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Six years ago the art columns of Manhattan newspapers were filled with attacks on the stodgy direction of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum, it was charged, was willing to spend a quarter of a million for a Titian when it already owned several; its collection was appallingly weak in French Post-Impressionists; its interest in living U. S. painters seemed to have died with Winslow Homer. From all sides the suggestion loudly arose that Manhattan should have a museum comparable to the Luxembourg in Paris that could buy and exhibit modern paintings, not with the idea of preserving eternal masterpieces for the ages, but so that the public could see what living artists were producing. As with the Luxembourg, masterpieces, bought cheap, might later be passed on to the historic museums, like the Louvre or the Metropolitan, when time had verified them. Besides Mrs. Rockefeller, founders of the Museum of Modern Art included Miss Bliss, Mrs. W. Murray Crane, A. Conger Goodyear, Editor Frank Crowninshield, Paul J. Sachs of Harvard's Fogg Museum. Gallery space was rented in the Heckscher Building, and on the advice of Professor Sachs, lean, 27-year-old Alfred H. Barr Jr. was hired as Director.
Cash & Collections. Hardly was the museum established than the immediate need for it seemed to diminish. Mrs. Whitney established her Museum of American Art. Stodgy Director Edward Robinson of the Metropolitan died, to be succeeded by the more liberal Herbert E. Winlock. Still the Museum of Modern Art grew and prospered, gained much prestige and more publicity with its loan exhibitions of almost everything from Henri Matisse to modern kitchen utensils. But it still owned no important pictures. In 1931 Miss Bliss died, leaving the bulk of the pictures she had been buying since the Armory Show to the Museum on condition other members raise an endowment fund of $1,000,000 (later reduced to $750,000) to care for them. With Mrs. Rockefeller leading, 160 members produced $630,000, including $100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation. Promising the other $120,000 the Museum found itself the proud owner of a collection of Cezannes equaled only by those in Moscow and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., the finest group of Seurat drawings in the U. S. and 59 other important works. In 1932 the Museum moved from the Heckscher Building around to its present quarters on West 53rd Street.
In the six years of its existence the Museum has also: 1) held 46 major art exhibitions in its own quarters; 2) sent 28 traveling shows to 98 cities in the U. S. and Canada; 3) established a modern valuable art library; 4) published 38 different books and pamphlets; 5) put on many a radio art program; 6) established a cinema museum which is preserving for students such valued films as the first Mack Sennett custard pies, The Birth of a Nation, Sarah Bernhardt as Queen Elizabeth, the first sound picture (Al Jolson's Jazz Singer), Rudolph Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire. Besides the donations from Miss Bliss, Mrs. Rockefeller and others, the Museum acquired few months ago Surrealist Salvador Dali's famed canvas of the limp watches on the seashore, The Persistence of Memory (TIME, Nov. 26, 1934).