Modern Art, Inc.: The Museum of Modern Art vs. Huntington Hartford

32 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00126

Edward Durell Stone. Two Columbus Circle, New York,1964. Home to the Gallery ofModern Art, 1964–1969. Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times/Redux.

Grey Room 53, Fall 2013, pp. 32–59. © 2013 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 33

Modern Art, Inc.: The Museum of Modern Art vs.Huntington HartfordSANDRA ZALMAN

In 1959, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) sued HuntingtonHartford, socialite and heir to the massive A&P grocery fortune,who had announced his intention to build a museum inManhattan that he would call the Gallery of Modern Art. MoMAwanted to prevent Hartford from using the words modern artin naming his new museum because it felt that Hartford’s versionof modern art was in direct conflict with its own. Instead ofheeding prevailing opinion about what constituted modern art,Hartford personally financed the $7-million effort (about $52million in today’s dollars) to create an institution that wouldshowcase what he considered legible, figurative, moral art, anaccessible alternative to the abstract version of modernism hethought MoMA was promoting.1 Not only did Hartford call hismuseum the Gallery of Modern Art, but he strategically sitedhis building less than a mile from MoMA, commissioning hisrival institution’s architect, Edward Durell Stone, to design it.Hartford intended his museum to draw upon and directly com-pete for the cultural cachet that MoMA had come to embody inits thirty-five-year existence. Although created to appeal to thetaste of the general public, just five years after its constructionin 1964, the Gallery of Modern Art closed.

MoMA’s lawsuit raises the question, “Who defines the bound-aries of modern art?” This article presents a counternarrativein the historiography of modern art, addressing MoMA’s enter-prise not from the perspective of insider dealings but from thepoint of view of an outsider.2 In this counternarrative, MoMA’sauthority is not challenged by a group of artists mounting critiques of the institution; rather the institution’s own way ofthinking about itself is pressured and ultimately altered by acompeting endeavor that aspired to the same cultural capital.By following this history, the essay explores the ideologicalstakes in defining the boundaries of modern art, not just as a form of political speech but as a way to deal directly with the perceived gulf between public and critical opinion.Hartford’s challenge to MoMA offers an important vantagepoint from which to analyze competing narratives of modern

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art in the 1960s and the difficulty of forging those narratives for public consumption.

Seen from the perspective of the twenty-first century,Hartford’s intervention may look quaint. Defining the modernis now a global business.3 Exemplified most spectacularly bythe success of its franchise in Bilbao, core promulgators of themodern tradition like the Guggenheim Museum now exhibittheir cases far from the half mile of midtown Manhattan thatseparated Hartford’s Columbus Circle institution from his rivalon West Fifty-third Street. Yet in an age of globalization,Hartford’s project compels us to think again about the metro-politan situatedness of the modern in a city that, according toSerge Guilbaut, had stolen its idea of art from Paris.4 An earlyinstitutional challenge to MoMA’s cultural capital, Hartford’sextensive efforts to defend what he saw as the interests of thepublic in the field of modern art have yet to be analyzed criti-cally from an art-historical perspective. This article shows how Hartford’s insistence on the malleability of the narrativeof modern art spurred MoMA in the 1960s to rethink—toretrench—its conception of its public and its own position aspowerful cultural agent of the modern.

MoMA’s lawsuit seemingly hinged on whether the wordmodern was a distinctive or descriptive term. In 1931, MoMA’sfirst director, Alfred Barr, had defined modern art as “a relative,elastic term that serves conveniently to designate painting,sculpture, architecture, and the lesser visual arts, original andprogressive in character, produced especially within the lastthree decades but including also the ‘pioneer ancestors’ of thenineteenth century.”5 This was amended ten years later in 1941when Barr noted, “the truth is that modern art cannot bedefined with any degree of finality, in either time or character.”6

Barr had been the first to teach a course on modern art history,but he recognized that the history of modern art was ongoingand that the museum’s mission thus needed to be broad enoughto encompass new developments. Significantly, MoMA did notdecide to retain a permanent collection until 1953. Prior to this,MoMA had been so committed to the idea that modern art was a fluid designation bounded by the previous fifty years thatit was willing to donate its “classic masterpieces” to theMetropolitan Museum in exchange for funds to buy newerworks of art.7 For most of its existence, MoMA saw modern artas a developing rather than definitive category. In part becauseof this, MoMA’s role as an arbiter of taste “in everything fromfrying pans to country houses” was more overt than its role indefining modern art.8

MoMA had been aware of Hartford’s activities for some timebefore the 1959 lawsuit. Hartford’s first foray into cultural crit-icism was the self-published essay Has God Been Insulted Here?

Philip Goodwin and EdwardDurell Stone. The Museum ofModern Art, New York, 1939. TheMuseum of Modern Art Archives,New York. Photographer: RobertDamora. © The Museum ofModern Art/Licensed bySCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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of 1951.9 Part of the essay addressedvisual art, singling out Pablo Picasso andSalvador Dalí for criticism. Hartford laidout his inclusive view of art and thepublic’s right to judge it:

We are all art critics, little or great;and those who turn up their nosesat the world of art are turning themup at life itself. Art was never thenarrow grave on which the intel-lectual snobs laid flowers on theone hand and the masses rever-ently avoided on the other. . . . Yes,the man who walks by the shopwindow on his way home, or staresat the ads in the subway . . .–thatman is a critic of art.10

At first glance, Hartford’s positionwas not necessarily incompatible withBarr’s views. The MoMA director alsotook an expansive view of modern artand promoted its integration in modernlife. Barr’s 1943 book What Is ModernPainting? was expressly aimed at the

“man on the street,” and exhibitions such as Modern Art inYour Life (1948) and the Good Design shows of the 1950s werealso intended to promote public proficiency in modern tenetsvia household objects. However, Hartford compared the deteri-oration of the arts in society to the deterioration of social mores“which leads to that mentality of which the police state con-sists.”11 In his 1964 profile of Hartford, cultural critic Tom Wolfecalled Has God Been Insulted Here? an essentially religioustract, dubbing Hartford the Martin Luther of Columbus Circle.12

Hartford took Wolfe’s characterization as a compliment. AsHartford saw it, Wolfe was pointing out that, in the 1950s, cul-ture in America had become the new moral battleground.13

While Has God Been Insulted Here? was privately distrib-uted, Hartford’s next intervention into cultural criticism, anessay entitled “The Public Be Damned?” was printed as a full-page ad—resembling a news article—in six major New Yorknewspapers on May 16, 1955, allowing Hartford a far-broaderaudience.14 Hartford’s concern over contemporary aestheticswas now more fervently framed as a religious imperative tomaintain the public good. Hartford implored people to standup to the “high priests of criticism and the museum directorsand the teachers of mumbo jumbo” and decide for themselveswhat their opinions of art were.15 Rhetorically, Hartford wanted

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to position himself as the individual out-sider taking on an organized and seem-ingly opaque (even corrupt) network wherepower was consolidated in the hands of aselect few. And yet, despite his emphasison the exclusion of the public from therealm of art, like many conservatives ofhis day Hartford discerned Communistpolitics at the root of “the diseases whichinfect the world of painting today—of obscurity, confusion, immorality, vio-lence.”16 Instead of cubism and abstractexpressionism, Hartford advocated what he considered to be realistic, legible, and beautiful.

Hartford’s publication did not go unno-ticed. Ironically, Hartford’s denounce-ment of Art News’s cryptic assessment ofWillem de Kooning’s Woman series ascharacteristic of the critical double-talkdominating the art world led directly to skyrocketing demandfor de Kooning’s paintings by art collectors.17 The article’s publication also sparked a flurry of mail to Hartford, includingcorrespondence from attorneys representing Art News whodemanded that Hartford recant his libelous statements.18 In the1955 Congressional Record, Representative Frank ThompsonJr. quoted from critic Jonathan Marshall’s rebuttal to Hartfordin Arts Digest:

We feel that Hartford’s blast was an ill-disguised attack onartistic freedom and set a dangerous precedent . . . forwealthy individuals to attempt to buy public opinion. . . .We wonder how Mr. Hartford can reconcile his profoundlove of democracy with his call for standardization of artand the elimination of imagination.19

Marshall, among others, recognized that Hartford’s demandson art paradoxically advocated the very censorship and dictatorship that he accused the art world of engaging in.Countering Hartford, Representative Thompson then remindedthe Speaker of the House that on the occasion of MoMA’stwenty-fifth anniversary the year before, President DwightEisenhower had stated, “There is an important principle whichwe should ever keep in mind—the principle that freedom of thearts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars of liberty in ourland.”20 Eleanor Roosevelt published an opinion piece in theNew York World Telegram defending modern artists’ “right toexperiment. Art dealers and museums should exhibit their artand the public in the long run will make the decision of whether


the art is good or bad.”21 Eisenhower’sand Roosevelt’s comments reveal thatHartford’s intervention into modern artcriticism—while ostensibly on behalf of the voiceless public—could also beinterpreted as an infringement on thefreedoms of both the public and artists.

