Hans Belting: Multiple Modernities. The Museum of Modern Art and the Invention of Modernism

Lecture at the Symposium »When was Modern Art? A Contemporary Question« (New York, Museum of Modern Art, April 8, 2005)

_______________________________________

1.

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its new spaces, on November 18, 2004, there was considerable expectation as to how it would represent its own history and , above all, its profile in a new century.(1) As it turned out, the claim for being , or having been, the world’s foremost address for modernist art invited for a retrospective look, as it tempted the curators to represent its own collection, so unique up to the Sixties, in the new exhibition halls. Thus, it turned out to be a dilemma for the instsitution to become a place for past art with little space for new art. When the authorities, in 1999, presented the plans for the extension of the Museum, for which they had appointed the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, the “future of the Museum of Modern Art”, as they entitled the publication of the new project, was nothing but a building project. Indeed, the core of the old collection profited most from the extension , as it was used in the exhibition halls. The future of the Museum was conveived as the future of the building.

But the problem inherent in this policy could not entirely be negated. Thus, the educational department , half a year later, announced a graduate seminar with the title “When was Modern Art ?” and explained the title as “a contemporary question” which only makes sense after the fact.(2) At this occasion, I gave the keynote address, whose subject I will pursue today. It is the unique role of the MoMa, as the New Yorker tenderly call it, in establishing Modern Art which it carries in its name, on a universal level and thus cut off from its home base in Europe. Right from its opening ,in 1929, it recreated Modern Art as as new myth that was rescued from European history and thus became accessible as an independant value for an American audience. Paradoxically, the myth lived from the fact that Modern Art’s history seemed to be over in prewar Europe which , as a result, made it possible to tell its history. With other words, it needeed a Narrative of Modern Art in order to turn it into history.

It probably comes as a surprise that it needed the Americans to ask the question “What is Modern Art?” , even though its history had largely bypassed them at the time. The question implied further questions such as “When was Modern Art?” and “Where was Modern Art?”, when it had not happened in the US ( a notion that was difficult to accept for a number of reasons). Much later, and because of new postwar ideologies, the conflict was covered up by the reconciliatory formula “Western Art”.(3) But , before the war, the mission of the MoMa implied the unwelcome message that Modernism in the arts had been marginal at home. The mission was carried out by a handful of curators and critics among which I will single out Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr., the first director of the Moma(4) , though the role of the Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1932 , and of the Guggenheim, all three in the same city, must not be forgotten. The success of the mission caused the protest of young American artists who felt excluded from the picture and demanded a share in Modern Art. In their counter attack, the New York School emerged like a phenix from the ashes of prewar art.

The war on the battlefield was followed by a war in the art scene which reversed the former relation between the two hemispheres. Soon, American newcomers dominated postwar art and claimed the heritage of European Modern Art for themselves. Cultural hegemony thus was an offshoot of the new world power in politics and economy. Though American Art still had to conquer its audience at home, it soon became a weapon for the worldwide export of the American idea of freedom. Abstract Expressionism, with its individual gesture, served politics best, because it did not look political . At a time when the Soviets forced their Social Realism upon their new satellites in Eastern Europe, we can speak of a cold war in the Arts. Also in Germany, Western Art testified as Free Art against State Art in the Eastern Half.(5) But this subject is well known, while I will treat a largely unexplored aspect of the same story. It was the effort to implant Modernism, as a universal model for art, in America, a story which anticipated what today happens in many countries as a result of art’s globalization. There was first a strong national bias against accepting Modern Art as something from uproad, and there was second an equally strong resistance against the notion that Modern Art had happened already, but not at home. The outcome of the battle in this case is obvious. It was the impatience of the American Art scene to overcome the time lag and to become Modern in an American way, though in a way which, again, would qualify as universal.

