Modern Women

Barry, born and educated in Birmingham, England, was a film critic for the London weekly The Spectator from 1925 to 1930, motion-picture editor of the London Daily Mail, cofounder of the London Film Society in 1925, and author of the first serious book of film criticism published in England, Let's Go to the Pictures (1926).¹ She moved to New York in 1930 and joined the staff of the Museum in 1932. In 1935 MoMA established its Film Library, with Barry as its curator and guiding light. That film was an art form was a completely new idea, and the American film studios were initially skeptical. Years of advocacy by Barry led them to realize that by depositing prints of their works in the library they could both clean out their vaults and build an enduring legacy. In addition, Barry brokered the nonprofit feature film exhibition in North America; the studios agreed that after two years of a commercial run, a film could enter the library archive and be screened for educational purposes, as long as admission was not charged.² In 1940 she organized the exhibition D. W. Griffith, American Film Master at MoMA, establishing the paradigm for film curatorship, and wrote the accompanying publication, still one of the greatest books on film in the history of the medium. In 1946 she was named director of the Film Library, in addition to curator, and held both titles until her retirement, in 1951.

A major advocate for the improvement of urban life through attractive, functional, and low-cost housing, Bauer (later Wurster) was first associated with the Museum in 1932, when she assisted in the preparation of the housing section of Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, the show that coined the appellation "International Style" for modern architecture. She contributed to the catalogue for the Museum's exhibition America Can't Have Housing (1934), and she wrote the foreword to the exhibition catalogue Architecture in Government Housing (1936). Also that year she joined the Museum's advisory committee on architecture, on which she served for six years. Through her efforts and those of her sister, Elizabeth Mock, the Museum's Department of Architecture and Industrial Design became an advocate in the fields of urban planning and housing in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1929 Bliss founded The Museum of Modern Art with Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.¹ She had been a financial supporter of the 1913 Armory Show, of which her friend, artist Arthur B. Davies, was a main organizer, and she had purchased multiple works from the show. Another major buyer at the Armory Show was John Quinn, who within a decade amassed the most important collection of modern art in the country. When Quinn died, in 1924, Bliss, along with Sullivan, made purchases from the auction of his collection. She also acquired work from Davies's collection after his death, in 1928. Bliss herself died on March 12, 1931, when the Museum was not yet two years old. At that time she owned twenty-six works by Paul Cézanne, including The Bather (c. 1885), in what was considered one of the most discerning privately held groups of Cézannes in the United States, as well as works by Honoré Daumier, Davies, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Pierre-August Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Her collection was valued at nearly $1.14 million and, in a complete surprise to staff and trustees at the Museum, including Rockefeller and director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., it was revealed after her death that she had bequeathed the largest and most important part of it to MoMA.² Her will included two stipulations: three specific works could never be sold or otherwise disposed of (the rest could be deaccessioned provided the funds be used to acquire other artworks) and MoMA must raise $1 million to endow the bequest. This was during the Great Depression, and the Museum could only raise $600,000. That proved sufficient, however, and in 1934 the Bliss bequest was officially acquired. Through this unparalleled gift, the Museum established the nucleus of its collection.

War Comes to the People: A Story Written with the Lens was the first one-woman exhibition at the Museum. On display from December 10, 1940, to January 5, 1941, it featured two hundred photographs by Bonney, an American journalist and photographer, representing the plight of the Finnish people during the Finnish-Soviet War (1939–40).

Each of the Museum's medium-based curatorial departments has a chief curator. The following women have held this position: Mary Lea Bandy (Film, 1980–93; Film and Video, 1993–2001; Film and Media, 2001–06), Iris Barry (Film, 1946–51), Cornelia Butler (Drawings, 2005– ), Riva Castleman (Prints and Illustrated Books, 1976–95), Margit Rowell (Drawings, 1994–2000), Ann Temkin (Painting and Sculpture, 2008–), and Deborah Wye (Prints and Illustrated Books, 1996– ).