Hartford was not the only one to frameart in terms of its ideological impli -cations. American politicians in the late 1940s and 1950s—most famouslyRepresentative George Dondero—werelaunching attacks on modern art asCommunistic propaganda.22 CongressmanDondero wrote to Hartford, commend-ing his efforts “of bringing back estheticand moral standards into the paintingworld” and noting that “to me the stuffwhich has taken the name of art whichhas been foisted upon the American

people during the last years is simply nauseating.”23 An articlein the Chicago Tribune complimented Hartford for “alerting thepublic to the dangers in an art whose strings are controlled byMoscow.”24 Barr had already responded to such critiques in1952 by publishing “Is Modern Art Communistic?” (in the NewYork Times Magazine), his defense of modern art as a politicalfreedom. In the article he points out that the Soviet and fascistregimes had themselves condemned modern art.25

In deciding to open his own museum, Hartford jumped intothese debates at the institutional level. Hartford originallyreferred to his enterprise as the Huntington Hartford Galleryand formed a trust to fund the institution in May 1954.26 Thegallery was initially slated to be located in southern California.27

Eventually, Hartford realized that New York was more appro-priate for his museum:

I finally decided that the only place to do anything likethat was in New York City. Because it’s like building agreat theater out in Oklahoma. No matter how great thephysical building is, the important thing is that you don’thave the people there, you don’t have the attention.28

By moving his institution to New York, Hartford acknowledgedhis goal of providing a viable alternative to what he perceivedas the taste-making establishment. Hartford publicly announcedhis plans to build a $2.5-million museum in Manhattan on June 10, 1956. Now he called his institution the Gallery ofModern Art; it would show art from the French Revolution tothe present, pushing modern art back 100 years from when

Opposite: Huntington Hartford IIat his foundation’s retreat forneedy artists, standing withpaintings that he considerswholesome, January 1, 1952.Photo: Allan Grant/Time LifePictures/Getty Images.

Above: Huntington Hartford II athis foundation’s retreat for needyartists, holding up prints he classifies as vulgar, January 1,1952. Photo: Allan Grant/TimeLife Pictures/Getty Images.

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MoMA considered it to have begun.The following year—and despite his denouncement of the

crass commercialism of the art market and his derision of Dalíonly a few years earlier—Hartford, who was working to build acollection for his museum, commissioned Dalí to paint TheDiscovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959).29 Hartfordpurchased the painting, which was to be a centerpiece of thenew institution, for a reported $250,000, an impressive amountthat neither Dalí nor Hartford would confirm but that wasrepeatedly cited in the press.30 (By comparison, the same year,the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased Jackson Pollock’sAutumn Rhythm [1950] for $30,000.)31 Hartford’s decision toforeground an artist who actively courted the market showedthat the line between the commercial and the popular was muchmore fluid than Hartford was willing to admit. Indeed, as a collector, Hartford was participating—even investing—in it.

The dispute between MoMA and Hartford was not specifi-cally about the definition of modern art. Rather, it hinged onthe public perception of the institutionalization of modern art.As Hartford persisted in using the name “Gallery of ModernArt” in the press, MoMA’s growing concern—stated both inter-nally and publically—was that the public would confuse thetwo entities. Yet when MoMA filed suit against HuntingtonHartford in January 1959, the museum’s administrators werewell aware that their institution’s name had first been used by the Société Anonyme in 1920. Though references to the“Société Anonyme: The Museum of Modern Art” are acknowl-edged in an internal memo, Barr argued that the SociétéAnonyme was generally known without its subtitle–“no onethought of it as the Museum of Modern Art.”32 Dondero, how-ever, had cited the Société Anonyme by its full name in a


Congressional speech in order to conflate it with MoMA.33 Anda letter printed in the New York Sunday Mirror cited “12 firmslisted with ‘modern art’ as part of their identification” in theManhattan telephone directory.34 That MoMA did not have a monopoly on the word modern—and had not sought onebefore 1959—is clear. Hartford’s enterprise was neverthelesssufficiently compelling to worry Barr.

Despite foreseeing that the press’s response to the lawsuitmight be unfavorable, MoMA decided that publically defend-ing itself against Hartford’s institution was a worthy expendi-ture of cultural (and financial) capital.35 On the whole, thepopular press welcomed the discussion, brought on by the law-suit, of what constituted “modern.” An article in the HeraldTribune pointed out that modern was a word applied

to almost everything in American life today. It is the dar-ling of advertisers in this land that prizes novelty abovealmost every other virtue. The word clings as a label toobjects that were new twenty years ago and no longer are. . . . Perhaps the word for Mr. Hartford’s museum—and for the art of our times—is “contemporary. It does notfix a work of art to a specific year, but merely reflects ourtastes at the moment, while “modern” art, in every field,ceases to be modern in no time at all.36

The author not only blamed commercial interests for thebroad use of the term but proposed the adoption of a new termfor new visual forms: contemporary.37 In her article on the law-suit, critic Aline Saarinen even pointed out that the Institute ofModern Art in Boston had changed its name in 1948 to theInstitute of Contemporary Art because the term modern was soclosely identified with MoMA’s version of art.38 That Hartfordhad chosen the term modern in naming his museum thusseems doubly significant, in part precisely because it was soclosely identified with MoMA as an institution (at least, by theart world) and, more intriguing, because he disagreed with the current understanding of the term. By adopting a term thatdescribed the period and sensibility of art that he haddenounced, Hartford signaled an implicit understanding thatsuch a category was malleable and could be revised.

This was precisely what MoMA feared when it argued thatHartford’s use of the term modern would “dilute the distinctivequality” of its own efforts as an institution.39 Because of thesuit, MoMA was forced to define tangibly how the Gallery ofModern Art threatened its own endeavors. Saarinen concludedthat while potential donors would be able to distinguishbetween the two institutions, the public might not be so dis-cerning. A cartoon later published in the New Yorker illustratesthis potential confusion by showing a Franz Kline–like abstract

Interior view of the Gallery ofModern Art, 1964. With SalvadorDali’s The Discovery of Americaby Christopher Columbus (1959)at right and The Battle of Tetuan(1962) at left. Photo: EddieHausner/The New York Times/Redux.

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expressionist painting being delivered to theGallery of Modern Art with the caption,“You’ve got the wrong address, Mac.”40 Theabsurdity of the mistake would have been obvi-ous to anyone following the controversy,because Hartford had expressly given hismuseum an anti-abstractionist mandate.Hartford seems to have appreciated the humorof the potential for mix-up and displayed thecartoon in his home.41

Most accounts of the lawsuit in the popularpress avoided an ideological interpretation ofmodern art, though in the wake of the Brown v.Board of Education decision, the CharlestonNews and Courier made an analogy between thelack of legitimacy of MoMA’s suit and the U.S.Supreme Court’s controversial ruling on schooldesegregation. The South Carolina paperreported that Hartford “does not concede that[modern art] consists mainly of strange blobs ofcolor, dripping lines or a collection of cubes. . . . Who knowsthese days what may happen? Perhaps the court will say thatMr. Hartford has no right to build a separate but equal galleryof modern art.”42 The Yonkers Herald-Statesman framed thelawsuit as a battle not between two museums but between mil-lionaires, pointing out that New York governor NelsonRockefeller was a patron of MoMA.43 Hartford’s desire to rep-resent the common man was in some ways undermined by thefact that, besides being a fixture in the society pages, he had theresources to build his own museum. But the article alsopointed to MoMA’s own status as a private institution. A writerfor the Wall Street Journal welcomed the idea of a new museumand noted that “people have been quarreling for a long timeover what ‘modern’ means and for even longer over what con-stitutes ‘art.’ We question whether anyone has a right to appro-priate those terms and to deny them to somebody else justbecause someone might become confused.”44 While comingdown on Hartford’s side, the article’s author acknowledged thatMoMA “takes a broader slant at modern art. . . . So long as thework is interesting, an abstract artist can work . . . in flashinglights and feathers, for all the Museum cares.”45 Newsweekquoted Hartford’s lawyers, who called MoMA’s suit “peevish,petty, even vindictive.”46 The New York Mirror supportedHartford, but maintained that “the suit is a good thing; it maydo more to bring so-called ‘modernity’ in art out in the openthan the recent fire at the museum. The term ‘modern,’ espe-cially in art, has little specific meaning.”47 Debates about mod-ernism in the popular press are revealing. Although they


demonstrate a vague distrust about the flexibility of the term,they also reveal a general openness to expansions and addi-tions to notions of the modern—and a shift away from partisanpolitical rhetoric.

