The Brooklyn Rail

“In the 1930s, a modern artwork was far less apt to be considered a masterpiece than a conundrum or an outrage,” writes Museum of Modern Art curator Ann Temkin. Or, as a former MoMA employee, Elodie Courter, put it: “Modern art is an acquired taste, like pickles or olives.” Given this early twentieth-century skepticism towards a new wave of radical artistry and vision, it is all the more fascinating to learn how a cohort of women—underrepresented themselves—so capably and astutely championed modern art. Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art is a compendium that spotlights fourteen decisive professionals who shaped the New York institution from its 1929 founding onwards. “We deliberately chose a structure for this book that resists the style of history in which a single voice narrates a unified telling,” Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn state in the introduction, regarding the decision to bring in fourteen different contributing writers. Each chapter opens with an introductory black-and-white portrait of the featured woman, peppered with illustrative works and archival documentation throughout.

The book, scholarly in tone, acts as a restitution. Not only were these women omitted from the narrative history of the institution, but also “their titles did not remotely reflect the extent of their responsibilities and the authority that they wielded,” Anna Deavere Smith clarifies in the foreword. As historian Jennifer Gray elucidates: “Erasures such as these … emanate from institutional bias, and MoMA on many occasions was responsible for marginalizing the very women it employed.” Furthermore, as Mary Schmidt Campbell laments: “The irony is that women’s centrality to these institutions didn’t translate into the equitable collection, documentation, and exhibition of the creative work of women artists.” Decades of such injustices create more than a niggling feeling of indignation in the reader. Still, the stories are ultimately ones of triumph through tenacity, intelligence, and vigor.

The museum’s three founders are the entry point into this legacy: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. From the start, they decided on a private museum, and each brought the “role and conspicuousness of names redolent with solid wealth,” noted writer Dwight Macdonald, adding that “few Americans care to argue with a hundred million dollars.” There is some repetition between these three stories: a pitfall of multiple contributors.

But the behind-the-scenes roles feel riveting for the ways in which each woman carved out something pragmatic and pivotal for herself. Many roles were savvily spearheaded, having not existed prior to their arrival. Iris Barry—born the same year the Lumière brothers first projected motion pictures—established the museum’s film library and recognized film as worthy of study at a time “when movies were a thin cut above the poolroom” (per British-American writer Alistair Cooke). Sarah Newmeyer was the museum’s first publicist: her outré style helped highlight that “an art show could be an extravaganza, not just an aesthetic display,” author Sloane Crosley remarks in her profile. Dorothy Dudley, the museum’s first registrar, found ways of indexing modern pieces with Byzantine components, for example a Miró work that included a stuffed parrot, silk stocking, and an engraved map. Similarly, the first museum conservationist, Jean Volkmer, introduced the role at her own behest, repeatedly confirming her ingenuity when there were no standard practices for treating the surfaces of modern paintings, precluding regulatory forces such as temperature and humidity control.

Some roles transcended the scope of the museum walls. Elodie Courter, as Romy Silver-Kohn explains, helped expand the museum’s influence as “it developed and sent dozens of shows of modern art across the country each year…. The Museum of Modern Art was more than a building in the heart of New York City; it had a ‘missionary’ responsibility to promote ‘the most vital art of the time’ to the widest possible range of people.” The roving, made-to-measure exhibitions traveled to universities and museums, and even unexpected settings, like a department store in Milwaukee. Another role with great reach enabled truly heroic consequences: “I saw myself as the Mata Hari of the Museum of Modern Art,” proclaimed multi-hyphenate translator/writer/administrator Margaret Scolari Barr, who was a key advisor to her husband, MoMA’s founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. In conjunction with the Emergency Rescue Committee, she facilitated the lifesaving escape of several European artists who were trapped in Vichy, France during World War II.

Alfred H. Barr Jr. described registrar Dorothy Dudley as a caryatid: “a term from classical architecture that refers to the female figures used as pillars on ancient Greek temples.” But any of these women could have been described thusly—they were indelible to the way the museum functioned and thrived. It’s meaningful to be able to honor their stories, to remember that while women were so often deprived of opportunities, there have always been wily exceptions. Although many of these women had a certain amount of privilege, even then, they were firmly at a disadvantage due to their gender—yet were enterprising regardless. Think appreciatively of them during your next museum visit.