Think of a favorite work of art you’ve seen in New York, and there’s a good chance it was brought to you by a woman. From The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh at MoMA to El Greco’s View of Toledo at The Met to the entire Whitney Museum of American Art, some of the city’s greatest museums were founded, funded or fundamentally established through the efforts of women.
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On the occasion of the recent release of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art and the major exhibition, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” which opened on November 17, Observer caught up with Ann Temkin, the Marie Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, as we looked into the women who made New York one of the art capitals of the world.
The most surprising thing she and her co-curators Romy Silver Kohn and Rachel Remick found, Temkin said, was just how many women played major roles in the formation of museums. “It’s incredible,” she admitted, “We still are sort of mind-boggled. We opened such a door into a universe for ourselves. We realized that it’s just a tiny bit of something so much larger.”
MoMA is using the exhibition, on view through March 29, 2025, to celebrate the legacy of Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931) and the 90th anniversary of her massive gift of art that transformed the institution into a collecting museum. When visitors enter the show, they’ll find not just her story but also those of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948) and Mary Quinn Sullivan (1877-1939). In 1928, the three women—a socialite, a relative recluse and a radical artist—decided something had to be done about the fact that there was no place in New York to show the exciting work that was being done in the early 20th Century. They decided to change that, raised funds and founded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. Their stories are paired with some of the museum’s most iconic works, including Paul Cézanne’s The Bather, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, all there courtesy of Lillie P. Bliss.
The obvious question is why it took almost 100 years to tell the stories of the women who created MoMA. Temkin has some theories. “It was, for the most part, men who were writing the history books,” she said. “And they were looking where they were looking and telling the history as they saw it. There’s just no denying now that stories were told through a very incomplete lens, and one that tended to consciously........