. Two , , 1964. Home to the Gallery of , 1964–1969. Photo: Eddie Hausner/ /Redux.

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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 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 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

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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 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

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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 ’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. 18 In the 1955 Congressional Record , Representative Frank Thompson Jr. quoted from critic Jonathan Marshall’s rebuttal to Hartford in Arts Digest : We feel that Hartford’s blast was an ill-disguised attack on artistic freedom and set a dangerous precedent . . . for wealthy individuals to attempt to buy public opinion. . . . We wonder how Mr. Hartford can reconcile his profound love of democracy with his call for standardization of art and the elimination of imagination. 19 Marshall, among others, recognized that Hartford’s demands on art paradoxically advocated the very censorship and dictatorship that he accused the art world of engaging in. Countering Hartford, Representative Thompson then reminded the Speaker of the House that on the occasion of MoMA’s twenty-fifth anniversary the year before, President Dwight Eisenhower had stated, “There is an important principle which we should ever keep in mind—the principle that freedom of the arts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars of liberty in our land.” 20 Eleanor Roosevelt published an opinion piece in the New York World Telegram defending modern artists’ “right to experiment. Art dealers and museums should exhibit their art and the public in the long run will make the decision of whether

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 the art is good or bad.” 21 Eisenhower’s and Roosevelt’s comments reveal that Hartford’s intervention into modern art criticism—while ostensibly on behalf of the voiceless public—could also be interpreted as an infringement on the freedoms of both the public and artists. Hartford was not the only one to frame art in terms of its ideological impli - cations. American politicians in the late 1940s and 1950s—most famously Representative George Dondero—were launching attacks on modern art as Communistic propaganda. 22 Congressman Dondero wrote to Hartford, commend - ing his efforts “of bringing back esthetic and moral standards into the painting world” and noting that “to me the stuff which has taken the name of art which has been foisted upon the American Opposite: Huntington Hartford II people during the last years is simply nauseating.” 23 An article at his foundation’s retreat for in the Tribune complimented Hartford for “alerting the needy artists, standing with paintings that he considers public to the dangers in an art whose strings are controlled by wholesome, January 1, 1952. Moscow.” 24 Barr had already responded to such critiques in Photo: Allan Grant/Time Life 1952 by publishing “Is Modern Art Communistic?” (in the New Pictures/Getty Images. York Times Magazine ), his defense of modern art as a political Above: Huntington Hartford II at freedom. In the article he points out that the Soviet and fascist his foundation’s retreat for needy 25 artists, holding up prints he regimes had themselves condemned modern art. classifies as vulgar, January 1, In deciding to open his own museum, Hartford jumped into 1952. Photo: Allan Grant/Time these debates at the institutional level. Hartford originally Life Pictures/Getty Images. referred to his enterprise as the Huntington Hartford Gallery and formed a trust to fund the institution in May 1954. 26 The gallery was initially slated to be located in southern California. 27 Eventually, Hartford realized that New York was more appro - priate for his museum: I finally decided that the only place to do anything like that was in . Because it’s like building a great theater out in Oklahoma. No matter how great the physical building is, the important thing is that you don’t have the people there, you don’t have the attention. 28 By moving his institution to New York, Hartford acknowledged his goal of providing a viable alternative to what he perceived as the taste-making establishment. On June 10, 1956, Hartford publicly announced his plans to build a $2.5-million museum in Manhattan. Now he called his institution the Gallery of Modern Art; it would show art from the French Revolution to the present, pushing modern art back 100 years from when

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 MoMA considered it to have begun. The following year—and despite his denouncement of the crass commercialism of the art market and his derision of Dalí only a few years earlier—Hartford, who was working to build a collection for his museum, commissioned Dalí to paint The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959). 29 Hartford purchased the painting, which was to be a centerpiece of the new institution, for a reported $250,000, an impressive amount that neither Dalí nor Hartford would confirm but that was repeatedly cited in the press. 30 (By comparison, the same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm [1950] for $30,000.) 31 Hartford’s decision to foreground an artist who actively courted the market showed that the line between the commercial and the popular was much more fluid than Hartford was willing to admit. Indeed, as a collector, Hartford was participating—even investing—in it. The dispute between MoMA and Hartford was not specifi - cally about the definition of modern art. Rather, it hinged on the public perception of the institutionalization of modern art. As Hartford persisted in using the name “Gallery of Modern Art” in the press, MoMA’s growing concern—stated both inter - nally and publically—was that the public would confuse the two entities. Yet when MoMA filed suit against Huntington Hartford in January 1959, the museum’s administrators were well aware that their institution’s name had first been used by the Société Anonyme in 1920. Though references to the “Société Anonyme: The Museum of Modern Art” are acknowl - edged in an internal memo, Barr argued that the Société Anonyme was generally known without its subtitle–“no one thought of it as the Museum of Modern Art.” 32 Dondero, how - ever, had cited the Société Anonyme by its full name in a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Interior view of the Gallery of Modern Art, 1964. With Salvador Dal í’s The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959) at right and The Battle of Tetuan (1962) at left. Photo: Eddie congressional speech in order to conflate it with MoMA. 33 And Hausner/The New York Times/ a letter printed in the New York Sunday Mirror cited “12 firms Redux. listed with ‘modern art’ as part of their identification” in the Manhattan telephone directory. 34 That MoMA did not have a monopoly on the word modern —and had not sought one before 1959—is clear. Hartford’s enterprise was nevertheless sufficiently compelling to worry Barr. Despite foreseeing that the press’s response to the lawsuit might be unfavorable, MoMA decided that publically defend - ing itself against Hartford’s institution was a worthy expendi - ture of cultural (and financial) capital. 35 On the whole, the popular press welcomed the discussion, brought on by the law - suit, of what constituted “modern.” An article in the New York Herald Tribune pointed out that modern was a word applied to almost everything in American life today. It is the dar - ling of advertisers in this land that prizes novelty above almost every other virtue. The word clings as a label to objects that were new twenty years ago and no longer are. . . . Perhaps the word for Mr. Hartford’s museum— and for the art of our times—is “contemporary.” It does not fix a work of art to a specific year, but merely reflects our tastes at the moment, while “modern” art, in every field, ceases to be modern in no time at all. 36 The author not only blamed commercial interests for the broad use of the term but proposed the adoption of a new term for new visual forms: contemporary . In her article on the law - suit, critic Aline Saarinen even pointed out that the Institute of Modern Art in Boston had changed its name in 1948 to the Institute of Contemporary Art because the term modern was so closely identified with MoMA’s version of art. 37 That Hartford had chosen the term modern in naming his museum thus seems doubly significant, in part precisely because it was so closely identified with MoMA as an institution (at least, by the art world) and, more intriguing, because he disagreed with the current understanding of the term. By adopting a term that described the period and sensibility of art that he had denounced, Hartford signaled an implicit understanding that such a category was malleable and could be revised. This was precisely what MoMA feared when it argued that Hartford’s use of the term modern would “dilute the distinctive quality” of its own efforts as an institution. 38 Because of the suit, MoMA was forced to define tangibly how the Gallery of Modern Art threatened its own endeavors. Saarinen concluded that while prospective donors would be able to distinguish between the two institutions, the public might not be so dis - cerning. A cartoon later published in the New Yorker illustrates this potential confusion by showing a Franz Kline–like abstract