The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. The newmuseum would be called The Gallery of Modern Art Includingthe Huntington Hartford Collection.48 When the revised namewas etched into the building’s façade, Newsweek reported thatHartford was not pleased. “‘I want this gallery to stand on itsown two feet,’ he said. ‘Anybody’s name on a semi-publicbuilding of this kind is bad—even Abraham Lincoln’s.’”49

Hartford wanted to suppress the private nature of his enter-prise so that his critique of MoMA would be framed as an insti-tutional, rather than individual, position. Meanwhile, CarlWeinhardt, the Gallery of Modern Art’s director, felt that theresolution absolved the new museum from any strict definitionof, or responsibility to, modern art:

I would like to pull a small throw rug from under anycritic who may be waiting to pounce and underline thefact that the legal name of the museum is “Gallery ofModern Art, including the Huntington HartfordCollection.” Thus it is clear that the Huntington HartfordCollection is not technically committed to being “mod-ern,” no matter how narrowly one chooses to define aword which has been peculiarly overworked andmaligned in the recent past to the point where it has lostalmost any accurate meaning for the immediate present.. . . In fact, it does, and will, consist of paintings, sculp-ture and graphic art created, for the most part, during the19th and 20th centuries. Huntington Hartford interpretsthe word modern in a broad sense which includes post-Renaissance Western art from 1800, more or less, to thepresent day.50

Weinhardt went on to define modern art as beginning at thedawn of the nineteenth century, which, despite his avowal thatthe Gallery of Modern Art operated independently of Hartford’scollection, nonetheless coincided with Hartford’s collectingpractices.51 Even as Hartford fought for the broader designationthat the term modern implied, the limits Hartford placed on hismuseum were blatantly a matter of personal taste.52 The paradoxof this was not lost even on someone like Dalí, who directlybenefited both from Hartford’s patronage and his use of theterm modern. Relaying a conversation between Hartford, Dalí,and himself in 1965, collector A. Reynolds Morse reported,

I said it was a shame, since he put so much love and effortinto it not to call it “The Hartford Gallery of Modern Art.”

James Stevenson. “You’ve Gotthe Wrong Address, Mac,” 1964.From the New Yorker, April 18,1964. © James Stevenson/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank/Condé NastPublications, Inc.

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No, he said—he did not want it to be a monument to him-self. Then too the Museum of Modern Art people withtheir lawyer had made an awful fuss at his use of the words“Modern Art.” How ridiculous Dali said—“le Museum isalready very old fashioned—is no modern at all.” Dali, hisantennae sensing that this was a difficult area again indi-cated a change of topic would be a good . . .53

Dalí—accused of being an academic painter himself—recog-nized that Hartford’s anti-abstractionist brand of modernismwas ultimately retrograde.

Hartford erroneously perceived MoMA to be dedicated uni-laterally to advancing the cause of abstraction. In fact, this wasthe Guggenheim’s original mandate. Founded as the Museumof Non-Objective Painting, the Guggenheim Museum’s namechange in 1952 reflected a broadening of its narrowly focusedoriginal mission (and the increasing inclusion in its collectionof more representational works). Hartford’s proposed museumwas a move in the opposite direction. Ground was broken onthe Guggenheim’s new building in 1956, the same year Hartfordpublicly announced his own plans for an art gallery, a coinci-dence that was noted in the press.54 However, while the con-struction of the Gallery of Modern Art was delayed by a stubbornshoe-store owner who refused to vacate the site, the Guggenheim’snew Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building opened to muchfanfare on October 21, 1959.55 Like the Guggenheim, Hartford’smuseum would also initially express the vision of a singlepatron, attempt to make a mark through distinctive architec-ture by a well-regarded American architect, and try to carve aniche within New York’s cultural institutions.

The issue of the role of museums in public life was at theforefront of discussion in the 1960s. In Art in America’s 1961special feature on museums, the new director of the Guggenheim,Thomas Messer, wrote that museums were more and morebecoming cultural combat zones: “Contemporary museums inparticular—are battlefields where forms are the weapons andthe spoils—the means and the end. Forms, within one’s owntime, become carriers of ideas, of ideals and of ideologies.”56

Messer laid out the stakes of aesthetic display in loaded termsthat emphasized contemporary cultural communication.These—more so than developing a strict definition of modernart—were the true stakes of the debate.

In the same issue, Katherine Kuh addressed what she termed“the edifice complex,” analyzing the recent increase inmuseum expansions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; theGuggenheim; and, perhaps most especially, the upcoming renovation of MoMA.57 As MoMA began to make plans for itsPhilip Johnson–designed expansion, which would take place


during the first half of 1964, administrators may also have beenthinking of the Gallery of Modern Art’s opening on the horizonand Hartford’s rhetoric about a museum for the public that wouldcombat MoMA’s elitism. Despite MoMA’s increased popularity,MoMA administrators—particularly Barr—continually soughtto increase the accessibility of the institution to the public.58

MoMA recognized that the perception of the museum by thepublic was crucial to its work even before the student protestsof 1968 and Thomas Hoving’s tenure at the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, which is credited with the rise of the “block-buster” era. Hartford’s museum put increased pressure onMoMA’s understanding of its own public role.

The opportunity created by MoMA’s temporary closure wasnot lost on Hartford. The Herald Tribune reported, “since theMuseum of Modern Art will be closed for extensive improve-ments for five months beginning Dec. 1, Mr. Hartford wouldlike to open quickly to take full advantage of the period whenone of his chief competitors will have its doors closed.”59 Theincreased exhibition space made possible by MoMA’s expan-sion facilitated a decision to prioritize the museum’s perma-nent collections, the display of which would make materiallyapparent a narrative of modern art built upon MoMA’s princi-ples that now stretched back seventy-five years. Still framed interms of the public’s understanding of modern art, directord’Harnoncourt presented MoMA’s expansion as something ofa revision of the museum’s mission:

Given the present intensified activity throughout the artworld there is less danger of the public’s lacking opportu-nities for seeing new manifestations than of its becomingconfused by the quantity of production and exhibitionand the diversity of styles. We can best fulfill our purposein the 60’s and 70’s by making our great resources–theCollections–available both to the growing general publicby providing continuous large-scale exhibitions of ourholdings, and to the increasing number of interested spe-cialists by providing facilities to study the material not on view.60

Because of the flourishing of the contemporary art scene,MoMA felt that its future responsibilities to the public lay inclarifying the past rather than showcasing recent directions in art. Thus, as MoMA sought to put more of its permanent col-lections on view, the institution was consciously turning awayfrom the idea that modern and contemporary art were one andthe same. The severing of the concept of modern from contem-porary—and the transformation of modern into a historical category—occurred because MoMA saw the necessity in clari-fying its mission for the public. While not necessarily a new

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interest of MoMA’s, the emphasis on history may have beenwhat critic Emily Genauer picked up on when she commentedthat MoMA’s commitment to its permanent collection dove-tailed with Hartford’s desire to ground modern art in the nine-teenth century:

The Museum of Modern Art has already announced that,when it re-opens in mid-May, it will emphasize, as neverbefore, its permanent collections of the old masters ofmodernism, and give much less attention than in the pastto new expressions which now find a perhaps too-readyshowcase in museums and many commercial galleries.The great irony, then, of the new Gallery of Modern Art isthat, conceived to combat art fashions, it now finds itselfin the very vanguard of them. The avant-chic thing rightnow is precisely the kind of painting Mr. Hartford stressesin his own collection.61

Genauer seemed to be proposing that since MoMA was lookinghistorically, Hartford’s retrospective frame of modern art was,in some ways, endorsed by the art establishment. However,upon MoMA’s reopening, d’Harnoncourt published an articlein the Times that aimed to clarify the debate:

By “modern art,” as distinct from “contemporary,” wemean art that strives to embody new ideas in new forms,or modify traditional forms, in creative ways that givethem fresh meaning for our own times. . . . Both abstrac-tion and representation (which boasts an equally venera-ble history) exist side by side today and continue to leadequally vigorous lives. . . . The Museum of Modern Arthas consistently been aware that no one tendency hasdominated the art of the past, nor dominates it today. . . .We do not consider that part of our task is to attempt tocontrol the course of art by telling artists what theyshould or should not do—even if that were possible. . . .With so many other institutions operating in this field,what is this museum’s distinctive role?62

D’Harnoncourt concluded that MoMA had responsibility to thepublic as an educational institution and would best serve itsaudience by putting its permanent collections in conversationwith its temporary exhibitions. MoMA’s decision to curate itspermanent collection was the first time it was able to formulatean institutional narrative of modern art—a narrative that museumofficials must have felt was much needed in the face of theincreasing plurality of the 1960s art world.