"Connie" Constantine came to the Museum in 1948 as an assistant curator in the Department of Architecture and Design (a title she held until 1952, when she was made an associate curator). An important mentor to many younger design historians, she organized a wide range of design and architecture exhibitions and was responsible for promoting the applied and decorative arts—graphic and product design, in particular. She organized design competitions for the Museum and initiated MoMA's involvement in social causes with the 1949 Polio Posters Competition, the first joint effort between a museum and a national health foundation. Her influential 1968 show Word and Image was the thirty-fifth exhibition of posters at the Museum but the only one to seriously address twentieth-century works and present a comprehensive historical survey of the Museum's rich collection of graphic art. In 1970 Constantine became a consultant to the Department of Architecture and Design and special assistant to the director of the Museum, posts she held for a year before leaving MoMA in 1971.

The Museum achieves its goal of educating the public about modernism in part through circulating its exhibitions, domestically and internationally. Though MoMA was not the first museum to have a program dedicated to traveling exhibitions, from the beginning its program was unique in scope, professionalism, and management. Courter (later Osborn) began volunteering in the Department of Circulating Exhibitions in 1933, and by 1935 she was in charge. Exhibitions were sent to museums, art galleries, schools, universities, department stores, movie theaters, and social clubs and associations, in an immense outreach project. The work was highly methodical: devising instructions for installations, writing gallery wall text, preparing press releases, and composing explicit directions for the unpacking and repacking of artworks. In conjunction with the Museum's education program, she was also responsible for the introduction of teaching portfolios—visual aids designed for classroom use and sent to schools. During her tenure the department developed from very modest beginnings into a widely emulated, internationally prestigious program. Courter resigned as director of the Department of Circulating Exhibitions in 1947. About her Alfred H. Barr, Jr., said, "Elodie was the kind who when she left the Museum it took four people to replace her."¹

Crane (widow of Murray Crane, former governor of Massachusetts and president of the paper company Crane & Co.) was a devoted supporter of the Museum and a member of its first board of trustees. She was not an expert on modern art, but she was a close friend of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and held a legendary weekly cultural salon at her apartment. She was also the main benefactor of New York's Dalton School and deeply interested in experimental education. She chaired the Museum's first membership committee and was chairman of the education committee in the early 1930s.

Daniel arrived at MoMA in 1943 from Germany (where she had worked at the Museum Folkwang, Essen) and proceeded systematically to build the Museum's collection of design objects. She almost always assisted with exhibitions and publications rather than organizing or authoring them herself, but she was an expert on the collection and on contemporary industrial design. Manufacturers looking for a good designer and journalists hoping to identify the best-designed product at a certain price went straight to her with their questions. Perhaps the culmination of her activity at the Museum was the 1958–59 exhibition 20th Century Design from the Museum Collection and the accompanying catalogue, the first major attempt to showcase the range and quality of the collection. ¹ She was an associate curator of design in the Department of Architecture and Design at the time of her sudden death, in 1962. Arthur Drexler, director of the department, recalled that Daniel could unerringly unearth "the best knife, fork, and spoon and the best teacup. She was a walking encyclopedia of everything produced both here and abroad, and worked like a dog for the wages of a porter. She carried a card file in her head, and after her death we had pandemonium."²

This position was created in 1986 along with four other deputy directorships as part of a restructuring program at the Museum, and Riva Castleman, Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, was the first person to take on the role. Mary Lea Bandy, Chief Curator of Film and Video, assumed the position from 1999 to 2006. The deputy director for curatorial affairs is the liaison between the director of the Museum and the seven curatorial departments, the Department of Education, the library, and the archives.

Dudley, formerly a registrar at the Newark Museum, in New Jersey, came to MoMA in 1936. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., referred to her as the "head of all registrars," and she is acknowledged for establishing professional registration practices, developing record-keeping systems and procedures that were subsequently adopted by museums throughout the country.¹ In 1958, with Irma Bezold Wilkinson, Dudley literally wrote the book on museum egistration. Titled Museum Registration Methods, it is a true classic in its field.² In addition to her registrarial duties, Dudley was a member of the National Committee to Liberalize the Tariff Laws for Art and chair of the American Association of Museums Committee on Customs. At that time the Tariff Act provided for the importation and return, free of duty, of artworks for exhibition purposes, but with some staggering exceptions. If, for example, a sculpture did not represent a "natural object" (as many in the Museum's collection did not), a duty would be levied. In 1959 the Treasury Department agreed in principle to liberalize the antiquated tariff laws for art and asked Dudley to help revise the law. In 1959 the Senate and House of Representatives passed the bill, and Senator Jacob K. Javits, who introduced the legislation, wrote to Dudley thanking her for her efforts: "You are an outstanding example of how a dedicated individual can move aside mountains of indifference and pave the way for increased cultural growth of all our citizens."³

