into prominence in the later 1950s. MoMA’s commitment to individual achievement effectively slowed its promotion of Abstract Expressionism as a distinct movement until a time when an identifiably American aesthetic—recognized on both a national and international arena—would take on greater urgency. Barr embraced the Modern’s mission to represent twentieth-century American art. Yet in the context of an institution that approached twentieth-century European modernism according to stylistic movements and modernist “masters,” American art posed a problem. Dorothy Miller’s tireless promotion of American art through her “Americans” series (1942–63) maintained a robust presence in that field of collecting and exhibiting. Yet faced with the sheer regional diversity of American painting, Miller chose to focus on individuals rather than movements, asserting the decentralized character of national life and the democratically representative nature of its culture. More pointedly ideological rationales eventually emerged in the context of the war years, when eclecticism and “democratic” diversity would be invoked as a stay against the danger of a bureaucratic or institutionalized high art. The stakes facing the Modern as the premier institution of modernism in the United States had intensified in the face of Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy that used culture as a weapon.6 Miller’s artworld contemporaries during the years around the Second World War linked stylistic

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entrenchment to the control and outright censorship of both Germany under National Socialism and—slightly later—the Soviet Union. Faced with the rise of official art and the suppression of modernism in Germany, the very absence of a coherent national tradition in the United States could now be claimed as a virtue. In this context, the broad output of American art could be seen as the expression of a highly individualized aesthetic culture grounded in local and regional realisms, self-taught art, and a range of expressionisms that revealed distinct artistic personalities rather than ideological, national, or institutional imperatives. With the emphasis on eclecticism as the signal quality of American art, the resistance of American artistic production to rubrics of style was turned from problem to confident assertion of the fundamentally democratic nature of art in the United States.7 MoMA’s characterization of American art in exhibitions, catalogues, and press releases used terms associated with the individualism of the American experience.8 Such trends in postwar American exceptionalist thinking were embedded in characterizations of early twentieth-century post-Impressionist painter Maurice Prendergast as “one of the most individual” American artists; one-person exhibitions of Georgia O’Keeffe and Ben Shahn in the immediate postwar years focused on their qualities of “personal conviction, under no imposed directive or compulsion,” on “sincere authority,” and on an adamantly personal and individual formation.9 Such criteria generated a paradoxical “tradition” that had no signature look or identifiable set of formal concerns. By contrast, in writing about European art, press releases used such judgmental and hierarchizing terms as “key figure,” “precursor,” and “mature style” to identify with some precision the historical placement of European figures such as Braque, Picasso, and Matisse. MoMA’s exhibitions of European art—witness Cubism and Abstract Art—would far more often draw on already established movements and terms of understanding. In 1942, Dorothy Miller initiated her signature series “Americans,” intended “to provide a continuing survey of the arts of the United States.” Focusing mostly on artists under 40, these exhibitions abandoned any references to historical or stylistic rubrics.10 Even prior to the “Americans” series, the Modern had already established a pattern of broad regional representation, starting with Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans (1929–30), Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans (1930–1), and Painting and Sculpture from 16 American Cities (1933). Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States (Figure 14.1) was the first of Miller’s exhibitions, followed by Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists (1943), Fourteen Americans (1946), and 15 Americans (1952).11 The aesthetic pluralism of the “Americans” series contrasted strikingly with the clear stylistic progression accorded to European modernism.12 Miller recalled in the 1970s that “they were what we considered the best artists of that particular moment,” noting that it was very much the museum’s mission to buy the work of living artists “and take a chance on it.”13 The series was a risky venture for Miller and the Modern, given the very unstable grounds upon which to make aesthetic judgments. These exhibitions however did establish eclecticism as a virtue rather than a cause for dismissing the immaturity of American art. Writing on the occasion of the first exhibition—Americans 1942— Miller combined work from geographically diverse regions, scouting for “high talent

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Figure 14.1  Unidentified visitors at the exhibition Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States (January 21–March 8, 1942). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art  Archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

and sound training in the arts.” Miller herself was quick to admit that the work thus assembled defied stylistic categories, but gave a particular spin to this condition: “All this is possible only in the liberty which our democracy gives to the artist. No regimentations, no compulsions or restrictions could call forth such richly various expressions of a people’s creative spirit.”14 As with numerous other exhibitions during the war, Miller’s foil was clearly the suppression of modern art under Hitler. A March 20, 1942 press release detailed Barr’s efforts in 1935 to save several works by Malevich

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“from the Hitlerian wrath against all modern art.”15 A press release in 1945 for a comprehensive and thematically ambitious exhibition based on the collections asserted that “when absolutism is being defeated and nations are once more attempting to solve the dilemma of freedom and order,” the museum’s public would do well to recall the lessons contained within the museum’s mission, of “catholicity and tolerance.”16 In a marked reversal of the discourses of nationalism that had dominated public discussion of culture and art in the 1930s (although not without some pushback from modernists like Stuart Davis), the Modern stood on principle against exclusions on doctrinal grounds, narrow regionalist prejudice, or advocacy of particular aesthetic forms, and in support of individual aesthetic freedom.17 But Miller’s 1942 exhibition contained another subtext; all but four of the eighteen artists featured had spent time in the government art programs during the New Deal. Of those four, two were ineligible because of foreign citizenship. In her curatorial efforts Miller characterized the New Deal as critical both for cultural production and in keeping artists alive. She later explained: The WPA really saved art in this country … they were not stopped from doing experimental work … they were allowed to go on even though it was experimental and not yet any good. But look what it resulted in. And they wouldn’t have survived I’m sure if they hadn’t had that steady little income. … I personally don’t think any of that great development would have happened in the 1940s and 1950s here without the WPA.18

The catalogue for Americans 1942 was careful in each case to note artists’ affiliations with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). By 1942 the WPA had been plagued by years of charges from the political right of boondoggling, socialism, and support of mediocrity. In the context of such right-wing attacks on New Deal “socialism,” Miller’s exhibition clearly demonstrated the range of individual styles that characterized the legacies of public patronage and that countered the right’s claims of a socialized art that stifled individual expression. Miller’s stated conviction later in life that nurturing fledging artistic careers would eventually generate work of lasting significance may have reflected the retrospective knowledge she had of the emergence of New York abstraction. But at the time it also reflected her devotion to federal support as a powerful vehicle for producing an American art. Miller and others in the museum world also felt—sometimes acutely—the burden and responsibility of taking up some of the slack created by the end of the WPA. In practice this meant encouraging the development of the market for American art. Beginning in the 1930s the public was given opportunities to buy works of fine art directly for sale in the museum. Loan works from exhibitions were also purchased by the museum itself for the collections, through its Purchase Fund.19 Miller’s commitment to provide broad geographical exposure to little-known American artists thus grew in no small part out of her desire to foster a base of collectors who would begin to fill the void left by the termination of federal support.20 She succeeded very well in this respect, reporting that after the Second World War “everybody collected.”21 Elsewhere in the same interview she recalled that:

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it started in the mid-1940s… after the war there were many, many galleries and all of them looking for new people. The Museum may have had something to do with that because those shows that we put on … we tried to have some new people in them like Graves and so on that New Yorkers had never seen.22

Miller’s commitment to organizing the Americans series around individual personalities persisted well into its later phases; from the beginning she had chosen to work with a limited range of artists, each represented by four to five works, sufficient to offer a rounded view of an artist’s contribution. This approach meant in practice that broad organizing movements were submerged if not actively suppressed in the name of individual achievement. As late as 1956, Miller’s 12 Americans exhibition preface was explicit on this point. The exhibition selected the twelve featured artists out of a larger field and placed each in a separate gallery in order that “the character and quality of his individual achievement can better be estimated.” It also emphasized—as Miller put it in her preface—“differences rather than similarity.” Miller installed “artists who differ widely in approach and technique as well as in age and geographical origin.”23 12 Americans included sculptures by Ibram Lassaw, José de Rivera, and Seymour Lipton, paintings by the first- and second-generation New York School including Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and James Brooks; Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, and Sam

