Unpacking the MoMA Myth: Modernism under Revision

As reviewers evaluated the “new” Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on the occasion of the institution’s ninetieth anniversary in 2019, several critics invoked a common myth of the museum’s origins. The myth goes something like this: Alfred Barr, the museum’s founding director, was a mastermind who established a narrow canon of modern art while building MoMA’s collection. This myth has recently been echoed by several writers, but it was most eloquently articulated by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter:¹

Early on, the Museum of Modern Art developed a snugly tailored origin myth for modern art itself. This was invented by the museum’s first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and mapped out in a began-and-begat chart of labels and directional arrows. The chart had the operational logic of a computer board, but was programmed for limited connectivity.²

Barr (who was indeed incautiously fond of diagrams) did have a vision—but it was not locked into a teleological genealogy, nor was it the “succession [of] dramas” that “has prevailed since the museum’s founding,” as critic Jerry Saltz writes. What these reductive characterizations leave out is that defining modernism was hardly a hard-wired affair, but a messy process that involved constant revision. While the chart has been rightly critiqued for its oversights and biases, this article aims instead to unpack what we could call the MoMA myth—that Barr’s famous 1936 chart of the development of abstract art advocates for a preordained streamlined, authoritarian modernism. In order to untangle the MoMA myth and the legacy of the chart, this article teases apart MoMA’s earlier experimental years from its later reputation to consider why the chart has played such an outsized role in (mis)representing modernism.

As a first step, it is time to stop reading Barr’s chart as mapping all of modern art, when it was meant—provisionally—to track the development of one stylistic trend among many others (fig. 1). As is well known, the chart appeared as the dust jacket of the 1936 exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art and was reproduced as a poster within the exhibition. Yet Barr meant neither the exhibition, nor the chart, to be definitive. Throughout MoMA’s history, he refrained from attempting to define modern art. In 1931, Barr would only describe it as “a relative, elastic term that serves conveniently to designate painting, sculpture, architecture, and the lesser visual arts, original and progressive in character, produced especially within the last three decades but including also the ‘pioneer ancestors’ of the nineteenth century.”³ And upon his retirement, more than thirty years later, he maintained this notion, insisting that modern art “can’t be defined with any degree of finality.”⁴ Barr envisioned modern art as an expansive category that encompassed a vast cross-section of visual production especially, though not necessarily, of the twentieth century, nor circumscribed by any particular style. To conflate modernism with abstraction—as so many later readings of the chart have done—might be an appealing simplification of Barr’s position, but it is one that fundamentally misrepresents his conviction that abstraction was only one strand of a more complicated, variegated modernism.⁵ Even MoMA’s current director, Glenn Lowry, makes this critical mistake in his 2013 essay on the chart, where he writes that “Barr’s diagram . . . had a goal: to demonstrate that abstraction was the inevitable culmination of earlier movements in art, making it the primary means of modern expression.”⁶ Lowry might see inevitability in reading the chart top to bottom, but we should consider Barr’s concept of the chart—as an “exercise in recent archeology,” that is, starting with abstract works of the present moment and working backwards.⁷ Moreover, Barr never made any claims on the primacy of abstraction, nor conflated it with modernism. He clearly labeled the diagram “the development of abstract art”; elsewhere he referred to it as the “Cubism and Abstract Art chart,” and, significantly, not as a chart of modern art, as it is mislabeled in his collected writings.⁸ The slip...