Beautiful Doings

(See Cover)

Just off Fifth Avenue on 54th Street, touched by the midday shadow of Rockefeller Center's enormous slab, stood the old four-story and nine-story mansions of the Rockefeller family. Town dwellings of the elder and younger John D. Rockefeller for, respectively, 40 and 2 5 years, the houses were abandoned two years ago to wreckers. Last week the site became part of a long garden. In the garden were evergreens, arbors, trees, wattle screens, and sculpture by Lachaise, Despiau, Zorach, Lipchitz. One fair spring night it was filled with hundreds of men with starched white bosoms, and hundreds of rustling ladies. Back of them stood a new, long, spacious building faced with marble and glass; inside it other crowds could be seen, swishing past its plate-glass panels like frilly fish in a bright aquarium. Occasion for these beautiful doings was the formal opening of the long-awaited, permanent home of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (since 1937 temporarily camped in offices and basement galleries of the TIME & LIFE Building in Rockefeller Center). In equal parts swank, sober and glamorous, the company (more than 6,000) included such varied personages as Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, ex-Premier Juan Negrin of Spain, Sculptor Constantin Brancusi. For them and for New York World's Fair visitors until October 1, the new Museum was decked out with a big, cream-of-the-crop exhibition of "Art in Our Time" paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, photography, industrial art, and a historical cycle of movies from 1895 to 1935. The Rockefeller-sited Museum also acquired, for its tenth anniversary, a Rockefeller president: brisk, hefty, sunny Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, 30-year-old second son of John D. Jr. As treasurer of the Museum since 1937, Nelson raised the funds for the new building (on which only $200,000 of $2,000,000 remained last week unpaid). In picking him to succeed frosty-headed A. (for Anson) Conger Goodyear, hard-working president since 1929, the Board of Trustees well pleased the person who was not only a founder but a moving spirit of the Museum: Nelson's publicity-hating mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. That the presidency of the Museum is no longer--if it ever was--merely a family, clique, or society function, the principal speakers of the evening made abundantly clear. Sample (Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking by radio from the White House) :

"In encouraging the creation and enjoyment of beautiful things we are furthering democracy itself. That is why this museum is a citadel of civilization. . . . Because it has been conceived as a national institution, the Museum can enrich and invigorate our cultural life. . . . The opportunity before the Museum of Modern Art is as broad as the whole United States. .. ."

Thus the Museum of Modern Art moved from a Center to a citadel. In its own handsome house it became one of the most completely visible institutions in the U. S. Ten years of work -- and the intelligent use of wealth--had given it a national reputation, national responsibilities. Liberal Ladies. For years after Manhattan's huge Armory Show of Post-Impressionism in 1913 the "modern art" controversy remained, to the public at large, barbaric and obscure. During those years two rich and modest women, Nelson Rockefeller's mother and her friend, the late Lillie Plummer Bliss, quietly bought whatever modern works they enjoyed, quietly deplored the fact that the art of living men received little or no institutional support in Manhattan. In the late spring of 1929 they and one or two other liberal ladies laid plans for a new museum. To head their organizing committee they chose A. Conger Goodyear, a solid, sensitive industrialist (lumber) with practical experience as a trustee of Buffalo's Albright Art Gallery. Mr. Goodyear knew a number of good men to have on the board of trustees, among them Harvard's eminent scholar and mentor of curators, Professor Paul Joseph Sachs. As Professor Sachs returned from a trip abroad in June 1929, Mr. Goodyear shook his hand and asked him to name the ablest candidate available for the directorship of a modern museum. He named Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr.