The death of John Quinn, in 1924, and Arthur B. Davies, in 1928, and the subsequent dispersals of their collections of modern art gave urgency to the idea of a museum for modern art in New York—envisioned as a possibility since the Armory Show, in 1913, among the city's network of collectors and patrons. It found particular traction among three women: Lillie P. Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. In 1936 Rockefeller recalled the formation of the Museum: "I began to think of women whom I knew in New York City, who cared deeply for beauty and who bought pictures, women who would be willing, and had faith enough, to help start a museum of contemporary art. Miss Lizzie Bliss and Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan were outstanding in this group; I asked them to lunch with me and laid the matter before them. I suggested that we form ourselves into a committee of three and that we find a man to be president of the museum that was to be."¹ As president the three women enlisted A. Conger Goodyear, a collector and former trustee of the Albright Gallery, in Buffalo, New York, and for the initial board of trustees they recruited Josephine Boardman Crane, Frank Crowninshield, and Paul J. Sachs. Nelson Rockefeller later remarked, "It was the perfect combination. The three women, among them, my mother, Lillie Bliss and Mary Sullivan, had the resources, the tact and the knowledge of contemporary art that the situation required. More to the point, they had the courage to advocate the cause of the modern movement in the face of widespread division, ignorance and a dark suspicion that the whole business was some sort of Bolshevik plot."² Bliss, Rockefeller, and Sullivan established the tradition at the Museum of women providing critical leadership and essential patronage.

Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, a regular member of the Museum, on her own initiative and unsolicited, walked into the director's office on December 6, 1937, and asked whether he would accept from her an important painting of his choice for the Museum collection. Her only stipulation was that it be a masterpiece—a work of excellence and enduring value. Pablo Picasso's painting Girl Before a Mirror (1932) was selected, and it was purchased in 1938 for $10,000. Margaret Barr later described Guggenheim's donation as "the first pearl in the brilliant necklace of gifts that bear her name."¹ In 1939 she provided $30,000 for the purchase of The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), by Henri Rousseau. After these two gifts, Guggenheim established a purchase fund at the Museum, with two conditions for its use: she must approve of the works purchased, and they must be masterpieces. The sixty-nine acquisitions she funded are staggering in their breadth and importance, and most have become integral to the identity of the Museum. Guggenheim joined the board of trustees in 1940; in 1954 she was named honorary trustee.

Gund joined the Museum's board of trustees in 1976. An outspoken advocate of women in the arts, she has been responsible, through advocacy and direct funding, for the addition of scores of works of art by women to MoMA's collection. She is the founder of Studio in a School, which since 1977 has brought artists into schools and community organizations in New York to lead classes in art-making and work with teachers to integrate art into the curriculum. In 2008 Gund endowed a program outside the Museum in memory of artist Elizabeth Murray: a series of interviews that will compose an oral history of women in the visual arts, administered by the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, New York. She is currently president emerita of the Museum and chairman of MoMA's International Council.

In 2007, Halbreich, acclaimed former director of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, assumed the position of associate director at the Museum. The associate director's role is to strengthen and support contemporary programs at MoMA and P.S.1 and to partner with the director on global initiatives and advocacy. It is the highest-ranking staff position held by a woman in the history of the institution.

In 1971 Heiss cofounded the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, which sought to transform underutilized and abandoned spaces across New York City into accessible artists' studios and exhibition venues. Under this umbrella she founded P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, in Long Island City, Queens, in 1976. For thirty-seven years, until her departure in 2008, Heiss oversaw the programming of this artistcentric Kunsthalle, widely acknowledged to be among the most innovative and important in the world; in 2000 P.S.1 formally became an affiliate of MoMA. In 1998 Heiss received a Women of Distinction Award from the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York and was recognized as one of New York's one hundred most influential women by Crain's New York Business. She established Art International Radio, a nonprofit Web radio station and media arts center operating out of the Clocktower Gallery, in Lower Manhattan, in 2009.

