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Abby Aldrich Rockefeller
- The idea for the Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1929 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan.
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The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan.
In the late 1920s, three progressive and influential patrons of the arts, Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, perceived a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums and to establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art.
6 days ago · Museum of Modern Art, comprehensive collection of primarily American and European art ranging from the late 19th century to the present that was established in New York City in 1929, with Alfred H. Barr as the founding director.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 21, 2020 · The Museum’s presence in the study of modern art began with their founding director, Alfred Barr, created a chart depicting the development and progression of modern art in the early 20 th century. His chart led to the MoMA’s exhibition, Cubism and Abstract Art , in March 1936, and Barr’s work is still followed today. [19]
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museum of modern art, an institution devoted to the collection, display, interpretation, and preservation of “avant-garde” or “progressive” art of the late 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
(Read Glenn Lowry’s Britannica essay on “Art Museums & Their Digital Future.”)
Museums of modern art, as they are understood today, owe their origins to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. Designated by Louis XVIII in 1818 as a venue for the collection and display of the work of living artists, the Musée du Luxembourg acted as a kind of testing ground for recent art to judge its worthiness for admission to the permanent collection of the state. Works acquired by the museum were kept there for a number of years after the death of the artist, at which point those works whose “glory had been confirmed by universal opinion” and that were deemed of national significance were transferred to the Louvre, while others were dispersed to regional museums.
Similar institutions and arrangements developed in Germany and Britain, among other places. In Munich, for instance, the Pinakothek (later renamed the Alte Pinakothek)—established by Louis I of Bavaria (ruled 1825–48) in 1826—was designed to display the Old Masters collection owned by the house of Wittelsbach, while the Neue Pinakothek (opened 1853) contained the collection of “modern” (that is to say, 19th-century) paintings that Louis had begun forming in 1809, while crown prince. In Britain the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain, one of four Tate galleries)—founded in 1897 as the National Gallery of British Art (later officially renamed the Tate Gallery in honour of Henry Tate, its initial donor) and part of the National Gallery of Art until 1954, when it formally became an independent institution—was in 1917 charged with collecting British historical art and forming a national collection of international modern art, while the National Gallery focused on art prior to 1900.
The idea of a museum devoted to modern art was given fresh impetus early in the 20th century by several pioneering directors, including Alexander Dorner in Germany and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., in the United States. Dorner, director (1925–37) of the Landesmuseum in Hanover, was deeply interested in the work of contemporary artists such as Piet Mondrian, László Moholy-Nagy, and Kazimir Malevich and sought to integrate their ideas into the Landesmuseum by inviting several of them to design displays for modern art that would fit the museum’s sequence of historical galleries. Dorner saw the museum not simply as an instrument of the Enlightenment that was designed to order and classify works of art of the past but as an “educational facility whose purpose is first to develop a taste for the subject—and secondly, and more importantly, to illustrate the developments of the human spirit in its most independent and liveliest object—in art.” It was this idea of the museum as an educational institution and a place for the discovery and interpretation of the work of contemporary artists that so influenced Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.
Barr traveled to Europe in 1927 to study contemporary European culture and to gather material for his intended thesis on the machine in modern art. Much of his thinking about modern art, and ultimately about MoMA, was formulated during this trip. He visited London, Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Warsaw, and Vienna, but he was particularly impressed by Dessau, Germany, which at that time was the home of the Bauhaus. Founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was a radical school that endeavoured to teach the interdisciplinarity of the arts and crafts, including painting, textile design, architecture, and photography. Gropius brought together some of the most daring and progressive architects and artists of the day, such as Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Johannes Itten, Marianne Brandt, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, the work of all but one of whom (Meyer) would ultimately be collected by MoMA.
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Artist: Max Beckmann. Paul Sachs, one of MoMA's first board members, gifted the nascent museum a set of prints and drawings by prominent German Expressionists, including Max Beckmann's Before the Mirror, thus seeding a permanent collection long before the museum officially had one.
At The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, we celebrate creativity, openness, tolerance, and generosity. We aim to be inclusive places—both onsite and online—where diverse cultural, artistic, social, and political positions are welcome.