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 expressionist painting being delivered to the Gallery of Modern Art with the caption, “You’ve got the wrong address, Mac.” 39 The absurdity of the mistake would have been obvi - ous to anyone following the controversy, because Hartford had expressly given his museum an anti-abstractionist mandate. Hartford seems to have appreciated the humor of the potential for mix-up and displayed the cartoon in his home. 40 Most accounts of the lawsuit in the popular press avoided an ideological interpretation of modern art, though in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Charleston News and Courier made an analogy between the lack of legitimacy of MoMA’s suit and the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling on school desegregation. The South Carolina paper reported that Hartford “does not concede that [modern art] consists mainly of strange blobs of color, dripping lines or a collection of cubes. . . . Who knows these days what may happen? Perhaps the court will say that Mr. Hartford has no right to build a separate but equal gallery of modern art.” 41 The Yonkers Herald-Statesman framed the lawsuit as a battle not between two museums but between mil - lionaires, pointing out that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was a patron of MoMA. 42 Hartford’s desire to rep - resent the common man was in some ways undermined by the fact that, besides being a fixture in the society pages, he had the resources to build his own museum. But the article also pointed to MoMA’s own status as a private institution. A writer for the Wall Street Journal welcomed the idea of a new museum and noted that “people have been quarreling for a long time over what ‘modern’ means and for even longer over what con - stitutes ‘art.’ We question whether anyone has a right to appro - priate those terms and to deny them to somebody else just because someone might become confused.” 43 While coming down on Hartford’s side, the article’s author acknowledged that MoMA “takes a broader slant at modern art. . . . So long as the work is interesting, an abstract artist can work . . . in flashing lights and feathers, for all the Museum cares.” 44 Newsweek quoted Hartford’s lawyers, who called MoMA’s suit “peevish, petty, even vindictive.” 45 The New York Mirror supported Hartford, but maintained that “the suit is a good thing; it may do more to bring so-called ‘modernity’ in art out in the open than the recent fire at the museum. The term ‘modern,’ espe - cially in art, has little specific meaning.” 46 Debates about mod - ernism in the popular press are revealing. Although they

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 James Stevenson. “You’ve Got the Wrong Address, Mac,” 1964. From the New Yorker , April 18, 1964. © James Stevenson/ The New Yorker Collection/ The Cartoon Bank/Condé Nast demonstrate a vague distrust about the flexibility of the term, Publications, Inc. they also reveal a general openness to expansions and addi - tions to notions of the modern—and a shift away from partisan political rhetoric. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. The new museum would be called the Gallery of Modern Art Including the Huntington Hartford Collection. 47 When the revised name was etched into the building’s façade, Newsweek reported that Hartford was not pleased. “‘I want this gallery to stand on its own two feet,’ he said. ‘Anybody’s name on a semi-public building of this kind is bad—even Abraham Lincoln’s.’” 48 Hartford wanted to suppress the private nature of his enter - prise so that his critique of MoMA would be framed as an insti - tutional, rather than individual, position. Meanwhile, Carl Weinhardt, the Gallery of Modern Art’s director, felt that the resolution absolved the new museum from any strict definition of, or responsibility to, modern art: I would like to pull a small throw rug from under any critic who may be waiting to pounce and underline the fact that the legal name of the museum is “Gallery of Modern Art, including the Huntington Hartford Collection.” Thus it is clear that the Huntington Hartford Collection is not technically committed to being “mod - ern,” no matter how narrowly one chooses to define a word which has been peculiarly overworked and maligned in the recent past to the point where it has lost almost any accurate meaning for the immediate present. . . . In fact, it does, and will, consist of paintings, sculp - ture and graphic art created, for the most part, during the 19th and 20th centuries. Huntington Hartford interprets the word modern in a broad sense which includes post- Renaissance Western art from 1800, more or less, to the present day. 49 Weinhardt went on to define modern art as beginning at the dawn of the nineteenth century, which, despite his avowal that the Gallery of Modern Art operated independently of Hartford’s collection, nonetheless coincided with Hartford’s collecting practices. 50 Even as Hartford fought for the broader designation that the term modern implied, the limits Hartford placed on his museum were blatantly a matter of personal taste. 51 The paradox of this was not lost even on someone like Dalí, who directly benefited both from Hartford’s patronage and his use of the term modern . Relaying a conversation between Hartford, Dalí, and himself in 1965, collector A. Reynolds Morse reported, I said it was a shame, since he put so much love and effort into it not to call it “The Hartford Gallery of Modern Art.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 No, he said—he did not want it to be a monument to him - self. Then too the Museum of Modern Art people with their lawyer had made an awful fuss at his use of the words “Modern Art.” How ridiculous Dali said—“le Museum is already very old fashioned—is no modern at all.” Dali, his antennae sensing that this was a difficult area again indi - cated a change of topic would be a good . . . 52 Dalí—accused of being an academic painter himself—recog - nized that Hartford’s anti-abstractionist brand of modernism was ultimately retrograde. Hartford erroneously perceived MoMA to be dedicated uni - laterally to advancing the cause of abstraction. In fact, this was the Guggenheim’s original mandate. Founded as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the Guggenheim Museum’s name change in 1952 reflected a broadening of its narrowly focused original mission (and the increasing inclusion in its collection of more representational works). Hartford’s proposed museum was a move in the opposite direction. Ground was broken on the Guggenheim’s new building in 1956, the same year Hartford publicly announced his own plans for an art gallery, a coinci - dence that was noted in the press. 53 However, while the con - struction of the Gallery of Modern Art was delayed by a stubborn shoe-store owner who refused to vacate the site, the Guggenheim’s new –designed building opened to much fanfare on October 21, 1959. 54 Like the Guggenheim, Hartford’s museum would also initially express the vision of a single patron, attempt to make a mark through distinctive architec - ture by a well-regarded American architect, and try to carve a niche within New York’s cultural institutions. The issue of the role of museums in public life was at the forefront of discussion in the 1960s. In Art in America ’s 1961 special feature on museums, the new director of the Guggenheim, Thomas Messer, wrote that museums were more and more becoming cultural combat zones: “Contemporary museums in particular—are battlefields where forms are the weapons and the spoils—the means and the end. Forms, within one’s own time, become carriers of ideas, of ideals and of ideologies.” 55 Messer laid out the stakes of aesthetic display in loaded terms that emphasized contemporary cultural communication. These—more so than developing a strict definition of modern art—were the true stakes of the debate. In the same issue, Katherine Kuh addressed what she termed “the edifice complex,” analyzing the recent increase in museum expansions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Guggenheim; and, perhaps most especially, the upcoming renovation of MoMA. 56 As MoMA began to make plans for its Philip Johnson–designed expansion, which would take place

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 during the first half of 1964, administrators may also have been thinking of the Gallery of Modern Art’s opening on the horizon and Hartford’s rhetoric about a museum for the public that would combat MoMA’s elitism. Despite MoMA’s increased popularity, MoMA administrators—particularly Barr—continually sought to increase the accessibility of the institution to the public. 57 MoMA recognized that the perception of the museum by the public was crucial to its work even before the student protests of 1968 and Thomas Hoving’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is credited with the rise of the “block - buster” era. Hartford’s museum put increased pressure on MoMA’s understanding of its own public role. The opportunity created by MoMA’s temporary closure was not lost on Hartford. The New York Herald Tribune reported, “since the Museum of Modern Art will be closed for extensive improvements for five months beginning Dec. 1, Mr. Hartford would like to open quickly to take full advantage of the period when one of his chief competitors will have its doors closed.” 58 The increased exhibition space made possible by MoMA’s expansion facilitated a decision to prioritize the museum’s permanent collections, the display of which would make mate - rially apparent a narrative of modern art built upon MoMA’s principles that now stretched back seventy-five years. Still framed in terms of the public’s understanding of modern art, director René d’Harnoncourt presented MoMA’s expansion as something of a revision of the museum’s mission: Given the present intensified activity throughout the art world there is less danger of the public’s lacking oppor tu - nities for seeing new manifestations than of its becoming confused by the quantity of production and exhibition and the diversity of styles. We can best fulfill our purpose in the 60’s and 70’s by making our great resources—the Collections—available both to the growing general public by providing continuous large-scale exhibitions of our holdings, and to the increasing number of interested spe - cialists by providing facilities to study the material not on view. 59 Because of the flourishing of the contemporary art scene, MoMA felt that its future responsibilities to the public lay in clarifying the past rather than showcasing recent directions in art. Thus, as MoMA sought to put more of its permanent col - lections on view, the institution was consciously turning away from the idea that modern and contemporary art were one and the same. The severing of the concept of modern from contem - porary—and the transformation of modern into a historical category—occurred because MoMA saw the necessity in clari - fying its mission for the public. While not necessarily a new