From 1939 until the early 1940s, the Museum's Reception Committee employed a cadre of female volunteers, called hostesses, to assist with entertainment functions. For the opening ceremonies of its Goodwin-Stone building, in 1939, for example, the Museum held a formal dinner on its premises for elite guests but also organized satellite events in at least fourteen private homes. A head shot of each hostess was sent to the social press, captioned "Mrs. ––, who will be hostess at one of the many dinners preceding the reception to be held the night of May 10th by the Trustees of the MOMA at the private opening of the Museum's new two million dollar building. Mrs. –– and her dinner guests will attend the reception and the preview of the Museum's opening exhibition, Art in Our Time."¹ Later, hostesses were also deployed to organize tea parties at the Museum to interest potential new members. Their role in building an audience and a philanthropic community for the Museum is in keeping with the long history of women in the founding and support of nonprofit institutions in the United States.

In 1952, at the urging of Museum director René d'Harnoncourt, MoMA created its International Program, underwritten by a five-year grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with the goal of furthering international understanding through the exchange of contemporary art. The International Council—an affiliate membership group designed to expand the program's base of support—was conceived in 1953 by d'Harnoncourt with Blanchette Rockefeller. Rockefeller spearheaded the organization, enlisting Eliza Bliss Parkinson and Emily Woodruff as colleagues. Members of the council contributed energy, ideas, and annual dues to support the International Program, and the body has continued to thrive under the leadership of remarkable women, such as Jo Carole Lauder and Agnes Gund, to this day.

The Junior Council was established in February 1949 to further the Museum's programming through volunteer activity by younger people with an interest in the arts. Though not restricted to female membership, the council and its leadership were predominately female. Blanchette Rockefeller was the founding chairman of the council, and over its thirty-year existence it was led by women with remarkable skill and passion, including Lily Auchincloss, Beth Straus, Joanne Stern, and Barbara Jakobson. The council was responsible for many important, innovative programs at the Museum, including its Art Lending Service, Penthouse exhibition program, and Christmas card and appointment calendar fundraising endeavors as well as a number of lecture series. In 1981 the Junior Council became the Associate Council, which, in 1986, became the Contemporary Arts Council.

In her early career, shortly after her graduation from Smith College in 1958, the critic and activist worked as a page in the Museum Library. In 1960 Lippard resigned that position, but she continued to spend a significant amount of time at the Museum, conducting research and translations and compiling bibliographies. Starting in 1969, with the advent of the Art Workers' Coalition (in which she was a leader), Lippard participated in protests and artists' rights demonstrations against the Museum. Her activism included founding the group Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) in 1979, an artists' collective (active through 1988) with the following goals: "To provide artists with an organized relationship to society, to demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making, and to provide a framework within which progressive artists can discuss and develop alternatives to the mainstream art system."¹ PAD/D's archive of clippings, photographs, posters, mail art, and ephemera from the period 1979–88 is now part of the Museum Library.

London began her career at the Museum in 1970 as program assistant for the International Program. In 1974, while working in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books as a curatorial assistant, a position she held until 1977, she established a pioneering video program at the Museum, showcasing work being produced internationally in the new art medium. London was responsible for numerous key acquisitions by women video artists at a critical point in the medium's early history. In 1978 she founded the long-running Video Viewpoints lecture series (now Modern Mondays), in which contemporary video artists present their works, and in 1984 she initiated the Museum's Video Study Center. Artwork using video and other timebased media (as well as Web, performance, and installation art) is now the purview of the Department of Media and Performance Art, created by the division of the Department of Film and Media in 2006. London is currently an associate curator in that department.

