Modern in the Making

Today the Museum of Modern Art is widely recognized for establishing the canon of modern art; yet in its early years, the museum considered modern art part of a still unfolding experiment in contemporary visual production. By bracketing MoMA's early history from its later reputation, this book explores the ways the Museum acted as a laboratory to set an ambitious agenda for the exhibition of a multidisciplinary idea of modern art. Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA's programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.

Austin Porter is Assistant Professor of Art History and American Studies at Kenyon College, USA. Sandra Zalman is Associate Professor and Program Director of Art History at the University of Houston, USA.

Introduction Establishing the Modern: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, Austin Porter (Kenyon College, USA) and Sandra Zalman (University of Houston, USA) Part I: Vernacular Influences Chapter 1: Folk Surrealism, Marci Kwon (Stanford University, USA) Chapter 2: New Rugs by American Artists: Modernism, Abstraction, and Rug Design at MoMA, Jennifer Padgett (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, USA) Chapter 3: MoMA's Child Artists, John Blakinger (University of Southern California, USA) Chapter 4: "Floor, Ceiling, Wall, Garden Market: The Curatorial Scene of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, Andy Campbell (University of Southern California, USA) Part II: New Mediums for a New Museum: Photography, Dance, Architecture and Design Chapter 5: Aesthetic versus the "Mere Historic": Civil War and Frontier Photography at MoMA, Sarah Kate Gillespie (Gettysburg College, USA) Chapter 6: An Exact Instant in the History of the Modern, Jason Hill (University of Delaware, USA) Chapter 7: Performance and the Dance Archives at the Museum of Modern Art, Swagato Chakravorty (Yale University, USA) Chapter 8: Architecture on Display: Breuer's House in the Museum Garden, Catarina Schlee Flaksman (Independent Scholar) Part III: Mobilizing Modernism Chapter 9: Reproducing Art and the Museum: Ancestral Sources in and beyond the Museum of Modern Art, Rachel Kaplan (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA) Chapter 10: The 'Great Gallery' Goes to New York: Ancient American Rock Art, MOMA, and the New York Avant-Garde, James Farmer (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA) Chapter 11: "Toward a Happier and More Successful Life," or When Veterans Made, Art in the Modern Museum, Suzanne Hudson (University of Southern California, USA) Part IV: MoMA's Global Vision Chapter 12: Occidental Arrangements: MoMA's Emerging Global History of Art at Midcentury, John Ott (James Madison University, USA) Chapter 13: Exhibiting Italian Democracy in Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art, Antje Gamble (Murray State University, USA) Chapter 14: American Exceptionalism at the Modern, 1942-1959: Dorothy Miller's Americans, Angela Miller (Washington University, USA) Index