MoMa’s share in this double story tempted the museum to reenact its own past when it reopened in 2004.On one entire floor, we are shown prewar Modernism which remains in European hands, while, on the next floor, and with the same extension, we are shown postwar Modernism as an American movement where the Europeans are marginalized. Though this view covers up a lot of internal battles in the war and postwar years, the museum’s role in canonizing Modern art is undisputed. As a result, Europe received its own Modernism back as a protected heritage out of American hands. When the clouds of the war years dissipated, Modern Art became an issue of recovery and rediscovery. The case of Picasso’s Guernica is, in our context, noteworthy. Commissioned by the Spanish Republic that soon would cease to exist, it went into exile in 1939 when young Jackson Pollock would admire it in a New York Gallery. As Picasso’s loan, it survived the Franco years in the MoMa and only was restituted in 1981.(6)

We usually handle a small repertory of key words when we describe the contemporary world. Such terms are “modern” or “modernist”, and we add a number of prefixes such as “premodern”, “high modern”,“postmodern”, “late modern” or “hypermodern“ in order to save the essence of “modern” for different exigencies. Such labels only function because we have agreed to accept them as explanatory, while, in fact, they live from conventions and only make sense in a given situation. We believe to understand what they mean, because the others equally believe in them. To speak of modern in modern times, seems to be a tautological act. But the term has become a matter of definition or, better, of identity. Nothing is more modern than the modern. But the modern, in the meanwhile, appears rather as our past or, as one often reads, as our antiquity.

2.

Seen in our context, modern art first was regarded as European and located in Paris. But, meanwhile, it had disintegrated in Europe, where it even was attacked as an official enemy. It also was threatened and contested all the time from within by competing waves of modernism.(7) It therefore needed a view from afar to identify Modern Art as a whole and to write its history as a meaningful evolution and progress. This only became possible in America where Modern Art was not at home but was looked at with the eyes of desire. It was praised for its international spirit which, as it was hoped, would help to overcome the still prevailing isolationism at home. The MoMa did not identify as a Museum of Modernist Art, but was rightly called a Museum of Modern Art. Modernity is different from Modernism, much as history is different from an idea. The term modernist, in the early writings of Clement Greenberg, seems to be synonymous with avant-garde. It certainly meant a program, in particular a life style and the firm belief in high culture which Americans wanted to possess themselves.(8)

Our museum therefore made the claim to represent the history of modern art or the modern history of art as a whole, and not just a new art movement called modernist. The young Alfred H. Barr did not tackle as yet with the term “modernist”, but tried to protect the term “modern” from all kind of misuses. In a note written in 1934, five years after the foundation of the MoMa, he distinguished “modern art” (whose chronology was everything but clear) from “the colloquialism ‘Modern Art’ in caps” which had become “a problem not of periods but of prejudices”.(9) Since recent art was “of immense and confusing variety”, Modern Art could “not be defined with any degree of finality”. This was a dangerous thought which he had to conceal soon thereafter, since it undermined his mission in the Museum.

In 1929, “The Ladies”, including Mrs Rockefeller, Jr, Ms Lillie P. Bliss and Mrs. Sullivan, appointed Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr., then 27 years old, as director of what would become the MoMa. After he had studied Medieval Art with Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton, he won a name by writing art criticism. His trip to Russia, two years before his nomination, convinced him that European Modernism in the arts could only survive in a free country.(10) As director, he kept distance from Europe where the battle over avantgardism had divided the parties. In his extraterritorial position, he felt it as his duty to make Modern Art a subject of Art History in a generally accepted and acceptable way and thus to liberate it from the debate over its value and whether it was still alive and how it should be defined. The project to codify Modern Art as a topic of Art History implied the necessity to agree on a great narrative on the same level with that of general Art History, a narrative for whose promotion he used a threefold strategy in addition to writing innumerable pamphlets and reviews. He first organized spectacular exhibitions which made the narrative visible and selfexplanatory, he then backed the exhibitions with diagrams of an almost biological evolution in the Arts, and, third, he tried to make the permanent collection his major concern in the hope that it should become a mirror of what was implied in the history of Modern Art. Also today, a collection turns out to be the most important, and complicated, issue for Museums in a Global World.