Figure 14.2  Installation view of the exhibition 12 Americans (May 30–September 8, 1956). Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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Francis; geometric abstraction by Fritz Glarner (Figure 14.2); and lesser-known figures such as Ernest Briggs and Raoul Hague; “[N]o single style or theme runs through the exhibition.”24 Acknowledging the association with “the movement known as abstract expressionism” of several of the artists shown, Miller reiterated that the illustration of “trends” was not her intention. She also noted that seven out of the twelve artists had been involved as younger men in the “Government’s art projects.” Taking stock of their wide geographical origins, Miller noted that eleven of the twelve artists had reached maturity in New York. Miller’s repeated statements about individual achievement reveal a pronounced avoidance of associations with international movements or with doctrinal positions.25 From its beginnings, MoMA had actively discouraged the internationalizing efforts of American artists making common cause with European movements of abstraction such as Abstraction-Creation. Members of both the Abstract American Artists (AAA) group and the somewhat later Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors attacked the Modern for its “increasingly reactionary policies … toward the work of American artists,” and its partiality to “works rightly considered academic and outmoded even in the Victorian era.”26 Writing in The Nation in 1944, Clement Greenberg quoted from the group’s letter, and cited American Realism and Magic Realism, and Romantic Painting in America, as evidence of what they identified as “one set of standards for … European art … and a thoroughly different one for its American selections.” MoMA indeed had a history of swatting aside claims for representation made by the AAA. In 1942, a press release for the Modern’s yearly exhibition blithely dismissed the organization, instead placing its imprimatur on European abstract art: “Two weeks ago the American Abstract Artists opened their annual exhibition of the year’s work. The Museum’s exhibition of cubist and abstract acquisitions surveys not one year but three decades.” MoMA did include several American abstract painters in its 1942 show—Arthur Carles, Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Ferren; all drew upon the broad currents of European modernism, from Impressionism to Cubism, but—except for Ferren— were unaligned with a specific group or aesthetic cause. The Modern claimed for itself a historical retrospect reaching back to “those calm but artistically exciting days before the start of the thirty-years war in 1914.”27 In a letter to the group, Barr cited MoMA’s policy of not exhibiting artists’ groups over which it had no power “to select or omit.”28 Repudiating doctrinaire forms of abstraction beholden to European movements, the Modern seemed most responsive to “artists [who] remained nourished but not dominated by external influences either at home or abroad.”29 Such a position—rather than a judgment about geometric abstraction as such— belied a broader unease with programmatic developments within the field of American art. Pluralism and tolerance were the rule; doctrinaire positions that threatened to submerge the individual beneath stylistic or organizational imperatives were greeted with cool disregard, especially when they carried no allegiance to American conditions.30 By 1942 Cubism and abstract art were historical; by contrast, twentiethcentury American art in these same years still had no established progression or cultural profile. To establish such a profile, the museum looked back to nineteenth-

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century American realisms, “national and cosmopolitan” forms, and “eclecticism” representing the “intensely personal” dimensions of the national tradition.31 After 1900 however such clarity of definition fractured into a prismatic range of styles and personalities. Miller later discussed the difficulty of deciding whom to include in an art book on American art: “[T]he early part of it up to 1900 was great.”32 Despite its commitment to exhibiting American art, MoMA’s refusal to project stylistic coherence increasingly emerged as a token of aesthetic and cultural flux and immaturity. The most vocal and principled critic of eclecticism in these years was Clement Greenberg, who directed one of a series of attacks on the Modern’s selective treatment of American art at a 1944 exhibition—Art in Progress—that commemorated the museum’s fifteenth anniversary. His salvo was premised upon an unapologetic elitism and defense of cultural authority over demotic taste. Greenberg’s review began on a positive note: the exhibition represented “the modern movement as it is embodied in the … visual arts and crafts.” But he went on to criticize the poor representation of American abstract art in the 1944 exhibition. Art in Progress mixed American works into the currents of European modernism in a sometimes uneasy fit; Greenberg felt that it overrepresented work by artists he linked to the more regressive currents of modern painting in the United States and Europe, garnering his withering criticism. Included in this group were artists associated with Surrealism (Tanguy and Dali); neo-romanticism (Eugene Berman); precisionist abstraction (O’Keeffe), and work loosely associated with what the museum called “magic realism” (Peter Blume, Pavel Tchelitchew). “The museum continues to show an uneven catholicity to contemporary art … The extreme eclecticism now prevailing in art is unhealthy, and it should be counteracted, even at the risk of dogmatism and intolerance. Inevitably, the museum makes enemies. Let it make them for good reasons.”33 A few years later in 1949, Greenberg sharpened his attack against broad public acceptance as a measure of value in art—or what H. W. Janson referred to the same year as the selling of American art to the public as a whole—and against what he felt was the capitulation of the Modern, along with the Whitney and others, to forms of “academic naturalism” in American art—his catchphrase for all forms of art that defaulted on the challenges of cubism and abstraction.34 In his pronouncements, Greenberg flipped the very terms—dogmatism and intolerance—that the Modern had used to attack the coercive unities of National Socialism and Soviet-style mandates. These terms now were battering rams with which Greenberg smashed what he considered the reactionary phases of American and European art, still mired as they were in illustration and other extra-artistic concerns. Yet Greenberg remained a minority voice; at an extreme from Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro would regard “the lack of a single necessary style of art not as a symptom of anarchy but of ‘freedom, individuality and sincerity of expression,’ sustaining the emerging values of social and political life.”35 After the Second World War the rhetoric of broad tolerance, diversity, and freedom of expression that had been directed against National Socialism pivoted to Soviet Communism, targeting the “totalitarian” control of creative expression. Special pleading for the qualities of democratic individualism now had the added challenge of expressing the nation’s new stature in the postwar world, and the need to assert not only political but cultural authority.36 Confidence in the ability of

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American art to rise to the challenge however was increasingly shadowed by a tone of apology and self-doubt. Several years after the Second World War, the eclecticism heralded as a defining feature of the American tradition by Miller and others gave way to calls for an advanced art in the United States that fulfilled claims to global leadership. It would do this by means of a cultural expression that carried universal significance. Increasingly in this context, democratic pluralism—an outgrowth of the federal support for the arts in the 1930s—would appear at cross-grains with the growing pressures for an authoritative and recognizable aesthetic, one that answered the quest for a mature and programmatically coherent American modernism. Nelson Rockefeller—president of MoMA in 1939–41 and again 1946–53—called for a demonstration of the nation’s cultural achievements, historical weight, and aesthetic unity commensurate with its new geopolitical and military prominence. Convening a conference on the role of art at MoMA, Rockefeller set the tone for a growing emphasis on the importance of culture in asserting international hegemony: “[I]t is our responsibility—the responsibility of such individuals and groups as are meeting here today—to see that the United States becomes a creative, dynamic force in the cultural life of the world.”37 According to Miller, Rockefeller—who served in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during the war—“understood, as few government people did, that every other important country in the world had some concern for cultural matters and believed that an exchange of cultural things such as exhibitions and orchestras and what not have value in international relations.”38 Spanning culture and politics, Rockefeller recognized that international respect for the United States and its growing stature globally would ultimately hinge on more commanding cultural achievements. While the Modern—and Miller—continued to emphasize the same qualities of personal style and private vision in its exhibitions of American art after the war, the early 1950s marked a period of greater confidence in the overall presentation of American art to the public as well as to an international audience. Barr, writing on the occasion of the Modern’s sponsored exhibition at the 1950 Venice Biennale (featuring works by Gorky, De Kooning, and Pollock), wrote that “[t]he spirit of painting after World War II seems much bolder than the retrospective movements of Post-World War I—at least in those countries where cultural freedom still survives.” Barr went on to celebrate the “renewed exploration and adventure” that characterized American art, while associates in the staging of the American pavilion heralded “the new maturity of our advancing painters.”39 This continued with the 1951 exhibition curated by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie—Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America—the first to focus uniquely on US abstraction as a distinct series of developments warranting its own study.40 Looking back to Barr’s landmark exhibition of 1936—Cubism and Abstract Art—Ritchie’s was an effort to garner new significance for American abstraction in its own right. Breaking abstract painting into two phases—1912–25 and 1930–50— Ritchie situated US abstraction in relation to European, and proposed a clear taxonomy of “Pure Geometric,” “Architectural and Mechanical Geometric,” “Naturalistic Geometric,” “Expressionist Geometric,” and “Expressionist Biomorphic.”41 In the latter category he placed Gorky, De Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Pousette-Dart, and Stamos alongside of artists associated with Surrealism and more hard-edged biomorphism.

