How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?
Picketing the Museum of Modern Art
In 1940, American Abstract Artists collaborated on and Ad Reinhardt designed a broadside: How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?. It was distributed on April 15, 1940, at a picketing of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for its exhibition policies. [1]
Carl Holty, American Abstract Artists Secretary, began a correspondence with Alfred Barr in November 1937 about holding their 1938 annual. The request was turned down on the grounds that the museum presently did not have room on their schedule. During the next two years subsequent requests were also turned down. [2]
Members of AAA questioned why the Museum of Modern Art did not exhibit modern American art. Exhibitions leading up to the demonstartion included 19th century masters, European modernists, and an exhibit of Italian masters from Renaissance through Baroque periods. There had been no exhibitions of American modern art.
That morning the exhibition PM Competition: The Artist as Reporter opened. It was a show of drawings and cartoons entered in a contest for the tabloid P.M. If the museum had space to show that, then it was not true they did not have room on their schedule for American abstract art as AAA had been previously told. [3] The broadside was handed out to about 1000 people who were invited to a preview, as they entered the museum. [4]
Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art
The heading “Is the Artist a Reporter?” questioned the relevance of the exhibition PM Competition: The Artist as Reporter, April 15 – May 7, 1940. In addition to this exhibit, AAA criticized how modern some other recent Museum of Modern Art exhibitions were:
- Art in Our Time: 10th Anniversary Exhibition, May 10 – September 30, 1939
- Modern Masters from European and American Collections, January 26 – March 24, 1940
- Italian Masters, January 26 – April 7, 1940
Text About MoMA Exhibits from How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?
Let’s Look at the Record
In 1939 the Museum professed to show ART IN OUR TIME—
Whose time Sargent, Homer, La Farge and Harnett?
Or Picasso, Braque, Leger and Mondrian? Which time?
If the decendants of Sargent and Homer, what about the decendants of Picasso and Mondrian? What about American Abstract Art?
If he had been in America, what dizzy successes for Repin? Even for Meissonier? Or J. L. Gerome? What about Towne and Ward—British cattle painters—turned loose on a Missouri farm? A Minnesota grain elevator painted by Daubigny? Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s done by Henri Regnault? The Nebraska praries by Eugene Boudin? The Bowery by Eugene Carriere?
And MODERN MASTERS (to counterbalance the Italian Masters, as this feeble demonstration from a great period was advertised) Eakins, Homer, Ryder, Whistler—died in 1916, 1910, 1917, 1903. Those are the only Americans included. Are they the grandfathers of the Europeans they are shown with? Seurat, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Lautrec—died in 1886, 1890, 1903, 1881. These are the older Europeans represented.
ITALIAN MASTERS—Caravaggio, Raphael, Bronzino! And such examples!
How easy to justify a Praxiteles show! How revolutionary the Egyptians! And an Eighteenth Century JAPANESE!
Design of the Broadside
The headline featured eight different type faces chosen to emphasize the museum’s un-modern exhibition policies at the time. In the second instance of the word Modern, the “M” is in the style of illuminated Medieval manuscript lettering. [5] The New York Times wrote that “even the curlicue type in which the challenge was set expressed the contempt of the rebels, for it conjured up the velvet antiquity and the theatrical bill posters of the Gay Ninties.” [6]
The heading in the lower half of the broadside, “What is this—a three ring Circus?”, was in repsonse to remarks reported in the New York Post about the museum’s finances from Nelson Rockefeller, head of the Museum of Modern Art, stating that this was the first time he was engaging in show-business.
The broadside is held in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Notes
1. Larsen, Susan C. “The American Abstract Artists: A Documentary History 1936 – 1941”, Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1974), p. 3.
2. Larsen. p. 5, 6.
3. Kraskin, Sandra. Pioneers of Abstract Art: American Abstract Artists, 1936 – 1996, exhibition catalog. Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, 1996, p. 16.
4. “Artists Denounce the Modern Museum”, The New York Times, 17 Apr. 1940.
5. Larsen, p. 6.
6. Jewell, p. 21.