The Missing Future: MOMA and Modern Women

the missing future: moma and
modern women / griselda pollock
Among the many reasons women took to the streets in
1970 was, perhaps surprisingly, art. Angry artists, critics,
curators, and art historians stomped militantly around
The Museum of Modern Art, protesting the unrepresen-
tative picture of the modern century perpetuated by
institutions that appeared to exhibit only the work of
men, and thus to educate their ever-expanding publics
in a half-truth about the nature of art and modernity, one
that would continue to “disappear” contemporary women
artists. That same year, at The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, curator Henry Geldzahler showed forty-three artists
in the exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940–
1970. Only one was a woman. Helen Frankenthaler (no. 2)
was rightly included, but Nell Blaine, Elaine de Kooning,
Grace Hartigan (no. 3), Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell (no. 1),
and Louise Nevelson (no. 4)—to name just a few—were
not. If artists who were women were still being kept from
public knowledge, what would happen if the institutions
and their selective stories were not challenged in the
name of both the erased past and the missing future?
Women Found the Museums
The history of museums, taste, and the collecting of
modern art in the United States owes much to influential
women amateurs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
marvelous collections of later-nineteenth-century
French art are based in Louisine Havemeyer’s remarkable
holdings, astutely assembled under the thoughtful guid-
ance of American painter Mary Cassatt.1 The involvement
29
1. Joan Mitchell (American,
1925–1992). Ladybug. 1957.
Oil on canvas, 6' 5 7/8" x 9'
(197.9 x 274 cm). The Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
Purchase

pollock 31
2. Helen Frankenthaler
(American, born 1928).
Jacob’s Ladder. 1957. Oil on
unprimed canvas, 9' 5 3/8" x
69 3/8" (287.9 x 177.5 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Hyman N.
Glickstein
3. Grace Hartigan (American,
1922–2008). River Bathers.
1953. Oil on canvas, 69 3/8" x
7' 4 3/4" (176.2 x 225.5 cm).
New York. Given anonymously

pollock 33
of wealthy women in culturally enriching activities was an
extension of their widespread nineteenth-century role in
philanthropy and social service.2 Collecting and museum
building were, furthermore, social strategies and cultural
mechanisms for legitimating the very visible forms of
social difference and privilege created by both old and
new wealth in the modern industrial era.3 As modernist
critic Clement Greenberg, in his most left-wing moment,
astutely pointed out in 1939, the artistic avant-garde,
while attempting to escape ideological subservience to
the new bourgeoisie by its self-imposed social exile, was
nonetheless inevitably, and inescapably, tied to the repre-
sentatives of social and economic power by “an umbilical
cord of gold.”4 Without the financial resources of those
adventurous and progressive sections of the new moneyed
class, the independent enterprise of individualist, avant-
gardist art-making could not have been sustained.
Modernism and modern social processes were thus inex-
tricably, if sometimes contradictorily, aligned. They crossed
most visibly in the formation of The Museum of Modern
Art in New York in 1929.
Legend has it that on a journey to Egypt in the winter
of 1928–29, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller met modernist art
collector Lillie P. Bliss. They discussed the project for a
museum of modern art. On her return crossing Rockefeller
traveled with Mary Quinn Sullivan, who became the third
key woman player in the founding of The Museum of
Modern Art, which opened in November 1929.5 In her
detailed historical account of the varied intellectual origins
of the Museum, Sybil Kantor revises the narrative by
reminding us that the creation of a museum dedicated
to modern art was already being discussed in New York
during the 1920s.6 Conditions for such an initiative had
been set by the first major exhibition of modern art in
New York: the Armory Show in 1913, organized in part by
Arthur B. Davies, who also advised Bliss on her pioneering
collection of modern art (later donated to MoMA). Kantor
also points to the impact of the patronage of modern
art by the collector John Quinn, another organizer of
the Armory Show, whose substantial collection was put
up for auction in New York in 1926 and was thus made
visible, for a brief moment, to the small but influential
groups of collectors, artists, and emerging curators
interested in modern art, for whom the idea of a more
permanent display was thus stimulated. (Quinn was
an indefatigable collector and patron of Gwen John.
In 1971 his sister gave John’s Girl Reading at a Window
[1911, no. 5] to the Museum.)
In addition, Kantor identifies the important work of
Katherine Dreier (no. 6), who with Marcel Duchamp and
Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in 1920, an exper-
imental project they called a Museum of Modern Art. The
group fostered the exhibiting, collecting, and teaching of
European and American modernist art, and produced a
major show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 (no. 7).7 As
yet another factor behind the founding of MoMA, Kantor
notes Museum Work and Museum Problems, an innovative
curatorial program at Harvard University directed by Paul
Sachs. MoMA’s first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., partici-
pated in the course in 1924–25, encountering, as would
other influential museum curators after him, Sachs’s
method of connoisseurship, which itself was based in
that of Bernard Berenson.
Historical events are always the effect of many
determinations and relations rather than the product of
individual initiatives. It is, however, the very contradiction
between the undoubtedly influential role of certain women
in founding and shaping MoMA and the vision of modern
art that the Museum disseminated—which radically
disappeared the equally vital and visible role of women
in making that modernist art, as artists—that we have
to explore and reframe.
4. Louise Nevelson (American,
1899–1988). Sky Cathedral.
1958. Painted wood, 11' 3 1/2"
x 10' 1/4" x 18" (343.9 x 305.4
x 45.7 cm). The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Ben Mildwoff

