Museum of Modern Art

Manhattan’s Great Art Dealers: Some History

January 4, 2023 by Jaap Harskamp 1 Comment

Manhattan’s 57th Street, the world’s “most expensive” street, was laid out and opened in 1857 as the city of New York expanded northward.

With the Hudson and East Rivers on either end, the area was until then largely uninhabited and clustered with small factories and workshops. As late as the 1860s, the area east of Central Park was a shantytown with up to 5,000 squatters.

Half a century later it was Manhattan’s cultural heart and an intercontinental meeting place of artists, collectors and dealers. [Read more…] about Manhattan’s Great Art Dealers: Some History

Julien Levy & Art at the Heart of Manhattan

August 24, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp Leave a Comment

The late 1920s and 1930s were crucial years in New York’s rise as an international artistic center. Cultural contacts between Europe and the United States multiplied. American artists who had studied in Paris returned with fresh ambitions; dollar rich patrons were willing to finance new initiatives; the First World War had unsettled European artists and gallerists, many of whom settled in New York. They were joined by others who fled the Nazi threat. Manhattan was turning into a Mecca of modernism where a multi-national cohort of artists, dealers and investors mixed and mingled.

By our standards the art world was relatively small. At any one time in that epoch, there were probably fewer than fifteen galleries active in New York with only a handful concentrating on contemporary art. A pioneering role was played by Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue. Operational since 1905, the gallery introduced the Parisian avant-garde to an American audience. In modernist Manhattan, Stieglitz was the Godfather. [Read more…] about Julien Levy & Art at the Heart of Manhattan

A Modern Art Historian’s Hanoverian Inspiration

October 26, 2020 by Jaap Harskamp Leave a Comment

On November 8th, 1929, ten days after the Black Tuesday stock market crash, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened its doors to the public.

The idea of establishing an institution devoted to the collection and display of contemporary art was controversial. Artists feared that creativity would become institutionalized. If paintings and sculptures were taken out of the living environment, the museum would merely serve as a mausoleum or dumping ground.

As modernists defined art in terms of continuous movement and change (innovation was the new permanency), the idea of a “museum of modern art” seemed an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. It needed clarification. [Read more…] about A Modern Art Historian’s Hanoverian Inspiration

Digital Art Resources Preservation Project Announced

November 26, 2013 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), consisting of the libraries and archives of The Frick Collection (Frick Art Reference Library), the Brooklyn Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art, has been awarded a grant of $340,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a program of web archiving for specialist art historical resources.

The two-year program will follow a 2012 pilot study, Reframing Collections for the Digital Age, also funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. That study demonstrated that the types of materials the NYARC libraries had been collecting in printed form were increasingly migrating to online versions available exclusively on the web. [Read more…] about Digital Art Resources Preservation Project Announced

NY Libraries Joining Digital Public Library of America

November 4, 2013 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced the addition of three new Service Hubs – Empire State Digital Network (New York), The Portal to Texas History (Texas), and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (North Carolina) – that are expected to bring hundreds of thousands of new digital materials into the DPLA collections in the coming weeks and months. [Read more…] about NY Libraries Joining Digital Public Library of America