Why Is the Museum of Modern Art Importtant Why Is the Museum of Modern Art Important

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While most recognize the Museum of Modern Fine art (MoMA) as the premiere institution for showcasing the advanced art of the 20^thursday century, it was not the starting time to do so. In 1908, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz gear up up a gallery, 291, to showcase paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs by daring European and American artists. Katherine Dreier, with the aid of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, established the Société Anonyme in 1920 and exhibited modern art, and in 1927, collector A. Due east. Gallatin opened his Gallery of Living Art, devoted to "fresh and individual works by living artists," such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Fernand Leger, and Piet Mondrian.

Despite these small interventions in the fine art world, museums remained conservative organizations, many not even recognizing modern art as valid, or valuable, plenty to even hang in their galleries. In 1928, a group of wealthy art enthusiasts and philanthropists, including Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, set out to change the traditional museum. They developed the idea for a small museum whose primary purpose was to be "encouraging and developing the report of Modernistic arts . . . and furnishing popular pedagogy." The women established a foundation to raise funds for a museum in New York.

The and then-chosen "daring ladies" partnered with A. Conger Goodyear, a well-known collector and curator, who formerly headed the board of trustees of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, which was known at the time for its impressive showings of modernistic art. Frank Crowninshield, the founding editor of Vanity Fair, and collector and socialite Josephine Boardman Crane besides joined the board. Goodyear recruited Paul J. Sachs, a Harvard professor and art historian, and when Sachs was asked to nominate a museum director, he recommended Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who was a educatee of his and had recently curated a groundbreaking modern art showroom at Harvard University'south Fogg Fine art Museum.

Before opening, Sachs gave the museum its first gift - nine prints and drawings past German language Expressionists, including Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Pechstein, and Georg Scholtz. On November seven, 1929, shortly after the stock market crash known as "Black Tuesday" that started the Peachy Low, the Museum of Modern Art opened to the public. Housed in six gallery rooms on the 12th floor in midtown Manhattan's Heckscher edifice, the museum'due south first showroom, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh, consisted of several paintings - all on loan - by the European Post-Impressionists. The inaugural exhibition lasted from November 7th to Dec seventh, 1929, and attracted a total of 47,293 visitors. The Heckscher building was MoMA'south home for a little over 2 years before moving to a rented space on West 53rd Street, the aforementioned address where the museum now stands.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Early on Years

As the Museum of Modernistic Art's offset director and founding curator, Barr was integral in expanding the founders' vision of an educational institution. Earlier beginning his stint at MoMA, Barr travelled through Europe and Russian federation, collecting books and information on modern art. He was particularly taken with the Bauhaus ideas in Germany equally well every bit the Constructivists in Russia. The ideas and the relationships he forged with artists would serve him well during his tenure at the museum and informed his ideas almost the museum as a laboratory for modernistic art, motion picture, and architecture.

In the early on years, the exhibitions Barr curated largely relied on loaned works of art, simply Barr envisioned a permanent collection at MoMA, one consisting not but of painting and sculpture but also of photography, film, and architecture. He later on established six different curatorial departments: Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Film, Photography, and Architecture and Blueprint.

In 1933, a young, formally-trained curator named Dorothy Miller came to the attention of Barr. Miller was curating The First Municipal Art Exhibition in a space donated by the Rockefeller family. Just one twelvemonth earlier, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., ordered Diego Rivera'due south mural (entitled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and Loftier Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future) commissioned by his father for the new RCA Edifice destroyed considering Rivera, a staunch Marxist, refused to remove the face of Lenin from the mural. Miller'due south show was at hazard of being boycotted by participating artists due to the devastation of Rivera's mural, but with Barr's help, they forestalled whatever protests.

Barr hired Miller in 1934, and she became Barr's closest confidant at the museum. Miller also happened to be the start professionally-trained curator hired by MoMA. Significantly, between the early-1940s and mid-1960s, Miller curated six different shows devoted to modernistic American artists, almost notably the 1952 15 Americans, which showcased several prominent Abstract Expressionists, thus cementing the movement's importance.

Barr's chief responsibility as Museum Managing director was to advise the board of trustees on their purchases and acquisitions for the museum. Barr proved to be extremely savvy in this loonshit, as MoMA spent a chiliad total of $1000 on all its purchases between 1929 and 1935.