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 interest of MoMA’s, the emphasis on history may have been what critic Emily Genauer picked up on when she commented that MoMA’s commitment to its permanent collection dove - tailed with Hartford’s desire to ground modern art in the nine - teenth century: The Museum of Modern Art has already announced that, when it re-opens in mid-May, it will emphasize, as never before, its permanent collections of the old masters of modernism, and give much less attention than in the past to new expressions which now find a perhaps too-ready showcase in museums and many commercial galleries. The great irony, then, of the new Gallery of Modern Art is that, conceived to combat art fashions, it now finds itself in the very vanguard of them. The avant-chic thing right now is precisely the kind of painting Mr. Hartford stresses in his own collection. 60 Genauer seemed to be proposing that since MoMA was looking historically, Hartford’s retrospective frame of modern art was, in some ways, endorsed by the art establishment. However, upon MoMA’s reopening, d’Harnoncourt published an article in the Times that aimed to clarify the debate: By “modern art,” as distinct from “contemporary,” we mean art that strives to embody new ideas in new forms, or modify traditional forms, in creative ways that give them fresh meaning for our own times. . . . Both abstrac - tion and representation (which boasts an equally venera - ble history) exist side by side today and continue to lead equally vigorous lives. . . . The Museum of Modern Art has consistently been aware that no one tendency has dominated the art of the past, nor dominates it today. . . . We do not consider that part of our task is to attempt to control the course of art by telling artists what they should or should not do—even if that were possible. . . . With so many other institutions operating in this field, what is this museum’s distinctive role? 61 D’Harnoncourt concluded that MoMA had responsibility to the public as an educational institution and would best serve its audience by putting its permanent collections in conversation with its temporary exhibitions. MoMA’s decision to curate its permanent collection was the first time it was able to formulate an institutional narrative of modern art—a narrative that museum officials must have felt was much needed in the face of the increasing plurality of the 1960s art world. While Hartford was still committed to showing older, repre - sentational work, by the time the Gallery of Modern Art finally opened in March 1964 the dominance of abstract expression -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 ism had begun to be displaced by new forms of contemporary art. Hartford’s alternative modernism seemed less drastic. Many reviewers agreed that, by 1964, what was once consid - ered unfashionable was again au courant. As critic Brian O’Doherty wrote: The new gallery, however, couldn’t have chosen a better time to be born. For taste has been changing and fashion flirting with the passé and the moribund. Some of the plans announced by the director, Carl J. Weinhardt Jr., sound almost avant-garde, which all goes to prove the cyclical theory of taste. If you lag behind far enough, long enough, history will catch up with you, pushing you along in front of it. Thus an institution that has seemed (often simultaneously) an eccentricity, a laughing stock and an anachronism, has the opportunity of becoming an important addition to the New York scene, filling a gap that has been yawning wider and wider. 62 Even critics such as Irving Sandler and Alfred Frankfurter conceded that the Gallery of Modern Art’s presence in New York would increase the number of exhibitions that could be seen by the public and that expanding the scope of art dis - played in New York would ultimately be instructive. 63 This perspective aligned with Hartford’s framing of the reason for building the museum. Far more tempered by 1964, Hartford’s retrospective account of his institution’s inception now played up the idea of diversity rather than ideology: I realized there were really very few modern art galleries here. This was before the Guggenheim was built, so there were only the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, for American artists. So I decided if only I could put up something , even in a small way, that would compete with the Modern Museum it would be a very healthy thing. No matter what I showed, the competition would be salutary. 64 Despite Hartford’s attempt to cast his museum in opposition to the elite art world, Stone’s tall, narrow, white marble build - ing was upon its completion immediately compared to an ivory tower. 65 Irving Sandler observed of the interior design: The interior of the Gallery also looks out of this century. Parquet floors are interspersed with thick red and gold colored rugs. The walls and ceilings are covered with walnut and macassar ebony panels and Japanese grass - cloth. And there are upholstered chairs and sofas, rich drapes and tapestries and a variety of rare plants. . . . Most modern museums are so stark that all you are able to do

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 is study the pictures. But in Hartford’s Gallery, the pic - tures are not that interesting, so you can bask in the opu - lence of the décor, see some fine views of Central Park, 1 listen to a 2 3 ⁄2-foot Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ, take an espresso break on the eighth floor or lunch on Polynesian delicacies in the Gauguin Room in the penthouse. 66 Yet, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted that Stone’s trademark grilles and rejection of the “brutal aspects of today’s architecture” is hardly controversial and “pads well with wall- to-wall luxury.” 67 A few months later, visitors to the New York World’s Fair could see Stone’s “House of Good Taste,” which, in an indication of the changing aesthetic, represented “mod - ern” good taste and was distinct from the “contemporary” model home designed by another architect. In both cases, Stone’s architecture invited the public to enjoy a certain brand of lifestyle mingled with a modernist sensibility. 68 Opening to much publicity over the course of four evenings in March 1964, the public initially flocked to the Gallery of Modern Art. The New York Times reported that 3,358 visited on the first day. They appeared, “for the most part, . . . middle- aged and prosperous-looking. There was only a scattering of the loose mohair sweaters, corduroys, beards and ballet slip - pers apt to be the uniform of the avant-garde.” 69 Just two weeks after the gallery opened, the Times reported that 38,573 patrons had visited and “large numbers of college-age youths were among those who kept a line building.” 70 A reviewer for the Nation compared the flood to “Macy’s at Christmas,” as “visi - tors stood immobilized, craning over one another’s shoulders for a glimpse of the exhibits.” 71 In its first year, the Gallery of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Interior view of the Gallery of Modern Art, 1964. Photo: Sam Falk/ The New York Times/Redux.