In this respect, the MoMa soon was attacked both from the Regionalists for underrepresenting American artists and from the Internationalists for promoting the wrong Americans. For the one side, it was responsible for the “degradation of Art in America”, meaning the betraying of American ideals, while the other side felt deluded by the Museum’s attitude to turn Abstraction into a historical style rather than to keep it alife. The battle cries were Formalism (against Abstract Cubism) and Romantic Illustration (against Figurative Art in the American tradition). The small formation of “American Abstract Artists” (AAA), whose members today mostly forgotten und still lacking the great names later to be associated with the New York School, declared war on the MoMa. Ad Reinhardt, one of the few to expect fame, designed a leaflet in april 1940 wondering “How modern is the Museum of Modern Art?” He thus questioned the title of a recent MoMa exhibition “Art in our time” and asked “Whose time? Which time? Should not Modern conceivably include the ‘Avant Garde’?”(11) The Museum’s policy, indeed, had caused a dilemma in distancing Modern Art into history, above all into a history out of America. Thus, young American artists preferred to ask: When will Modern Art happen in America? “What about the hundreds (literally) modern and Non-Objective artists in America”, as Reinhardt concluded the list of questions.

3.

Such controversies only prove the unusual success of the MoMa’s activities, above all of its exhibitions which received a maximum of attention and gave rise to endless debates, as no art museum ever has experienced. It was here that the cause of Modern Art, despite its European genealogy, eventually was settled, though it took twenty years to reach this goal in the States. As Arthur Danto put it: “The Modern made us modern”. But Architecture was better qualified to win the battle, if only because there existed only one candidate to represent the Modern: “The International Style”, as Henry-Russell Hitchcock and young Philip Johnson called it in their book which they published on the occasion of the big exhibition of 1932 they curated on Barr’s request. Barr predicted that “America will be going completely modern”, as he wrote in a letter to the trustee Philip Goodwin.(12) It was unusual that a museum changed the reigning order of the country’s architecture. Johnson’s next exhibition, 1934, was a design show entitled “Machine Art”. Also here the target was undisputed.(13)

But the main battle was still ahead, and Barr sounded the charge with his two big exhibitions on the Visual Arts , the first of which opened in March 1936 with the title “Cubism and Abstract Art”. On the dust jacket of the catalogue he presented one of his charts of Modern Art. It is a genealogical tree rooted in the years around 1890 and, in 1935, producing the two main branches of Geometrical and Non-Geometrical Abstract Art. The one current, as he writes on the occasion, is more intellectual while the second appears more emotional.(14) He would, in December of the same year, dedicate the next show to the second of these currents which he called “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”. His favour was with the second which he regarded as the rightful heir to Abstraction whose course, in his feelings, had already turned full circle, much to the dislike of the living abstracts. In the catalogue, however, he tried to keep a careful balance and to act more as a historian than as partisan art critic, since, in his view, both currents compelemented each other in representing the Modern in the arts. In the catalogue, he described the Surrealist exhibion, already the 55th exhibition of the Museum in only eight years, as “the second of a series intended to illustrate some of the principal movements of modern art in a comprehenseive, objective, and historical manner. In exhibiting these movements the Museum does not intend to foster any particular aspect of modern art”.(15) Nevertheless, it was obvious that Modern Art had very different faces which did not harmonize and invited for partisanship and mutual exclusion.

Barrs panoramas of modern art’s history in which Americans were latecomers, damaged the cause more than helping it. Were Americans the rightful heirs and did they want to be heirs at all or rather have their own modernism? Reinhardt’s cartoon of 1946, an ironical mirror of Barr’s charts, advises us “How to look at Modern Art in America”, but this title offers an ambivalent reading, as it also can be read: How to look in America at Modern Art. The so-called “tree of contemporary art” has a main branch devoted to “pure (abstract ) ‘paintings’ (in caps)” that was to Reinhardt’s liking, while a second, overloaded branch that threatens to break down, has the illustrative or pictorial masters, mostly Americans and among them “world war II artists” and those of “regionalism and illustration”, obviously the wrong choice. Abstract Expressionism was not yet ready as label, but some of its representatives flourish on the healthy branch. The mighty trunk however is entirely European and displays the names of Barr’s three favourites Bracque, Matisse and, above all, Picasso to whom we will come back(16).

