Word: museumed
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
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...
Stinger. Painting and sculpture have remained the Museum's most popular promotions, but its architectural department has had probably more influence on U. S. design. Budgeted at practically nothing during the first years, in 1932 it held the first decent U. S. exhibition of the so-called "International Style" (also the first of 68 exhibitions which the Museum has circulated out of Manhattan). In 1934 it attacked Housing with such vigorous exhibits as an actual tenement room, complete with cockroaches. The Museum's architectural notes and shows have in general packed more sting than any others...
...Museum's new home, designed by Architects Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, was evidence that the Museum can mix its own concrete: a million-dollar building on a million-dollar lot, with a sheer, severe front of plate glass, white marble and thermolux (a translucent sandwich made of spun glass insulator between two sheets of plate glass), galleries with collapsible walls, library, auditorium, projection rooms and roof terrace. The chairs and desks which furnish it (by van der Rohe, Breuer, Aalto, et al.) are in themselves a show of industrial fine...
...What? Director Barr spent his spare time last week warning himself against the perils of Bigness and Popularity. So far the Museum has amply proved its intellectual honesty, to the dinner-table discomfiture of certain conservative trustees. Director Barr is delighted and others are somewhat surprised that the trustees have supported him so well...