Public Utility

Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art celebrated its 15th birthday last week. The celebration took the form of a massive show which was to earlier Modern Museum shows as lightning to static electricity. Only at the risk of shin splints did gallerygoers poke into all the corners of the Museum's spectacular open house. Outstanding were:

P:A second floor crammed with modern paintings, owned and loaned. Prize of the exhibit (which included practically every modern artist of note from Degas to Miro): Pablo Picasso's Woman Seated before a Mirror.

The retrospection and prophecy of the top floor, crammed with pretzel-shaped, chair-sized chips of plywood (to demonstrate the versatility of wood molders); pat-the-bunny samples of various materials; early modern chairs whose box-kitelike form suggested early abstract paintings--and a chair whose fishnet seat (draped over a pneumatic, plastic doughnut) was surrealistically adapted to the most unsurrealistic sitter.

A photogenetic first floor, which reviewed the camera's art from the days of Civil War Photographer Mathew Brady's menacing portrait of a Victorian lady (Miss Edwards in Front of Indian Rock, Lookout Mt.) to Ansel Adams' magical Moonrise, New Mexico, Edward Weston's claims to be the Ingres of modern photography, and Walker Evans' deceptively simple-seeming studies of Main Street.

Innocence and Bliss. The show and the crowds would have pleased the Modern Museum's prime founder, Lizzie ("Lillie") P. Bliss, late, wealthy daughter of Drygoodsman Cornelius N. Bliss. Genial hostess of a teetotaling salon, Founder Bliss was one of the greatest art collectors produced by Manhattan society's latter-day Age of Innocence.

She began to gather moderns seriously when they made their first U.S. reconnaissance in force at the 1913 Armory Show. In 1919, with Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, she asked A. Conger Goodyear to head the Museum's original organizing committee. As director they appointed Alfred H. Barr Jr.--who retired last January (his successor has not been appointed). At its opening show (November 1929) the hand counters rang up the first 50,000 of what have since become some 3,400,000 admissions. When "Lillie" Bliss died about a year later she left the bulk of her collection to the Museum--with the canny proviso that the directors raise $750,000. They did. Last year admission fees plus other income paid about 40% of Museum expenses.

Pre-eminent in its field, the Modern Museum has become one of the most imposing of U.S. public utilities. First housed in a single floor on Fifth Avenue, it moved into its modern 53rd Street residence in 1939. Its Modern Architecture exhibit (1932) was the most comprehensive view of such workers in the International Style as Germany's Walter Gropius, France's Le Corbusier, the U.S.'s Raymond Hood. In 1935, it successfully arranged the American canonization of Vincent van Gogh. In 1936, its Cubism and Abstract Art show was a glamorously complete record of the quarter-century since that September Morn of cubism: Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. In later shows the Museum assembled Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, the works of Picasso. Over the years it has coyly flirted with lusty, callow, sometimes triumphant U.S. art.

Besides its lectures, publications, traveling shows, and collections of theatrical design, it collects and exhibits outstanding movies from nickelodeon days to The Good Earth, now boasts enough reels for 3,300 hours of continuous projection.

Trust and Distrust. Because the Modern Museum has won over some other museums to its preference for the School of Paris, some observers have seen a taste trust in the making, and the Museum has acquired a small but respectably alert number of enemies. It has been attacked by progressives for showing the canvases of U.S. Bravurist John Singer Sargent, and (by Boston's Society for Sanity in Art) for corrupting the hinterlands with Picasso. Its hustling hospitality to Latin American art has been regarded as more than a hint at the policy-making power of former Museum President Nelson A. Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

Latest dissident to disturb the art world's prevailing respect for the Museum's taste and influence is Russian-born Sculptor Alexander Archipenko. Archipenko is preparing a book entitled Why I Request to Remove My Works from the Museum of Modern Art. He declines to reveal his reasons until his book is on the counters.

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