While Hartford was still committed to showing older, repre-sentational work, by the time the Gallery of Modern Art finallyopened in March 1964 the dominance of abstract expression-


ism had begun to be displaced by new forms of contemporaryart. Hartford’s alternative modernism seemed less drastic.Many reviewers agreed that, by 1964, what was once consid-ered unfashionable was again au courant. As critic BrianO’Doherty wrote:

The new gallery, however, couldn’t have chosen a bettertime to be born. For taste has been changing and fashionflirting with the passé and the moribund. Some of theplans announced by the director, Carl J. Weinhardt Jr.sound almost avant-garde, which all goes to prove thecyclical theory of taste. If you lag behind far enough, longenough, history will catch up with you, pushing youalong in front of it. Thus an institution that has seemed(often simultaneously) an eccentricity, a laughing stockand an anachronism, has the opportunity of becoming animportant addition to the New York scene, filling a gapthat has been yawning wider and wider.63

Even critics such as Irving Sandler and Alfred Frankfurterconceded that the Gallery of Modern Art’s presence in NewYork would increase the number of exhibitions that could beseen by the public and that expanding the scope of art dis-played in New York would ultimately be instructive.64 Thisperspective aligned with Hartford’s framing of the reason forbuilding the museum. Far more tempered by 1964, Hartford’sretrospective account of his institution’s inception now playedup the idea of diversity rather than ideology:

I realized there were really very few modern art gallerieshere. This was before the Guggenheim was built, so therewere only the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney,for American artists. So I decided if only I could put up something, even in a small way, that would competewith the Modern Museum it would be a very healthything. No matter what I showed, the competition wouldbe salutary.”65

Despite Hartford’s attempt to cast his museum in oppositionto the elite art world, Stone’s tall, narrow, white marble build-ing was upon its completion immediately compared to an ivorytower.66 Irving Sandler observed of the interior design:

The interior of the Gallery also looks out of this century.Parquet floors are interspersed with thick red and goldcolored rugs. The walls and ceilings are covered withwalnut and macassar ebony panels and Japanese grass-cloth. And there are upholstered chairs and sofas, richdrapes and tapestries and a variety of rare plants. . . . Mostmodern museums are so stark that all you are able to do

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is study the pictures. But in Hartford’s Gallery, the pic-tures are not that interesting, so you can bask in the opu-lence of the décor, see some fine views of Central Park,listen to a 231⁄2—foot Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ, take anespresso break on the eighth floor or lunch on Polynesiandelicacies in the Gauguin Room in the penthouse.67

Yet, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable noted that Stone’strademark grilles and rejection of the “brutal aspects of today’sarchitecture” is hardly controversial and “pads well with wall-to-wall luxury.”68 A few months later, visitors to the New YorkWorld’s Fair could see Stone’s “House of Good Taste,” which,in an indication of the changing aesthetic, represented “mod-ern” good taste and was distinct from the “contemporary”model home designed by another architect. In both cases,Stone’s architecture invited the public to enjoy a certain brandof lifestyle mingled with a modernist sensibility.69

Opening to much publicity over the course of four eveningsin March 1964, the public initially flocked to the Gallery ofModern Art. The New York Times reported that 3,358 visitedon the first day. They appeared, “for the most part, . . . middle-aged and prosperous-looking. There was only a scattering ofthe loose mohair sweaters, corduroys, beards and ballet slip-pers apt to be the uniform of the avant-garde.”70 Just two weeksafter the gallery opened, the Times reported that 38,573 patronshad visited and “large numbers of college-age youths wereamong those who kept a line building.”71 A reviewer for theNation compared the flood to “Macy’s at Christmas,” as “visi-tors stood immobilized, craning over one another’s shouldersfor a glimpse of the exhibits.”72 In its first year, the Gallery of


Modern Art was attended by “a third of a million” visitors.73

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, which ran from March 20to April 19, 1964, was a Pavel Tchelitchew retrospective, whichbrought together more than 300 of the artist’s works, includingstage designs as well as paintings and drawings.74 Tchelitchew’sworks occupied three floors, and Hartford’s collection, whichconsisted of about sixty representational works from the past200 years, was displayed on the remaining two.75 MoMA hadbeen the last New York institution to grant a solo show toTchelitchew, in 1942, and, despite Hartford’s ideological dis-agreements with MoMA, the 1942 exhibition was cited in pressmaterials.76 Tchelitchew’s work offered a contradictory state-ment for the Gallery of Modern Art’s first show. Here was anartist whose output may not have been strictly avant-garde but had been endorsed by MoMA and continued to enjoy thatmuseum’s imprimatur.

Despite the fanfare that surrounded the opening of theGallery of Modern Art, just five years after its construction itclosed. By mid-1965, attendance figures had dropped signifi-cantly, and Hartford began to search for new revenue sourcesfor the museum.77 The departure of Weinhardt just prior to the opening of a planned Dalí retrospective also presented adifficulty for Hartford’s museum, leaving it rudderless for sometime.78 Without a board of trustees, and operating with a net loss of half a million dollars a year, Hartford sought to forma fundraising arm for the gallery, explaining, “in the future,support of the museum must come largely from the generalpublic.”79

Hartford recognized that what may have sabotaged theGallery of Modern Art was Hartford himself. Though “morethan 350,000 persons have paid the gallery’s admission fee sinceits opening last year and the eighth-floor restaurant is said tobe doing well,” at the end of 1964 Hartford published the bookArt or Anarchy: How the Extremists and Exploiters Have Reducedthe Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism.80 As Hartfordnoted, “We were getting wonderful reviews of our shows . . .until my book came out. Then the critics became very nega-tive.”81 Reviews by and large dismissed Hartford as an alarmist,if harmless, philistine.82 O’Doherty’s review in Life is repre-sentative. The critic concluded, “One can’t finish this mar-velously archaic opus without developing an affection for it. ATreasury of Inanities, a Layman’s Guide to Obsolete Prejudices,it is not to be missed by any connoisseur of the absurd.”83 Thebook also reprinted Hartford’s old diatribe “The Public BeDamned?” Rather than reignite the old debates, however, itonly tarnished Hartford’s image as a misguided philanthropist.

The Gallery of Modern Art’s next major show also followedMoMA’s lead from the 1940s. The large Dalí exhibition that

Interior view of the Gallery of Modern Art, 1964.Photo: Sam Falk/The New York Times/Redux.

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opened at the Gallery of Modern Art in December 1965 was,perhaps predictably, popular with audiences. As he had withTchelitchew, Hartford leveraged surrealism as a modern art thatcould operate between high and low culture. According to Morse,though the Dalí exhibition garnered large attendance numbersand could potentially have revitalized the ailing gallery, themuseum staff wanted to close the show as planned in order toinstall a George Bellows exhibition that they thought would salvage their professional legitimacy as an art museum.84 TheGallery of Modern Art continued to rotate exhibitions—moreand more often featuring private collections—until Hartfordclosed the museum in 1969, just five years after its debut.85

As Hartford prepared to close the gallery, he became inter-ested in becoming chairman of the recently created NationalEndowment for the Arts (NEA). He persuaded Senator MiltonYoung to write to President Richard Nixon’s assistant PeterFlanigan to endorse him.86 Though he was unsuccessful in hisbid to lead the NEA—an organization that in 1969 had a budgetof just under $8 million (approximately equal to Hartford’sinvestment in the Gallery of Modern Art)—Hartford still believedin the public’s continued interest in, and access to, art.87

Hartford’s attempt to challenge the art establishment onbehalf of common culture raises important questions about theway the public consumes modern art. But his failure is perhapseven more telling; it seems to indicate a certain respect for elit-ism on the part of the public—an interest in, rather than analienation from, the ideas of experts and standards. Perhapsmost surprising, Hartford’s institution opened up the frame-work for modern art while its demise demonstrated the con-tinued vitality of the avant-garde. Hartford was able to broadenthe category of modernism not only by attempting to expand itsscope but by forcing those who had defined the field to engagewith his ideas on an institutional level. In part he was able todo this because of the urban situatedness of these conversa-tions, which today would take place in a much more diffuseglobal network. Moreover, though the concept of modernismmay have been elastic, it was not undermined by Hartford’sattempted poaching. On the contrary, by keeping the conceptof modern art in flux just at the moment when modernism wasbecoming an institutionalized category, Hartford’s and MoMA’scross-purposes ignited a rigorous dialogue about the museum’sobligation to the public—ultimately locating modern art at thetension between high and low, between the historical and a newterm these arguments helped bring about: the contemporary.


NotesFirst and foremost, I thank the Andy Warhol Foundation—Creative CapitalArts Writers Grant, which generously funded research for this article. Thanksare also due to the University of Houston and the Society for the Preservationof American Modernists for help in funding licensing and reproduction fees.

