How Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Laid a Stable Ground for MoMA’s Success

In the words of Gertrude Stein, “You can be modern or you can be a museum, but you cannot be both.” Her remark captured exactly the contradiction inherent in one of the country’s first museums dedicated exclusively to modern art. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in many regards a traditional spouse, mother, and homemaker, understood the oxymoronic challenge posed by a museum of the modern. With a fervent band of sympathizers, she became instrumental in creating a home where modern art and its supporters could flourish. She championed modernism and galvanized a spirited and determined group of modernists to form one of the world’s great museums.

Rockefeller’s passion for building a museum of modern art came at a time of massive post–World War I social change: growing labor unrest, recently attained women’s suffrage, along with the growing presence of women in the work force and the mass migration of Black citizens from the South to the North. The mass migration, in particular, first begun at the turn of the century, accelerated as the Jim Crow South grew increasingly threatening. Their destinations were urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, where most of the country’s great museums resided. The New Negro Movement, a cultural ripening in art, music, dance, and literature, was flowering at exactly the same time as the plans for the Museum of Modern Art. Harlem, just a few subway stops north of MoMA, had become the Black cultural capital of the world.

Throughout the Museum of Modern Art’s nascency, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s presence at the institution was ubiquitous. For 16 years she was the steady hand at the helm, having honed her executive skills presiding over several large estates, administering a large family, and managing marriage to a husband, John D. Rockefeller Jr., engaged in complicated businesses, public projects, and global enterprises. In her positions as treasurer (1929–34), first vice president (1934–36; 1939), and first vice chair (1941–45), she wielded enormous authority, as she did as a member of various Museum committees, including the executive and finance committees. She chaired the committee responsible for planning the Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1939 on land where the nine-story Rockefeller family mansion once stood. She is also credited with being one of the chief champions of the establishment of the Film Library and for spearheading the War Veterans Art Center at MoMA, which served more than a thousand veterans during World War II and for several years afterward, resuming the interest she and gallerist and collector Mary Quinn Sullivan had shared during World War I. 

After Rockefeller, Sullivan, and Lillie P. Bliss, the Museum’s three founders, secured A. Conger Goodyear’s commitment as the inaugural president, the first order of business was to construct the founding board of trustees. Founding boards are critical. They set the standards and expectations for an institution for years to come. This board would have the task of deciding for the Museum whom to choose as its director; where to locate it; how to fund its exhibitions, permanent collections, and publications; and how to support the staff who run the organization day to day. The three women, in consultation with their designated president, assembled a founding committee of like-minded, impassioned experts and modern art advocates—a precursor to the official full board of trustees. Each member of the founding committee brought expertise and a specific skill set that signaled the direction in which the founding women and Goodyear intended to steer the institution. Paul J. Sachs, a former partner at his family’s investment firm, Goldman Sachs, was a professor of fine arts at Harvard and the associate director of its Fogg Museum. There, his courses on museums, art history, and connoisseurship were the national gold standard for the training of museum professionals. Frank Crowninshield, the elegant editor of Vanity Fair, then one of the nation’s leading cultural magazines, was a collector of African art. He offered a keen sense of the media combined with an intimate knowledge of the leading artists and writers of the day. Josephine Boardman Crane was the socialite widow of Murray Crane, whose company manufactured the paper on which the US government printed its currency; she was also a progressive thinker in the field of education.

At the outset, each of the founding committee members vigorously took on some major aspect of establishing a permanent museum. Bliss assumed the duties of vice president. Tragically, in 1931, just a year and a half after MoMA opened, she succumbed to cancer; but she left instructions in her will that would have a lasting impact on the course of the Museum. Sullivan, the least wealthy of the founders, brought extensive knowledge of modern art. She lent her expertise to the staff and generously opened up to them the ample gardens of her family farm in Astoria, Queens, on the East River, for much-appreciated social opportunities. Crane was a particularly avid fundraiser with extensive social contacts.

Given his position at Harvard, Sachs was charged with recruiting a qualified candidate for director—the most important assignment of all. He eventually landed on Alfred H. Barr Jr., an associate professor at Wellesley College with impeccable credentials. Barr had earned undergraduate and master’s degrees in art history at Princeton and had studied with Sachs at Harvard, where he completed his course work for a doctorate. He’d left Harvard before finishing his PhD to begin teaching—first at Princeton and then at Wellesley, where he offered the course Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting, thought to be the first in higher education on modern art. He called on his students, whom he referred to as “faculty,” to take note of the design elements of everyday life in addition to the more conventional content of art history, an approach that signaled the fresh, innovative approach he would bring to the new museum. Deference to Rockefeller’s authority is evident in the fact that although Sachs recruited the candidate, it was Rockefeller who interviewed him, with Barr traveling to her home in Seal Harbor, Maine, for the meeting.

