“You can be a museum, or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.” According to the recollection of John B. Hightower, former longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this was Gertrude Stein’s response when Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s first director, outlined plans for the new institution. Stein identified what turned out to be an enabling contradiction in the early years, one that has come to unsettle the institution in recent decades.
Founded in 1929 by donors Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, MoMA received official endorsement by the City of New York on the condition that it focus on public education and, like European musées de passage such as the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris, display its acquisitions for five years, then deaccession them—by sale, gift, or exchange, or by transferring them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By obliging itself to prioritize remaining modern, it functioned much like contemporary art spaces do today.
But not for long. The value of the museum’s holdings grew so quickly and became so identified with the institution in the minds of visitors, that, in 1953, these arrangements ceased. Perhaps the major factor, however, was that MoMA became the place where modern art—along with the other arts, fashion, and taste aligned with it—was explored in the most depth, articulated by its practitioners and interpreters, and defined for increasingly interested publics. It became not only the leading museum of its kind in the world, but the museum of modern art per se.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, a clear sense of modern art’s historic mission was projected. Major shows traced the evolution of key art movements, notably abstract art, Cubism, and Surrealism; of modern masters, above all Picasso; of modern architecture, especially the International Style; and of design, including Machine Design. American painting in its triumphal phase was enthusiastically embraced. Compelling exhibitions, major publications, well-wrought arguments, aided not least by the coherence of its in-house design, all had a major impact on visitors, readers, artists, and other similar institutions worldwide. In a phrase, modern art became MoMA modernism.
By the 1970s, however, the overlooking of artists of diverse genders, races, and nationalities had come to seem like what it was: systemic exclusion. Protests erupted, and alternative spaces, such as the New Museum, were founded to fill these gaps. Meanwhile, MoMA focused on growing its collections and expanding its footprint, with major renovations in 1984, 2004, and 2019. Outsourcing the most happening art to its PS1 location in Queens, the Midtown museum remained committed to the idea that contemporary art is, fundamentally, an updating of the complex dynamics of modern art, so MoMA needed to show only the recent and current art that fit this bill. The seemingly endless variety of mediums within which contemporary artists work, the multiplicitous character of art being made now all over the world, and its immersion in contemporary concerns rather than modernizing narratives, tells a different story. Meanwhile, MoMA remains a museum of modern art, as its medium-specific departments, and curatorial structure, attests. —Terry Smith