Barr’s second strategy concerned the permanent collection. In a first moment, the collection was not conceived to be “unchangeable”, as Conger Goodyear wrote in 1931, but would “metabolically discard older works, as it acquired newer ones”, to keep to the modern in the sense of the ever present, as Kirk Varnedoe summarized the case(17) Though it was only in 1953 that the MoMa formally renounced this program and decided to freeze the collection of masterpieces, the bequest of private collections (such as the Lillie P.Bliss Collection) already in 1933 exerted a new pressure on the acquisition policy. Barr, in 1933, demanded a representative collection showing the origins and history of modern art . The “Report on the Permanent Collection” was remembered as the “torpedo report”, for Barr, an amateur of military history, thought of the collection “as a torpedo moving through time, its nose the ever advancing present, its tail the ever receding past”(18). In a chart drawn in the same year, the torpedo is launched in 1850 with “European Prototypes and Sources”, speeding up after 1900 with the “French School” and leaving Americans only a minor part. The arrow denotes a time span of fifty years for collecting Modern Art. Even later, in 1944, Barr advised to concentrate on “the past fifty years”.(19) But what when the timelimits shifted from year to year? And what with new art that never could be anticipated and even less directed? Barr had gone into his own trap when he declared Modern Art as history and still wanted to convert America to it.

4.

Before the war years, European modernism had been canonized as a foreign and powerful ideal that was to challenge American culture. This happened paradoxically not via European intervention but, on the contrary, as an American project that even valued Modern art from Europe higher than Europe was willing to do at the time. Alice G. Marquis, Barr’s biographer, uses captions like “converting the heathen” or “preaching the gospel” for characterizing his missionary MoMa project(20). It is not that European modernism was a legend. But it was recreated as a myth in America and lived on with this reconsecration, while in Europe it seemed to be exhausted. Thus, the American mirror was welcomed as a recompense for an almost lost history which continued in the New World as a myth. With the outbreak of world war II, many European artists went to New York into exile. At the time, the city was still thought of as exile, while, ten years later, it became the new paradise of Modern Art. It was then, that the geography of art changed over night.

The MoMa, to be true, had exhibited American artists time and again and even had sent American art for exhibitions to Europe. But it mostly acted as a European outpost. Picasso who never visited the States, enjoyed his extraterritorial apogee in 1939 when the MoMa launched his legendary retrospective, showing “Forty years of his Art”, as the subtitle said. Two years earlier, the same museum had acquired Picasso’s famous “Demoiselles d’Avignon”, the official icon of Modernism, that dated back as far as 1907. It is noteworthy that in France where it had been for sale for almost ten years, not a single museum had been interested to buy it(21). In the meanwhile, also Picasso’s “Guernica”, a recent work from 1937, came as loan of the artist to the MoMa which, as a result, became the official stage of his oeuvre. Its publication, by the art dealer Curt Valentin, which, at that time, must have been the first monograph of any work of Modern Art, was introduced by Barr himself(22). Four years later, 1951, Barr wrote a voluminous book on “Matisse.His Art and his public”which had grown out of his early catalogue of Matisse in the MoMa, exactly twenty years before(23).

Quite different was the case of Marcel Duchamp who actually worked in the States from early on and already exhibited in the Armory show of 1912. The difference may be explained with his difficult working (or rather non working) practice, but, in fact, it also was a result of a bitter rivalry among the New York curators. His “Large Glass” which had never left the US , was first exhibited 1926 in Katherine S. Dreier’s “International exhibition of modern art” at the Brooklyn museum(24). The artist was closely linked to Ms Dreier who claimed to have founded a forerunner of the MoMa. With Duchamp’s help and that of Man Ray, she had established the Société Anonyme in 1920, also called “Museum of Modern Art” (25). Thus, Duchamp was part of an earlier project in the city and acted in another camp. In 1930, Dreier wrote a book with the premature title “Western art and the New Era” which Barr did not want to review. They avoided each other, as any rivals do. As a result, she decided to give a large part of her collection to Yale University in 1941. Even after her death, Barr was unable to acquire the “Large Glass”, since Duchamp who acted as her executor, did not want to favour the MoMa where he never had an exhibition, though he lived around the corner.

