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As origin stories go, the serendipitous founding of the Museum of Modern Art has long had the quality of a Stanley-Meets-Livingstone legend. In early 1929, with the stock market at dizzying heights, two New York society women were wintering in North Africa and the Middle East, respectively. One day in southern Egypt—“among the temples and pyramids,” as one writer has it, or perhaps “in the desert sands,” as another asserts—they ran into each other. Soon the talk veered from the Nubian tribes of Wadi Halfa to the Metropolitan Museum’s persistent allergy to Van Gogh and Matisse.[1] Something, they decided, had to be done. Then, in the first-class tearoom of the boat back from Europe, one of the two ran into a third friend of theirs, also a committed modernist, who quickly concurred: It was time to start a new museum. By the time the three “adamantine ladies” reunited that spring in Manhattan, the project was well under way, and within six months, the thing was done. Amid the ruins of the ancient world, a home for the newest art was born.
It is a seductive tale, but little of it happens to be accurate. The three New York friends—Lillie Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Sullivan—were indeed the driving forces behind one of the most adventurous museum start-ups in a generation. But the plan was hardly concocted during a chance meeting in the shadows of Giza. (Bliss’s and Rockefeller’s parties did have an unplanned encounter, but it was at the far more mundane port of Haifa, not in Egypt, and no pharaonic monuments were involved.[2]) Nor did the project have the unlimited backing that Rockefeller involvement suggested. The women had been tossing the idea around for several years, and far more important in inspiring their “great scheme,” as it was later called, was the event that had shamed the New York art world back in 1926: the breakup of the John Quinn collection. More specifically, the plan was set in motion by the sudden death of Quinn’s friend and ally Arthur B. Davies—in baroque circumstances that carried eerie echoes of Quinn’s own demise.
It began with personal connections to Quinn himself. Bliss had quietly supported Quinn’s efforts ever since the Armory Show, including the 1921 post-Impressionist exhibition. Though she was no radical, she had recently ventured as far as Picasso, and her magnificent Cézannes positioned her as one of the city’s most important modern patrons. Sullivan, who was in her late forties, had even closer ties to Quinn: Raised in Indianapolis by Irish immigrant parents, she was, like him, not from an elite background and had made her own way in New York. A pioneering art teacher at Pratt, she had married one of Quinn’s Harvard classmates, and for years, she had avidly followed Quinn’s avant-garde patronage. Quinn was mindful of both women’s interest in his ideas, and when he had instructed his executors to let his friend Arthur Davies try to raise $250,000 to save his collection as the nucleus of a new museum, it was Bliss and Sullivan he had chiefly in mind.
Although neither was able to come up with the funds, they quickly came to recognize that the dispersal of Quinn’s Seurats, Rousseaus, and Picassos on the European market was a stain on the city. Bliss was already in her early sixties, and, like Quinn, she had no immediate heirs; she must have wondered about the fate of her own collection, given the Metropolitan’s entrenched conservatism. In fact, despite years of advocacy by Quinn and his friends, the Manhattan establishment seemed hardly more ready for the new art than it had been at the time of the Armory Show. In 1928, Valentine Dudensing, one of the city’s most progressive art dealers, confessed, “I do not want Picasso[s], because I don’t know who to sell them to.”[3]
Bliss and Sullivan were not alone in sensing a crisis. So did their socially prominent friend Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who had led progressive causes in the city for years. Around the time of Quinn’s death, Rockefeller discovered modern art, and bought several drawings from the Quinn estate. By 1927, she had also made friends with Davies, who must have talked to her, as well, about his failed Quinn plans. At first there appeared to be little Rockefeller could do: She was married to Junior—John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—who, along with being the richest man in America, was dour and humorless and detested modern art. A collector of medieval tapestries and giant Kangxi urns, he refused to have strange new paintings in the public rooms of their eight-story townhouse; he also strictly limited what Abby was allowed to spend on modern art. At one point, the billionaire’s wife found herself having to explain to a French cultural official why she had only a single small Matisse. “The only reason I have not more,” she told him, “is my inability to acquire them.”[4]
Then, in October 1928, Davies died of a heart attack in Florence, leaving behind a legacy of art and women that was nearly as messy as Quinn’s. Though he had a wife and children in New York, Davies had been traveling with his secret longtime mistress, Edna Potter, with whom he also had a child. Bliss, as one of Davies’s closest friends, was drawn into the cover-up. (In a panic, Potter asked Bliss for advice; Bliss told her, “You’ll have to tell his wife.” Soon after, Potter and Mrs. Davies, who had never met, joined forces to try to keep the story out of the papers.[5]) But Bliss and her friends were equally dismayed by the fate of Davies’s art collection, which included works by Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and other artists that Quinn had pursued. Like Quinn’s, Davies’s paintings had no obvious home, and they, too, were liquidated and scattered at auction. It marked a sordid end to the circle around Quinn who had tried for so long to bring modern art to New York.