If searching for the right leader was the highest priority, finding the right place for the Museum was a close second. A museum is a destination, a place to enter the worlds created by the artists housed within. The space has to accommodate the comings and goings of the public and the scope of programming the founders envision. The arduous task of finding suitable real estate thus fell to Crowninshield and Goodyear, who searched several possibilities before settling on six rooms on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building, at 730 Fifth Avenue, a location that Sullivan, through a former student of hers, helped them root out.

Rockefeller was less active in the initial search. Although she might have pressed her husband for help, whether for rooms in one of the many Manhattan buildings that he owned or for land and money to construct a building designed expressly for the Museum, she resisted. Three years later, however, the initial space now inadequate, she would take on greater responsibility for finding MoMA a permanent home. In 1932 the Museum moved into a brownstone owned by the Rockefellers at 11 West 53rd Street. John’s financial concession was to offer the building at an annual lease of $10,000 instead of $12,000. Eventually, he lowered the cost to $8,000. The house served as the Museum until 1937, when it was razed to make way for a building designed expressly for a museum of modern art on land grudgingly provided at an affordable price by Abby’s husband.

On October 3, 1929, the committee held the inaugural meeting as the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art. Days earlier, with the pro bono assistance of Sullivan’s spouse, Cornelius, the Museum had secured its charter from the Board of Regents of the State of New York Department of Education. The trustees’ first order of business was to elect officers. In addition to Bliss as vice president, Crowninshield became secretary, and Goodyear, as had already been decided, was named president. Crane, Sachs, and Sullivan were named charter trustees. Rockefeller took on the formidable role of treasurer, assuming primary responsibility for overseeing the construction of a sturdy financial infrastructure that could sustain a museum in perpetuity.

She was clear from the start that as the wife of one of the richest men in the country, she would not prevail upon her husband for support; the Museum needed to establish itself as self-sufficient. What made that position even more difficult is that the founding trustees determined early on that they would not depend on public financing. Unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, which stood on land owned by the City of New York and received modest support and capital investments from the city, MoMA elected from the outset to be completely private. As the founding trustees expanded their ranks, it was then by necessity that an important prerequisite for membership was having either wealth or access to it.

In her role as treasurer, Rockefeller undertook what was perhaps the most daunting task: to find ongoing support for a new museum that had no endowment, no ongoing income, and no government assistance. The recently developed enterprise was immediately strapped for cash. Barr and the talented staff he was assembling needed salaries. Monthly rent would be due on the lease at the Heckscher Building. Works for exhibitions had to be borrowed, shipped, mounted, and returned. The Museum intended to publish catalogs and host programs to educate and capture the attention of the public. All these activities required funding. The trustees calculated that at minimum they required $100,000 a year for the first two years. To meet their budgetary requirements, they began by making personal donations and soliciting subscriptions from their circles of wealthy friends and associates. The popularity of the idea of a museum of modern art was confirmed when more than  50 responded with contributions.

Their plan would have made perfect sense, if the opening had taken place in ordinary times. But these were not ordinary times. Ten days before MoMA welcomed its first visitors, the economy crashed and one of the worst financial disasters of modern times gripped the nation, posing a distinct challenge for the new treasurer. The task was made all the harder with bank closings and unemployment and financial ruin tearing through the populace like a tornado, wreaking havoc among the wealthy and working class alike.

Yet under Rockefeller’s watchful eye, the Museum pieced together a remarkably sustainable set of income streams. One of these was to implement a membership program accommodating people of diverse financial means, recognizing the necessity of cultivating a broad base of donor and patron support for the long-term health of the institution; each level of support entitled the member to certain admissions privileges and perks from the Museum, including invitations to member-only lectures. Another was to generate income that stemmed naturally from MoMA’s intellectual content, including public lectures, circulating exhibitions, and publication sales. Yet a third source of revenue came from the never-ending fundraising appeals and annual gifts from the trustees. Perhaps Rockefeller’s instincts led her to believe that were she to demonstrate the Museum’s enterprising ingenuity for self-sustainment, she would win the support of her spouse, whose contributions would ultimately be pivotal in enabling the Museum to weather the financial storms of the Depression.

As MoMA sought to be both a museum and modern, it faced any number of dilemmas. Rockefeller’s influence in defusing or navigating the most incendiary of these reveals the considerable power and influence she quietly wielded. The first of these inherent conflicts was over the content of the inaugural exhibition. The founding trio of women and Crane, the well-connected socialite, insisted that the show focus on the “ancestors” of modernism who rebelled against verisimilitude in favor of expression or formal elements. Four Europeans were of particular interest: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh, their work having set the stage for what followed in painting and sculpture. The trio’s male colleagues, by contrast, were in favor of showing the American artists Albert Pinkham Ryder, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins. The women won out. Although it required major feats of cultural diplomacy, with Goodyear and Barr seeking loans in Europe and the United States for almost 100 paintings and works on paper, the inaugural show was a resounding success. The instincts of the founders, once again, were on the mark.