But there was, beside Alfred H. Barr and Katherine S. Dreier, a third mythographer of Modern European Art whose public success surpassed the one of the other two, although her name is rarely included in the story. I am speaking of the American writer Gertrude Stein who started living, when 29 years old, in Paris from 1907 onwards and stayed in the city for all her life. Picasso’s famous portrait of hers dates from 1907 when her lasting friendship with the artist began. The photograph by Man Ray, the great American in Paris, from 1922 stages her, as it were, as the American muse of a European genius(26). This epitomizes her life with the Paris Avantgarde which she herself turned into an official legend. This happened when she published her first popular book in 1933. It was a selfpromotion under the mask of another writer, her companion Alice B. Toklas whose autobiography the title announces. She revealed the truth only on the last page when she admitted that she had written the autobiography for Alice. “I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe”.(27)

Indeed, the facts were almost as fictitious as in Defoe’s case. But they qualified as historical truth and thus confirmed the participation of Americans in the myth of Modern Art in Europe. Though friends like Picasso were upset after reading the text, the success with the general public in the US was amazing. Over night, the author had become a celebrity in America. In October 1934, she arrived in New York to start a lecture tour which took her from one coast to the other. Interestingly enough, her first lecture was organized by the MoMa where she lectured on pictures and explained that writers differed from painters, even when they both pursued the same project of inventing modernism(28). One year later, Barr mounted the first of his two ground breaking exhibitions on Modern Art. In 1938, Gertrude Stein published her essay on Picasso in Paris, and used again a deliberatly popular style, so unlike her other writings. In 1939, Scribner’s sold 8000 copies of the American edition, in the same year when the big Picasso show opened at the MoMa(29). This can be no mere coincidence. The Americans were happy to own in the person of Gertrude Stein an eye witness and even a patron of the European avantgarde from early on. In the Alice Toklas book, she pretended to have “introduced Matisse and Picasso to each other”, thus embarrassing the “Picassoites and the Matisseites” who in the States still fought their battles. In her Pisasso book, Stein stressed the affinities between Spanish and American artists with which she tried to explain her own artificial writing style as equivalent to Picasso’s Cubism(30).

5.

It is here not my intention to describe myth II, postwar American Modernism, once again. Often enough, the saga of the New York school has been told as a miraculous epiphany or as an immaculate conception. Even John Updike’s novel, “Seek my face”, restores the myth through a fictitious interview with Jackson Pollock’s widow that, as the author admits, is based on a Pollock biography(31). But, at closer look, it becomes obvious that the saga of European Modernism, the MoMa saga, was a reason for creating Myth II in a spirit of opposition and liberation from European ancestors. Modern Art , up to then seemed to live on in America without American artists and, even worse, as an already completed story. In both respects, the picture changed dramatically with the victory of the American case which made reconciliation with the MoMa saga possible.

It needed however a new protagonist to set the wheels in motion. Clement Greenberg, at the time a young neo-marxist literary critic, easily eclipsed the authority of Barr, Jr. when, in his article “Avantgarde and Kitsch”, from 1939, he made two claims that became mandatory for American Modernism: first, “to keep culture moving”in America and, second, to strive for “high level” avant-garde whose “expression of the absolute” was best represented by “abstract” or “nonobjective” art(32). At the same time when Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian Catholic, took his first steps in what would become the studies of Mass Media, as a topic worth of Academic attention (his “Mechanical Bride” from 1950, transferred methods of art criticism to the discussion of low culture), Greenberg, like an Old Testament prophet, demanded to purifiy art from the dirty “kitsch”, as he called it, of the picture world of the mass media in print and film.American artists found a powerful advocate in him who, step by step, made their case his own. Also Peggy Guggenheim, disillusioned by her relationship with Max Ernst, started to accept young Americans, among them Jackson Pollock, for her gallery “Art of This century” which she had opened in New York in October 1942(33). But it still took some time ,until, in 1949, “Life” magazine would publish an article on Pollock where a Greenberg remark on “the geatest living painter in the US” was quoted with a question mark(34).

As a matter of fact, American society was not yet ready to accept Modern Art that seemed to undermine patriotic values and to alienate Americans from their own traditions. At the same time, when the first exhibitions of American Art began to travel to Europe (later on, as we have learned, even supported by the CIA in the name of freedom and free art), the ideological battle at home reached its peak. In the MoMa, the acquisition policy , in the late fourties, was more debated than ever and now also involved American artists. Some members of the Committee in charge, “encouraged by adverse newspaper crirticism”, resisted the acquisition of paintings called “Abstract Expressionist”, as Barr noted 1948 in his chronicle(35). In the new climate of the Cold War, abstract art was attacked for being Communist in spirit. Already in 1946, the US State Department had been prompted to cancel a show with the title “Advancing American Art”, consisting of works purchased by the government. Even president Truman joined the ranks of the critics and blamed Modern art for being a “Ham and eggs school”. In July 1948, the items of the show were auctioned off in order to avoid further trouble(36).