1. Even though many critics have characterized MoMA as a sanctuary forabstraction, MoMA was late in institutionally embracing abstract expres-sionism. See Ann Temkin, Abstract Expressionism and the Museum of ModernArt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010). Temkin notes that MoMA col-lected abstract expressionism alongside a variety of figurative paintingsthroughout the 1940s and 1950s, and that it was not until “the 1960s—when Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and their peers were becoming householdnames—that MoMA bestowed the official recognition of retrospectives onsenior statesmen such as Rothko, Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock,and de Kooning” (25).

2. Much of MoMA’s historiography has been written by employees of the museum or by close associates. See, for example, John Elderfield, ed., The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad, Studiesin Modern Art, no. 4 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1994); JohnElderfield, ed., The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity andChange, Studies in Modern Art, no. 5 (New York: The Museum of ModernArt, 1995); and Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of theMuseum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973).

3. See, for example, Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story ofContemporary Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004).

4. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University ofChicago, 1983).

5. See Dwight MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street-I,” NewYorker 29, n. 43 (1953): 55.

6. See MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street-I,” 55.7. See Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the

Collection of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art,” in TheMuseum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change, pp. 13-73.

8. MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-Third Street-I,” 57.9. Hartford published 4,000 copies of the book, which he distributed to

newspapers and colleges. Dorothy Bock Pierre to Madeleine Kilpatrick, 11September 1952, in Huntington Hartford Archives, Howard Gotlieb ArchivalResearch Center, Boston University. Hartford described the essay as “a sortof diatribe against a lot of contemporary literature.” Huntington Hartford,interview by Paul Cummings, 19 May 1970, in Archives of American Art,Smithsonian Institution.

10. Huntington Hartford, Has God Been Insulted Here? (New York: PrivatePrinting, 1951), 19–20.

11. Hartford, Has God Been Insulted Here? 20.12. Tom Wolfe, “Portrait Gallery: Museum Piece Huntington Hartford . . .

‘Has God Been Insulted Here?’” Sunday London Times, 15 March 1964. In1964, Winthrop Sargeant of the New Yorker contacted Hartford about writing aprofile on him for the magazine. Sargeant said that Hartford’s interventionsinto American culture and his willingness to take on the establishment asrepresented by MoMA made him a worthy subject of a nonpartisan profile.Winthrop Sargeant to Huntington Hartford, 24 April 1964, in file 14, box 36,

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Huntington Hartford Archives. The profile never appeared.13. Tom Wolfe, “The Luther of Columbus Circle,” Sunday Magazine, 23

February 1964, 15, in Alfred H. Barr microfiche frame 2194, MoMA Library.14. The ad was published in the New York Times, New York Post, New

York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Wall Street Journal, and New York JournalAmerican. These publications had a combined circulation of 4,300,000.Typescript of article written by Paul Mocsanyi, United Press, 17 May 1955,in Huntington Hartford Foundation subject file, MoMA Library. The advertisement cost Hartford $25,000, according to Val Duncan, “Art WorldWarrior,” Newsday, 3 May 1960, 36.

15. Huntington Hartford, “The Public Be Damned?” (advertisement), NewYork Times, 16 May 1955, 48.

16. Hartford, “The Public Be Damned?” 48.17. John Brooks, “Why Fight It? (Profile of Sidney Janis),” The New Yorker,

12 November 1960, 88. Brooks reprinted what Hartford quoted from ArtNews: “‘The stages of the painting . . . are neither better nor worse, more orless ‘finished’ than the terminus. Some might appear more satisfactory thanthe ending, but this is irrelevant.’ Hartford demanded ‘What kind of double-talk is this?’ He would seem to have had a sharp point there, but to art collectors who read the ad the point was apparently ‘Buy De Kooning.’Within two months, Janis’s supply of de Koonings was exhausted, and therehas been a waiting list for the painter’s work almost ever since” (88).

18. Goldstein, Judd, and Gurfein to Mr. Dana C. Backus, President of CitizensUnion Research Foundation, Inc., 19 May 1955, in file 2, box 34, HuntingtonHartford Archives.

19. See Frank Thompson, The Congressional Record, 18 July 1955, A5255.Thompson was quoting from Jonathan Marshall, “The Public Be Damned?—No,” Arts Digest, 1 July 1955, 5. Thompson, a Democratic representative fromNew Jersey, was disturbed because of Hartford’s suggestion that he would beable to write off the cost of the ads on his income taxes. “The Public BeDamned?” reportedly cost Hartford $25,000, though “‘[the ads] won’t cost meanything, of course’ said Mr. Hartford with a smile ‘for I’ll deduct the moneyfrom my income tax. The article has after all an educational purpose’” (5).

20. See Frederick Thompson Jr., Congressional Record—Appendix, A5255,18 July 1955. Eisenhower’s quotation was also cited in Eleanor Roosevelt,“The Case of Mr. Hartford and His Ad against Art,” New York WorldTelegram, 30 July 1955, 6.

21. Roosevelt, “The Case of Mr. Hartford,” 6. Thompson sent a copy ofRoosevelt’s article to MoMA’s director, Rene d’Harnoncourt. memorandum,Frederick Thompson to Rene d’Harnoncourt, 1 August 1955, in reel 2194,Alfred Barr Papers, MoMA Archives.

22. See George Dondero, “Communist Maneuver to Control Art in theUnited States” (1949), in Art in Theory, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 665–668.

23. George A. Dondero to Huntington Hartford, 30 March 1955, in file 12,box 15, Huntington Hartford Archives. Dondero was a Republican fromMichigan.

24. Eleanor Jewett, “Modern Art as a Tool for Propaganda,” ChicagoTribune, 31 July 1955.

25. See Alfred Barr, “Is Modern Art Communistic?” New York Times, 14December 1952. Though domestic critics of modern art continued to accuseit of representing anti-American values, at the end of 1956 MoMA expandedits international program, forming the International Council, which exported


its first show, The New American Painting, to eight countries in 1958–1959.The exhibition featured prominent abstract expressionists and was meant topromote freedom and individualism. For more on abstract expressionism’srelationship to the Cold War, see Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism,Weapon of the Cold War” (1974), in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate,ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Routledge, 2000), 147–154.

26. Document forming a trust, 5 May 1954, in file 7, box 39, HuntingtonHartford Archives. The document establishing the gallery’s trust was nota-rized in New York.

27. The foundation was established in 1948 and hosted its first fellow in1950. First Fruits (Pacific Palisades, CA: Huntington Hartford Foundation,1956). Hartford closed the art colony in 1965. Hartford’s initial plans for LosAngeles were based on his residence there at the time: “Well, the original reason [for founding the Museum] was that I became so incensed at one pointat the crap that was exhibited as good art that I wanted to have an exhibitionout in California—in fact, I asked the Los Angeles County Museum, theyturned it down—showing representative examples of good public taste. AndI don’t think it should be just the general public, but something which repre-sented the more intelligent level of the general public versus the critics. Imean this is something that I was very uptight about at that time, you know,and very concerned about. And originally I wanted to build a museum whereI could do this kind of thing, you see, where I’d have some base of opera-tions.” Hartford, interview by Cummings.

28. Hartford, interview by Cummings. We can also speculate about howdifferently Hartford’s efforts may have played out if he had built his museumin Los Angeles as he originally planned. Not only does the recent PacificStandard Time initiative by the Getty Foundation demonstrate the diversityof art practices taking place in Southern California during the 1950s and1960s, but the diffuse cultural environment may have been more amenableto Hartford’s interventions. The opening of the Getty Museum in 1974 speaksto an audience for more academic art. Furthermore, though Hartford com-pared Southern California to Oklahoma, claiming that no matter how impres-sive its physical architecture (or, presumably, its cultural endeavors) amuseum there would have trouble attracting a large enough audience, theoverwhelming popularity of the new Crystal Bridges Museum of AmericanArt in Bentonville, Arkansas—funded by another grocery heir, AliceWalton—reveals that major cultural institutions in regional areas can servepent-up demand.