Charioteer. Alfred Barr was then 27, an associate professor of fine arts at Wellesley. Born in Detroit, brought up in Baltimore, son of a Presbyterian minister who had a taste for medieval art, he had majored in science until his last year at Princeton, intending to become a paleontologist. This training served him well when he came to deal with the data of Dada. After graduate work in art and archeology, he taught at Vassar, Harvard, Princeton, and launched at Wellesley in 1926 an ambitious course in modern art. It involved "driving a seven-or eight-wheeled chariot," handling not only modern sculpture and painting but architecture, industrial art, cinema, photography and whatever music and literature came in handy. Its purpose: "to equip people to face contemporary civilization." This course led Professor Sachs to recommend him to Mr. Goodyear. It was the subject matter of this course, in a new incarnation, which visitors last week saw displayed in the Museum of Modern Art.

Attempts to treat the diversity of contemporary arts had been made before at the Bauhaus in Germany, but they were fancy business in America in 1929. No zealot, Director Barr concentrated on paintings, the main interest of such trustees as Samuel A. Lewisohn and Stephen C. Clark, and bided his time. He got a secretary and five small exhibition rooms in a Fifth Avenue office building. The trustees met for the first time in October, armed with pledges for $200,000. In November the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors with an exhibition of Lillie Bliss's fine Cezannes and other first-rate French paintings borrowed by President Goodyear in Europe. Reporters discovered young, lean, black-haired Mr. Barr looking tired, a description which it has been safe to apply ever since. The way people piled in, it might have been Madison Square Garden.

Pictures have a longer tradition as Art than machine-tooling or the cinema. The 186,000 visitors to the Museum during its first year came to see pictures, and pictures for a long time made up the Museum's most elaborate and popular exhibitions. Among them:

Homer, Ryder and Eakins (May 1930), the first time these three 19th-Century U. S. painters were linked together.

Corot and Daumier (October 1930), including the first loans ever made by the Louvre and Berlin's National Gallery to a U. S. museum.

Diego Rivera (December 1931), first big U. S. exhibition of his work.

Van Gogh (October 1935), a smash hit seen by 125,000 in Manhattan.

Cubism and Abstract Art (March 1936).

New Horizons in American Art (September 1936), first big show of work done on the Federal Art Project.

Fantastic Art, Dada & Surrealism (December 1936), a wow.

Three Centuries of American Art (May 1938), shown in Paris at the Jeu de Paume Museum.

Thus a bold onset was followed by adroit changes of pace. Director Barr, whose fragile look is deceptive, stopped short at no dilettantism, worked like hell. Stage designing, posters, industrial design, children's art illustration and many an-other branch of art came in for special exhibitions, each worked up by the Museum's characteristic method: thorough research, orderly classification of the work shown, equal respect for every experimental artist whether probably great or palpably minor, explanatory notes for the public. Not all the Museum's shows have been revelations, some have been merely precious, but the documented catalogues for Abstract Art and Dada-Surrealism, in particular, were thorough jobs of making-art- intelligible-while-it's-hot. Among other decidedly valuable contributions to art literature was Photography 1830-1937, by the Museum's scholarly Librarian Beaumont Newhall.

Meanwhile the Museum moved from its five rooms to five floors of a greystone mansion on 53rd Street, in view of the back windows of the Rockefeller home. Membership ($10 a year) shot up by leaps & bounds. The board of trustees became a galaxy of the enlightened rich. Greatest of many gifts were the Bliss collection of modern French paintings, a bequest for which the Museum raised an endowment of more than $600,000 in 1934, and Mrs. Rockefeller's collection in 1935. The Museum acquired an energetic executive director, Thomas Dabney Mabry Jr., an able assistant curator of painting & sculpture, Dorothy Miller, a learned manager of publications, Frances Collins, to edit its unexpectedly successful books. In 1935 the Film Library was created under bright-eyed Iris Barry and her husband, John Abbott, received a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $120,000.

