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Common Goods: American Folk Crafts as Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1932—33

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Jennifer Marshall
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Extract

During New York City's newly opened Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) fourth exhibition season of 1932–33, while director and intellectual leader Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was on sabbatical leave in Europe, interim director Holger Cahill mounted a show of 18th- and 19th-century American arts and crafts. Offered for sale in New England as antiques at the time of the show, the items on display in Cahill's American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 obscured the divisions between the avant-garde and the traditional, between high art and the everyday object. In an exhibit of items not easily categorized as modern nor properly considered art, MoMA admitted such local antiques and curiosities as weather vanes and amateur paintings into spaces otherwise reserved for the likes of Cézanne and Picasso.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 447 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

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References

NOTES

1. MoMA explicitly posited the folk art as familiar. The works were less foreign in terms of the public's presumed familiarity with local and Pennsylvania folk art, and literally less foreign than the contemporary art of the French avant-garde.

2. Recent art historical efforts have considered MoMA's early and mutually informing interactions with Manhattan's burgeoning commodity culture. Mary Anne Staniszewski's recent 1998 book, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, Terry Smith's 1993 Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America, as well as the writings on MoMA by Christoph Grunenberg, Carol Duncan, and Alan Wallach, all constitute important theoretical steps toward a history of MoMA's alignment of the discourses of modernism with American capitalism. Put simply by Grunenberg, “MoMA resolved the contradictions of capitalism and modernism by turning modern art into a business, promoting it just like any other commodity” (“The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America, ed. Pointon, Marcia [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994], 197)Google Scholar.

3. Cahill, Holger, “Document,” Archives of American Art Journal 24 (1984): 22–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Cahill, Holger, “American Folk Art,” in American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 16Google Scholar.

5. Grunenberg, “Politics of Presentation,” 197.

6. Previously, the largest crowd drawn came during the first season to see Painting in Paris: attracting only 58,575. For its season, Art of the Common Man provided over 46 percent of the total museum attendance (statistics culled from Goodyear, A. Conger, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years [New York: by the author, 1943]Google Scholar, Appendix H).

7. Goodyear, Museum of Modern Art, Appendix H. Between October of 1932 and October of 1933, Museum attendance increased 22.7 percent over the previous season's increase (Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 1 [11 1933]: 3Google Scholar).

8. Lynes, Russell, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 107Google Scholar. Art of the Common Man, which circulated from 1933 to 1934, was not the first MoMA exhibit to travel. Prior to this in 1932, Philip Johnson's Modern Architecture: International Exhibition and the grand tour of Whistler's mother (Arrangement in Black and Gray No. 1) spread the activity of MoMA into other American cities.

9. Henry McBride, “American Folk Art Shown: Modern Museum Aids in the Search of a Past,” in Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks, 5064 Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

10. Ruth Benedict, a student of Franz Boas, argued for the power of society in the construction of the individual in her 1934 Patterns of Culture. Community was thus the logic to which experience could be reduced. Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 113–14Google Scholar. Bearing this notion of the unifying structure of “culture,” the act of declaring an “American culture” was instantly a politically very potent gesture.

11. Cahill, , Art of the Common Man, 28Google Scholar.

12. This attitude applied to other shows of the era that lifted objects from their social contexts in order to elevate them to the status of art. However, avant-garde exhibition practices belied their professed disinterest in particular origins. Exhibitions of various items, whether of American or foreign “primitive” arts, tended to maintain regional and racial categories. Witness MoMA's exhibits: American Sources of Modern Art, of pre-Columbian ceramics (1933) and African Negro Art (1934). Another notable example was the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts at Grand Central Art Galleries in Manhattan (1931), which claimed to be an exhibition of “Indian art as art, not ethnology,” in spite of its obvious ethnic categorization. For more on the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, see Mullin, Molly H., “The Patronage of Difference: Making Indian Art ‘Art, Not Ethnology’,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 395–424CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Suzanne La Follette, “American Folk Art in a current exhibition,” Vogue, December 1932, in Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks, 5064 Archives of American Art/ Smithsonian Institution.

14. “Child Artists Win Awards in County Center Exhibit,” Argus (Mt. Vernon, N.Y.), 06 26, 1934Google Scholar, in Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks, 5064 Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

15. Corn, Wanda M., The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (University of California Press, 1999), 320Google Scholar.

16. Cahill, , “Folk Art: Its Place in the American Tradition,” Parnassus 4 (03 1932): 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Cahill, , Art of the Common Man, 7Google Scholar.

18. Allow, Dorothy, “American Folk Art,” Christian Science Monitor, 10 16, 1933Google Scholar, in Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks, 5058 Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institute.

19. “Child Artists Win Awards in County Center Exhibit,” Argus (Mt. Vernon, N.Y.), 06 26, 1934Google Scholar; and “Folk Art Represents Triumph of Instinct in the Creative Period,” Union and Republican (Springfield, Mass.), 12 4, 1932Google Scholar, in Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks, 5058 Archives of American Art/ Smithsonian Institution.

20. Appadurai, Arjun, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai, Arjun (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Ibid, 28.

22. Goux, Jean-Joseph, Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud, trans. Gage, Jennifer Curtiss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 16Google Scholar.

23. Marx, Karl, Capital, ed. McLellan, David (Oxford University Press, 1995), 14Google Scholar.

24. Cahill, , Art of the Common Man, 24Google Scholar.

25. Ibid, 8.

26. Ibid, 7–8.

27. For a treatment of MoMA's stance on decorative movements in design, see Lawrence, Sidney, “Clean Machines at the Modern,” Art in America 72 (02 1984): 127–41, 166–68Google Scholar.

28. Taylor, Jay, “The Art Forum,” Telegraph (New York), 12 11, 1932Google Scholar, in Museum of Modern Art Public Information Scrapbooks, 5064 Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution.

29. Cahill, , Art of the Common Man, 7Google Scholar.

30. Current art historical scholarship disputes this, finding interesting links between American folk art and European professional art. See especially the work of John Michael Vlach.

31. Duncan, Carol and Wallach, Allan, “The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis,” Marxist Perspectives 1 (Winter 1978): 28–51Google Scholar.

32. Joselit, David, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–41 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 188Google Scholar.

33. Ibid, 137–38 n. 46,184.

34. Ibid, 138.

35. Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–51Google Scholar.