6.

In the late forties, the MoMa waged war on two fronts, as it was accused for backing Modernism, as a wrong track in America, in the first place, but soon attracted the opposite criticism of not backing enough the rise of American Modernism. The “Boston revolt”, from 1948, exemplifies the one debate, the Thomas Hess campaign, from 1954, the other. James S.Plaut, from Boston, surprised the MoMa with his populist declaration that Modern Art, as a style, had become “both dated and academic” and thus offered no future for American art. In his words, it had been “brought to a close in 1939”, in the year of Barr’s big Picasso retrospective in the Moma. The publicity of the attack was enourmous, as Plaut was director of the Boston Museum of Modern Art which had been founded in 1935 as an offshoot of the MoMa and which Plaut renamed “Institute of Contemporary Art” , since he would no longer “stomach the word Modern”, as Life magazine reported. The magazine discussed the Boston exhibition “Milestones of American Painting in Our Century” as an attempt to strengthen native traditions against European schools which had become a “silly faddism”(37). The protectionist appeal to National feelings sounds familiar from other scenes. Remarkably enough, American art, while it was ready to exert worldwide hegemony, at home still defended its acceptance. The problem was to identify American art as Modern art in an international sense.

Barr eventually was able to settle the case with a “three museum statement on Modern Art”, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, in March 1950. The text affirmed the “belief in the continuing validity of what is generally known as Modern Art” and opposed “its definition in narrow nationalistic terms”. With other words, Modern Art was not over but was expected to continue in America. The battle was joined by Modernist artists who felt humiliated by the assaults on their patriotism and morals. Eighteen of them, the so-called “Irascibles”, in 1950 protested against a growing anti-modernism in the general public. They were offended by Plaut’s demand to “enjoin the artist to forge closer ties with an ever growing public in terms of common understanding”(38). Barr objected that the Nazis and the Soviet Communists had enjoined the artists with terrible results and that only free art would represent a democratic society.

The other campaign was launched by Thomas B. Hess, executive editor of Art News, in 1954 when he complained that the MoMa was “late on Abstract Edxpressionsim” and did not sufficiently recognize postwar American art. Again, in 1957, he rebuked the MoMa for speaking “for rather than to its public”. Barr however reminded the readers that Art News already in 1950 had published an article of his for the catalogue of the Venice Biennale from where, incidentally, American art would triumphantly return home(39). The MoMa, in fact, had exhibited American avant garde art in 1952 and even before, but did not dedicate an entire show to Abstract Expressionism until 1958. The exhibition The New American Painting however first toured in Europe, before it was shown at the Museum in 1959. American Art, while recently becoming important for political campaigns uproad, still remained then controversial among Americans. In the Sixties, this debate looked suddenly old when a new art scene, heralding postmodern thinking, rejected so-called Modern Art as being no longer their concern. With the emergence of Pop, Minimal and Happening, the accepted definitions of “Modern” were out of date. The artists themselves revolted against MoMa’s collection that so neatly symbolized Modernism one and Modernism two. Thus, they deliberately risked the Non- Admittance in the Temple of Modern Art.In less than twenty years, so-called modern had become a past definition of art.

At that moment, the Europeans reentered the stage of American art where they had been lost presence lately. Jean Tinguely, a young member of the “New Realists” from France, invaded even the grounds of the MoMa with a kind of Trojan horse. In the evening of March 17th, 1960 his selfconstructed machine exploded in the Museum’s sculpture garden. He called it a “self-destroying work of art” and entitled it ironically as “Homage to New York”. His was a hybrid between installation and performance that reversed the creative working process, in that the work dissoved with fire and smoke. The event only could be recorded with a film and survived in the description of Billy Klüver(40). A piano, played mechanically, and a radio were part of the machine. One of Tinguely’s so-called “Meta-Matics”, with a painting arm, produced the writing “L’art ephemère“. Barr, then close to retirement, hilariously introduced the event that so clearly contradicted his collection principles, with an allegorical speech. The machine that was to collapse into “junk and scrap”, he argued, would “at the drop of a coin scribble a moustache on the automatist Muse of Abstract Expressionsism” (41). He was, however, happy that he did not have to consider the work’s acquisition, as it destroyed itself.