29. Hartford and Dalí likely met socially, and Dalí’s own fallen status,which marked him as an art world outsider, in addition to his renewed inter-est in classicism and history painting, likely convinced Hartford that his ear-lier assessment of Dalí had been inaccurate. The subject of the painting tiedin with the location of the Gallery at Columbus Circle, so named in 1892 onthe occasion of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.Hartford’s foundation awarded Dalí a $5,000 grant in October 1957, report-edly “the largest single gift the foundation has granted in its four years ofawards.” “Dali Gets $5,000 Award of Hartford Foundation,” New York Times,21 October 1957. According to Dalí collector A. Reynolds Morse, “it wasindeed Dali behind the scenes who was directing and shaping HuntingtonHartford’s art collecting.” A. Reynolds Morse, “The Legacy of HuntingtonHartford,” 14 April 1992, in Dali Museum Archives, St. Petersburg, Florida.Morse assesses Hartford sympathetically: “As an independent appraiser ofour artistic culture, and as an art collector, he refused to kowtow to the

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professional tastemakers, art critics, and ‘museum experts.’ Then to worsenmatters, he first dared to exercise his own tastes, and second he undertook towrite about esthetic matters usually left to paid appraisers which we art ama-teurs were tacitly supposed to leave totally alone. His opprobriums as a veryrich man and mine as a poor one, however, and our diverse approaches to art,were totally rejected by the formal snob establishment. There, typically, ‘artexperts’ are paid to tell people what to like and endorse and what to reject. Ibet on Dali and created the Dali Museum in parochial St. Petersburg whichis drawing up to 1000 people a day. Hartford on the other hand bet on him-self, and lost nearly everything. His eight million dollar museum—and in itsday New York’s most interesting monument—was eventually destroyed: anesthetic crime if ever there was one . . . leaving nothing but an array of sensualtabloid eccentricities. These now totally overshadow his courage in buyingonly passé art whose renaissance Dali believed was sure to follow his owncontemporaneously controversial attempt to ‘become classic’ in an era whereart had no content whatsoever” (11–12).

30. A news story noted that architect Edward Durell Stone, who attendedthe unveiling, had “to raise one of the ceilings of the projected museum toaccommodate the large canvas,” which measured fourteen feet high. JohnMolleson, “Reported Price $250,000; It’s For New Columbus Circle Gallery,”New York Herald Tribune, 13 January 1960. Dalí’s painting was unveiled on12 January 1960, in a private showing at the gallery French and Co.

31. Brooks, “Why Fight It?” 59.32. Nonetheless, Barr conceded that after MoMA opened in 1929 Katherine

Dreier “felt badly about our using the name Museum of Modern Art. As Irecall, either the President or myself wrote a letter of apology and explana-tion.” Memorandum, Alfred Barr to [MoMA] files, 5 February 1959, in AlfredBarr Papers, 2194:941, MoMA Archives. Perhaps unfortunately for MoMA,Aline Saarinen’s The Proud Possessors had just been published in December1958, debuting at number fifteen on the New York Times bestseller list andincluding a chapter on Katherine Dreier that referred to the Société Anonymeby its full name. “Best Seller List,” New York Times, 7 December 1958, infolder 8, box 8, Aline and Aero Saarinen Papers, Archives of American Art.(The book eventually reached number nine on the nonfiction bestsellers list).Elizabeth Shaw, publicity director at MoMA brought this to the attention ofMoMA’s lawyers, quoting the passage to them in which Saarinen citesDreier’s explanation of the name: “Since Miss Dreier’s idea was to promote‘Art, not personalities,’ Man Ray obligingly baptized the group ‘The SocieteAnonyme, Inc.: Museum of Modern Art 1920.’ Miss Dreier liked explaininghis joke. ‘Since “Societe Anonyme” is also the French for “incorporated” andas we incorporated, we became Incorporated Incorporated,’ she would say,laughing heartily.” See memorandum, Elizabeth Shaw to Walter J. Holska ofWinthrop, Stinson, Putnam, and Roberts, 10 February, 1959, in Alfred BarrPapers, 2194:940, MoMA Archives.

33. Dondero stated, “The Société Anonyme according to the American ArtAnnual was first organized as the Museum of Modern Art. The Museum ofModern Art founded in 1920, officered in 1923 and for years thereafter byKandinsky, Russian Commissar of the ‘Isms’ becomes crystallized as the pre-sent Museum of Modern Art. As an enduring link between the two, Alfred H.Barr, Jr., member of the Board of Directors of the Société Anonyme, is theDirector of the present Museum of Modern Art.” See Esther Julia Pels, “Artfor Whose Sake?” American Legion Magazine, October 1955, 55.

34. Adolph Block, “No Monopoly on ‘Modern,’” New York Sunday Mirror,


15 March 1959. The letter also cited the $29,490,000 MoMA was reported tohave spent on its activities promoting modern art.

35. Barr wrote d’Harnoncourt a memo in which he worried that Hartfordwould use “the situation for maximum publicity not only for his museum butfor his opinions about modern art as expressed in that really poisonousadvertisement.” Memorandum, Alfred Barr to Rene d’Harnoncourt, 2 February1959, in Alfred Barr Papers, 2194:945, MoMA Archives. The same day,MoMA (likely Barr) compiled a four-page summary of the press’s commentson the lawsuit for its internal files, assessing nine major articles and record-ing fifteen newspapers nationally that carried the Associated Press articleabout the lawsuit.

36. “Good Old Fashioned Modern,” Herald Tribune, 24 January 1959.37. The Boston Museum of Modern Art had changed its name to the

Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948 to reflect its commitments to new art.In contrast, the San Francisco Museum of Art added the word modern to itstitle in 1975 “to describe its purview more accurately,” though its missionstatement describes the institution as a “center for modern and contempo-rary art.” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “History + Staff: Overview,”n.d., http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_history_staff.

38. Saarinen reminded her readers, “That institute felt strongly that theMuseum of Modern Art in New York had usurped these words unto itselfand invested them exclusively with meaning the kind of art it championed.To the Boston group that art was extreme, experimental and tinged with chicanery. Then, with a great deal of fanfare, an expensive manifesto andmaximum righteousness, it proudly changed its name from ‘Institute of ModernArt’ to ‘Institute of Contemporary Art.’” Aline B. Saarinen, “Museums Go toLaw for Right to a Name,” New York Times, 1 February 1959, X19. The NewYorker stated that the Boston museum had explained that its name changewas necessary because “so-called ‘modern art’” had given rise to ‘a cult ofbewilderment and double-talk.’” MacDonald, “Action on West Fifty-ThirdStreet-I,” 56.

39. Saarinen, “Museums Go to Law for Right to a Name,” X19.40. James Stevenson, “You’ve Got the Wrong Address, Mac,” New Yorker,

18 April 1964.41. Doris Herzig, “Hartford at Home,” Newsday, 12 May 1971, 6A. Herzig

also reports, “And he describes an even more satiric cartoon in which a manis sitting at a bar, looking very dejected. ‘He’s an artist,’ the bartenderexplains, ‘and Huntington Hartford likes his paintings” (6A).

42. “Battle of Museums,” Charleston News and Courier, 3 February 1959.43. “2 Millionaires Fight over Affairs of Art,” Yonkers Herald-Statesman,

in Alfred Barr Papers, 2194, MoMA Archives. Not only was Rockefeller apatron, but he was a past president of MoMA, and his mother had cofoundedthe museum.

44. “Confusion in Modern Art,” Wall Street Journal, 22 January 1959.45. “Confusion in Modern Art.”46. “Petty? Vindictive?” Newsweek, 9 February 1959, 92.47. “What Is ‘Modern’?” New York Mirror, 23 January 1959. In April 1958,

a fire at MoMA destroyed several paintings. Other works were evacuated ontothe street. Shortly thereafter, MoMA’s conservation department was founded.

48. As Dalí collector Morse reported, “We talked about the museum—andhow much Hartford was in it—how he had been on the job day after day dur-ing its construction—how the MoMA had fought them on the name, and onlyconceded if they would always use the suffix “including the Huntington

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Hartford collection.” A. Reynolds Morse, A. Reynolds Morse journals,December 1965, frame 1277, in Archives of American Art.

49. “Hartford Modern: What’s in a Name?” Newsweek, 23 March 1964, 64.50. Carl Weinhardt, “Why Manhattan Needs Another Museum,” Show,

March 1964, 9. In 1961, the Gallery of Modern Art’s first director, WinslowAmes, resigned. “Word got around that he and Old Hunt (who isn’t old at allbut is really young, handsome, and plays a whale of a game of tennis) didn’tsee eye to eye on what constituted art.” William Longgood, “Island of ArtAwash in Realism,” New York World-Telegram, 20 January 1964, 13. Hartford,who discussed Ames amiably in later years, attributed Ames’s departure tohis more scholarly demeanor: “I was very, very lucky to have Winslow Amesas my first director. He quit before the Museum opened because I think hewas rather frightened at the idea of it actually opening. He loved to workbehind the scenes.” Hartford interview by Cummings. Weinhardt, previouslydirector of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, came on board October 1, 1963.

51. Weinhardt, “Why Manhattan Needs Another Museum,” 9. Critics alsowere quick to notice that Hartford’s collection was weighted heavily in thenineteenth century. Alfred Frankfurter pointed out that of the works on dis-play from Hartford’s collection, only a dozen pictures were painted in thetwentieth century. Alfred Frankfurter, “Caviare?—New York’s Newest Museum,”Art News, March 1964, 34.