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Davies’s unexpected death spurred Bliss and her friends to action. It was finally time to do something about the plan that Davies had urged on them after Quinn’s death. “His influence on these women,” Bliss’s niece said, “is what brought it all about.”[6] As Bliss, Rockefeller, and Sullivan gathered that spring under the sedate chandeliers of the Rockefeller townhouse, though, they quickly began to see the scale of the challenge they faced. If Quinn’s collection had been saved and Davies were around to oversee it, they would have had the makings of one of the greatest modern museums in the world. Now they had neither. Even for three exceptionally determined women—even with the Rockefeller name—starting an entirely new kind of museum from scratch, without anything to put in it, was daunting.
But then Mary Sullivan told them about the museum man from Buffalo who had a colorful history with one of Quinn’s Picassos.[7] A former military colonel as well as a lumber and railroad baron, A. Conger Goodyear had been a longtime trustee of the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo’s large museum. In the mid-1920s, the Albright was, alongside the Metropolitan, one of the country’s most resplendent museums. Built with more than five thousand tons of Maryland marble, it occupied an opulent turn-of-the-century temple that was meant to evoke the fifth-century-b.c. Erechtheion in Athens; only the U.S. Capitol had more columns. Its galleries were filled with an increasingly ambitious assembly of classic European paintings and sculptures, and its giant, skylit sculpture court featured ancient works from Egypt, India, and Cambodia. But Goodyear had an unusual taste for modern art, and sought to bring more of it to the museum as well.
Goodyear happened to be in New York when Quinn’s collection was being dispersed, and one of the paintings that most caught his eye was Picasso’s La Toilette. Though it was painted only a year before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the works could not have been more different. Exquisitely serene, the full-length La Toilette depicts a young woman in the nude nonchalantly tying up her hair, while another woman, clad in a long blue robe and shown in profile, holds up a mirror for her; they stand before a warm but almost abstract background. The painting marked a high point of the reddish-tinted naturalism that Picasso had perfected during an unusually tranquil summer with Fernande in Gósol, in the Pyrenees, and captured its subject with unrestrained grace and beauty—as Alfred Barr later observed, here were a pair of demi-goddesses who seemed to be directly inspired by Athenian statuary.[8] By the time Goodyear discovered La Toilette, it had just been sold to Paul Rosenberg in the controversial deal he made with the Quinn estate; in the normal course of things, it would have gone back to Paris with the rest of the Picassos. But Goodyear was determined to get it, and, with the support of the Albright’s new director, William M. Hekking, who shared Goodyear’s interest in modern art, quickly arranged to buy it. At the time, no major museum in the United States owned a Picasso painting, and Goodyear and Hekking thought it would make a bold addition to the Albright’s collection.[9]
When La Toilette was unveiled in Buffalo, however, all hell broke loose. The nudity was too much for some of the other trustees; soon the controversy extended to Goodyear’s larger plans to expand the Albright into modern art. “Not only the Picasso, but the other works acquired through Conger’s influence, had offended them,” Goodyear’s son later wrote. The conservatives were led by the museum’s architect, the man who had designed all those Athenian columns, and the Albright family, which had in large measure paid for them, and when Goodyear’s board seat came up for renewal, they kicked him off. Around the same time he went through a divorce, and in the small world of Buffalo society, he was tarnished goods; soon after, he fled to New York City.[10]
For Rockefeller and her friends, Goodyear’s efforts to bring Picasso to Buffalo took on a decidedly different cast. They were trying to create a museum for precisely this kind of art, and early Picasso, at least, hardly seemed cause for alarm. As Sullivan suggested, Goodyear might be just the man they needed. In late May, they invited him for lunch and asked him outright: Would he like to be chairman of a new museum they were planning? It must have seemed somewhat whimsical, given that none of them knew anything about running a museum, and they had no collection, or building, or staff, or as yet, funds: This was a very long way from the million-dollar Albright Art Gallery. Still, he was at loose ends after Buffalo, and he was intrigued by his socially prominent hosts. The next day, he accepted.