Modern Art was attended by “a third of a million” visitors. 72 The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, which ran from March 20 to April 19, 1964, was a Pavel Tchelitchew retrospective, which brought together more than 300 of the artist’s works, including stage designs as well as paintings and drawings. 73 Tchelitchew’s works occupied three floors, and Hartford’s collection, which consisted of about sixty representational works from the past 200 years, was displayed on the remaining two. 74 MoMA had been the last New York institution to grant a solo show to Tchelitchew, in 1942, and, despite Hartford’s ideological dis - agreements with MoMA, the 1942 exhibition was cited in press materials. 75 Tchelitchew’s work offered a contradictory state - ment for the Gallery of Modern Art’s first show. Here was an artist whose output may not have been strictly avant-garde but had been endorsed by MoMA and continued to enjoy that museum’s imprimatur. Despite the fanfare that surrounded the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art, just five years after its construction it closed. By mid-1965, attendance figures had dropped signifi - cantly, and Hartford began to search for new revenue sources for the museum. 76 The departure of Weinhardt just prior to the opening of a planned Dalí retrospective also presented a difficulty for Hartford’s museum, leaving it rudderless for some time. 77 Without a board of trustees, and operating with a net loss of half a million dollars a year, Hartford sought to form a fund-raising arm for the gallery, explaining, “in the future, support of the museum must come largely from the general public.” 78 Hartford recognized that what may have sabotaged the Gallery of Modern Art was Hartford himself. Though “more than 350,000 persons have paid the gallery’s admission fee since its opening last year and the eighth-floor restaurant is said to be doing well,” at the end of 1964 Hartford published the book Art or Anarchy: How the Extremists and Exploiters Have Reduced the Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism .79 As Hartford noted, “We were getting wonderful reviews of our shows . . . until my book came out. Then the critics became very nega - tive.” 80 Reviews by and large dismissed Hartford as an alarmist, if harmless, philistine. 81 O’Doherty’s review in Life is repre - sentative. The critic concluded, “One can’t finish this mar - velously archaic opus without developing an affection for it. A Treasury of Inanities, a Layman’s Guide to Obsolete Prejudices, it is not to be missed by any connoisseur of the absurd.” 82 The book also reprinted Hartford’s old diatribe “The Public Be Damned?” Rather than reignite the old debates, however, it only tarnished Hartford’s image as a misguided philanthropist. The Gallery of Modern Art’s next major show also followed MoMA’s lead from the 1940s. The large Dalí exhibition that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 opened at the Gallery of Modern Art in December 1965 was, perhaps predictably, popular with audiences. As he had with Tchelitchew, Hartford leveraged surrealism as a modern art that could operate between high and low culture. According to Morse, though the Dalí exhibition garnered large attendance numbers and could potentially have revitalized the ailing gallery, the museum staff wanted to close the show as planned in order to install a George Bellows exhibition that they thought would salvage their professional legitimacy as an art museum .83 The Gallery of Modern Art continued to rotate exhibitions—more and more often featuring private collections—until Hartford closed the museum in 1969, just five years after its debut. 84 As Hartford prepared to close the gallery, he became inter - ested in becoming chairman of the recently created National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). He persuaded Senator Milton Young to write to President Richard Nixon’s assistant Peter Flanigan to endorse him. 85 Though he was unsuccessful in his bid to lead the NEA—an organization that in 1969 had a budget of just under $8 million (approximately equal to Hartford’s investment in the Gallery of Modern Art)—Hartford still believed in the public’s continued interest in, and access to, art. 86 Hartford’s attempt to challenge the art establishment on behalf of common culture raises important questions about the way the public consumes modern art. But his failure is perhaps even more telling; it seems to indicate a certain respect for elit - ism on the part of the public—an interest in, rather than an alienation from, the ideas of experts and standards. Perhaps most surprising, Hartford’s institution opened up the frame - work for modern art while its demise demonstrated the con - tinued vitality of the avant-garde. Hartford was able to broaden the category of modernism not only by attempting to expand its scope but by forcing those who had defined the field to engage with his ideas on an institutional level. In part he was able to do this because of the urban situatedness of these conversa - tions, which today would take place in a much more diffuse global network. Moreover, though the concept of modernism may have been elastic, it was not undermined by Hartford’s attempted poaching. On the contrary, by keeping the concept of modern art in flux just at the moment when modernism was becoming an institutionalized category, Hartford’s and MoMA’s cross-purposes ignited a rigorous dialogue about the museum’s obligation to the public—ultimately locating modern art at the tension between high and low, between the historical and a new term these arguments helped bring about: the contemporary.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes First and foremost, I thank the Andy Warhol Foundation –Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, which generously funded research for this article. Thanks are also due to the University of Houston and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists for help in funding licensing and reproduction fees.

1. Even though many critics have characterized MoMA as a sanctuary for abstraction, MoMA was late in institutionally embracing abstract expres - sionism. See Ann Temkin, Abstract Expressionism and the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). Temkin notes that MoMA col - lected abstract expressionism alongside a variety of figurative paintings throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and that it was not until “the 1960s— when Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and their peers were becoming household names—that MoMA bestowed the official recognition of retrospectives on senior statesmen such as Rothko, Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock, and de Kooning” (25). 2. Much of MoMA’s historiography has been written by employees of the museum or by close associates. See, for example, John Elderfield, ed., The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad , Studies in Modern Art, no. 4 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994); John Elderfield, ed., The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change , Studies in Modern Art, no. 5 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995); and Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973). 3. See, for example, Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: , 1983). 5. Dwight MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street—I,” New Yorker 29, n. 43 (1953): 55. 6. MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street—I,” 55. 7. See Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change , 13 –73. 8. MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street—I,” 57. 9. Hartford published 4,000 copies of the book, which he distributed to newspapers and colleges. Dorothy Bock Pierre to Madeleine Kilpatrick, 11 September 1952, in Huntington Hartford Archives, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Hartford described the essay as “a sort of diatribe against a lot of contemporary literature.” Huntington Hartford, interview by Paul Cummings, 19 May 1970, in Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 10. Huntington Hartford, Has God Been Insulted Here? (New York: Private Printing, 1951), 19–20. 11. Hartford, Has God Been Insulted Here? 20. 12. Tom Wolfe, “Portrait Gallery: Museum Piece Huntington Hartford . . . ‘Has God Been Insulted Here?’” Sunday London Times , 15 March 1964. In 1964, Winthrop Sargeant of the New Yorker contacted Hartford about writing a profile on him for the magazine. Sargeant said that Hartford’s interventions into American culture and his willingness to take on the establishment as represented by MoMA made him a worthy subject of a nonpartisan profile. Winthrop Sargeant to Huntington Hartford, 24 April 1964, in file 14, box 36,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Huntington Hartford Archives. The profile never appeared. 13. Tom Wolfe, “The Luther of Columbus Circle,” Sunday Magazine , 23 February 1964, 15, in Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, microfiche reel 2194, Museum of Modern Art Archives. 14. The ad was published in the New York Times , New York Post , New York Herald Tribune , Daily News , Wall Street Journal , and New York Journal American . These publications had a combined circulation of 4,300,000. Typescript of article written by Paul Mocsanyi, United Press , 17 May 1955, in Huntington Hartford Foundation subject file, MoMA Library. The advertisement cost Hartford $25,000, according to Val Duncan, “Art World Warrior,” Newsday , 3 May 1960, 36. 15. Huntington Hartford, “The Public Be Damned?” (advertisement), New York Times , 16 May 1955, 48. 16. Hartford, “The Public Be Damned?” 48. 17. John Brooks, “Why Fight It? (Profile of ),” The New Yorker , 12 November 1960, 88. Brooks reprinted what Hartford quoted from Art News : “‘The stages of the painting . . . are neither better nor worse, more or less ‘finished’ than the terminus. Some might appear more satisfactory than the ending, but this is irrelevant.’ Hartford demanded ‘What kind of double- talk is this?’ He would seem to have had a sharp point there, but to art collectors who read the ad the point was apparently ‘Buy De Kooning.’ Within two months, Janis’s supply of de Koonings was exhausted, and there has been a waiting list for the painter’s work almost ever since” (88). 18. Goldstein, Judd, and Gurfein to Mr. Dana C. Backus, President of Citizens Union Research Foundation, Inc., 19 May 1955, in file 2, box 34, Huntington Hartford Archives. 19. Frank Thompson Jr., 18 July 1955, 84th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record , appendix, A5255. Thompson was quoting from Jonathan Marshall, “The Public Be Damned?—No,” Arts Digest , 1 July 1955, 5. Thompson, a Democratic representative from New Jersey, was disturbed because of Hartford’s suggestion that he would be able to write off the cost of the ads on his income taxes. “The Public Be Damned?” reportedly cost Hartford $25,000, though “‘[the ads] won’t cost me anything, of course’ said Mr. Hartford with a smile ‘for I’ll deduct the money from my income tax. The article has after all an educational purpose’” (5). 20. See Frank Thompson Jr., Congressional Record , A5255 . Eisenhower’s quotation was also cited in Eleanor Roosevelt, “The Case of Mr. Hartford and His Ad against Art,” New York World Telegram , 30 July 1955, 6. 21. Roosevelt, “The Case of Mr. Hartford,” 6. Thompson sent a copy of Roosevelt’s article to MoMA’s director, René d’Harnoncourt. Memorandum, Frederick Thompson to René d’Harnoncourt, 1 August 1955, in Barr Papers, reel 2194, MoMA Archives. 22. See George Dondero, “Communist Maneuver to Control Art in the United States” (1949), in Art in Theory , ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 665–668. 23. George A. Dondero to Huntington Hartford, 30 March 1955, in file 12, box 15, Huntington Hartford Archives. Dondero was a Republican from Michigan. 24. Eleanor Jewett, “Modern Art as a Tool for Propaganda,” , 31 July 1955. 25. See Alfred Barr, “Is Modern Art Communistic?” New York Times , 14 December 1952. Though domestic critics of modern art continued to accuse it of representing anti-American values, at the end of 1956 MoMA expanded

