Art: Beautiful Doings

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Pictures have a longer tradition as Art than machine-tooling or the cinema. The 186,000 visitors to the Museum during its first year came to see pictures, and pictures for a long time made up the Museum's most elaborate and popular exhibitions. Among them:

Homer, Ryder and Eakins (May 1930), the first time these three 19th-Century U. S. painters were linked together.

Corot and Daumier (October 1930), including the first loans ever made by the Louvre and Berlin's National Gallery to a U. S. museum.

Diego Rivera (December 1931), first big U. S. exhibition of his work.

Van Gogh (October 1935), a smash hit seen by 125,000 in Manhattan.

Cubism and Abstract Art (March 1936).

New Horizons in American Art (September 1936), first big show of work done on the Federal Art Project.

Fantastic Art, Dada & Surrealism (December 1936), a wow.

Three Centuries of American Art (May 1938), shown in Paris at the Jeu de Paume Museum.

Thus a bold onset was followed by adroit changes of pace. Director Barr, whose fragile look is deceptive, stopped short at no dilettantism, worked like hell. Stage designing, posters, industrial design, children's art illustration and many an-other branch of art came in for special exhibitions, each worked up by the Museum's characteristic method: thorough research, orderly classification of the work shown, equal respect for every experimental artist whether probably great or palpably minor, explanatory notes for the public. Not all the Museum's shows have been revelations, some have been merely precious, but the documented catalogues for Abstract Art and Dada-Surrealism, in particular, were thorough jobs of making-art- intelligible-while-it's-hot. Among other decidedly valuable contributions to art literature was Photography 1830-1937, by the Museum's scholarly Librarian Beaumont Newhall.

Meanwhile the Museum moved from its five rooms to five floors of a greystone mansion on 53rd Street, in view of the back windows of the Rockefeller home. Membership ($10 a year) shot up by leaps & bounds. The board of trustees became a galaxy of the enlightened rich. Greatest of many gifts were the Bliss collection of modern French paintings, a bequest for which the Museum raised an endowment of more than $600,000 in 1934, and Mrs. Rockefeller's collection in 1935. The Museum acquired an energetic executive director, Thomas Dabney Mabry Jr., an able assistant curator of painting & sculpture, Dorothy Miller, a learned manager of publications, Frances Collins, to edit its unexpectedly successful books. In 1935 the Film Library was created under bright-eyed Iris Barry and her husband, John Abbott, received a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $120,000.