But Goodyear was an executive, not a curator. They would need an expert in modern art to direct the enterprise, someone who could organize shows at the highest level possible. At the time, not only were many museums skittish about the paintings that Quinn had collected; their curators were often ignorant about modern art. True expertise, in Europe as well as the United States, came from the modern art market and the dealers and connoisseurs who engaged in it. “Mr. Quinn was advised by artists,” one prominent New York critic had written during the breakup of the Quinn estate. “Who advises our museums?”[11]
Seeking additional help, Goodyear and Rockefeller recruited Paul Sachs, who knew more about museums than almost anyone in the country. As Sachs scanned the landscape, however, he was not hopeful. American institutions were notably weak in modern art. They could try to hire a director from one of Germany’s advanced museums, but it seemed unlikely that one could be lured for such an experimental venture. Then he thought of his unconventional Harvard protégé. While it was true that Alfred Barr had never run anything, he had just spent a year investigating the newest museums and art schools in Europe and arguably knew more about modern art than anyone in America. He also was already trying, in his own teaching, to elevate avant-garde art to the same status as its historic precedents. Sachs told Goodyear and Rockefeller that if they didn’t object to “a very young man,” he had a perfect candidate in mind.
At first Rockefeller was underwhelmed. After meeting Barr, she told Goodyear she was disappointed that he didn’t have a “more impressive appearance.”[12] Nevertheless, she was struck by his intellectual potency, and she summoned him to the Rockefeller compound in Seal Harbor, Maine, for a more extended audition. Known as the Eyrie, the vast estate featured a half-timbered Tudor-style “cottage” with one hundred rooms and a staff of twenty-two. Perched on a verdant hillside, it overlooked a dramatic, rock-strewn natural expanse dropping down to the sea. It was an intimidating place to talk about the Bauhaus, but Barr was surprised to discover the extent of Rockefeller’s enthusiasm for her project. During long walks together through the Chinese-inspired gardens, he told her some of his ideas about artists, movements, and schools, his experiences in Europe, even his observations about lighting and wall labels. Already he was thinking of the new museum as a laboratory for the kind of advanced art culture he had found in Germany. He also envisioned a pioneering collection of exceptional works that could tell the story of modern art. (In theory, this part was an easy sell. “We must show only the best,” Rockefeller said.[13])
Whatever she made of all of his ideas, Rockefeller was convinced by his energy and knowledge and gave him the job. He even persuaded her to summon his longtime Harvard roommate and devoted friend, Jere Abbott, to Seal Harbor as well, and after a brief interview, she offered him a job as Barr’s deputy. Abbott had been about to begin a prestigious academic position, but he was willing to pass it up for this. (“i would rather work with you on this thing than anything i know,” he cabled Barr.[14]) For a student who, only a few months earlier, had been unable to secure funding for his Ph.D., it was a remarkable turnaround. But there was no time to celebrate. It was already August, and Rockefeller and her friends were determined to open later that fall. And they still needed to define the museum’s formal mission. Once again, Barr turned to ideas that had originated with John Quinn.