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Ritchie’s exhibition was followed by Miller’s 1952 15 Americans which—like the previous exhibition—featured notables of what would emerge as the New York School (Pollock, Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin; De Kooning was invited but chose not to participate), but situated them within a still eclectic artistic landscape that included figures associated with Surrealism (Kiesler and Baziotes) along with figurative expressionist painters Edwin Dickinson (Figure 14.3), Joseph Glasco, and Thomas Wilfred, a pioneer of light art. The show by her own count had “the biggest impact because so much that was new and radical had happened in the six years since my previous show in 1946. Pollock and everybody had blossomed.” Miller located the emergence of the still unheralded ‘new American painting’ within a broader field of abstraction winnowed down from some forty artists: “I was going mad trying to choose, there were so many very, very good people … It was a terribly exciting moment in New York.”42 Such eclectic mixing of abstraction with other more conservative painting styles remained commonplace into the later 1950s among other curators of note, a situation that sets into high relief the later exhibition and collecting histories of American art at MoMA and its turn away from aesthetic pluralism and toward established canons.43 It also corrects a still persistent belief that New York school abstraction had fully coalesced as the most significant current of American painting by the early 1950s.44 Though Miller had done much to foster what her

Figure 14.3 Installation view of the exhibition 15 Americans (April 9–July 27, 1952). Photographic Archive, Museum of Modern Art archives, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

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interviewer called “the emergence of American painting in a stronger way,” she still emphasized individual achievement over recognition for what Greenberg would call in 1955 “American-Type Painting.”45 The first large-scale exhibition at MoMA devoted exclusively to the New York school did not come until 1958, and it was an international traveling exhibition.46 “The New American Painting” was curated once again by Dorothy Miller, with an introduction by Barr. Done in conjunction with the International Council of the Modern, the exhibition broke with the earlier pattern of including a variety of stylistically distinct work. Despite the fact that Miller’s “Americans” had turned more consistently toward advanced art in 1952 and 1956, it was only by the later 1950s that the Modern was prepared to place its imprimatur on an exhibition that broke definitively with the eclecticism of earlier exhibitions.47 Yet even in the context of asserting a powerful new aesthetic language on an international stage, Barr’s preface to the exhibition repeatedly used the language of individualism: “For them, John Donne to the contrary, each man is an island … these artists dislike labels and shun the words ‘movement’ and ‘school.’”48 Yet—while showcasing powerfully individual and distinct personalities—“The New American Painting” by its very title also spoke with an assertive new authority underwritten by bold aesthetic and intellectual claims. As the “new American art” came into greater focus, it generated interest in earlier American art, a broad spectrum of which would enter the collections in the years between 1952 and 1959.49 The Modern also committed itself to a canon of masterworks that would ground its collections of more recent art, rather than passing these along to the Met, as had been the museum’s original intention.50 By the end of the decade, the Modern had swung away from its earlier strategy of stylistically eclectic exhibitions of American art and in a direction that supported the “universal claims” associated with Greenberg’s “formalist criticism.”51 In the context of the United States’ expansive new global role, eclecticism—messy and egalitarian in impulse, regionally varied, and spanning abstraction and figuration—would be eclipsed by powerful and aesthetically compelling movements that both generated and were justified by a critical apparatus of unprecedented force.52 Exhibitions increasingly positioned American artists such as Gorky and Calder within stylistically defined movements, asserting that “[s]tyle is the signature of an era, in the same way that handwriting is the personal mark of an individual.”53 Writing in 1959, as Abstract Expressionism found itself officially “set up on the altar” of the Modern, critic Hilton Kramer wrote that it constituted a new form of official art: “[I]n this country, Abstract Expressionism is now our certified contemporary art style so far as museums, the critics, and the big investors in modern painting are concerned.” With surprising acuteness he pinpointed the dilemma faced by the New York school as it attained international prominence, spending “half its time denying it is a school and the other half wondering if it is a new academy.”54 These developments were historically aligned with the consolidation of what C. Wright Mills would identify as corporate and governmental power interests that took shape toward the end of the 1950s. And while I do not intend any causal connection between them, the emergence of the “figure” of Abstract Expressionism out of the “ground” of a varied and messy field of artistic production by the late 1950s was abetted by the institutional and ideological pressures to consolidate a branded

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identity for American art.55 In doing so, the uneven and varied pluralist production of American art would find itself consigned to the margins. Following the scaling back of the WPA art programs beginning in 1941, Miller’s commitment to an eclectic and non-hierarchical artistic field effectively widened the public for art and worked against the centralization of aesthetic authority. But it also posed a problem for the emerging governmental and corporate elites of the 1950s, insofar as they lacked the kind of legitimizing effect of an established cultural apparatus with which to buttress their growing national and institutional authority.56 The apparent opposition between democratic eclecticism and a recognizable national “school” would find something of a resolution however in the very appearance of a matured modern and American art. That resolution would come precisely with the recognition—from members of the New York school themselves—that had it not been for the support of the federal government in the 1930s, they would never have been able to sustain themselves through the difficult years of national depression long enough to nurture their own individual creative vision.

Notes 1

2

3

4

On Barr, see Marcia Brennan, “The Multiple Masculinities of Canonical Modernism: James Johnson Sweeney and Alfred H. Barr Jr. in the 1930s,” in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 179–201. This emphasis however slights the educative and pedagogical mission of Barr’s formulation of modernism: see A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 84–128. John Elderfield, “Preface,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: Continuity and Change (Studies in Modern Art 5) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, dist. by H. N. Abrams, 1995), 8, asserts that “popularism as well as popularity were among the Museum’s primary aims at mid-century.” Such outreach produced volumes like Robert Goldwater’s 1949 Modern Art in Your Life which extended Barr’s educative mission of earlier years. Brzyski, “Introduction: Canons and Art History,” 3, defines canons as “discursive structures that organize information within a particular field according to a hierarchic order, which engenders cultural meanings, confers and withholds value, and ultimately participates in production of knowledge.” Indeed, a major source of difference in the treatment of European and American art at MoMA had its origins in the uneven development of the respective canons for each, during the years under consideration. The experimental and provisional tone of MoMA’s approach to twentieth-century American art is evident in James Thrall Soby’s “Preface” to his Contemporary Painters (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948), 7. Miller became Barr’s assistant curator in 1934, rising to the level of curator of collections in 1947. On Miller, see Lynn Gilbert and Gaylen Moore, Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981), 21–9. Wendy Jeffers is also completing a biography of Miller. Taylor is quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of The Museum of Modern Art,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: Continuity and Change (Studies in Modern

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7

8 9

10

11 12

13

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Art 5) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, dist. by H. N. Abrams, 1995), 39. See also Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), 27: “The Cubists … immured themselves from any contact with the public by shutting themselves up in their studio laboratories.” By branding, I refer to the institutionally guided effort to deploy aesthetic and visual production to buttress the emerging authority of cultural elites. Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo,” 38–9, argues that—after the Second World War—a similar rationale would justify MoMA’s often-controversial collecting of advanced art. The embattled status of modernism in Hitler’s Germany “gave such art new stature as the embodiment of principles of individual freedom.” MoMA’s program of democratic inclusion resonated across a broad political spectrum: see George Baer, “Young American Artists—1942: Modern Museum Show Proves Great Possibilities of Art,” Daily Worker, February 4, 1942. H. W. Janson, in “Symposium: The State of American Art,” Magazine of Art 42 (March 1949), 96, may have been alone in recognizing the tension between “individual experience” and the growth of “standardized mass responses,” a development that for Janson imperiled the entire project of modernism itself. Foundational texts in the emerging field of American studies at midcentury include Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), David Potter’s People of Plenty (1954), and R. W. B. Lewis’s American Adam (1955). “Museum of Modern Art Presents Retrospective Exhibition of Ben Shahn’s Paintings, Posters and Sketches for Murals,” press release 47930-(or 50?) 40, September 30, 1947. In 1948 MoMA—in a press release for a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe (no. 46514–25)—reprinted her statement about finding herself as an artist, a parable of artistic self-invention that held special power as a foundational narrative for American artists. Two noteworthy exceptions—in 1943–4—were American Realists and Magic Realists and Romantic Painting in America, organized around broad although loose stylistic tendencies unifying the diverse field of American painting and arcing from the eighteenth century to the present. These were succeeded by 12 Americans (1956) and Sixteen Americans (1959). I am preserving the original citation form. See John R. Lane and Susan Larsen, eds., Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927–1944 (New York: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh and Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 19. On Miller’s exhibitions, see Lynn Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans, 1942–1963,’” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: Studies in Modern Art, no. 4 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 54–107. The exception to this general pattern are exhibitions MoMA did on contemporary European art, such as The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors (1955), but these were far outnumbered by monographic and stylistically focused exhibitions on European artists, exemplified by the 1936 Cubism and Abstract Art. Tape-recorded interview by Paul Cummings with Dorothy Miller (1970–1) May 26, 1970–September 28, 1971, Archives of American Art (transcription), 118–19, 128. As early as 1929, “19 Living Americans,” featuring 105 works by 19 artists, “aroused a great deal of healthy controversy.” See “American Art and the Museum,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 8, no. 1 (November 1940): 3–26; quote on p. 7. Dorothy Miller, ed., Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1942), 10; also in press release, no. 42117–7 (January 17, 1942).

