The formidable women who shaped MoMA: Untold stories

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / I didn’t expect to particularly like MoMA’s Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, but merely to learn from it. Turns out I loved all fourteen essays – each by a contemporary female writer, and each about a woman who worked at or for MoMA during the first decades after its founding in 1929. Many are beautifully written. While all are about formidable, pathbreaking women, none are hagiographic. 

The idea of MoMA came from three New York women: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. The first two were from wealthy, white, Protestant families with New England roots, the third an Irish-Catholic originally from the Midwest who, as they say, married well but not into wealth that remotely approached that of the other two. Given their divergent personalities, it’s passing strange that these three women would form a friendship, let alone found an art museum. Rockefeller was married (apparently happily), raised six children, and lived in luxury. Bliss never married, eschewed the life her wealth could have afforded her – her wardrobe consisted of two changes of clothes – and steered clear of the spotlight. Sullivan attended the Pratt Institute, and, though a little bohemian, married a lawyer and, needing money later in life, opened a gallery where she happened to employ Betty Parsons, the future dealer of the Abstract Expressionists. The glue that bonded these very different women was a passion for modern art, which at the time was dangerously radical even for the cultured elite.

While the women profiled in the book were not revolutionaries, each bristled at the constraints of the pervasive misogyny of their time and possessed the street smarts to navigate it. Cultivating modern art in the early twentieth century did not imply holding modern ideas about women. Although Rockefeller, Bliss, and Sullivan came up with the bold proposal to establish a museum dedicated to modern art, they understood that putting a woman at the helm would hamstring any new museum. For their first president, they chose A. Conger Goodyear, an Establishment male and New York industrialist who collected early modern art. Rockefeller assumed the role of treasurer, which gave her a public persona, while the two others operated in the background.

The museum started out under tough circumstances, opening in a rented space on Fifth Avenue just a few days after the stock market crashed. After moving a few more times to other temporary locations, it settled into its current location on 53rd Street in 1939. Alfred H. Barr is remembered (if not exalted) as the first MoMA director, and the brilliant exhibitions he curated – particularly the popular Van Gogh exhibition in 1935, the Cubism and abstract art exhibition in 1936, and, most memorable of all, the Picasso retrospective in 1939–40 – made him a model for the museum directors who have since come down the pike.

Yet, as this book makes clear, Barr was successful only because of several women working at the museum – women who received little if any public credit for their work. Even his wife, Margaret Scolari Barr (the subject of Lanka Tattersal’s revelatory essay) played a hidden but powerful role, functioning as her husband’s amanuensis, translator, and even curatorial advisor. Naturally she was paid nothing. Barr hired Dorothy Miller, MoMA’s first professionally trained curator, in 1934, and in 1936 she brought on board her friend Dorothy Dudley as the museum’s first professionally trained registrar. Both had been educated at The Newark Museum’s pioneer training program for women wanting to work in museums, although, as Roberta Smith notes in her piece on Dudley, the curriculum did not include museum directing. Miller – covered by Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women –did work in the public gaze. Her six exhibitions of contemporary American artists, curated between 1942 and 1966, ended up being generously covered by the press, and she was even labeled a “tastemaker.” Dudley invented her job and expanded it as she went along. She played a pivotal role in organizing and directing the conservation work required after the terrible fire in 1958 that killed a worker, burned up a couple of Monets, and nearly destroyed Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, then on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago (I can’t help but wonder if the fire is why the painting has never again left its home).

In large part owing to the work of the somewhat zany Sarah Newmeyer, MoMA’s first publicist, the general public was drawn to MoMA even before Miller’s contemporary art shows. Sloane Crosley points out that it remains a mystery why Newmeyer was hired. as she’d previously worked only as a teacher and a secretary. Yet she seems to have had the instincts of a crack TikTok influencer in promoting MoMA exhibitions in a way that made them seem consummately with-it. That was fortunate. When MoMA opened, what a museum of modern art could and should be was up for grabs. Gertrude Stein told Alfred Barr, “You can be modern, or you can be a museum, but you cannot be both.” The women in this book saw things differently. They understood modern art to be the visual expression of freedom from the intellectual, social, and political constraints of their time, and cast the museum as a way for the public to share this newfound freedom with them. While some may consider such a vocation a recipe for turning modern art into a repository for middlebrow culture, others, like me, see it as a lofty calling.

Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Edited by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn. With essays by Mary Schmidt Campbell, Kate Walbert, Nell Irvin Painter, Lanka Tattersall, Juliet Kinchin, Farran Smith Nehme, Romy Silver-Kohn, Sloane Crosley, Mary Gabriel, Roberta Smith, Brenda Wineapple, Jennifer Gray, Ann Temkin, and Anne Umland. 

About the author: Laurie Fendrich is an abstract painter and arts writer who lives in Lakeville, CT. She is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles and is a frequent contributor to Two Coats of Paint.

NOTE: We’ve just kicked off the first week of the Two Coats of Paint 2024 Year-end Fundraising Campaign! This year, we’re aiming for full participation from our readers and gallery friends. Your support means everything to us, and any contribution—big or small—helps keep the project thriving into 2025. Plus, it’s tax-deductible! Thank you for being such a vital part of our community and keeping the conversation alive. Click here to contribute.