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 its international program, forming the International Council, which exported its first show, The New American Painting, to eight countries in 1958–1959. The exhibition featured prominent abstract expressionists and was meant to promote freedom and individualism. For more on abstract expressionism’s relationship to the Cold War, see Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” (1974), in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate , ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), 147–154. 26. Document forming a trust, 5 May 1954, in file 7, box 39, Huntington Hartford Archives. The document establishing the gallery’s trust was nota - rized in New York. 27. Hartford’s foundation was established in 1948 and hosted its first fellow in 1950. First Fruits (Pacific Palisades, CA: Huntington Hartford Foundation, 1956). Hartford closed the art colony in 1965. Hartford’s initial plans for were based on his residence there at the time: “Well, the original reason [for founding the Museum] was that I became so incensed at one point at the crap that was exhibited as good art that I wanted to have an exhibition out in California—in fact, I asked the Los Angeles County Museum, they turned it down—showing representative examples of good public taste. And I don’t think it should be just the general public, but something which repre - sented the more intelligent level of the general public versus the critics. I mean this is something that I was very uptight about at that time, you know, and very concerned about. And originally I wanted to build a museum where I could do this kind of thing, you see, where I’d have some base of opera - tions.” Hartford, interview by Cummings. 28. Hartford, interview by Cummings. We can also speculate about how differently Hartford’s efforts may have played out if he had built his museum in Los Angeles as he originally planned. Not only does the recent Pacific Standard Time initiative by the Getty Foundation demonstrate the diversity of art practices taking place in Southern California during the 1950s and 1960s, but the diffuse cultural environment may have been more amenable to Hartford’s interventions. The opening of the Getty Museum in 1974 speaks to an audience for more academic art. Furthermore, though Hartford com - pared Southern California to Oklahoma, claiming that no matter how impres - sive its physical architecture (or, presumably, its cultural endeavors) a museum there would have trouble attracting a large enough audience, the overwhelming popularity of the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas—funded by another grocery heir, Alice Walton—reveals that major cultural institutions in regional areas can serve pent-up demand. 29. Hartford and Dalí likely met socially, and Dalí’s own fallen status, which marked him as an art world outsider, in addition to his renewed inter - est in classicism and history painting, likely convinced Hartford that his ear - lier assessment of Dalí had been inaccurate. The subject of the painting tied in with the location of the Gallery at Columbus Circle, so named in 1892 on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Hartford’s foundation awarded Dalí a $5,000 grant in October 1957, report - edly “the largest single gift the foundation has granted in its four years of awards.” “Dali Gets $5,000 Award of Hartford Foundation,” New York Times , 21 October 1957. According to Dalí collector A. Reynolds Morse, “it was indeed Dali behind the scenes who was directing and shaping Huntington Hartford’s art collecting.” A. Reynolds Morse, “The Legacy of Huntington Hartford,” 14 April 1992, in Dalí Museum Archives, St. Petersburg, Florida. Morse assesses Hartford sympathetically: “As an independent appraiser of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 our artistic culture, and as an art collector, he refused to kowtow to the professional tastemakers, art critics, and ‘museum experts.’ Then to worsen matters, he first dared to exercise his own tastes, and second he undertook to write about esthetic matters usually left to paid appraisers which we art ama - teurs were tacitly supposed to leave totally alone. His opprobriums as a very rich man and mine as a poor one, however, and our diverse approaches to art, were totally rejected by the formal snob establishment. There, typically, ‘art experts’ are paid to tell people what to like and endorse and what to reject. I bet on Dali and created the Dali Museum in parochial St. Petersburg which is drawing up to 1000 people a day. Hartford on the other hand bet on him - self, and lost nearly everything. His eight million dollar museum—and in its day New York’s most interesting monument—was eventually destroyed: an esthetic crime if ever there was one . . . leaving nothing but an array of sensual tabloid eccentricities. These now totally overshadow his courage in buying only passé art whose renaissance Dali believed was sure to follow his own contemporaneously controversial attempt to ‘become classic’ in an era where art had no content whatsoever” (11–12). 30. A news story noted that architect Edward Durell Stone, who attended the unveiling, had “to raise one of the ceilings of the projected museum to accommodate the large canvas,” which measured fourteen feet high. John Molleson, “Reported Price $250,000; It’s For New Columbus Circle Gallery,” New York Herald Tribune , 13 January 1960. Dalí’s painting was unveiled on 12 January 1960, in a private showing at the gallery French and Co. 31. Brooks, “Why Fight It?” 59. 32. Nonetheless, Barr conceded that after MoMA opened in 1929 Katherine Dreier “felt badly about our using the name Museum of Modern Art. As I recall, either the President or myself wrote a letter of apology and explana - tion.” Memorandum, Alfred Barr to [MoMA] files, 5 February 1959, in Alfred Barr Papers, 2194:941, MoMA Archives. Perhaps unfortunately for MoMA, Aline Saarinen’s The Proud Possessors had just been published in December 1958, debuting at number fifteen on the New York Times best-seller list and including a chapter on Katherine Dreier that referred to the Société Anonyme by its full name. “Best Seller List,” New York Times , 7 December 1958, in folder 8, box 8, Aline and Aero Saarinen Papers, Archives of American Art. (The book eventually reached number nine on the nonfiction bestsellers list). Elizabeth Shaw, publicity director at MoMA, brought this to the attention of MoMA’s lawyers, quoting the passage to them in which Saarinen cites Dreier’s explanation of the name: “Since Miss Dreier’s idea was to promote ‘Art, not personalities,’ Man Ray obligingly baptized the group ‘The Societe Anonyme, Inc.: Museum of Modern Art 1920.’ Miss Dreier liked explaining his joke. ‘Since “Societe Anonyme” is also the French for “incorporated” and as we incorporated, we became Incorporated Incorporated,’ she would say, laughing heartily.” See memorandum, Elizabeth Shaw to Walter J. Holska of Winthrop, Stinson, Putnam, and Roberts, 10 February, 1959, in Barr Papers, reel 2194, frame 941, MoMA Archives. 33. Dondero stated, “The Société Anonyme according to the American Art Annual was first organized as the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art founded in 1920, officered in 1923 and for years thereafter by Kandinsky, Russian Commissar of the ‘Isms’ becomes crystallized as the pre - sent Museum of Modern Art. As an enduring link between the two, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., member of the Board of Directors of the Société Anonyme, is the Director of the present Museum of Modern Art.” See Esther Julia Pels, “Art for Whose Sake?” American Legion Magazine , October 1955, 55.