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15 Press Release, March 20, 1942. 16 Press Release 45615-20a, “Museum of Modern Art Opens Large Exhibition of Its Own Painting and Sculpture,” June 15, 1945. 17 See “American Art and the Museum,” 1, which denounced the “hysterically intolerant nationalism which has swept over half of Europe.” At the same time, MoMA felt called upon to defend itself from charges that it favored foreign over national arts, despite the mandated collecting of American art at both the Met and the Whitney which shifted some of the responsibility to these other institutions. Despite these charges, exhibitions of American artists and acquisitions of works at MoMA by Americans outnumbered any other category. The Bulletin in 1940 listed 10 American to 5 foreign exhibitions; 8 one-person shows of US artists to 6 foreign; and a total of 307 US acquisitions to 226 School of Paris. In the category of circulating exhibitions however, foreign outnumbered United States-focused shows by 2:1. 18 Cummings interview transcript, 13. Miller reported having done “a little show for the MoMA … I called it The U.S. Government Art Projects: Some Distinguished Alumni,” limited to thirty artists—“you could make it much bigger—each one of whom is right on top of the heap now. It was quite exciting. Painters and sculptors” (13). Miller also kept an Artists File beginning in 1934, documenting the artists who came to MoMA to sell works (39). She witnessed daily the plight of artists during the Depression, estimating (p. 41) that as many as 800 artists sought her out each year at the Modern. Though federal programs took up much of the slack, many artists remained destitute. See also Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s ‘Americans,’” 60–1; and Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, 24. 19 See Press Release, 43312–16 (n.d. March 12, 1943?), announcing “Last Week of Exhibition of Realists and Magic Realists. Paintings Purchased from Exhibition.” 20 Even years later, Miller’s delight in being able to send a “great big check” to Morris Graves, whose work in her Americans 1942 exhibition generated great excitement, is palpable. 21 Cummings interview transcript, 61. See also Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, 28. 22 Cummings interview transcript, 172. 23 “Twelve American Artists Featured at Museum of Modern Art,” Press Preview, May 30, 1956, 1–2. 24 Miller, “Foreword and Acknowledgement,” in 12 Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: MoMA, dist. by Simon and Schuster, 1956), n.p. Similar statements appear in the Foreword for Miller’s 1959 Sixteen Americans. Please note that I am preserving the original typography of the titles. 25 Responding to an Art News review by Thomas Hess pointing to MoMA’s slow recognition of Abstract Expressionism, Barr both corrected the record in terms of collecting and asserted that “the Museum has not, and I hope will not, commit itself entirely to one faction.” “The Museum of Modern Art’s Record on American Artists,” in Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred Barr, Jr., eds. Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (New York: Abrams, 1986), 229. 26 Clement Greenberg, “The Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and the Museum of Modern Art,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), vol. 1, 182. 27 The 1942 exhibition that occasioned this putdown featured “New Acquisitions Which Span Three Decades of Cubist and Abstract Art.” Press release March 20, 1942.

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28 Barr’s letter to the AAA is quoted in Lane and Larsen, Abstract Painting and Sculpture, 37. 29 Press release 441023–35 (October 23, 1944) for a joint exhibition of Marsden Hartley and Lionel Feininger. On Barr’s treatment of the Abstract American Artists’ group, see Lane and Larsen, Abstract Painting and Sculpture, 37–9. 30 See Lane and Larsen, in Abstract Painting and Sculpture, 20, endnote 8. 31 Holger Cahill, American Painting and Sculpture, 1862–1932 (New York: MoMA in association with Arno Press, 1932), 9 and 13; also Art in America in Modern Times, eds. Cahill and Alfred Barr (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934). 32 Cummings interview transcript, 65–6. 33 Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, 213. 34 Greenberg, “Symposium: The State of American Art,” Magazine of Art 42 (March 1949): 92. Many other critics in the Symposium however—taking a more nuanced measure of art production—observed a kind of “juste milieu” framed between abstraction and naturalism, containing a significant “dose of abstract design” informing their work. See George Heard Hamilton, “Symposium: The State of American Art,” 93. 35 Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of the Avant Garde,” Art News 56 (June 1957): 37. 36 “Nelson A. Rockefeller Opens Art Conference at Museum of Modern Art” (Press release 47426–17, April 14, 1947). Such comments became standard issue in the 1950s. 37 “Rockefeller Opens Art Conference,” 1. 38 Cummings interview transcript, 141. 39 Barr and Alfred Frankfurter, American Commissioner for the Biennale, quoted in press release 500524–39, “American Paintings to be shown at Biennale in Venice, Italy.” Along with a retrospective of John Marin, the “old master of modern American art,” and the three abstract painters, the pavilion included the work of Lee Gatch, Rico Lebrun, and Hyman Bloom. 40 See press release 501229–79. The Whitney Museum surveyed the topic as early as 1935 in its exhibition Abstract Painting in America. The brief introduction to the checklist for the exhibition, written by Stuart Davis, offers an interesting contrast with MoMA in its emphasis on “large groups and masses” over “personal feelings, egos.”(“Introduction,” n.p.) 41 See “Exhibition of the Work of Demuth and Watkins,” Press release 491111–80, (June 11, 1950), which notes Watkins’ independence from “ism” categories. 42 Gilbert and Moore, Particular Passions, 26–7. Miller called it “a very far-out show” for 1952. 43 This point is often overlooked in the scholarship on the New York school, which generally removes it from its exhibitionary context in eclectic group shows. Zelevansky, “Dorothy Miller’s Americans,” 103, note 110, cites other examples. Michael Kimmelman, “Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-century: At Home and Abroad (Studies in Modern Art 4), ed. Barbara Ross (New York: Museum of Modern Art, dist. by H. N. Abrams, 1994), 48, also asserts that the 1956 traveling exhibition curated by Miller, “Modern Art in the United States,” which was circulated internationally under different titles in 1955 and which included a significant range of Abstract Expressionists, placed them within a much broader field. Catherine Dossin, “To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art,” ARTL@s Bulletin 3, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 84, notes that New York school artists exhibited in Europe also tended

