Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949

Description

Today the Museum of Modern Art is widely recognized for establishing the canon of modern art; yet in its early years, the museum considered modern art part of a still unfolding experiment in contemporary visual production. By bracketing MoMA’s early history from its later reputation, this book explores the ways the Museum acted as a laboratory to set an ambitious agenda for the exhibition of a multidisciplinary idea of modern art. Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA’s programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production. Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Establishing the Modern: The First Twenty Years at MoMA • Austin Porter and Sandra Zalman Part I: Vernacular Influences 1 Folk Surrealism • Marci Kwon 2 New Rugs by American Artists: Modernism, Abstraction, and Rug Design at MoMA • Jen Padgett 3 MoMA’s Child Artists: The Politics of Creating Creative Children • John R. Blakinger 4 Floor, Ceiling, Wall, Garden, Market: The Curatorial Scene of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art • Andy Campbell Part II: New Mediums for a New Museum: Photography, Dance, Architecture, and Design 5 Aesthetic versus the “Mere Historic”: Civil War and Frontier Photography at MoMA • Sarah Kate Gillespie 6 An Exact Instant in the History of the Modern • Jason E. Hill 7 Remediating the Body: Performance, Photography, and the Dance Archives at MoMA • Swagato Chakravorty 8 Architecture on Display: Marcel Breuer’s House in the Museum Garden • Catarina Schlee Flaksman Part III: Mobilizing Modernism 9 Reproducing Art and the Museum: Ancestral Sources in and beyond the Museum of Modern Art • Rachel Kaplan 10 The Great Gallery Goes to New York: Ancient American Rock Art, MoMA, and the New York Avant-garde • James Farmer 11 “Toward a Happier and More Successful Life,” or When Veterans Made Art in the Modern Museum, 1944–1948 • Suzanne Hudson Part IV: MoMA’s Global Vision 12 Occidental Arrangements: MoMA’s Emerging Global History of Art at Midcentury • John Ott 13 Exhibiting Italian Democracy in 1949: Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art • Antje K. Gamble 14 American Exceptionalism at the Modern, 1942–1959: Dorothy Miller’s Americans • Angela Miller Index