In a draft position statement that summer, he set out to diagnose the crisis that the city faced. In previous eras, the most innovative artists were embraced by rich men and kings. “Popes bowed to Michelangelo, an Emperor to Titian,” he observed. In contrast, the leading painters of the modern era had been greeted with “contempt and derision.” By now, these attitudes had gradually shifted, with a growing number of international collectors and critics coveting the most important examples of the new art. He noted that while John Quinn had paid just $7,000 for Seurat’s Circus ten years earlier, it would now be worth “not much less than $150,000, that is, if the Louvre to which Quinn bequeathed it decided to sell.” Yet New York had spurned Quinn’s paintings. In a remarkable echo of Quinn’s complaint at the time of the Armory Show more than sixteen years earlier, Barr noted that “the Metropolitan, the foremost museum in America, owns no Van Gogh, no Gauguin, no Seurat, no Toulouse-Lautrec (men long dead) and among the living no Matisse or Picasso, no Segonzac, no Derain.” As a result, he continued, some of the old prejudices had persevered: “Obtuse” viewers, even now, continued to regard any artist who followed the modernist tradition as a “madman, degenerate and (more absurdly) bolshevik.” Such was the scale of the problem that only a new museum could address it.[15]
Back in 1914, in his initial plans for a “modern museum,” Quinn had identified the Luxembourg in Paris as a model. He had called for a public gallery that would not only showcase the newest art but also build a permanent collection of the best examples, a notion that was completely alien to the nation’s historically oriented museums. Later, he had set out to form such a collection of advanced modern art himself—the “magnificent unity” whose dispersal had spurred Rockefeller and her friends in the first place. That fall, as Barr and the founding committee presented their new museum to the public, they turned to these same principles. Already Barr was envisioning a museum that would collect premier works by the most important artists, as Quinn had done, while putting on a continual program of loan shows. “The Luxembourg…was founded in order to solve a problem very similar to that which confronts New York,” Barr wrote in Vanity Fair. “It is…with an ideal Luxembourg in mind,” he continued, that they were making “remarkable progress toward the foundation of a Museum of Modern Art.”[16]
While he did not invoke Quinn explicitly, Barr made clear that the idea for their venture had its origins in the aftermath of the “riotous, epoch-making Armory Exhibition of 1913.” Not only, then, would the museum set out to remedy the crisis posed by the dispersal of the Quinn collection. It would also take the form that Quinn himself had once advocated. In recollecting the founding of the museum decades later, Barr went further, imagining how Quinn himself might have contributed to the project. “Had he lived another decade,” Barr reflected, “what a wonderful president of the Museum of Modern Art he would have made.”[17]
Barr’s plans faced formidable challenges. Along with Quinn in the flesh, they also lacked his paintings. They wouldn’t have a single one of the dozens of Picassos and Brancusis that only a few years earlier had been in an apartment less than two miles from the Rockefeller townhouse; they lacked his Circus and his Sleeping Gypsy. For the time being, they would have to borrow the art they needed. Nor was it clear whether Rockefeller and her friends would be prepared to follow Barr into the later stages of Cubism, let alone the more recent movements in art, architecture, film, and design he had witnessed in Dessau and Moscow. “Now remember, Alfred, that we cannot get all the things that we want at once,” Sachs warned him when he accepted the job, adding that he would need to “follow the line of least resistance” with the board.[18]
Still, the economy was strong, and the long-overdue museum showed every sign of attracting wide support in the art world. “Funds must be raised, the co-operation of collectors, critics and dealers invited,” Barr wrote in August. “But there is so much enthusiasm and interest in New York that these things will scarcely be lacking.” He could not know that the world would look very different by the time the museum opened three months later.[19]