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45

46 47

48 49 50 51

52

53 54

Modern in the Making to be presented in relation to their individual achievements rather than as part of an identifiable movement or group. My conclusions here are echoed by Kimmelman, “Revisiting the Revisionists,” who traces the history of MoMA’s support for the New York school to counter earlier narratives about its complicity with the promotion of Abstract Expressionism in the context of Cold War. The most influential study propounding the early rise and “triumph” of Abstract Expressionism is Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983). The Modern continues to be linked to vigorous promotion of the New York school in spite of the evidence against such a reading; see, for instance, Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradictions: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 73–87. Miller, in her interview with Cummings, recalled that “there was the great excitement of the group of artists that we call abstract expressionist.” But she continued to exhibit them alongside other unrelated figures. Kimmelman, “Revisiting the Revisionists”, 48–49, also raises questions about whether Abstract Expressionism had fully congealed as a recognizable entity even by the early 1950s. MoMA did do a retrospective of the work of Jackson Pollock following his death in 1956, curated by Sam Hunter. Adding a slight wrinkle to the story is that Miller’s 1959 Sixteen Americans exhibition took the limelight off of Abstract Expressionism for a domestic audience at least. Included in the exhibition were Jay De Feo, Alfred Leslie, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Wally Hedrick, and Louise Nevelson among others. Ruby Neri, “Remembering Voulkos,” in Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years (London: Black Dog Publishing, Ltd., 2016), 54, noted that the Sixteen Americans show at MoMA “undermined the dominance of Abstract Expressionism.” Alfred Barr, “The New American Painting as Shown in Eight European Counties 1958–59: Introduction,” in Defining Modern Art, 231–2. This is based on the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art’s list of acquisitions between 1940 and 1960. See Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo”; and Kimmelman, “Revisiting the Revisionists,” 54, note 48. Caroline Jones, “Form and Formless,” 127–44, in Amelia Jones, ed. A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2006), 137. On the Modern’s “postwar embrace of Geenbergian formalism,” see also Saab, For the Millions, 88. Another function played by the emergence of a consensus about what constituted important American art (if not yet a “canon”) was its ability to attract prospective gifts from museum donors. The shows of “masterworks” at MoMA in the 1950s played a similar function. See Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo,” 43. Press release 500706–46: “Three Modern Styles—Art Nouveau, Cubist Geometric and Free Form—To Be Exhibited at Museum.” n.d. 1950–5. Kramer, “The End of Modern Painting,” The Reporter, July 23, 1959, 41–2. Dorothy Miller recalled (Cummings interview transcript, p. 162) that David Rockefeller called Barr to ask about borrowing some paintings for the Rockefeller Institute in the new UN Building. Barr refused, writing that “[t]hey’re in terrific demand… and they’re being sent all over the world and everybody wants to see them and we can’t make any long-term loans.”

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55 The resistance to such alignment of American art along certain tracks was however still very much in evidence in such publications as Nathaniel Pousette-Dart’s, American Painting Today (New York: Hastings House, 1956) which is striking for its range. 56 Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” in Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 408, 419.

Index Abbott, John 79 n.18, 79 n.20 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden 141 Abramović, Marina 127 Abstract Expressionism 44, 60, 171–2, 174, 231–2, 237, 241, 246 n.44 abstraction, modern 35, 41, 43–5, 49, 197, 232, 237–40 Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (1951) exhibition 239 Adams, Ansel 84–6, 88–93, 94 n.10, 94 n.12, 96 n.43, 102 Action Photography (1943) exhibition 103 and Barr 92–3 aesthetics 8, 11–12, 21–2, 31 n.15, 46 n.17, 55–6, 84–5, 88–9, 93, 101, 116, 122, 127, 198, 218, 220, 232 African Negro Art (1935) exhibition 197–200, 203–4, 208–9 Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future (1943) exhibition 7, 15 n.26 amateur/amateurism 19, 21–3, 25–6, 29, 183 Amberg, George 123–4 America Can’t Have Housing 134 American Abstract Artists (AAA) 1, 13 n.5, 26, 237–8 American archaeological scholarship 175 n.3 American art 12, 21, 28–9, 30 n.3, 42, 85, 164, 170, 172–3, 199–200, 215, 231–3, 235, 237–42, 246 n.52, 247 n.55 American Occupational Therapy Association 184 American Photographs $10 (1941) exhibition 94 n.9 Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States (1942) exhibition 233–5

12 Americans (1956) exhibition 236, 243 n.11 15 Americans (1952) exhibition 233, 240 American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan) (1933) exhibition 123, 197–203, 198, 201 Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists (1943–4) exhibition 233, 243 n.10 American West 83, 85–6, 91, 94 n.10 Ancestral Sources of Modern Painting (1941) exhibition 147–51, 153–9, 161 n.36 Another Modern Art: Dance and Theater (2009) exhibition 129 n.20 Anti-hoarding Pictures by New York School Children (1942) exhibition 54 A Pageant of Photography (1940) exhibition 85, 94 n.10 Appleton, Helen 22 Architectural Forum 204, 206 architecture exhibitions 131–40. See also Breuer, Marcel; modern architecture Armed Services Program (ASP) 183 Armory Show 1 art education 55–6, 58–61 art educators/teacher 59 in Nazi Germany 56 Art Education in Wartime (1943) exhibition 56 Art for War Veterans (1945) exhibition 184, 187–8, 190 artifacts 4, 53, 56, 104, 199, 204–6 Art in Our Time (1939) exhibition 5, 14 n.16 The Artist Is Present (2010) exhibition 127 Art Materials for High Schools and Colleges (1947) exhibition 57 art photography 86, 93 The Arts in Therapy (1943) exhibition 183–5, 189

Index Arts of the South Seas (1946) exhibition 197, 204–5, 209 art therapy 181, 186 Art Work by Children of Other Countries (1948) exhibition 183 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) 69 authoritarianism 52, 55–6 avant-garde 1, 4, 9, 24, 29, 122, 131, 171, 218–20, 223 Barnard, George 87, 95 n.30 Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 1, 3, 5, 13 n.9, 15 n.32, 19, 22, 26, 29, 40, 44, 45 n.11, 61, 67–8, 73, 131, 133, 148–50, 160 n.19, 161 n.33, 164, 166, 171, 173–4, 178 n.50, 181–2, 199–200, 204, 215, 217–18, 220, 222–3, 225 n.5, 227 n.34, 228 n.67, 231, 239, 241, 245 n.28, 247 n.54 Adams and 92–3 on agenda/goals of museum 8 “Art in Our Time: The Plan of the Exhibition” 14 n.16 on children’s art 52–3 Dreier and 25 on Futurism 219 Goodyear and 41 “Is Modern Art Communistic?” 15 n.33 Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America 34 n.56 and Morey 217 Pearson and 47 n.27 in promoting modern art 21 rock art 169 Surrealism 23 teachings on color reproductions 149 Torpedo (“Report on the Permanent Collection”) 151–2 vision of modern art 39, 153 What Is Modern Painting (WIMP) 8 Barrier Canyon Anthropomorphic Style 164 Barrier Canyon Mural 163–6, 168, 170–4, 175 n.2, 175 n.7, 176 n.21, 177 n.38 Barr, Margaret Scolari 15 n.30, 224 n.3 Bateson, Gregory 205–6, 209 Bauhaus: 1919–1928 exhibition (1938–9) 46 n.13, 47 n.31, 96 n.34

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Bedarida, Raffaele 218 Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (1981) exhibition 83 Bell, William, Photographs of the Western Territory of the United States 88 Beneš, Mirka 73 Benjamin, Walter 149–50, 155, 160 n.17, 160 n.24 Bennett, Tony 67 Benton, Thomas Hart 123, 170 Berlant, Lauren 67 Bikini Atoll 102, 106 Bird, Elzy J. 169, 173, 175 n.7 Blackburn, Alan 26–8 Blake, Peter 135–6, 143 n.28 Boas, Franziska 117, 120–1 Bolter, Jay David 121, 129 n.13 Bonney, Thérèse 103 Booner, Paul Hyde 225 n.9 Boris Aronson: Stage Designs and Models (1947) exhibition 125 Bosch, Hieronymus 33 n.50, 154 Boyer, Allston 190 Brady, Mathew 85–6, 88, 107–8 Braque, Georges 42, 110, 156, 233 Breatore, Matthew 128 n.3 Breton, André 23, 32 n.30 Breuer, Marcel 39, 67, 131–2, 135–41, 142 n.24. See also architecture exhibitions; modern architecture Marcel Breuer: Architect and Designer 135 A Brief Survey of Modern Painting (1931) exhibition 148–50 building industry, American 140 Burstow, Robert 217 Cage, John 130 n.28 Cahill, Holger 21–2, 29, 31 n.15, 198–200 American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man (1750–1900) 21 folk art (see folk art) Calder, Alexander 49, 241 Camouflage for Civilian Defense (1942) exhibition 54 Campbell, E. Simms, “Harlem Sketches” 202–3 candid photography 107