Miller, a curator of painting and sculpture, organized six legendary Americans exhibitions at the Museum between 1942 and 1963. Designed to showcase recent trends in American art, as a series they reflected and promoted what Miller saw as the best work of the day. In 1952 her exhibition 15 Americans debuted Abstract Expressionism at the Museum, bringing the innovations of the New York School to a (somewhat hostile) mass audience for the first time. In 1956 Miller organized 12 Americans, giving voice to the apostles of the Abstract Expressionists, the second generation of the New York School. In 1958–59 her traveling exhibition The New American Painting proclaimed the radicalism of American abstraction throughout Europe, propelling the artists onto the international scene—it was "the equivalent of the Armory show in reverse," collector Ben Heller said.¹ Perhaps the most radical of Miller's Americans exhibitions was 16 Americans, of 1959–60. This historic exhibition featured the next generation of American artists—those whose work, departing from Abstract Expressionism, led to the Neo-Dada, Minimalism, and Pop art of the latter decades of the century. In addition to her discerning eye and uncanny ability to scout new talent, Miller was distinctive in her approach to exhibition installation. "What you try to achieve," she said, "are climaxes—introduction, surprise, going around the corner and seeing something unexpected, perhaps several climaxes with very dramatic things, then a quiet tapering off with something to let you out alive."² Miller retired from the Museum in 1969.

Mock began working at MoMA part-time in 1937 and with John McAndrew, Curator of Architecture and Industrial Design, she organized What Is Modern Architecture?, a circulating exhibition, in 1938. In 1940 she became McAndrew's assistant and after he was dismissed, in 1942, she took over the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design, heading it during the war years. She organized several exhibitions relating to housing—Built in the U.S.A.: 1932–1944 (1944), Tomorrow's Small House: Models and Plans (1945), and If You Want to Build a House (1946)—and through her efforts and those of her sister, Catherine Bauer, the department became an advocate in the fields of urban planning and housing in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1964 the Museum published Mock's book Modern Gardens and the Landscape (she was known then as Elizabeth B. Kassler), one of the definitive surveys in the field.

The Modern Women's Fund was established at the Museum in 2005, through the generous support of Sarah Peter, to promote scholarship on women in the arts. The first project financed by the fund was the twoday international symposium "The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts," in January 2007. The symposium brought together artists, art historians, curators, and activists to examine the ways in which gender is and has been addressed by museums (including MoMA), the academy, and artists and to discuss its future role in art practice and scholarship. This book, Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, is its second major undertaking. The fund has also sponsored educational programs (including The Feminist Future series of panel discussions, 2007–08, and the Women and the Bauhaus lecture series, 2009–10), research and travel opportunities for curators, and a series of exhibitions featuring work by women artists in the Museum's collection in 2010.

When her husband, Beaumont, the Museum's curator of photography, was drafted into the Army Air Forces in 1942, Newhall—a painter and an expert on the work of photographer Alfred Stieglitz—was hired in his stead.¹ Although inexperienced in museum work, she steered the department through a turbulent period, including the dismissal of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., as director of the Museum, in 1943, and an exhibition program that included—against her wishes—large-scale photographic reproductions for propagandistic aims (in shows organized by Edward Steichen), very much in opposition to the department's scholarly and aesthetic approach to the medium. During her tenure Newhall organized more than a dozen exhibitions, including New Acquisitions: Photography by Alfred Stieglitz (1942–43); Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children (1943), Levitt's first solo exhibition; and significant monographic exhibitions of work by Paul Strand (1945) and Edward Weston (1946), the first photography retrospectives at the Museum and the first for Strand at any American museum. Despite these contributions, the Museum did not allow Newhall to remain in the department after Beaumont's return, in 1945. In 1946 Steichen was hired to head the department and Beaumont resigned in protest.

