Sunday, November 8, 2009

This Day in Art History (MOMA Opens Doors—and Eyes, to New Forms of Expression)


November 8, 1929—Only 10 days after the stock market crashed, eviscerating at one stroke the ability of New York’s monied class to act as patrons and the capacity of the middle class to pay for anything besides essentials, the Museum of Modern Art opened to something astounding: an audience receptive to its innovative mission of extending art outside the traditional forms of painting and sculpture to newer forms such as photography.

The exhibit in the 5,000-sq.-ft. rental space on the 12th floor of the Heckscher Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street (four locks north of its current location), attracted such crowds to its exhibit featuring Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh that other tenants in the building had trouble getting to their elevator.

One of the newer art forms, of particular interest to me, is film. Alfred H. Barr (in the image accompanying this post), the 27-year-old who became the museum’s first director, appointed Iris Barry, one of the founders of London’s Film Society, to be the first film librarian to be part of a museum in the 1930s.

Much of the blog you’re reading now—in particular, my obsession with all manner of movie minutiae—owes its very existence to the scholarly interest in film as a serious art form fanned into being by Barr and Barry.

Now you know who to blame for this!

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