52. Hartford must have felt ambivalent about the issue of personal taste,because he was publicly advocating for art for the common good. AsWeinhardt wrote in a Gallery of Modern Art publication in 1964, Hartford’sendeavors were “in the splendid American tradition of private collecting foreventual public pleasure” despite being “a result of his highly individual andpersonal philosophy about art.” Carl J. Weinhardt, Paintings from theHuntington Hartford Collection (New York: Gallery of Modern Art, 1964),n.p. Among the articles in Hartford’s archives is one of J. Paul Getty’scolumns for Playboy in which the collector extols the virtues of assemblinga fine art collection. Within the pages of such a magazine, Getty’s assessmentthat “few human activities provide an individual with a greater sense of personal gratification than the assembling of a collection of art objects thatappeal to him” must have carried particular weight. Hartford likely also iden-tified with some of the criticisms that Getty cites of his own collecting prac-tices: “the critic concluded his tirade by disdainfully sneering: ‘Paul Gettybuys only what he likes!’” In defending himself, Getty quoted Sir AlecMartin of Christie’s: “‘I don’t hold it against him at all that his collections arean expression of the man,’ Sir Alec declared. ‘I’m rather fed up with theseimpersonal, “complete” collections that are chosen by somebody for some-body else. The formation of his wonderful collection has been a public service.’ No collector could hope for greater vindication of his collection phi-losophy—or for higher praise of his collection.” J. Paul Getty, “CreativeCollecting: The Profits and Pleasures to be Found in the Fine Art,” Playboy12, no. 11 (November 1965): 111, 204. Hartford, too, was criticized for inflict-ing his personal taste on the public: “He has revived the terrible heresy that itis permissible for people to disregard fashions in art and to enjoy whateverthey happen to like and he has given New Yorkers a chance of seeing a col-lection of pictures which has nothing much in common but for their havingappealed to him at one time or another.” Anthony West, “Art World TastemakersNeed to Sweeten Image,” Los Angeles Times, 26 April 1964.

53. Morse, journals, December 1965, frame 1285.54. “This [Hartford’s] tentative plan is not wholly dissimilar to the plan of


the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, nowbeing built at Fifth Avenue and 88th Street,” one reviewer wrote. “ArchitectPicked for Museum,” New York Times, 19 May 1958.

55. Despite the Guggenheim’s established reputation, during the newbuilding’s three-year construction Wright’s building plans elicited much crit-icism from Robert Moses, who called it “an inverted oatmeal dish” and com-pared it to “a giant corkscrew, a washing machine and a marshmallow.” Oncethe building opened (in the wake of Wright’s death the previous April), crit-ics praised its innovative design. Emily Genauer, “Frank Lloyd Wright’sSpiral Museum Opens,” New York Herald Tribune, 21 October 1959, 1.

56. Thomas Messer, “What Should a Museum Be?” Art in America 49, no.2 (1961): 23.

57. See Katherine Kuh, “Minus of the Building Boom,” Art in America 49,no. 2 (1961): 41. Architect Edward Durell Stone, who designed Hartford’sbuilding (and had codesigned MoMA in 1939), used the Art in Americaforum to promote the importance of a museum’s accessibility, though fromhis perspective that accessibility was meant for a middle- and upper-classaudience. See Edward Durell Stone, “What Should a Museum Be?” Art inAmerica 49, no. 2 (1961): 35. Though a full-page image of the Gallery ofModern Art is included in the article, Stone makes no mention of the museum.

58. From the time of the construction of Stone and Goodwin’s building in1939 until 1959–1960, MoMA had more than doubled its attendance, almostquadrupled its membership, and increased the number of items in the collection seven-fold. Kuh, “Minus of the Building Boom,” 41. Also in 1939,MoMA started charging for admission. In 1961, Barr wrote a three-pagememo to d’Harnoncourt expressing his concerns about a hostile or unwel-come atmosphere in the museum. Memorandum, Alfred Barr to Rened’Harnoncourt, 11 December 1961, Barr Papers, 2194:908, MOMA Archives.

59. Don Ross, “Change of Heart at A-Borning Museum,” New York HeraldTribune, 28 August 1963, 18.

60. See MoMA, “Reopening of the Museum in May with ExpandedPrograms,” press release, 23 February 1964, in MoMA Archives, availableonline at http://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/3219/releases/MOMA_1964_0006_1964-02-23_6.pdf.

61. Emily Genauer, “See What Mr. Hartford Likes,” New York HeraldTribune, 15 March 1964, 37. Critic Brian O’Doherty also saw overlap inHartford’s and MoMA’s interest in history but noted, “the Modern Museum[is] devoted to historical perspectives rather than to the historical context,i.e., the uses of the past to illuminate the present . . . rather than a study of asection of the past in its immediate historical context . . . there is room for a‘context’ view of the past, which is presumably what the Hartford Gallerywill provide.” Brian O’Doherty, “Hartford Gallery: Old Wine, A New Bottle,”New York Times, 12 January 1964, X17.

62. Rene d’Harnoncourt, “When Is Art ‘Modern Art’?” New York TimesMagazine, 24 May 1964, SM17. The expansion gave 15,000 more square feetof space to the permanent collection. Ada Louise Huxtable, “And Its Big andBeautiful: Redesigned Museum Is Good Architecture, Fine Cityscape,” NewYork Times, 31 May 1964, X15.

63. O’Doherty, “Hartford Gallery,” X17. Critic Ada Louise Huxtable echoedthis sentiment: “With that curious reversal of chic, in which the chic NewYork world specializes, where ‘out’ becomes ‘in’ for the avant-garde, theHuntington Hartford gallery promises to make the unfashionable extremelyfashionable from now on.” Ada Louise Huxtable, “Columbus Circle Gallery

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Will Open in Mid-March,” New York Times, 25 February 1964, 33. Weinhardtembraced the idea of unfashionability: ““As a result of the independent andpersonal nature of the collection, the Gallery has already been dubbed ‘themuseum of unfashionable art.’ Instead of disturbing me, I find this title ratherpleasing. ‘Unfashionable’ is not a bad thing for a museum to be. Had amuseum with such an avowed policy existed through the centuries, it wouldpossess examples of the works of most of the great painters of the past, almostall of whom have slipped into unfashion or disfavor at one time or another,and they would have been acquired at bargain prices.” Weinhardt, “WhyManhattan Needs Another Museum,” 5.

64. As Sandler wrote, “Despite my negative reaction to the Gallery ofModern Art, I believe it can serve a valuable function in New York today. Inthe last few years, because of a lack of museum space, New Yorkers missedfine retrospectives of Courbet and Houdin as well as surveys of the BarbizonSchool and Spanish painting. If the Gallery would bring such shows to NewYork—and it has announced it will—this in itself would be a welcome publicservice.” Irving Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,” New York Post, 5 April 1964,14. Despite the “avowedly anti-modern pictures,” critic Alfred Frankfurterconcluded that seeing the Pre-Raphaelites does offer an opportunity to recon-sider the anomalies of a style that was celebrated in its own time but nowseems hackneyed. Alfred Frankfurter, “Caviare?” 60. Genauer also framedher support of the Gallery of Modern Art as one that did not necessarily haveto do with avant-garde values: “One particular aspect of modern art, abstract-expressionist painting, which it was utterly ridiculous to consider subver-sive or evil or destructive, nevertheless was at that time all but monopolizingthe attention of most American museums and galleries. It would be good,therefore, to see a certain balance restored, and art that was vital and imagi-native, without necessarily being avant-garde, made impressively availableto the public again, along with new experimentation.” Genauer, “See WhatMr. Hartford Likes,” 37.

65. See Sally Hammond, “Huntington Hartford and His Museum,” NewYork Post, 15 March 1964, 2.

66. As Hartford wrote, “[The Gallery of Modern Art’s] purpose is to showa different esthetic point of view from the vulgar commercialism on the onehand and the ‘ivory tower’ intellectualism on the other which have prevailedin the art world for some 20 or 30 years in American art circles.” HuntingtonHartford, “New Museum in Manhattan,” Show, March 1964, 3. The HeraldTribune attempted to play up the debates surrounding the museum by takingout an illustrated advertisement in its pages to promote Genauer’s upcomingreview of Stone’s building, attempting to entice readers “Is the new Galleryof Modern Art as full of holes as its façade? . . . The controversy may continueto rage, but now it can do so with the benefit of an informed opinion.”Advertisement, New York Herald Tribune, 1964, in Huntington HartfordArchives.

67. Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,” 14. Newsweek’s reviewer described themuseum thusly: “There is the individual lighting for each picture designedby Abe Feder of ‘My Fair Lady’ fame. There is a cocktail lounge with itsleather-topped bar, the cosy espresso nook, the plants and masks from Polynesia,the Danish wool upholstery, the parquet floors, the giant Aeolian-Skinnerorgan which will send uplifting tones gently through the bones of viewerscontemplating the utopian pinups of Bouguereau.” “Hartford Modern:What’s In a Name?” Newsweek, 23 March 1964, 65.