Stinger. Painting and sculpture have remained the Museum's most popular promotions, but its architectural department has had probably more influence on U. S. design. Budgeted at practically nothing during the first years, in 1932 it held the first decent U. S. exhibition of the so-called "International Style" (also the first of 68 exhibitions which the Museum has circulated out of Manhattan). In 1934 it attacked Housing with such vigorous exhibits as an actual tenement room, complete with cockroaches. The Museum's architectural notes and shows have in general packed more sting than any others, and the one positively new section of last week's exhibition was a survey of modern housing in Europe and the U. S. down to the last projects of the $800,000,000 U. S. Housing Authority. Cracked Curator John McAndrew, with the pictures on the wall to back him up:

"Conservative design habits account for the curiously compromised appearance of so many PWA housing projects. Behind these and other errors stood a stupid officialdom which refused to recognize the enormous progress already made elsewhere. . . . From the first group [of U. S. H. A. designs] it is gratifyingly clear . . . that we may expect projects surpassing those of PWA both in efficiency and quality of design."

The Museum's new home, designed by Architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, was evidence that the Museum can mix its own concrete: a million-dollar building on a million-dollar lot, with a sheer, severe front of plate glass, white marble and thermolux (a translucent sandwich made of spun glass insulator between two sheets of plate glass), galleries with collapsible walls, library, auditorium, projection rooms and roof terrace. The chairs and desks which furnish it (by van der Rohe, Breuer, Aalto, et al.) are in themselves a show of industrial fine art.

So What? Director Barr spent his spare time last week warning himself against the perils of Bigness and Popularity. So far the Museum has amply proved its intellectual honesty, to the dinner-table discomfiture of certain conservative trustees. Director Barr is delighted and others are somewhat surprised that the trustees have supported him so well.

Cynics might view the Museum's work as an esthete's dream--fostered by dilettantes and benefactors of great wealth--with only superficial relation to the broad life of the U. S. But Alfred Barr comes nearer home when he says, "The Museum of Modern Art is a laboratory; in its experiments the public is invited to participate." And the cynical view will not stand up very well in the presence of the Museum's new president.

Mother's Son. When, in speaking of art, Nelson Rockefeller's tongue slips and he says "geology" for "morphology," he says he wishes he could get the oil business out of his head for a minute. He is director of Creole Petroleum Corp., a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey with properties in Venezuela. He is also (since a year ago) prince and president of the huge landlording enterprise of Rockefeller Center. Nelson's actual function in both offices is under reasonable public suspicion, but it is, increasingly, that of director and president indeed.

Considered by his friends to be the most lively and happy-go-lucky of his rigid grandfather's grandsons, Nelson has shared from childhood the artistic interests of his mother ("one of the most extraordinary persons I've ever met"). At Dartmouth, besides playing two years on the soccer team, he edited a magazine called The Five Arts. In 1930, he married hearty, charming Mary Todhunter Clark of Philadelphia, took her honeymooning around the world and settled in a big remodeled farmhouse near the golf course at Pocantico Hills. Since then they have had five children: Rodman, Ann, Steven and the twins, Michael and Mary, born last year.

In 1932 Nelson showed his independence and his taste by hiring his friend Diego Rivera to paint a fresco for Rockefeller Center. This turned into a famous, first-class educational incident for all concerned. When Rivera's great mural was destroyed--for the public reason that it contained a portrait of Lenin--the Rockefeller family suffered once more in the eyes of liberals, and Nelson, naturally, took the rap. At first he was strong for showing the mural, sins and all, at the Museum of Modern Art. Then he came around to his father's view that the less said and seen, the better.

Since then Nelson Rockefeller has thought of art, and now thinks of the Museum of Modern Art, as a quality of style that can just as well pervade as it can be at odds with modern commercial society. He is proud of the pioneer work the Museum has done, prouder that "last year our traveling shows were exhibited in over 250 cities and towns. . . ." He admires the great art collectors but has not emulated them. He buys sculpture for his desk (last week he had a woodcarving by William Steig), paintings for his walls, wishes that all men could do the same. As president, he wants to put the imaginative and lucid work of Alfred Barr and Co. into even greater circulation.

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