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The Museum of Modern Art V. Huntington Hartford

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The Museum of Modern Art V. Huntington Hartford Edward Durell Stone. Two Columbus Circle, New York, 1964. Home to the Gallery of Modern Art, 1964–1969. Photo: Eddie Hausner/ The New York Times/Redux. 32 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00126 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Modern Art, Inc.: The Museum of Modern Art v. Huntington Hartford SANDRA ZALMAN In 1959, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) sued Huntington Hartford, socialite and heir to the massive A&P grocery fortune, who had announced his intention to build a museum in Manhattan that he would call the Gallery of Modern Art. MoMA wanted to prevent Hartford from using the words modern art in naming his new museum because it felt that Hartford’s version of modern art was in direct conflict with its own. Instead of heeding prevailing opinion about what constituted modern art, Hartford personally financed the $7-million effort (about $52 million in today’s dollars) to create an institution that would showcase what he considered legible, figurative, moral art, an accessible alternative to the abstract version of modernism he thought MoMA was promoting. 1 Not only did Hartford call his museum the Gallery of Modern Art, but he strategically sited his building less than a mile from MoMA, commissioning his rival institution’s architect, Edward Durell Stone, to design it. Hartford intended his museum to draw upon and directly com - pete for the cultural cachet that MoMA had come to embody in its thirty-five-year existence. Although created to appeal to the taste of the general public, just five years after its construction in 1964, the Gallery of Modern Art closed. MoMA’s lawsuit raises the question, “Who defines the bound - aries of modern art?” This article presents a counternarrative in the historiography of modern art, addressing MoMA’s enter - prise not from the perspective of insider dealings but from the point of view of an outsider. 2 In this counternarrative, MoMA’s authority is not challenged by a group of artists mounting critiques of the institution; rather the institution’s own way of thinking about itself is pressured and ultimately altered by a competing endeavor that aspired to the same cultural capital. By following this history, the essay explores the ideological stakes in defining the boundaries of modern art, not just as a form of political speech but as a way to deal directly with the perceived gulf between public and critical opinion. Hartford’s challenge to MoMA offers an important vantage point from which to analyze competing narratives of modern Grey Room 53, Fall 2013, pp. 32–59. © 2013 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photographer: Robert art in the 1960s and the difficulty of forging those narratives for Damora. © The Museum of public consumption. Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Seen from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Hartford’s intervention may look quaint. Defining the modern is now a global business. 3 Exemplified most spectacularly by the success of its franchise in Bilbao, core promulgators of the modern tradition like the Guggenheim Museum now exhibit their cases far from the half mile of midtown Manhattan that separated Hartford’s Columbus Circle institution from his rival on West Fifty-third Street. Yet in an age of globalization, Hartford’s project compels us to think again about the metro - politan situatedness of the modern in a city that, according to Serge Guilbaut, had stolen its idea of art from Paris. 4 An early institutional challenge to MoMA’s cultural capital, Hartford’s extensive efforts to defend what he saw as the interests of the public in the field of modern art have yet to be analyzed criti - cally from an art-historical perspective. This article shows how Hartford’s insistence on the malleability of the narrative of modern art spurred MoMA in the 1960s to rethink—to retrench—its conception of its public and its own position as powerful cultural agent of the modern. MoMA’s lawsuit seemingly hinged on whether the word modern was a distinctive or descriptive term. In 1931, MoMA’s first director, Alfred Barr, had defined modern art as “a relative, elastic term that serves conveniently to designate painting, sculpture, architecture, and the lesser visual arts, original and progressive in character, produced especially within the last three decades but including also the ‘pioneer ancestors’ of the nineteenth century.” 5 This was amended ten years later in 1941 when Barr noted, “the truth is that modern art cannot be defined with any degree of finality, in either time or character.” 6 Barr had been the first to teach a course on modern art history, but he recognized that the history of modern art was ongoing and that the museum’s mission thus needed to be broad enough to encompass new developments. Significantly, MoMA did not decide to retain a permanent collection until 1953. Prior to this, MoMA had been so committed to the idea that modern art was a fluid designation bounded by the previous fifty years that it was willing to donate its “classic masterpieces” to the Metropolitan Museum in exchange for funds to buy newer works of art. 7 For most of its existence, MoMA saw modern art as a developing rather than definitive category. In part because of this, MoMA’s role as an arbiter of taste “in everything from frying pans to country houses” was more overt than its role in defining modern art. 8 MoMA had been aware of Hartford’s activities for some time before the 1959 lawsuit. Hartford’s first foray into cultural criticism was the self-published essay Has God Been Insulted 34 Grey Room 53 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Here? of 1951. 9 Part of the essay addressed visual art, singling out Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí for criticism. Hartford laid out his inclusive view of art and the public’s right to judge it: We are all art critics, little or great; and those who turn up their noses at the world of art are turning them up at life itself. Art was never the narrow grave on which the intel - lectual snobs laid flowers on the one hand and the masses rever - ently avoided on the other. Yes, the man who walks by the shop window on his way home, or stares at the ads in the subway . that man is a critic of art. 10 At first glance, Hartford’s position was not necessarily incompatible with Barr’s views. The MoMA director also took an expansive view of modern art and promoted its integration in modern life. Barr’s 1943 book What Is Modern Painting? was expressly aimed at the “man on the street,” and exhibitions such as Modern Art in Your Life (1948) and the Good Design shows of the 1950s were also intended to promote public proficiency in modern tenets via household objects. However, Hartford compared the deteri - oration of the arts in society to the deterioration of social mores “which leads to that mentality of which the police state con - sists.” 11 In his 1964 profile of Hartford, cultural critic Tom Wolfe called Has God Been Insulted Here? an essentially religious tract, dubbing Hartford the Martin Luther of Columbus Circle. 12 Hartford took Wolfe’s characterization as a compliment. Wolfe was pointing out that, in the 1950s, culture in America had become the new moral battleground. 13 While Has God Been Insulted Here? was privately distrib - uted, Hartford’s next intervention into cultural criticism, an essay titled “The Public Be Damned?” was printed as a full- page ad—resembling a news article—in six major New York newspapers on May 16, 1955, allowing Hartford a far-broader audience. 14 Hartford’s concern over contemporary aesthetics was now more fervently framed as a religious imperative to maintain the public good. Hartford implored people to stand up to the “high priests of criticism and the museum directors and the teachers of mumbo jumbo” and decide for themselves what their opinions of art were. 15 Rhetorically, Hartford wanted Zalman | Modern Art, Inc.: The Museum of Modern Art vs. Huntington Hartford 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 to position himself as the individual out - sider taking on an organized and seem - ingly opaque (even corrupt) network where power was consolidated in the hands of a select few. And yet, despite his emphasis on the exclusion of the public from the realm of art, like many conservatives of his day Hartford discerned Communist politics at the root of “the diseases which infect the world of painting today— of obscurity, confusion, immorality, vio - lence.” 16 Instead of cubism and abstract expressionism, Hartford advocated what he considered to be realistic, legible, and beautiful. Hartford’s publication did not go unno - ticed. Ironically, Hartford’s denounce - ment of Art News ’s cryptic assessment of Willem de Kooning’s Woman series, which Hartford characterized as the critical double-talk dominating the art world, led directly to skyrocketing demand for de Kooning’s paintings by art collectors. 17 The article’s publication also sparked a flurry of mail to Hartford, including correspondence from attorneys representing Art News who demanded that Hartford recant his libelous state - ments.
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