In 1933 the Museum hired Newmeyer to organize its first publicity department. Her initial project was a national tour-in-progress of James McNeill Whistler's painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871)—also known as "Whistler's Mother." Revitalizing an almost nonexistent publicity effort, she sent a flood of press releases announcing each city on the tour, describing the lengths the Museum had gone to borrow the painting from the Louvre and highlighting its insurance valuation of $1million. Due in large part to her efforts the tour was a nationwide sensation: more than two million people visited their local museums to view the work and the United States Postal Service created a stamp featuring it. For the 1935 exhibition Vincent van Gogh, Newmeyer issued advance releases announcing Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s trip to Europe to select works and giving highly sentimental descriptions of the artist's life. During the show, police had to be brought to the Museum to control the crowds. Newmeyer likewise capitalized on sensation with the 1940 exhibition Italian Masters, which consisted of loans of Renaissance masterworks, including Botticelli's Birth of Venus (c. 1485), that had been insured for $26 million. When they arrived in New York, she arranged to have them escorted by mounted police to the Museum and unpacked under floodlights, inside the back entrance. By 1947 the Museum was the most highly publicized in the world, receiving roughly ten times as much publicity as any other museum and probably more than all the museums in North America collectively.¹ When Newmeyer left the Museum in 1948 Nelson Rockefeller noted, "She has been a pioneer in this field."²

This show, the first group exhibition of women artists at the Museum, showcased the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Esther Bubley, Tana Hoban, Dorothea Lange, Hazel Frieda Larsen, and Helen Levitt. These artists—three well-known and three lesser-known—worked in various aspects of photography, including photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and commercial photography. The exhibition was organized by Edward Steichen, Director, Department of Photography.

In June 1969 the Art Workers' Coalition (AWC), a New York–based group of artists, architects, filmmakers, critics, and museum and gallery personnel (leadership included Lucy R. Lippard and Joan Snyder), made a number of demands of MoMA on behalf of artists: that its board of trustees be divided evenly between museum staff, patrons, and artists; that admission be free; that a section of its exhibition space be under the direction of underrepresented groups and devoted to the exhibition of their work; that artists retain control of their work in the Museum collection; and that "the Museum should encourage female artists to overcome the centuries of damage done to the image of the female as an artist by establishing equal representation of the sexes in exhibitions, museum purchases and on selection committees."¹ In December 1969 AWC's Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) committee met with Museum staff Betsy Jones, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography. In the negotiations that followed, the Museum agreed in principle to the following recommendations: that it should designate a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture to research women artists not represented by major galleries and report his or her findings to the department; investigate the feasibility of a historical survey of women artists; and consider a temporary exhibition of work by lesserknown women artists.² There is no evidence that the Museum took substantive action on these matters. In 1976 a group of women artists—the MoMA and Guggenheim Ad Hoc Protest Committee (organized by Nancy Spero)—picketed the Museum during the exhibition Drawing Now, organized by Bernice Rose, Curator, Department of Drawings, on the grounds that the show included too few women artists (of the forty-six artists in the show, five were women), and artist Joanne Stamerra placed erasers stamped "erase sexism from MOMA" throughout the galleries. The group accused the Museum of "blatant sexism in overlooking both black and white women artists" and demanded, unsuccessfully, that MoMA organize another Drawing Now exhibition in which fifty percent of the artists would be women.³ The Museum was picketed again in 1984, on the opening of its new, greatly expanded building and the exhibition International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculptur, organized by Kynaston McShine, Senior Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture. The show, intended to be an up-to-the-minute survey of the most significant contemporary art in the world, included only fourteen women among the 169 artists chosen. The protest was sponsored by the New York chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art, with organizational support from the magazine Heresies, the Women's Interart Center, and the Feminist Art Institute, all in New York. Out of this protest and subsequent research into the under-representation of women artists at other museums and galleries, the Guerrilla Girls were born. In one of its earliest posters, from 1985, the activist artist group asked, "How many women had one-person exhibitions at NYC museums last year?" MoMA was listed below with the tally "1."⁴