7.

The MoMa already had become captive of its own history. After having created the double myth of the Modern, the museum now staged its own myth. When Barr, Jr. retired in 1967 from the Moma, William Rubin, as director of painting and sculpture, closely followed his footsteps. His Picasso show was hailed in 1980 as the greatest event in the museum’s history and, in my memory, was the first show to require visits by appointment worldwide(42). But the living art scene had been for a long time departed from Picasso’s Modernism. In this respect, the situation was altogether different in Barr’s Picasso show in 1939, more than forty years before, when the artist, two years after Guernica, was still discussed as a possible guide for American artists. In the meanwhile, at the age of 92, he had died in 1974, but , among artists, he had long before fainted into a memory of another age, called the Modern. Barr’s show had opened immediately after the outbreak of World War Two and thus had also political overtones.This was no longer the case in 1980, and the public enjoyed the show in a different mood. Modern Art which in a way had become MoMa’s destiny, was celebrated as Paradise lost.

Four years later, with “Primitivism and 20th century Art”, William Rubin followed the same line. The subtitle of the 1984 exhibition, speaking of an “affinity of the Tribal and the Modern”, tries to conceal an old hegemonial argument that nevertheless became so obvious in the exhibtion, since the latter was not dedicated both to Tribal Art and Modern Art, but, once again, chose Tribal masks and festishes as “inspiration” for the creative genius in Modern painting(43). Whereas the 1939 show spoke of Picasso’s “Negro period” as a single moment in his long career, the new show presented Primitivism as a general subject in Modern Art. Primitivism which had neatly divided the West from the rest of the world, was just the other side of the Modernist coin. Modern Art had become Modern by appropriating and redefining Tribal Art which the young artists in Paris collected in a mood of protest against Academism.Rubin’s show could have been called “Picasso and Ethnic Art”. But it definitely looked outdated in 1984. The colonial gaze, so important for Modernist identity, no longer could be applied with the old self confidence. It was the last time when Modernism, with its claim of Universalism, was officially proclaimed by a Western Museum.

