Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	Modern Art's First Museum Twenty years after the event, Katherine Dreier wrote that her museum was founded with gaiety. And yet with more than gaiety, for she had recorded earlier that "the serious works of serious men were shown and studied, and left to act as the desired leaven in the art world of the community." Miss Dreier has left small doubt that Marcel Duchamp was the central force. "Funds were only sufficient," she wrote, "to make a demonstration, [yet] Marcel Duchamp, with the help of Katherine S. Dreier, Andrew McLaren, Man Ray, and Henry Hudson, had the courage to incorporate this Museum of Modern Art as the Société Anonyme." It is said, in fact, that $6,000 comprised the total "funds" with which this historic project was launched. This modest amount even then might have bought only one important modern picture by one of the recognized contemporary masters. But, whatever her announced plans of expansion and magnitude of operation, Miss Dreier actually operated, not in terms of huge collections and important buildings, but in terms of a continuing review of new developments. She was trying to provide the landing-field for new ideas which modern art, as a living thing, so urgently required. The Société Anonyme opened on April 30, 1920, at 19 East 47th Street, in quarters so small that the first show was limited to sixteen paintings. It was almost like 291, which had been closed for three years, come to life again. That there was more than this one resemblance between the Dreier and the Stieglitz ventures, time would show. Both of them, at least-- Stieglitz's in 1907 and Dreier's in 1920--were ideas timely to the essence. The spawning development of modern art had made a permanent museum a crying need. Already in sixteen years it had explored more new directions, established more new schools than the entire preceding century. The work--from the conservationist's point of view--was piling up at an alarming rate and, paradoxically, becoming more expensive every day. Wealthy collectors were bidding in an international market, with dealers fully exploiting the situation. German industrialists, French capitalists, wealthy Czechoslovakians, American millionaires --even a fabulously rich Japanese baron--were grasping for the prizes. And there were the peaceful Swiss, who always have money. In five years a new movement would already be historic, and its monuments would be disappearing from view into many a private mansion. How to preserve for the public the newly old and at the same time to collect the newly new while it was still underpriced had become a towering problem. One or two of our long-established museums were trying, finally, to get into the swim, but, already loaded down, they found the swimming difficult. The Brooklyn Museum had already become the first to show a French retrospective from Courbet and Manet through Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin to Picasso and Matisse. A commendable thing, but only a lone straw in a high wind. Then, in 1921, the Metropolitan made a quick, exorcising pass at the situation. Plenty of people had been prodding the Old Lady of Fifth Avenue. Finally a committee that included Miss Lillie P. Bliss went to work, and the Met agreed-having no modern pictures of its own--to display pictures from important private collections. Walter Pach describes how Bryson Burroughs went to John Quinn's apartment on Central Park West to choose paintings and later "told with a gasp how, for several hours, workmen kept bringing in and removing paintings . . . passed in review for his choice." "Get thee behind me, Satan," said the Met, once the show was over, and for more years than one cares to count, never looked around again. Already the big collections were starting to come onto the market to be broken up and dispersed. The custom of leaving these legacies to the public through its institutions was not yet general. The first big sale came when the collection of Oriental art dealer Dikran Kelekian was publicly sold in 1922. American collectors got some of the items, like the large Picasso Green Still Life, which Miss Bliss bought; but Paris dealers then began the practice of coming over to bid in many of the most important works to cart back to France. This same year the bulk of the important Jerome Eddy collection went on posthumous exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, an important exception to the rule of the time. Chicago, it should be noted, was, to a degree, looking up. The socially prominent Arts Club of that city, incorporated in 1916, had entered the fray, and by 1921 had a room in the Art Institute. Here, as well as in its own quarters, it began showing advanced art from Europe: in 1923 Picasso, then Soutine, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Under the leadership of Mrs. John Alden Carpenter, the Arts Club put strong but discreet pressure on the Art Institute to liberalize its policy. To the remarkable Mrs. Carpenter's influence on her vastly wealthy uncle Joseph Winterbotham, the Institute owes his fund, which started their purchase of important modern painting from Paris. It certainly was none of the doing of the Institute itself, which in those days--long before the coming of Daniel Catton Rich as Director--quite evidently aspired to become the Metropolitan Museum of Michigan Boulevard, one of those anomalies which make the "wild" west not so wild, after all. Even as late as 1926, when the Birch-Bartlett collection was bequeathed to the Institute, its trustees were divided about accepting it. The bequest included works of prime importance by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rousseau, Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani, and was crowned by the colossal Georges Seurat masterpiece, Sunday on the Grande Jatte. This high point of pointillisme and curtain-raiser for the discovery of abstract form had been bought originally for the collection for a reputed $45,000. Although the trustees knew this, they were not impressed, thinking no doubt that, as the old saying has it, a fool and his money are soon parted. They quite openly called certain Cézannes and Matisses--even the eye-filling Seurat--"obnoxious." The rumors of dissension spread. Finally, about six years after the Institute's uneasy acceptance of the bequest, a syndicate was formed in France to buy the Seurat. The offer was a cool $450,000. The trustees decided not to sell. But it was Paris, Paris, Paris, in the minds of the great collectors and the great museums. Was there something sanctifying about the air of Paris? Apparently so. In any event, Marcel Duchamp, a French expatriate more durable than even the Marquis de Lafayette, commented with acid sarcasm on the belief. On a brief trip to Paris he had a pharmacist seal up fifty cubic centimeters of the a'tmosphere in a glass ampoule, which he brought back and solemnly handed to Walter Arensberg. Arensberg as solemnly took it and added to his Duchamp collection. All through that decade of polemics, individuals and organizations propagandized, argued, and persuaded in the cause of modern art--and through it all generally forgot to include the American modernist. One would have thought that he had resigned from the movement by coming home. And yet, perhaps, as native friend and advocate, he might have won the case himself and with greater benefit to all concerned. Our contingent was fighting alone, like a detachment cut off from communications. Here we had our advanced abstractionists: Stuart Davis, Carles, Graham, and the others. And here, too, had sprung up independently the new movement called immaculatism or, less frequently, precisionism. Its beginnings had come as early as 1916, with the forthright machine pictures of Schamberg, an artist strongly influenced by Duchamp and Picabia. Then, about 1920-1, came Charles Demuth and his weaving of delicately precise machine forms into an over-all abstract design. Immaculatism soon included Preston Dickenson, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. With these varied artists, precisionism could include the extremes from O'Keeffe's female symbology to Sheeler's photography-like abstractions of factories and barns. The movement had its special local cult and no more; it was never given the opportunity of the comparison, which might have been more than favorable, with purism, the parallel French movement. Stuart Davis had to take his paintings with him to Paris in 1928 "to see how they stacked up over there."