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 34. Adolph Block, “No Monopoly on ‘Modern,’” New York Sunday Mirror , 15 March 1959. The letter also cited the $29,490,000 MoMA was reported to have spent on its activities promoting modern art. 35. Barr wrote d’Harnoncourt a memo in which he worried that Hartford would use “the situation for maximum publicity not only for his museum but for his opinions about modern art as expressed in that really poisonous advertisement.” Memorandum, Alfred Barr to René d’Harnoncourt, 2 February 1959, in Barr Papers, reel 2194, frame 945, MoMA Archives. The same day, MoMA (likely Barr) compiled a four-page summary of the press’s comments on the lawsuit for its internal files, assessing nine major articles and record - ing fifteen newspapers nationally that carried the Associated Press article about the lawsuit. 36. “Good Old Fashioned Modern,” New York Herald Tribune , 24 January 1959. 37. Saarinen reminded her readers, “That institute felt strongly that the Museum of Modern Art in New York had usurped these words unto itself and invested them exclusively with meaning the kind of art it championed . To the Boston group that art was extreme, experimental and tinged with chicanery. Then, with a great deal of fanfare, an expensive manifesto and maximum righteousness, it proudly changed its name from ‘Institute of Modern Art’ to ‘Institute of Contemporary Art.’” Aline B. Saarinen, “Museums Go to Law for Right to a Name,” New York Times , 1 February 1959, X19. The New Yorker stated that the Boston museum had explained that its name change was necessary because “so-called ‘modern art’” had given rise to ‘a cult of bewilderment and double-talk.’” MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street-I,” 56. In contrast, the San Francisco Museum of Art added the word modern to its title in 1975 “to describe its purview more accurately,” though its mission statement describes the institution as a “center for modern and contemporary art.” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “History + Staff: Overview,” n.d., http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_history_staff. 38. Saarinen, “Museums Go to Law for Right to a Name,” X19. 39. James Stevenson, “You’ve Got the Wrong Address, Mac,” New Yorker , 18 April 1964. 40. Doris Herzig, “Hartford at Home,” Newsday , 12 May 1971, 6A. Herzig also reports, “And he describes an even more satiric cartoon in which a man is sitting at a bar, looking very dejected. ‘He’s an artist,’ the bartender explains, ‘and Huntington Hartford likes his paintings” (6A). 41. “Battle of Museums,” Charleston News and Courier , 3 February 1959. 42. “2 Millionaires Fight over Affairs of Art,” Yonkers Herald-Statesman , in Barr Papers, reel 2194, MoMA Archives. Not only was Rockefeller a patron, but he was a past president of MoMA, and his mother had cofounded the museum. 43. “Confusion in Modern Art,” Wall Street Journal , 22 January 1959. 44. “Confusion in Modern Art.” 45. “Petty? Vindictive?” Newsweek , 9 February 1959, 92. 46. “What Is ‘Modern’?” New York Mirror , 23 January 1959. In April 1958, a fire at MoMA destroyed several paintings. Other works were evacuated onto the street. Shortly thereafter, MoMA’s conservation department was founded. 47. As Dalí collector Morse reported, “We talked about the museum—and how much Hartford was in it—how he had been on the job day after day dur - ing its construction—how the MoMA had fought them on the name, and only conceded if they would always use the suffix ‘including the Huntington Hartford collection.’” A. Reynolds Morse, A. Reynolds Morse journals,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 December 1965, frame 1277, in Archives of American Art. 48. “Hartford Modern: What’s in a Name?” Newsweek , 23 March 1964, 64. 49. Carl Weinhardt, “Why Manhattan Needs Another Museum,” Show , March 1964, 9. In 1961, the Gallery of Modern Art’s first director, Winslow Ames, resigned. “Word got around that he and Old Hunt (who isn’t old at all but is really young, handsome, and plays a whale of a game of tennis) didn’t see eye to eye on what constituted art.” William Longgood, “Island of Art Awash in Realism,” New York World-Telegram , 20 January 1964, 13. Hartford, who discussed Ames amiably in later years, attributed Ames’s departure to his more scholarly demeanor: “I was very, very lucky to have Winslow Ames as my first director. He quit before the Museum opened because I think he was rather frightened at the idea of it actually opening. He loved to work behind the scenes.” Hartford interview by Cummings. Weinhardt, previously director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, came on board October 1, 1963. 50. Weinhardt, “Why Manhattan Needs Another Museum,” 9. Critics also were quick to notice that Hartford’s collection was weighted heavily in the nineteenth century. Alfred Frankfurter pointed out that of the works on dis - play from Hartford’s collection, only a dozen pictures were painted in the twentieth century. Alfred Frankfurter, “Caviare?—New York’s Newest Museum,” Art News , March 1964, 34. 51. Hartford must have felt ambivalent about the issue of personal taste, because he was publicly advocating for art for the common good. As Weinhardt wrote in a Gallery of Modern Art publication in 1964, Hartford’s endeavors were “in the splendid American tradition of private collecting for eventual public pleasure” despite being “a result of his highly individual and personal philosophy about art.” Carl J. Weinhardt, Paintings from the Huntington Hartford Collection (New York: Gallery of Modern Art, 1964), n.p. Among the articles in Hartford’s archives is one of J. Paul Getty’s columns for Playboy in which the collector extols the virtues of assembling a fine art collection. Within the pages of such a magazine, Getty’s assessment that “few human activities provide an individual with a greater sense of personal gratification than the assembling of a collection of art objects that appeal to him” must have carried particular weight. Hartford likely also iden - tified with some of the criticisms that Getty cites of his own collecting prac - tices: “the critic concluded his tirade by disdainfully sneering: ‘Paul Getty buys only what he likes!’” In defending himself, Getty quoted Sir Alec Martin of Christie’s: “‘I don’t hold it against him at all that his collections are an expression of the man,’ Sir Alec declared. ‘I’m rather fed up with these impersonal, “complete” collections that are chosen by somebody for some - body else. The formation of his wonderful collection has been a public service.’ No collector could hope for greater vindication of his collection phi - losophy—or for higher praise of his collection.” J. Paul Getty, “Creative Collecting: The Profits and Pleasures to Be Found in the Fine Art,” Playboy 12, no. 11 (November 1965): 111, 204. Hartford, too, was criticized for inflict - ing his personal taste on the public: “He has revived the terrible heresy that it is permissible for people to disregard fashions in art and to enjoy whatever they happen to like and he has given New Yorkers a chance of seeing a col - lection of pictures which has nothing much in common but for their having appealed to him at one time or another.” Anthony West, “Art World Tastemakers Need to Sweeten Image,” Los Angeles Times , 26 April 1964. 52. Morse, journals, December 1965, frame 1285. 53. “This [Hartford’s] tentative plan is not wholly dissimilar to the plan of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, now