68. Huxtable, “Columbus Circle Gallery Will Open in Mid-March,” 33.


69. As the New York Times reported, “Those who came seemed disposedto enjoy rather than find fault with the opulence of the interiors—parquetfloors, crimson carpeting, dull-bronze fixtures, luxuriant potted plants—appeared to excite as much comment as the paintings.” Thomas Buckley,“Huntington Hartford’s White Marble Tower Is Open,” New York Times, 22March 1964, 63.

70. Buckley, “Huntington Hartford’s White Marble Tower Is Open.”Record numbers continued into April, with crowds above 4,000 paying theseventy-five-cent admission. “4,719 at Modern Gallery Set AttendanceRecord,” New York Times, 2 April 1964, 30.

71. “4,719 at Modern Gallery Set Attendance Record,” 30.72. Maurice Grosser, “Huntington Hartford’s Ivory Tower,” The Nation, 20

April 1964, 402.73. Genauer reported, perhaps erroneously, that this annual attendance

figure took MoMA fourteen years to achieve. Emily Genauer, “The First Yearon Columbus Circle,” New York Herald Tribune, 7 March 1965, 25. The dataprinted in Katherine Kuh’s article “Minus of the Building Boom” contradictsthis, citing a figure of 307,509 visitors in MoMA’s tenth year. Kuh, “Minus ofthe Building Boom,” 45.

74. Reviews were mixed. While one critic declared “The Tchelitchew ret-rospective is a great deal more interesting than the permanent collection,”Sandler felt that Tchelitchew fit well with Hartford’s collection. Grosser,“Huntington Hartford’s Ivory Tower,” 403; and Sandler, “In the Art Galleries,”14. Genauer assessed Tchelitchew as a draftsman, but pointed out that he differed from the men in Hartford’s stable in that he was attentive to compo-sitional structure in the mode of Picasso and Paul Cézanne and that he wasinterested in the psychology of human relationships. Genauer, “See What Mr.Hartford Likes,” 38.

75. Despite Hartford’s desire to differentiate his idea of modern, “Keeneyes have noted (and voices proclaimed perhaps too shrilly) that Mr. Hartfordhas taken idols of the modern art pantheon—such names as Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Courbet—and represented them with youthful works ofunjelled style all but unidentifiable. And that they keep company with worksby slick nontalents who were celebrated not too long ago but deserve to restin peace and oblivion.” Leo Monsky, “One Man Battles the Establishment,”New York Journal-American, March 1964, in Huntington Hartford Archives.Another article described the collection: “As everyone must know by now,Mr. Hartford eschews abstraction, nonobjective painting, and much of thework of the twentieth century; the “modern art” to which the museumaddresses itself encompasses 200 years of art, and his collection representswhat he feels is the best of that heritage: John Singer Sargent, Monet, Cassatt,Courbet, Inness, Vuillard, Hopper, Marsh, Sir Jacob Epstein, Salvador Dali tomention but a few. Mr. Hartford’s collection will be on permanent display inthe fourth and fifth floor galleries.” “About New York,” Cue, 18 March 1964.

76. When Tchelitchew debuted at MoMA in 1942, reviewers comparedhim, favorably, to Dalí, who had had a solo show at MoMA the year before.Both exhibitions were curated by James Thrall Soby. MoMA bought Hide andSeek just before the exhibition opened, which Tchelitchew called “miracu-lous. I thought it big joke.” See “Russian Artist Out-Dalis Dali; Plays Peekaboowith Paint Brush,” New York World Telegram, 9 November 1942. ThoughMoMA made no mention of Dalí in its press materials, the multiple-imagetechnique Tchelitchew showcased in Hide and Seek was reminiscent ofDalí’s works.

58 Grey Room 53

77. The New York Times reported, “The museum is host to an average of500 people a day on weekdays and 1,000 a day on weekends. Admission is$1.” Richard F. Shepard, “Hartford Seeks Aid for Gallery,” New York Times,15 May 1965, 29.

78. Weinhardt’s departure was announced in the New York Times: GraceGlueck, “Director Leaves Modern Gallery,” New York Times, 19 October 1965.However, according to Morse’s journals, Weinhardt had been a largely absen-tee director long before then. An internal memo from William Z. Cline, theexecutive vice president of the Foundation for Modern Art, to Hartford sug-gested both Harry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan and a proponentof pop art, and Lawrence Alloway, curator at the Guggenheim Museum, forthe director position at the Gallery of Modern Art. Memorandum, William Z.Cline to Huntington Hartford, 8 March 1966, in file 11, box 16, HuntingtonHartford Archives. As Hartford remembered: “I had problems with getting areally top notch director. I had Carl Weinhardt for a while. He wasn’t too satisfactory. He finally quit. And after that I haven’t had any director for thelast two or three years. That worked pretty well. It wasn’t bad. Internally itworked perfectly. I mean we had no problems internally. The only way itprobably didn’t work as well was externally. I mean we probably didn’t getas much support as if we had people on the outside, you know, bringing insocial events and things of this sort.” Hartford, interview by Cummings.

79. “Gallery of Modern Art Selects a Fund-Raiser,” New York Times, 3 August 1965, 28. Elsewhere, Hartford had acknowledged, “but of course artmuseums are never self supporting.” See Charles E. Davis, “HuntingtonHartford Plans to Close Canyon Artist Retreat,” Los Angeles Times, 2 May1965, B1. Davis’s article also lists $600,000 as the annual cost of operating theGallery of Modern Art. In mid-1966, the Wall Street Journal reported thatHartford was selling a large portion of his shares in A&P, worth approxi-mately $22 million. “Public Sale of 760,000 A&P Shares Set by HuntingtonHartford for This Month,” Wall Street Journal, 8 June 1966, 7. The article alsoreported that the last time Hartford had sold A&P stock had been in 1959,when he had raised $40 million from the sale.

80. Huntingdon Hartford, Art or Anarchy: How the Extremists andExploiters Have Reduced the Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism (NewYork: Doubleday, 1964). According to Hartford, the book, which was pub-lished in December 1964, had sold 7,000 copies by mid-1965. Morse, journals,13 March 1965, frame 1920.

81. See Grace Glueck, “Hartford to End Coast Art Colony,” New YorkTimes, 2 April 1965. At one point, Hartford considered selling the book in theGallery of Modern Art. Morse, journals, 13 March 1965, frame 1290.

82. See Hilton Kramer, “The Hartford Retreat,” The New York Review ofBooks, 11 February 1965; and Daniel J. Chasan, “Hartford’s Art or Anarchy,”The Harvard Crimson, 17 December 1964. Russell Lynes’s review was suc-cinct: “When I read Mr. Hartford’s book, on the other hand, I thought he mustbe pulling somebody’s leg. I was distressed to come to the conclusion that theleg he was pulling seemed to be his own.” Russell Lynes, “Writing Themselvesinto a Corner: Review of the Irresponsible Arts by William Snaith and Art orAnarchy? by Huntington Hartford,” Book Week, 29 November 1964, 17–18.

83. Brian O’Doherty, “A Millionaire Art Buff Takes on the Bad Guys,” Life,1964.

84. Morse, journals, December 1965, frames 1269–1270. The Bellows show eventually went forward but was delayed by an extension of the Dalíexhibition.


85. Exhibitions included Selections from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. T.Edward Hanley, Aubrey Beardsley, A Tribute to Joe Pasternak, Childe Hassam,The Nina Stevens Collection: Twentieth-Century Russian Painting, Man inSport, and Peter Fink Photographs, among others.

86. Milton R. Young to Peter Flanigan, 28 April 1969, in file 7, box 39,Huntington Hartford Archives. (Young was a Republican from North Dakota.)That Hartford wanted to be chairman of a federal program first proposed byPresident John F. Kennedy is curious. Kennedy had said, “If art is to nourishthe roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his visionwherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propa-ganda; it is a form of truth. . . . In free society art is not a weapon and it doesnot belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology.” John F. Kennedy, speechat Amherst College, 26 October 1963, National Endowment for the Arts web-site, http://www.arts.gov/about/Kennedy.html. Kennedy was assassinatedless than a month later, and President Lyndon B. Johnson created the NEA in 1965.

87. See the 1969 annual report of the National Endowment for the Artsand National Council on the Arts. Much of the foreword deals with theimportance of funding museums: “It is the view of this Council that the reportdocuments the broad scope of museum services and makes it abundantlyclear that the nation’s museums play an authentic and major role in thenation’s cultural and intellectual life. The report makes clear, too, that a per-vasive and insistent financial crisis confronts these institutions.” On Hartford’sinvestment in the Gallery of Modern Art, see Huntington Hartford to WilliamZ. Cline, 3 March 1966, in file 11, box 16, Huntington Hartford Archives.

Modern Art, Inc.: The Museum of Modern Art vs. Huntington Hartford

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