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Index

canons 242 n.2 capitalism 5, 12, 216 Cárdenas, Lázaro 67 Carrà, Carlo 219 Carrieri, Raffaele 224, 229 n.79 Carson, Alice M. 35, 40–4 and V’Soske 47 n.41 Case Study House program 138 Caso, Alfonso 71–2, 77, 79 nn.20–1 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cultural programs (1950s) 217, 225 n.15 Cézanne, Paul 148, 154 Chesterton, G. K. 128 n.9 children art education/program for 52–3 child (young) artists 49 Children of England Paint (1941) exhibition 183 children’s art 11, 22, 26, 32 n.21, 56, 58–9 as modern art 52–3 war-themed 54–5 Children’s Art Carnival 49, 53, 60 Children’s Festival of Modern Art (1942) exhibition 61 n.2 Children’s Holiday Circus of Modern Art (1943) exhibition 50 Children’s Holiday Fair of Modern Art (1947–8) exhibition 51 Children’s Painting and the War (1942) exhibition 54, 56 Chinese Children’s War Pictures (1944) exhibition 54 Chorley, Kenneth 182, 186–7, 190 Christian Science Monitor (Adlow) 197 chronophotographs 121 Circolo delle Arte 222 Civil War 83, 85–8, 92–3, 107 Claflin-Emerson Expeditions 168 Clark, Stephen C. 26, 182 Cold War 51–2, 55, 58–60, 107, 215–18, 223, 226 n.26 Coleman, A. D. 101, 103, 111 n.10 Colonial art 68–9, 71 colonialism 198–9, 208–9 color reproductions 148–50 commercial culture 1, 4, 11–12, 19, 27–8 commercialism 19, 28 Committee on Art in American Education and Society 53, 58, 185

Communism 52, 58, 215, 217 conservativism 8 Cornell, Joseph 24–5 Cortissoz, Royal 200, 208 Costa, Joseph 106, 113 n.37 Courter, Elodie 149–50 Covarrubias, Miguel 71, 78 n.13, 79 n.20, 170, 200, 209 Craven, Thomas 24–5, 149 Crawford Rug Shop 41 Creative Art by American Children (1946) exhibition 57 creativity 50, 52, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 62 n.26, 191 creative art 58–9 creative education 181 creative photography 103 creative therapy 184–5 Crowninshield, Frank, “New York Goes Mexican” 76 Crystal Palace, London (1851) 132 Cubism 171, 218, 237–8 Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) exhibition 3–4, 22–3, 52, 199, 219, 227 n.41, 233, 239 Cummings, Paul 243 n.13, 244 n.18 daguerreotype 85, 94 n.10, 102, 106–7, 110 D’Amico, Victor 52–6, 60–1, 62 n.13, 69, 181–2, 185–7, 190–1 art education 58–9 “Creative Expression: A Discipline for Democracy” 55 Creative Teaching in Art 55 Educational Project 52–3, 148 indoctrination 55 “New Deal for Art Education” 55 Dana, Charles 14 n.15 Dance and Theatre Design (1944) exhibition 125 Dancers in Movement: Photographs by Gjon Mili (1942) exhibition 115–17, 119, 122, 126–7 Davis, Stuart 26, 47 n.35, 235, 237 Barber Shop (1930) 47 n.36 Flying Carpet (1942) 36, 43 Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style (1940) 36–7 De Chirico, Giorgio 219

Index decorative art 21, 147, 156 Degas, Edgar, Jockeys in Training (c.1885–7) 156 De Kooning, Willem 239–40 democracy 5, 8, 52, 55, 58, 215–17, 223, 232–4, 239, 243 n.7 Derain, André 156 Deschin, Jacob 107 Deskey, Donald 143 n.37 Developing Creativeness in Children (1955) exhibition 57 Devree, Howard 223–4 Dewey, John 52–3, 58, 181, 186 Dezarrois, André 65, 67 d’Harnoncourt, René 8–9, 15 n.34, 59–61, 70–1, 124, 158, 163–4, 166–7, 169–74, 182, 197, 204–6, 208–9 Diamond, Rhoda 110 digital photography 94 n.6 Division of Defense Housing Coordination, Washington 134 Dondero, George A. 60–1 Dove, Arthur 36, 45 n.3, 237 Downey, Jack 99, 101, 104 Dreier, Katherine 1, 24–5, 53 Dubs, Jason 159 n.3 Dymaxion Deployment Unit structure 134 eclecticism 232–3, 238–9, 241–2 Edgerton, Harold 103 Milk-drop Coronet (1936) photography 118 Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums (1936) exhibition 123 Eglington, Laurie 203–4, 209 Elisofon, Eliot, Tunisian Triumph (1943) exhibition 103 Elligott, Michelle 128 n.3, 129 n.20 Éluard, Paul 32 n.30 Enciso, Jorge 69 ersatz art 28 Euro-American tradition 69, 217–18, 224 European art 231, 233, 237–8, 243 n.12 European painting 147, 153–5, 158 The Exact Instant: Events and Faces in 100 Years of News Photography (1949) exhibition 100, 102–3, 106–8, 110 New York Journal-American on 109 U.S. Camera 102, 107, 113 n.39

251

Exposición de Arte Popular (1921) exhibition 69–71, 73 expressionism 231, 233 facsimiles 149–50, 173 Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–7) exhibition 4, 19–20, 22–9, 53 A God of War Shooting Arrows to Protect the People (Hoisington, Jean) 24 Farnsworth Art Museum, Wellesley 149 Fascism/Fascist 5, 12, 26–8, 52, 58, 61, 63 n.28, 218–20, 222–4, 232 Fausett, Lynn 168–73, 175 n.2, 176 n.19, 176 n.21 Fayum portrait 153, 156, 161 n.33 Federal Arts Project (FAP) 21–2, 53, 163, 168–9, 232 Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors 26, 237 Ferren, John 36, 237 Fogg Museum, Harvard University 149 folk art 8, 11, 19, 21–3, 29, 30 n.5, 32 n.21, 65, 78 n.7, 102, 123 folk surrealism 11, 19, 29 formalism 3, 10 Foster, Hal 127 Foster, Robert 213 n.46 Fourteen Americans (1946) exhibition 233 Frankfurter, Alfred 245 n.39 free media in art 185 From the Picture Press (1973) exhibition 101 Fronte nuova secessione artistica italiana (1946–50) 220 Fuller, Buckminster, Dymaxion Deployment Unit 134 Futurism 218–20, 222, 227 n.38, 227 n.41 Gallatin, Albert E. 13 n.6, 36, 44 The Gallery of Living Art 13 n.6 Gardner, Alexander 86–8, 107 Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866) 86–8 Gaylord, Kristin 32 n.25 Gaynor, William 107 Genauer, Emily 26, 42, 44, 47 n.33, 47 n.38, 173, 205 “The Fur-Lined Museum” 25

252

Index

German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact 29 Ghiringhelli brothers (Peppino and Gino) 222–3 Gibson, James F. 87 Gobin, Robert 153 Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco 166, 168 Goldwater, Robert, Primitivism in Modern Painting (1938) 203 Good Design program (1950) 140 Goodwin, Philip L. 134, 200 Goodyear, A. Conger 41 and Newmeyer 46 n.24 Gorky, Arshile 36, 237, 239, 241 Bull in the Sun Rug (1942) 38 Gottlieb, Adolph 171–2 Graham, Martha 117, 127, 129 n.10 Great Depression 5, 19–20, 51–2 Great Gallery (Horseshoe Canyon) Utah 163–5, 168–70, 172–4, 175 n.5, 177 n.23 Great News Photographs exhibition 110 Greenberg, Clement 47 n.43, 238, 241, 245 n.34 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” 28–9 formalism 44–5, 241 The Nation 237 Greenwich Village artistic community 20 Gropius, Walter 39, 42, 46 n.13, 142 n.24 Grunenberg, Christopher 46 n.17 Grusin, Richard 121, 129 n.13 Guggenheim, Peggy 171 Guttuso, Renato 218 The Maffia 220 Hague, Donald 173, 175 n.2, 176 n.19 Halbreich, Kathy 115 Hals, Frans, Malle Babbe 153 Harriman, William Averell 225 n.9 Harrison, Wallace K. 46 n.13 Hart, William S. 88 Hay, Eduardo 79 n.20 Henry, Barbara McKee 41 Hiroshige, Andō 155 Hirshfield, Morris 4, 26 Hitchcock, Henry-Russel 133 Hitler, Adolf 29, 54–5, 61, 234, 243 n.6 Hitler Youth 54–8 Hobler, Anne Stevens 173