Importantly, Barr also promoted artistic realms beyond painting and sculpture as well. In 1932, MoMA established the Section of Architecture nether the chairmanship of architect Philip C. Johnson, who would remain at the museum in diverse capacities for several decades. The department was somewhen combined with the Section of Blueprint and through many exhibitions popularized Bauhaus ideals of art and design.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Barr also curated a series of exhibitions that explored then-chosen "archaic" art (read Primitivism in Art), including African Negro Art (1935), Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937), and Art of the South Seas (1946), which he saw as an important factor in the evolution of modernistic art. Additionally, he brought attending to self-taught artists and even exhibited children'south art.

During the 1930s, Barr curated an impressive number of groundbreaking shows at MoMA, including a Vincent van Gogh exhibition in 1935, Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism in 1936, and a Bauhaus evidence in 1938. The Cubism and Abstruse Art exhibit in detail was a monumental achievement. Orchestrated by Barr, the show received an impressive number of works past Picasso, Arp, Mondrian, Delaunay, and Braque, amongst others, all on loan. In the exhibition's catalog, Barr crafted a magisterial narrative of mod art through the rise of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, and Dada. His formalist approach to the successive avant-garde movements became foundational non only for MoMA but for the written report of modern art more broadly.

MoMA Expands

In 1937, the Museum moved its location to a set of offices and basement galleries in the Time and Life Edifice in Rockefeller Center. Two years afterward, on May 10, 1939, MoMA opened to the public at its permanent abode on W 53rd Street. The new edifice was designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, Modernist architects best known for their innovative, Bauhaus-influenced International Style.

In 1939, Nelson Rockefeller (son to Abby and John D.) was appointed as MoMA'due south new president. Nelson was a flamboyant publicist and promoter and was instrumental in obtaining the funds necessary for the Museum to motion into its new home.

MoMA gained international recognition in 1939-twoscore with its Pablo Picasso retrospective - arguably the most impressive Picasso showing the world had e'er witnessed - which reinterpreted the significance of Picasso's contributions to art history. For the exhibit, Barr lauded Picasso as the greatest artist of the modern era. Also in 1940, MoMA created the first curatorial department devoted to photography. Noted photographer Beaumont Newhall was named its offset curator, and in 1947 Edward Steichen became the section's director.

In 1943, Steven Clark was appointed the new chairman of the Board of Trustees. Clark and Barr sparred over several administrative and curatorial issues, and as a result Barr was fired every bit MoMA's manager. The same year board member and former curator at the Wadsworth Athenaeum James Thrall Soby was hired equally a new Assistant Managing director, and he created a special informational position for Barr with far fewer responsibilities. Ane year later on, MoMA appointed Rene d'Harnoncourt as its new director. D'Harnoncourt, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of art, was well-known for his dear of antique and contemporary Mexican artists. Dissimilar Clark, d'Harnoncourt respected the part Barr had played at the Museum, and the two men got along amicably.

David Rockefeller, Nelson's younger brother, also played a significant role in the Museum when he took over the role as MoMA'due south president. Possibly David's greatest contribution was commissioning Philip Johnson, who was too the manager of the Department of Architecture, to redesign MoMA's garden, which became the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

In gild to keep their collection up-to-date and relevant, in 1948 MoMA agreed to sell older paintings by more accepted modern masters to the Metropolitan Museum to create new space for an ever-expanding collection of new, more modern artists. The bargain ended in 1951 when the Lath of Directors, led past its new chairman John Jay Whitney (and with the help of Barr), decided that MoMA should continue the older works in the permanent collection.

MoMA and Abstract Expressionism

Before Earth War II, Barr faced criticism for not recognizing local modern art. In 1940, the American Abstract Artists, led by Advertising Reinhardt, picketed MoMA and distributed leaflets emblazoned with the heading "HOW Modern is THE MUSEUM OF Modern Art?" They were opposing the Museum's tendency to favor European artists over American ones. Indeed, Barr was initially reticent to accept works by the Abstract Expressionists, only the museum purchased Jackson Pollock'southward She Wolf in 1944, and a Theodoros Stamos painting was accepted every bit a gift in 1947. In 1948, the Museum besides purchased i of Willem de Kooning's blackness and white abstractions.

Even though Barr was MoMA's Director of Collections after the war, in that location is little evidence to suggest that he was personally instrumental in launching the museum's post-war favor toward Abstract Expressionism. In fact, it was MoMA curator Dorothy Miller's 15 Americans prove that opened in 1952, which showcased Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Even so, William Baziotes, and Bradley Walker Tomlin, that signaled the museum's credence of the then-called New York School.