(1) On the extension project cf. John Elderfield, ed.,Imagining the Future of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, H.Abrams 1998); on the opening: Charles Rosen- Henri Zerner, Red-Hot MoMa, in: The New York Review of Books, January 13,2005,p.18ff.-Cf.also John Elderfield,ed., Modern Painting and Sculpture:1880 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art (N.York 2004). On the MoMa as a myth, cf.Arthur C.Danto, High Art, Low Art, and the Spirit of History, in:A.D.,Beyond the Brillo Box (N.York 1992)p.147ff.
(2) Conference on April 8-9, 2005, at the MoMa: Cf.Hans.Belting,Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age, in:Peter.Weibel-Amdrea Buddensieg,ed.,Contemporary Art and the Museum. A global Perspective (Stuttgart 2007)p.25.
(3) Cf.Laszlo Glozer,ed., Westkunst.Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939 (Catal.of the Cologne Exhibition, 1981).
(4) Irving Sandler-Amy Newman,ed., Defining Modern Art. Selected Writings of Alfred H.Barr,Jr. (New York.H.Abrams 1986);Alice Goldfairb Marquis, A.H. Barr, Jr., Missionary for the Modern (New York, Contemp. Books, 1989).; Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the intellectual origins of the Museum of Modern art (MIT Press, Cambridge 2002).
(5) Hans Belting, Identität im Zweifel. Ansichten der deutschen Kunst (Cologne 1999) and Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago 2003)p.54ff.
(6) Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (Chicago 2001)p.p.352ff.: Guernica. The work as myth.
(7) Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (Yale Univ.Press,New Haven 1995)p.123ff.
(8) Already in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), Clement Greenberg uses the term “Modernist Art” as syonymous with Avant-Garde: John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg. The collected essays and criticism, Vol. I (Chicago 1986)p.11.
(9) Sandler, in Sandler-Newman (see note 4)p.82.
(10) Sandler, in: Sandler-Freeman (cf.note 4)p.5ff.. Cf.also Marquis, on the subject.
(11) Kynaston MC Shine, The Museum as Muse.Artists reflect(H.Abrams,New York 1999)p.209;Sandler (cf.note 4)p.26f.
(12) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.18f. and 98ff.
(13) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.22.
(14) Sandler (cf.note 4) p.26 and p.84ff., p.92 (Chart) and p.93ff. Cf. Kantor (cf.note 4) p. 190ff. and 314ff. (Cubism and Abstract), the chart (325ff.)
(15) Sandler-Newman (cf.note 4) p.91
(16) W. Rubin, ed.,Ad Reinhardt, Catal.of Exhibition (MoMa 1991)p.110; Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Querelle des Modernes. Zum Generationenkonflikt der Avantgarde, in: Sigrid Weigel, ed., Generation. Zur Genealogie des Konzepts-Konzepte der Genealogie (München 2005)p.57ff. and Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde (Berlin 2005).
(17) Kirk Varnedoe, The evolving torpedo:Changing ideas of the collection of painting and sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art, in:John Eldefiel,ed., The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century.Continuity and Change (New York.H.Abrams 1995)p.15f. and 17
(18) V arnedoe (cf.note 17)p.21
(19) Varnedoe (cf.note 17)p.25f. and Sandler (cf.note 4)p.27ff.
(20) Marquis (cf.note 4), p. 256f
(21) Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece (Chicago 2001)p.254-163 with further bibliography p.462.
(22) Juan Larrea, Guernica.Pablo Picasso (introduction by Alfred H.Barr, Jr.)(Curt Valentin Publisher, New York 1947)
(23) A.H. Barr, Jr., Matisse. His art and his public (New York,MoMa 1951) p.222 (for his own Matisse show). Cf.Marquis (cf.note 4)p.260f.
(24) Marquis (cf.note 4)p.256-260. Cf. Also Amadée Ozenfont, Leben und Gestaltung. Bilanz des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Kiepenheuer, Potsdam 1931) p.. 116f. for a picture of the Large Glass in the Exhibition.
(25) Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A biography (New York 1996) p.273f.
(26) Man Ray, Self Portrait (New York 1963,1988)p.147. For the legend of the portrait cf. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, (New York 1933, Vintage Books 1990)p.49,53 and 57, as well: Gertrude Stein, P icasso (London 1938, Dover Publ. ,N.York 1984)p.8 and 21.
(27) Stein (cf.note 26) p. 252.
(28) Stefana Sabin, Gertrude Stein. (Rowohlts Monographien, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1996)p.p.105
(29) Sabin (cf.note 28)p. p.116
(30) Stein, Picasso (cf.note 26)p.1.-Cf. Donald Gallup, Picasso, Gris, and Gertrud Stein. In: Picasso.Gris.Miró.Spanish Masters of 20th Century (Catalogue San Francisco Musum of Art, 1948, p.15f.
(31) John Updike, Seek my face (New York, Knopf 2002)p.7 for his sources. Cf. Steven Naifeh-Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock. An American Saga (London, Barrie and Jenkins 1989).
(32) John O’Brian, (cf.note 8)p..5-22. For Greemberg, cfg. Naifeh-Smith (cf.note 31)passim and Thierry De Duve, Clement Greenberg bertween the lines (Paris 1996)
(33) Naifeh-Smith(cf.note 31)p.435ff.
(34) Life Magazine, August 19549. Cf. C.Ratcliff, The fate of a gesture:J.Pollock and Postwar American Art (New York 12996) and Naifeh-Smith (cf.note 31) p.595
(35) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.30
(36) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.31
(37) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.32f.
(38) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.36
(39) Sandler (cf.note 4)p.38f.Cf., for Venice, Germano Celant-Anna Costantini, Roma-New York 1948-64 (Milan 1993)
(40) Billy Klüver, The Garden Party, in: Pontus Hulten, ed., A magic stronger than Death (Catalogue Jean Tinguely, Milan 1987) p.74-83 and Bruno Latour-Peter Weibel, ed., Iconoclash (Kartlsruhe, ZKM, and MIT Press,2002) p.620 with “invitation card”
(41) James Leggio, A.H.Barr, Jr.,as Writer of Allegory, in: John Elderfield (cf.note 17)p.141f.
(42) W. Rubin, ed., Pablo Picasso. A retrospectiver (The Museum of Modern Art 1980)
(43) Alfred H.Barr, Jr., Picasso.Forty Years of his Art (with the statements by the artist,, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago) (The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1939)