Hoisington, Jean, A God of War Shooting Arrows to Protect the People 25 Holbrook, Athena 128 n.4 Holy Ghost Mural 176–7 n.21 The House in the Museum Garden (1949) exhibition 12, 131–2, 134–41, 141 n.6 Housing Exhibition of the City of New York (1934) exhibition 133 Howard, Charles 36, 44 The Spot 43 The Virgin 43, 45 n.9 Humble, Laurel E. F. 190 Image of Freedom (1941–2) exhibition 183 Indian art 164, 166, 170, 172, 174 Indian Art of the United States (1941) exhibition 67, 130 n.31, 163–6, 170–4, 200–1, 204, 206, 210 n.3 prehistoric galleries of 166–8, 176 n.13 Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB) 163, 166, 169, 173 Indych-López, Anna 69, 77 n.1, 78 n.7, 79 n.17 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 154 The Archaeologist Désiré-Raoul Rochette (c. 1830) 155 International Council of the MoMA 241 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture (1932) exhibition 148 international exhibition programming 8 International Style in architecture 133–4 Italian Masters (1940) exhibition 218 Italy 228 n.65 democratic 222–3 Italian art 215–24, 224 n.3 Italian Renaissance 155, 164, 218, 222 Italo-American alliance 216–17 Jackson, William Henry 85–6, 96 n.47 Photographs of the Yellowstone National Park and Views in Montana and Wyoming Territories (1873) 88 Janson, H. W. 238, 243 n.7 Jean, Marcel 24 Jewell, Edward Alden 83, 86, 198, 201–2 “The Anatomy of Cubism and Abstract Art” 32 n.27

Index Johnson, Charles G. 89 History of the Territory of Arizona (Part I, 1868) 88 Pacific Coast Scenery (1872) 88 Johnson, Philip 26–8, 40, 133, 135, 139–41, 190, 228 n.67 Jones, Robert 169–70, 175 n.5 Barrier Canyon Remembered 176 n.17 Kabotie, Fred 167 Kauffer, Edward McKnight 36, 45 n.2 Kaufmann, Edgar J., Jr. 47 n.42, 140, 144 n.53 Kelekian, Dikran 156 Kelsey, Robin 93, 95 n.17 Kirstein, Lincoln 123, 127 Kramer, Hilton 101, 241 Krasner, Lee 177–8 n.38 Kunsthalle 3 laissez-faire approach 55 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut 56 Art under a Dictatorship (1954) 55 Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1947) exhibition 150 Levin, Gail 177 n.38 liberalism 215, 218 life groups 205 Limon, José 119–21 live art 115, 123 Louchheim, Aline B. 158 Lowenfeld, Viktor 60–1, 63 n.28, 64 n.47 Lynes, Russell 15 n.42, 104 Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (1971) 10 MacDonald, Dwight 21, 28–9 Machine Art (1934) exhibition 4, 11, 39–40 MacIver, Loren 36 Macy’s department store 28, 74 magic realism 231, 238. See also realism Magriel, Paul 116, 123–4 Malraux, André 150, 160 n.24 Manet, Édouard 155 Le Bon Bock (1873) 153 Le Concert champêtre (1509) 153 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) 153

253

Marey, Etienne-Jules 103, 119, 121 Marini, Marino, Horse and Rider (1947) 222 Markova, Alicia 127 Marquis, Alice Goldfarb, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern 15 n.42 Marshall, Jennifer Jane 11 Marshall Plan 225 n.14, 226 n.23 Martin, Linda 100 Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America (1938) exhibition 29 material-based therapy 187 Matisse, Henri 4, 156, 233 McAlpin, David H. 84, 94 n.12 McAndrew, John 67–8, 71–3 McCray, Porter A. 150 McFarlane, Ellen 85, 93 Mead, Margaret 59, 63 n.41 Metropolitan Museum of Art 69, 71, 168, 206 Mexican art 65, 69, 71, 170–1, 200, 209 Mexican Arts (1930) exhibition 69–71, 168 Meyer, Richard 160 n.15 What Was Contemporary Art (2013) 11 Michel, Concha 123 Mili, Gjon 116–20, 125–8, 128 n.9, 129 n.10 Down Beat—Franziska Boas 120 Limon and Weidman 119–21 remediation process 122, 127–8 ultra-high-speed photography 119, 121–2 Miller, Dorothy 231–40, 242, 242 n.3, 243 n.13, 244 n.18, 244 n.20, 246 n.45, 247 n.52 Milone, Joe 25–6 Miró, Joan 24–5, 42, 49, 52 Modern American Dance (1945) exhibition 125 modern architecture 133–40. See also architecture exhibitions; Breuer, Marcel Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932–3) exhibition 4, 133 Modern Art in Your Life (1949) exhibition 1–2, 4, 9–10 Modern Cuban Painters (1944) exhibition 199

254

Index

modern painting 35, 147, 153–9, 183, 199, 203, 238, 241 Montenegro, Robert 69–73 Montgomery, Harper 78 n.7 Morandi, Giorgio 219, 228 n.45 Morey, Charles Rufus 45 n.11 and Barr 217 cultural cooperation 215 The Index of Christian Art (1917) 21, 31 n.10 Morgan, Len 109, 111 n.17 Morgan, Willard 102 Morris, George L. K. 36, 39, 44 Mosco, Mike 32 n.25 Moscow Museum of Western Art 28 mural painting 43, 167, 169–70, 172, 175 n.3 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1–2, 5, 7–8, 19 attention on exhibition 2–3 “Average Day at the Museum” 6 challenges in exhibition 13 n.4 Committee on Art Education 63 n.27, 63 n.36 Creativity (see creativity) Dance Archives 116, 122–7, 129 n.26 Department of Architecture and Industrial Design 39, 46 n.12, 133, 139 Department of Circulating Exhibitions 5, 117, 147–52, 158, 160, 162 n.53 Department of Painting and Sculpture 188 Department of Photography 85, 99, 125, 161 n.48 Department of Theatre Arts 123–4, 126 educational initiatives of 50, 52–4, 60, 181–2, 191 Exhibitions Policy Committee 188 Film Library at 124–5 Goodwin/Stone building 5, 68 Modern Dance series 115 Purchase Fund 235 role in Cultural Cold War 216–18 “Studies in Modern Art” series 15 n.43 visitors 5, 9, 12, 14 n.21, 15 n.40, 131 Mussolini, Benito 219–20 Muybridge, Eadweard 103, 119, 121 Animal Locomotion (1887) 156

National Institute of Mental Health 186 National Mental Health Act 186 National Security Council 225 n.15 National Socialism 56, 233, 238 National War Poster Competition (1943) exhibition 54 Native American art 163–4, 166, 170–1, 173 Naumburg, Margaret 185–6 Negro art 198–200, 203 Neuberger, Roy R. 47 n.36 Neutrality Act 86 New Deal arts program (1933) 6, 20, 163, 235 New Design Inc. 139 Newhall, Beaumont 84–6, 88–93, 94 n.10, 94 n.12, 99, 102–3, 110, 111 n.15, 112 n.20, 161 n.48 Newhall, Nancy 95 n.18, 102–3, 110 New Horizons in American Art (1936) exhibition 6, 22–3, 53 Passover Feast (F. Rick) 22 new media 121–2 Newmeyer, Sarah 5, 41, 76, 80 n.35 and Goodyear 46 n.24 New Rugs by American Artists (1941) exhibition 35–6, 39–45 news photography 100–3, 109–10 New York Press Photographers Association 101, 103 Noguchi, Isamu 36 non-Western art 171, 198–200, 203–6, 209, 210 n.3 North American Indian art 163–4, 166, 171, 174 Novecento group 220 Noyes, Eliot F. 35, 39–44, 46 n.13, 46 n.25, 47 n.42 and Pereira 45 n.4, 46 n.14 Nusbaum, Jesse 86 occupational therapy 181, 184–6 Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC) 158, 217 O’Keeffe, Georgia 95 n.31, 233, 243 n.9 Oles, James 69, 71, 78 n.7 Oppenheim, Meret 25 Organic Design in Home Furnishings (1941) exhibition 40, 134

