The subtitle of INVENTING THE MODERN: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, $45) is no girlboss revisionism. Without the visionaries profiled within — especially Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan — New York’s citadel for the avant-garde would likely not exist.
So argues this volume of 14 capsule biographies, collected by the MoMA curator Ann Temkin and researcher Romy Silver-Kohn. Mary Schmidt Campbell writes that Rockefeller, MoMA’s first treasurer, used allowances from her husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., to collect strange paintings he didn’t like. As Kate Walbert reveals, after the “spinster” Bliss, MoMA’s first vice president, willed her collection to the museum with the egoless provision that it could be parted out, the director Alfred H. Barr Jr. could then acquire van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” perhaps the museum’s biggest draw.
Barr’s poorly credited wife, Margaret, writes Lanka Tattersall, translated European documents into English for him, and secured cooperation with artists abroad. In Mary Gabriel’s telling, Dorothy Miller, an iconic curator from 1934 to ’69, would rove New York’s galleries with Alfred Barr in what one witness called “a magic circumference of silence,” poaching Jasper Johns and Frank Stella art for the collection.
The gem is Roberta Smith’s essay on the founding registrar, Dorothy Dudley, a one-woman catalog of every acquisition, condition and sale at a time when what constituted art was increasingly hard to define. Dull work but vital, especially when World War II upset the handshake culture of art loans. A retired critic with decades of reviews behind her, Smith is part of MoMA’s story herself.
From the Gilded Age hobbyists to the imposing professionals of later decades: In a way this book chronicles women outstepping the limits on their gender to become, simply, tastemakers. Wishful thinking? Consider: No men were involved in the writing of this book.
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