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 being built at Fifth Avenue and 88th Street,” one reviewer wrote. “Architect Picked for Museum,” New York Times , 19 May 1958. 54. Despite the Guggenheim’s established reputation, during the new building’s three-year construction Wright’s building plans elicited much crit - icism from Robert Moses, who called it “an inverted oatmeal dish” and com - pared it to “a giant corkscrew, a washing machine and a marshmallow.” Once the building opened (in the wake of Wright’s death the previous April), crit - ics praised its innovative design. Emily Genauer, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Spiral Museum Opens,” New York Herald Tribune , 21 October 1959, 1. 55. Thomas Messer, “What Should a Museum Be?” Art in America 49, no. 2 (1961): 23. 56. See Katherine Kuh, “Minus of the Building Boom,” Art in America 49, no. 2 (1961): 41. Architect Edward Durell Stone, who designed Hartford’s building (and had codesigned MoMA in 1939), used the Art in America forum to promote the importance of a museum’s accessibility, though from his perspective that accessibility was meant for a middle- and upper-class audience. See Edward Durell Stone, “What Should a Museum Be?” Art in America 49, no. 2 (1961): 35. Though a full-page image of the Gallery of Modern Art is included in the article, Stone makes no mention of the museum. 57. From the time of the construction of Stone and Goodwin’s building in 1939 until 1959–1960, MoMA had more than doubled its attendance, almost quadrupled its membership, and increased the number of items in the collection seven-fold. Kuh, “Minus of the Building Boom,” 41. Also in 1939, MoMA started charging for admission. In 1961, Barr wrote a three-page memo to d’Harnoncourt expressing his concerns about a hostile or unwel - come atmosphere in the museum. Memorandum, Alfred Barr to René d’Harnoncourt, 11 December 1961, Barr Papers, reel 2194, frame 908, MoMA Archives. 58. Don Ross, “Change of Heart at A-Borning Museum,” New York Herald Tribune , 28 August 1963, 18. 59. See MoMA, “Reopening of the Museum in May with Expanded Programs,” press release, 23 February 1964, in MoMA Archives, available online at http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/3219/releases/MOMA_ 1964_0006_1964-02-23_6.pdf. 60. Emily Genauer, “See What Mr. Hartford Likes,” New York Herald Tribune , 15 March 1964, 37. Critic Brian O’Doherty also saw overlap in Hartford’s and MoMA’s interest in history but noted, “the Modern Museum [is] devoted to historical perspectives rather than to the historical context, i.e., the uses of the past to illuminate the present . . . rather than a study of a section of the past in its immediate historical context . . . there is room for a ‘context’ view of the past, which is presumably what the Hartford Gallery will provide.” Brian O’Doherty, “Hartford Gallery: Old Wine, A New Bottle,” New York Times , 12 January 1964, X17. 61. René d’Harnoncourt, “When Is Art ‘Modern Art’?” New York Times Magazine , 24 May 1964, SM17. The expansion gave 15,000 more square feet of space to the permanent collection. Ada Louise Huxtable, “And It’s Big and Beautiful: Redesigned Museum Is Good Architecture, Fine Cityscape,” New York Times , 31 May 1964, X15. 62. O’Doherty, “Hartford Gallery,” X17. Critic Ada Louise Huxtable echoed this sentiment: “With that curious reversal of chic, in which the chic New York world specializes, where ‘out’ becomes ‘in’ for the avant-garde, the Huntington Hartford gallery promises to make the unfashionable extremely fashionable from now on.” Ada Louise Huxtable, “Columbus Circle Gallery