MoMA in the Cold War

During the Common cold War, the American authorities, both overtly and covertly, promoted American art and civilisation abroad in hopes of countering Soviet propaganda. Over the years, there were rumors that MoMA and the C.I.A. entered into a secret agreement to do just that, merely equally critic Louis Menand argues, the evidence is largely coexisting. Equally Menand points out, the leaders of MoMA, including Nelson Rockefeller, Rene d'Harnoncourt, and by this time Barr, were "on the same page.... [they] did not have to exist encouraged to use American fine art to promote the nation'southward paradigm abroad."

In 1958, under the aegis of the museum'southward International Council, Dorothy Miller curated The New American Painting, an exhibition designed to expose new American art to a European audience. The bear witness visited eight European countries over the course of a twelvemonth, showcasing seventeen different American artists and forever changing the manner Europeans viewed American art. Included in this highly influential and educational show were the artists de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Philip Guston, Notwithstanding, and Barnett Newman among others. The Director of the International Plan, Porter McCray, reported that "the paintings created a sensation; whether enthusiastically, hesitatingly, in the form of back-handed compliments or real hostility, it was acknowledged that in America a totally 'new' - a unique and indigenous - kind of painting has appeared, 1 whose influence can be clearly seen in the works of artists in Europe too in many other parts of the world."

MoMA in the Postmodern Era

Perhaps a historical coincidence, Alfred Barr officially retired from MoMA in 1967, at a moment when, most art historians agree, a profound shift occurred in art making, ushering in the Postmodern era. While Barr may have departed, the steady diet of European and American modern masters, including Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and Rothko, continued through the 20^thursday century.

MoMA underwent massive renovations between 2002 and 2004. On May 21, 2002, MoMA closed its doors at West 53rd Street and opened a temporary home in a old staple factory in the Queens borough of New York Metropolis. The Museum's redesign was led by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, who had once briefly worked for Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school. On September 27, 2004, MoMA reopened on Due west 53rd Street with a new design and an $8 hike in access fee (going from $12 to $twenty).

In 2011, MoMA reconfigured its new galleries in an effort to bring the story of modern fine art up to the nowadays and included Conceptual and Process Fine art, Performance, and Video work. The spirit of Picasso no longer reigns supreme in the galleries, and instead the trajectory of mod art leads to Conceptual art and more than spectacle-based installations. Equally art critic Roberta Smith observed about MoMA revamped atrium, which houses large-scale works and performances, "the atrium is both a measure of the Modern'southward new vitality and a symptom of something more than than a little scary almost where contemporary art is headed, or where the Modern is taking it. (Hint: Conceptual Fine art in the new Cubism.)"

Just a decade subsequently their new building opened, MoMA again set out to expand. They acquired the American Folk Art Museum next door, and and so controversially decided to partially annihilate and rebuild the infinite. Thus, a new residential belfry was erected by architect Jean Nouvelle which volition contain more gallery space and dramatically increase the number of works the museum tin can evidence. The museum'south chairman explained, "Nosotros don't want to forget our roots in terms of hanging the greatest Modernist collection, but the museum didn't emphasize female person artists, didn't emphasize what minority artists were doing, and it was limited on geography....Where those were ever the exceptions, now they really should be part of the reality of the multicultural lodge we all live in." The new MoMA will reopen to the public in the fall of 2019.

Legacy

When museums were considered to exist the secular churches of human civilisation and built to resemble the classical architecture of the Greek Parthenon, complete with expansive stairways and daunting pillars, the Museum of Mod Art rooted itself into city life and became equally much a role of Manhattan as the boilerplate flat or office edifice. Its original design and placement made it feel more than accessible to the public and far less stuffy or ostentatious than other museums. MoMA has forever changed the mode people feel museums. Over the years and through many expansions, MoMA'south footprint has grown, and while its loftier ticket prices alienate some of its more than local clientele, it continues to evangelize the story of modernistic art with a collection unsurpassed by whatever modern art museum in being.

In addition to its roster of notable curators, MoMA has also nourished a host of writers and artists over the years, including poet Frank O'Hara who was a curator, as well as Lucy Lippard and Roberta Smith, and several artists, including Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Scott Burton, Howardena Pindell, and Robert Mangold, worked in various capacities in the museum. Afterward Allan McCollum and Jeff Koons besides worked at that place. Mangold recalled, "Well, being around the works that were here helps delineate what interests you lot and what doesn't interest you. When you're around them all the time, it's similar living with one of the great collections of painting or sculpture. And y'all sharpen your sense of what interests you and what you want to do and what doesn't involvement yous. Then, that's of import."

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/venue/museum-of-modern-art/history-and-importance/