Index Orozco, José Clemente 67, 77 n.3, 79 n.21, 170 O’Sullivan, Timothy 85–6 Photographs of the Western Territory of the United States 88 Packard, Artemas C. 53, 55, 159 n.7 Packard Report 148 Paine, G. Lyman, Jr. 141 n.14 Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans (1930–1) exhibition 233 Painting and Sculpture from 16 American Cities (1933) exhibition 233 Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans (1929–30) exhibition 233 Paintings by Paul Cézanne from the Museum exhibition 178 n.50 Park, Robert O. 157 Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography 167–70, 175 n.3 Pearson, Ralph Barr and 47 n.27 hooked rug 41–2 People’s Art Center 182, 187, 190–1 Pereira, Irene Rice 36, 38 and Noyes 45 n.3, 46 n.14 Perez-Chaves, Ruth 128 n.3 performance art 115–16, 125–8 as image/imaging 116–22 Phelan, Peggy 122 “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction” 121 Phillips, Christopher 94 n.7, 102 photograph 94 n.6 Photographs by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (1941) exhibition 96 n.34 Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier (1942) exhibition 83–5, 87, 89–92 Photography: 1839–1937 exhibition 84, 94 n.10, 96 n.34, 99, 103 photography/photographic exhibitions 7–8, 12, 83–5, 87–93, 99–100, 102–5, 107–8, 110, 116, 118, 156 Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (1939) exhibition 200

255

Picasso, Pablo 4, 9, 42, 49, 154, 227 n.44, 233 Painter and His Model (1928) 206 Portrait of Madame Wildenstein (1918) 155 Woman in White (1923) 156, 161 n.43 pictographs 147, 167, 169, 171 Pissarro, Camille 155 plastic arts 116 politics and art 5–8, 11, 26, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 125, 209, 215 “political” 14 n.23 Pollock, Jackson 171–2, 177 n.38, 239–40, 246 n.46 Mural (1943) 171–2 popular art 69–73, 79–80 n.25 Popular Front 33 n.41 populism 28–9 Porter, Eliot 102 Porter, Katherine Anne 69, 78 n.13 postwar educational programming 181 Pousette-Dart, Richard 172, 239 Symphony No. 1, The Transcendental 171 Poussin, Nicolas 154 Precolumbian art 166, 168, 171 Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937) exhibition 171, 173, 178 n.50, 199, 210 n.3 Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (1984) exhibition 197–8, 209 Progressive Education Association 55 psychotherapy 185 Raimondi, Marcantonio, Judgment of Paris (c. 1510–20) 153 Rasmussen, Waldo 182–3, 192 n.9 Read, Herbert 60 realism 55–6, 220, 231, 233, 238. See also magic realism Reidy, John 100–1, 104–6 Shonbrun, Eli, photograph of 100–1, 103–6 Reilly, David 33 n.44 remediation process 110, 116, 121–2, 127–8 Repin, Ilya 28

256

Index

Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff 239–40 Rivera, Diego 6, 67, 79 n.21, 148, 170 Road to Victory (1942) exhibition 7, 54, 83, 93 n.2 Robinson, Edward 2 rock art 163–4, 166, 168–9, 171, 173–4 Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich 20, 182 Rockefeller, David 247 n.54 Rockefeller, John D. 170 Rockefeller, John D., Jr. 192 n.10 Rockefeller, Nelson 53, 67, 69, 71–3, 76, 79 nn.18–20, 79–80 n.25, 80 n.35, 183, 217, 239 Romantic Painting in America (1943–4) exhibition 237, 243 n.10 Roosevelt, Eleanor 137, 139 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 5 Rosenfield, John 224 Rothko, Mark 60, 239–40 Rousseau, Henri 29 rug designs 35 artists 36–40 modern 41–2 Rugs from the Crawford Shops Designed by American Artists (1937) exhibition 41 Rushing, W. Jackson 169, 171, 173, 175 n.1 Russell, Andrew J. 96 n.37 Ryman, Robert 193 n.39 Saint-Gaudens, Homer 71 Sarfatti, Margherita 220 Schapiro, Meyer 238 Scott, Donald 168–70 Scuola Metafisica 219 Second World War 7, 12, 51–2, 55, 58, 158, 181, 187, 191, 200, 208–9, 215, 223, 232, 238–9 Shonbrun, Eli, photograph of 100–1, 104–5, 111 n.5 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 170 Sixteen Americans (1959) exhibition 243 n.11, 246 n.47 Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics (1940–1) exhibition 84–5, 88, 94 n.10, 103 Soby, James Thrall 26, 33 n.39, 182–6, 215–18, 220, 222–3, 227 n.34, 227 n.36

socialism 235 Solman, Joseph 26 Sources of Modern Painting (1939) exhibition 159 n.2 Soviet Communism 56, 238 Soviet Union 5, 183, 233 Spinden, Herbert 123, 199 Stage Design by Robert Edmund Jones (1945) exhibition 125 Stalin, Joseph 28–9, 55, 61 Steichen, Edward 83, 95 n.31, 100–7, 109–10, 113 n.37 The Family of Man exhibition (1955) 99, 102 Stieglitz, Alfred 1, 103 Stock Market Crash of 1929 20 Stone Age rock art paintings 170 Stone, Edward Durell 134, 200 Storey, Walter Rendell 42 Strand, Paul 102 stroboscopic lighting technique 118, 120 Surrealism 9, 11, 23–4, 26, 28–9, 171, 238–9 folk surrealism 11, 19, 29 Sweeny, James Johnson 15 n.27, 188, 190, 198–201 Szarkowski, John 101, 104 Taft, Robert 90 Taylor, Francis 232, 242 n.4 textile exhibition 11 Thomas, Edna 123 Three Centuries of American Art (1938) exhibition 65, 67, 90 Timeless Aspects of Modern Art (1948) exhibition 9, 158, 197, 204, 206–8, 210 Titian 153 Tobias, Jennifer 160 n.15, 160 n.23 Toninelli, Angelo 222–3 Toor, Frances 78 n.15 Guide to Mexico 65, 77 “Sombreros de Palma / In Any Market” 66 total design theory 39 totalitarianism 8, 11, 19, 28, 52, 56 Toussaint, Manuel C. 71, 79 nn.20–1 Toyokuni, Utagawa 155 Tretyakov Gallery 28 Turner, Fred 62 n.21

Index Twelve Modern Paintings (1937) exhibition 178 n.50 Twentieth Century Italian Art (1949) exhibition 215–22, 224 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940) exhibition 11, 65–72, 74, 76–7, 171, 200, 210 n.3 ultra-high-speed photography 119, 121–2 The United States 2, 8, 13, 21, 40–1, 69, 85–6, 117, 147, 151, 153, 158, 164, 166, 170, 174, 209, 216, 224, 232–3, 239 University of Utah Natural History Museum, Salt Lake City 174 US Armed Services and Merchant Marines 181 Useful Household Objects Under $5 (1938) exhibitions 4, 40, 139–40 Useful Objects under $10 exhibition 44 U.S.O. Club 151, 158 van der Rohe, Mies 133, 135 Vandivert, William 103, 107 van Gogh, Vincent 148, 155 Veblen, Thorstein, The Instinct of Workmanship 21 vernacular art 4, 8, 11–12 V’Soske (rug manufacturer) 35, 47 n.37 V’Soske, Stanislav 38–9, 44 and Carson 47 n.41 Warnecke, Harold 106–7 War Veterans’ Art Center 53, 181–2, 185, 187, 189–91

257

Watkins, Carlton 85 Weidman, Charles 119–21 The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier (1991) exhibition 95 n.21 Westchester Folk Art (1934) exhibition 22 Weston, Edward 85, 102 Wheeler, Monroe 71, 77, 79 n.18–19, 150, 215, 222 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt 1–2, 20, 41 Whitney, John Hay 217 Whitney Museum of American Art 2, 245 n.40 Willkie, Wendell 7, 63 n.40 Wolseley, Roland 113 n.38 Women in Necessary Civilian Employment (1943) exhibition 7 Wood, Christopher 210 Wood, Grant 170 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 21, 26, 32 n.38, 168–70, 173, 235, 242 World of Illusion: Elements of Stage Design (1948) exhibition 126 Wright, Frank Lloyd 135 Young People’s Gallery 26, 49, 51, 53–4, 56–8, 148–9, 159 n.10 Zevi, Bruno B. 223, 229 n.70 Zorach, Marguerite Thompson 36 Cartoon Sketch for Coral Sea Rug (1942) 37 Coral Sea 38, 46 n.25 Zorach, William 22, 203