Some twenty-five years after her marriage to John D.Rockefeller, Jr., son of the wealthiest man in the world, Rockefeller began to form her collection of modern art.¹ Primarily amassed between 1925 and 1935, it was heavily weighted toward works on paper, and Rockefeller had a particular fondness for the work of living Americans. Like Lillie P. Bliss, an old friend of hers, she was also a patron, directly supporting individual artists through acquisitions, commissions, and financial contributions. With her contacts, her knowledge of art, and her family's vast wealth, Rockefeller was able to offer the critical financial backing necessary to create a new museum, and in 1929 she, Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan founded The Museum of Modern Art. Rockefeller's gifts to the Museum are far too numerous to itemize. In 1935, acting anonymously, she donated $1,000 for director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to purchase works with during his trip to Europe that summer with Margaret Barr. The following year she donated $2,500 for the purchase of work by American artists and $2,000 for purchases abroad; in 1938 she contributed $20,000 for acquisitions, to which her son Nelson added $11,500 in his mother's name, and she renewed this gift in 1939. In 1935 she donated 181 paintings and drawings to the Museum; in 1939 thirty-six works of modern sculpture and fifty-four pieces of American folk art; in 1940 approximately 1,630 prints; and in 1946 ninety-two prints. She was not only generous with her financial support but also had complete faith in Alfred Barr's direction of the Museum. When a purchase fund she had established was used to acquire Picasso's etching Minotauromachy (1935), she suggested, "Let's label this: purchased with a fund for prints which Mrs. Rockefeller doesn't like."² After her death, in 1948, Barr wrote to Nelson, "Few realize what positive acts of courage her interest in modern art required. . . . She was the heart of the Museum and its center of gravity."³

Blanchette Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller 3rd, was a major benefactor of the Museum. In 1949 she spearheaded the Junior Council, and four years later she was named to the board of trustees and became founding president of the International Council. She was twice president of the board, from 1959 to 1962 (the first female president) and from 1972 to 1985, and she was chairman from 1985 to 1987. Among her many contributions to the institution is her leadership of a fund-raising campaign that enabled the Museum to undergo the 1984 expansion that doubled its gallery space, raising $55 million. She was named president emeritus in 1987.

Roob worked at the Museum as Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s assistant from 1961 to 1965 and then from 1969 to 1971. She returned in 1979 for research projects involving the Museum's historical archival collections. In 1989, with the authority of the board of trustees, she established The Museum of Modern Art Archives, the first formal archival repository at MoMA, as founding archivist. She was chief archivist from 1996 to 1998. Today the archives are home to over 4,500 linear feet of historical documents pertaining to modern and contemporary art, including personal papers, program records, audio and visual recordings, photographs, and oral histories.

Organized by Lynn Zelevansky, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, this large group show was the first exhibition at the Museum to deal explicitly with gender in relation to art practice. It featured work by Polly Apfelbaum, Mona Hatoum, Rachel Lachowicz, Jac Leirner, Claudia Matzko, Rachel Whiteread, and Andrea Zittel.

Sipprell's photograph New York City, Old and New (c. 1920), acquired in 1932, was the first work by a female artist to enter the Museum's collection.

In 1917 Mary Quinn, an art teacher, married prominent lawyer Cornelius Sullivan (a noted collector of art and rare books).¹ She began to form her own collection a few years later, acquiring important works by Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in 1929, with Lillie P. Bliss and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, she founded The Museum of Modern Art. Of the three founders, Sullivan was the most knowledgeable about art education, and one of her legacies is the Museum's strong educational mission, an integral element since the institution's inception. In October 1933 Sullivan resigned her position as a trustee. She opened a gallery and began to deal in art, a position that precluded further involvement with the Museum at a leadership level.

The Museum's board of trustees has always been partially composed of women, beginning with its three founders, and women have held top-ranking leadership positions. Female officers have included chairmen Blanchette Rockefeller (1959, 1985–87) and Agnes Gund (1993–95); presidents Rockefeller (1959–62, 1972–85), Eliza Bliss Parkinson Cobb (1965–68), Gund (1991–93, 1995–2002), and Marie-Josée Kravis (2005– ); and presidents emerita Rockefeller (1987) and Gund (2002).

In 1958 a fire broke out at the Museum; one person was killed, three paintings were destroyed, and several artworks were damaged. In the wake of the disaster the Museum founded its Department of Conservation and appointed Volkmer as its first staff head conservator. Volkmer had been trained by Sheldon and Caroline Keck, the foremost living American art conservators, who had routinely performed contract work for the Museum.

This exhibition, the first comprehensive historical examination of the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, was organized by Cornelia Butler, Chief Curator of Drawings at MoMA, for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. WACK! traveled to New York, where it was installed at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. The exhibition spanned the period 1965–80, featuring 120 artists and artist groups and comprising work in a broad range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art.