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 Will Open in Mid-March,” New York Times , 25 February 1964, 33. Weinhardt embraced the idea of unfashionability: ““As a result of the independent and personal nature of the collection, the Gallery has already been dubbed ‘the museum of unfashionable art.’ Instead of disturbing me, I find this title rather pleasing. ‘Unfashionable’ is not a bad thing for a museum to be. Had a museum with such an avowed policy existed through the centuries, it would possess examples of the works of most of the great painters of the past, almost all of whom have slipped into unfashion or disfavor at one time or another, and they would have been acquired at bargain prices.” Weinhardt, “Why Manhattan Needs Another Museum,” 5. 63. As Sandler wrote, “Despite my negative reaction to the Gallery of Modern Art, I believe it can serve a valuable function in New York today. In the last few years, because of a lack of museum space, New Yorkers missed fine retrospectives of Courbet and Houdin as well as surveys of the Barbizon School and Spanish painting. If the Gallery would bring such shows to New York—and it has announced it will—this in itself would be a welcome public service.” Irving Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post , 5 April 1964, 14. Despite the “avowedly anti-modern pictures,” critic Alfred Frankfurter concluded that seeing the Pre-Raphaelites does offer an opportunity to recon - sider the anomalies of a style that was celebrated in its own time but now seems hackneyed. Alfred Frankfurter, “Caviare?” 60. Genauer also framed her support of the Gallery of Modern Art as one that did not necessarily have to do with avant-garde values: “One particular aspect of modern art, abstract- expressionist painting, which it was utterly ridiculous to consider subver - sive or evil or destructive, nevertheless was at that time all but monopolizing the attention of most American museums and galleries. It would be good, therefore, to see a certain balance restored, and art that was vital and imagi - native, without necessarily being avant-garde, made impressively available to the public again, along with new experimentation.” Genauer, “See What Mr. Hartford Likes,” 37. 64. Sally Hammond, “Huntington Hartford and His Museum,” New York Post , 15 March 1964, 2. 65. As Hartford wrote, “[The Gallery of Modern Art’s] purpose is to show a different esthetic point of view from the vulgar commercialism on the one hand and the ‘ivory tower’ intellectualism on the other which have prevailed in the art world for some 20 or 30 years in American art circles.” Huntington Hartford, “New Museum in Manhattan,” Show , March 1964, 3. The Herald Tribune attempted to play up the debates surrounding the museum by taking out an illustrated advertisement in its pages to promote Genauer’s upcoming review of Stone’s building, attempting to entice readers, “Is the new Gallery of Modern Art as full of holes as its façade? . . . The controversy may continue to rage, but now it can do so with the benefit of an informed opinion.” Advertisement, New York Herald Tribune , 1964, in Huntington Hartford Archives. 66. Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,” 14. Newsweek ’s reviewer described the museum thusly: “There is the individual lighting for each picture designed by Abe Feder of ‘My Fair Lady’ fame. There is a cocktail lounge with its leather-topped bar, the cosy espresso nook, the plants and masks from Polynesia, the Danish wool upholstery, the parquet floors, the giant Aeolian-Skinner organ which will send uplifting tones gently through the bones of viewers contemplating the utopian pinups of Bouguereau.” “Hartford Modern: What’s In a Name?” Newsweek , 23 March 1964, 65. 67. Huxtable, “Columbus Circle Gallery Will Open in Mid-March,” 33.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 68. As the New York Times reported, “Those who came seemed disposed to enjoy rather than find fault, and the opulence of the interiors—parquet floors, crimson carpeting, dull-bronze fixtures, luxuriant potted plants— appeared to excite as much comment as the paintings.” Thomas Buckley, “Huntington Hartford’s White Marble Tower Is Open,” New York Times , 22 March 1964, 63. 69. Buckley, “Huntington Hartford’s White Marble Tower Is Open.” Record numbers continued into April, with crowds above 4,000 paying the seventy-five-cent admission. “4,719 at Modern Gallery Set Attendance Record,” New York Times , 2 April 1964, 30. 70. “4,719 at Modern Gallery Set Attendance Record,” 30. 71. Maurice Grosser, “Huntington Hartford’s Ivory Tower,” The Nation , 20 April 1964, 402. 72. Genauer reported, perhaps erroneously, that this annual attendance figure took MoMA fourteen years to achieve. Emily Genauer, “The First Year on Columbus Circle,” New York Herald Tribune , 7 March 1965, 25. The data printed in Katherine Kuh’s article “Minus of the Building Boom” contradicts this, citing a figure of 307,509 visitors in MoMA’s tenth year. Kuh, “Minus of the Building Boom,” 45. 73. Reviews were mixed. While one critic declared “The Tchelitchew ret - rospective is a great deal more interesting than the permanent collection,” Sandler felt that Tchelitchew fit well with Hartford’s collection. Grosser, “Huntington Hartford’s Ivory Tower,” 403; and Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,” 14. Genauer assessed Tchelitchew as a draftsman, but pointed out that he differed from the men in Hartford’s stable in that he was attentive to compo - sitional structure in the mode of Picasso and Paul Cézanne and that he was interested in the psychology of human relationships. Genauer, “See What Mr. Hartford Likes,” 38. 74. Despite Hartford’s desire to differentiate his idea of modern, “Keen eyes have noted (and voices proclaimed perhaps too shrilly) that Mr. Hartford has taken idols of the modern art pantheon—such names as Degas, Toulouse- Lautrec, Monet, Courbet—and represented them with youthful works of unjelled style all but unidentifiable. And that they keep company with works by slick nontalents who were celebrated not too long ago but deserve to rest in peace and oblivion.” Leo Monsky, “One Man Battles the Establishment,” New York Journal-American , March 1964, in Huntington Hartford Archives. Another article described the collection: “As everyone must know by now, Mr. Hartford eschews abstraction, nonobjective painting, and much of the work of the twentieth century; the “modern art” to which the museum addresses itself encompasses 200 years of art, and his collection represents what he feels is the best of that heritage: John Singer Sargent, Monet, Cassatt, Courbet, Inness, Vuillard, Hopper, Marsh, Sir Jacob Epstein, Salvador Dali to mention but a few. Mr. Hartford’s collection will be on permanent display in the fourth and fifth floor galleries.” “About New York,” Cue , 18 March 1964. 75. When Tchelitchew debuted at MoMA in 1942, reviewers compared him, favorably, to Dalí, who had had a solo show at MoMA the year before. Both exhibitions were curated by James Thrall Soby. MoMA bought Hide and Seek just before the exhibition opened, which Tchelitchew called “miracu - lous. I thought it big joke.” See “Russian Artist Out-Dalis Dali; Plays Peekaboo with Paint Brush,” New York World Telegram , 9 November 1942. Though MoMA made no mention of Dalí in its press materials, the multiple-image technique Tchelitchew showcased in Hide and Seek was reminiscent of Dalí’s works.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 76. The New York Times reported, “The museum is host to an average of 500 people a day on weekdays and 1,000 a day on weekends. Admission is $1.” Richard F. Shepard, “Hartford Seeks Aid for Gallery,” New York Times , 15 May 1965, 29. 77. Weinhardt’s departure was announced in the New York Times : Grace Glueck, “Director Leaves Modern Gallery,” New York Times , 19 October 1965. However, according to Morse’s journals, Weinhardt had been a largely absen - tee director long before then. An internal memo from William Z. Cline, the executive vice president of the Foundation for Modern Art, to Hartford sug - gested both Harry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan and a proponent of pop art, and Lawrence Alloway, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, for the director position at the Gallery of Modern Art. Memorandum, William Z. Cline to Huntington Hartford, 8 March 1966, in file 11, box 16, Huntington Hartford Archives. As Hartford remembered: “I had problems with getting a really top notch director. I had Carl Weinhardt for a while. He wasn’t too satisfactory. He finally quit. And after that I haven’t had any director for the last two or three years. That worked pretty well. It wasn’t bad. Internally it worked perfectly. I mean we had no problems internally. The only way it probably didn’t work as well was externally. I mean we probably didn’t get as much support as if we had people on the outside, you know, bringing in social events and things of this sort.” Hartford, interview by Cummings. 78. “Gallery of Modern Art Selects a Fund-Raiser,” New York Times , 3 August 1965, 28. Elsewhere, Hartford had acknowledged, “but of course art museums are never self supporting.” See Charles E. Davis, “Huntington Hartford Plans to Close Canyon Artist Retreat,” Los Angeles Times , 2 May 1965, B1. Davis’s article also lists $600,000 as the annual cost of operating the Gallery of Modern Art. In mid-1966, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hartford was selling a large portion of his shares in A&P, worth approxi - mately $22 million. “Public Sale of 760,000 A&P Shares Set by Huntington Hartford for This Month,” Wall Street Journal , 8 June 1966, 7. The article also reported that the last time Hartford had sold A&P stock had been in 1959, when he had raised $40 million from the sale. 79. Huntingdon Hartford, Art or Anarchy: How the Extremists and Exploiters Have Reduced the Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism (New York: Doubleday, 1964). According to Hartford, the book, which was pub - lished in December 1964, had sold 7,000 copies by mid-1965. Morse, journals, 13 March 1965, frame 1920. 80. See Grace Glueck, “Hartford to End Coast Art Colony,” New York Times , 2 April 1965. At one point, Hartford considered selling the book in the Gallery of Modern Art. Morse, journals, 13 March 1965, frame 1290. 81. See Hilton Kramer, “The Hartford Retreat,” The New York Review of Books , 11 February 1965; and Daniel J. Chasan, “Hartford’s Art or Anarchy ,” The Harvard Crimson , 17 December 1964. Russell Lynes’s review was suc - cinct: “When I read Mr. Hartford’s book, on the other hand, I thought he must be pulling somebody’s leg. I was distressed to come to the conclusion that the leg he was pulling seemed to be his own.” Russell Lynes, “Writing Themselves into a Corner: Review of the Irresponsible Arts by William Snaith and Art or Anarchy? by Huntington Hartford,” Book Week , 29 November 1964, 17–18. 82. Brian O’Doherty, “A Millionaire Art Buff Takes on the Bad Guys,” Life , 1964. 83. Morse, journals, December 1965, frames 1269–1270. The Bellows show eventually went forward but was delayed by an extension of the Dalí exhibition.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00126 by guest on 27 September 2021 84. Exhibitions included Selections from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. T. Edward Hanley, Aubrey Beardsley, A Tribute to Joe Pasternak, Childe Hassam, The Nina Stevens Collection: Twentieth-Century Russian Painting, Man in Sport, and Peter Fink Photographs, among others. 85. Milton R. Young to Peter Flanigan, 28 April 1969, in file 7, box 39, Huntington Hartford Archives. (Young was a Republican from North Dakota.) That Hartford wanted to be chairman of a federal program first proposed by President John F. Kennedy is curious. Kennedy had said, “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propa - ganda; it is a form of truth. . . . In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology.” John F. Kennedy, speech at Amherst College, 26 October 1963, National Endowment for the Arts web - site, http://www.arts.gov/about/Kennedy.html. Kennedy was assassinated less than a month later, and President Lyndon B. Johnson created the NEA in 1965. 86. See the 1969 annual report of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Council on the Arts. Much of the foreword deals with the importance of funding museums: “It is the view of this Council that the report documents the broad scope of museum services and makes it abundantly clear that the nation’s museums play an authentic and major role in the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. The report makes clear, too, that a per - vasive and insistent financial crisis confronts these institutions.” On Hartford’s investment in the Gallery of Modern Art, see Huntington Hartford to William Z. Cline, 3 March 1966, in file 11, box 16, Huntington Hartford Archives.

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