When Bliss died in March 1931, her estate posed another dilemma for the new museum, and tested Rockefeller’s prowess as treasurer. The terms of the Bliss bequest required that within three years the Museum demonstrate that it had acquired a space for the collection and an endowment of $1 million. At stake were the 120 paintings, prints, and drawings by late 19th- and early 20th-century artists, most of them European, and the largest collection of work by Bliss’s dear friend Arthur Davies. Rockefeller, well aware that the gift would form the cornerstone of MoMA’s permanent collection and set a high standard for acquisitions to come, took on the responsibility of identifying donors to make sure that the Museum fulfilled the terms of her friend’s will. By 1934 Rockefeller and her fellow trustees had raised $600,000, which the executor of the Bliss estate deemed adequate. Although the trustees had waged a valiant effort to raise it, a full half of that amount ended up coming from the Rockefeller family.

Defining the boundaries of the collection was yet another dilemma and one of the most contentious and hotly debated aspects of the Museum. Rockefeller took a lively interest in the discussion. Should the collection contain modern masterworks like those presented in the inaugural exhibition? Or should the Museum periodically divest itself of those works that age over time and no longer belong in the category of contemporary? And if the Museum of Modern Art were to divest itself of the older works of art, where would those pieces go? There was another worry, as Rockefeller expressed in a 1931 letter to Barr: “[The] part that distresses me most,” Rockefeller wrote, “is how we are going to remain modern and at the same time satisfy donors that the pictures they give us will not be disposed of in a manner that would be objectionable to them.” The policy debate would not be resolved until five years after her death in 1948. At that time the Museum committed to keeping older works, while simultaneously pursuing new ones.

Rockefeller’s influence over the Museum’s collection was often wielded with a deft touch. In 1931 Barr persuaded her to purchase Diego Rivera’s 1928 sketchbook of watercolors. Rockefeller did so knowing that it would help fund Rivera’s trip to New York to participate in an exhibition of his work, and she later gifted the watercolors to the Museum. Her own collecting interests were also influential. American folk art became a collecting priority for Rockefeller, who viewed it as the American ancestor of modernism. From 1932 to 1933, Holger Cahill, Rockefeller’s adviser on folk art, filled in for Barr as acting director while Barr was on sabbatical. One of the shows that Cahill curated during his brief tenure was the 1932 “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900,” to which Rockefeller anonymously contributed the bulk of the 175 works on display.

At the same time, Rockefeller recognized the merit in enabling the Museum’s innovative director to select works he considered art historically valuable, and on several occasions she provided Barr with modest sums of money to acquire European and American art of his choosing. Even when she did not agree with his selection, Rockefeller recognized the importance of leaving the decision to his discretion. On one such occasion, Barr used funds from the founder to acquire Picasso’s print Minotauromachy. Rockefeller abhorred the work and quipped, “Let’s label this: ‘Purchased with a fund for prints which Mrs. Rockefeller doesn’t like.’ ” When in 1934 John set up trust funds for his wife and each of his children, Abby’s resources increased dramatically, augmenting her ability to support the Museum’s collection. In 1936 she arranged for two acquisition funds totaling $4,500, and in 1938 for a fund of $20,000, to which her son Nelson, who was being groomed by his mother to succeed her in her leadership role, contributed an additional $11,500 in her name.

MoMA’s collection benefited greatly from Rockefeller’s largesse. Cumulatively, she would donate more than 1,600 drawings, prints, and watercolors, which became the cornerstone of what is today the Department of Drawings and Prints. Although American artists dominated her collection, she also acquired works by Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Redon, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Her donation in 1946 of 61 lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec made MoMA one of the major repositories of the work of this modern European virtuoso.

Perhaps the most lasting contribution that Rockefeller made to the Museum was her support of its visionary first director. Barr took seriously Stein’s warning that you cannot have a museum and be modern at the same time, and throughout the Museum of Modern Art’s first 14 years, he led the institution as if he were determined to prove Stein wrong.

Overall, Rockefeller embraced Barr’s understanding of the word modern as an idea that extended beyond the artifacts of painting and sculpture, even if she did not always agree with him. Modern for Barr meant popular design, architecture, film, photography, dance, theater, and the objects of everyday life. Modern acknowledged the ancestral precedents for modernism from other countries and other cultures. But these were the kind of unorthodox ideas that would also irritate beyond measure many of the establishment members who populated the board. Rockefeller’s role would emerge as that of the stately diplomat who was able to see all sides, enabling MoMA to enjoy Barr’s dedicated leadership as the institution grew by leaps and bounds. That is, until she could no longer maintain the energy required for equanimity. 

From the book Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn. ©2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reprinted with permission from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. All rights reserved.

A version of this article appears in the 2024 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.