34 the missing future pollock 35
of a continuous history of women participating in, and
being acknowledged for, art-making throughout the cen-
turies and cultures, culminating in their massive presence
both in the professional art world by the end of the nine-
teenth century and in avant-garde groupings from the
beginning of the twentieth century. Women studied
and exhibited at salons and academies. They founded
independent organizations, won prizes, challenged limita-
tions, took the lead in projects.“The Independents,” as
Cassatt insisted on calling the artists we know better as
Impressionists, not only included four women in their
core group of ten or so but were financially and aestheti-
cally supported by them. One of these highly intelligent
and creative women, Berthe Morisot, was hailed by French
critic Claude Roger-Marx as perhaps “the only true
Impressionist.”9 By the dawning of the twentieth century,
and notably after the long-fought campaigns for political
emancipation had borne fruit and a world war had proved
women’s resilience and adaptability to hard industrial
labor, women clearly felt rising confidence in their ability
to assume an equal role in making modern society and its
cultures, a potential that was also increasingly registered
by the cinema industry in its representations of women at
work and enjoying social and personal agency.
If the exemplary museum dedicated to curating,
preserving, and disseminating distinctively modernist
cultural forms in all their manifestations, from painting to
cinema, architecture to design, photography to graphics,
systematically produced and maintains an incomplete
(universalizing, masculinist, Eurocentric) picture of its
subject, we have to ask: How could this have happened?
What made that extraordinary selectivity possible at the
very moment when living reality delivered evidence of
new diversity? What aspects of modernist culture itself
have been suppressed in the manner in which the history
of modernism has been curated in museums such as
MoMA? Of what is it symptomatic that we can now work
positively to transform for the future?
Two answers to my first question about selectivity
spring to mind and must be disposed of swiftly. The first
is good old-fashioned sexist prejudice against women
per se. But that is hardly interesting. Selectivity is often
presented as a matter of self-evident quality. It is possible
that those seeking generously to create a museum of
modern culture simply chose the best, as they saw it. It
seems, problematically however, that the best happened
to be more or less created by men, and white men at that,
with little consideration of sexualities. Without denying
The Paradox of MoMA’s Missing Modernist Women
At the heart of MoMA’s history lies a profound paradox.
The 1920s were a self-consciously modern moment, in
which women from all walks of life and social classes and
many countries were, for the first time in history, actively
shaping societies and making democratizing changes. Yet
MoMA created a vision of modern art that effectively
excluded the new and, importantly, modern participation
of women.
In the film and book Paris Was a Woman (1995), Greta
Schiller and Andrea Weiss recovered a rich archive of
photographic and filmed footage that once again revealed
the vitality of Paris from 1900 to 1940 as the center of a
cultural revolution for and by women.8 By now, a mass of
scholarship firmly disproves the idea that there were no
women modernists. There were—in numbers. It is not
that their work lacked quality, relevance, originality, or
importance. Modernist women were creating and innovat-
ing alongside, and often in partnership with, their male
colleagues, husbands, lovers, rivals. It is not that their
work was unexhibited, unreviewed, unavailable to be
collected through dealers. In the United States, advanced
women artists were active in forming avant-garde artistic
organizations such as the American Abstract Artists.
They participated in groups, journals, and events, and
were present in every aesthetic move and major “move-
ment,” including Dada and Surrealism, that MoMA
would chart as modernism.
Modernist consciousness was fundamentally engaged
with the changing social roles, economic activity, public
visibility, and cultural articulation of women in urban
society at the levels of both lived processes and cultural
representation. So how can we account for the counterin-
tuitive fact that despite every form of evidence to the
contrary, and despite everything that made the modern-
ization of gender roles fundamental to modernity itself, the
dominant vision of modern art created by the most influ-
ential American museum systematically failed to register
the intensely visible artistic participation of women in
making modernism modern? And why has it taken so long
for this problem to be addressed and redressed?
This irony needs to be further underlined. It is not an
incidental or trivial fact. We cannot dismiss it as the mere
residue of older attitudes, or of embedded sexist prejudices
that would eventually be swept away with natural liberal-
ization. In fact, research since 1970 into the history of
women in the arts has yielded incontrovertible evidence
Opposite:
5. Gwen John (British,
1876–1939). Girl Reading at
a Window. 1911. Oil on canvas,
16 1/8 x 10" (40.9 x 25.3 cm).
New York. Mary Anderson
Conroy Bequest in memory
of her mother, Julia Quinn
Anderson
6. Katherine S. Dreier
(American, 1877–1952).
Abstract Portrait of Marcel
Duchamp. 1918. Oil on canvas,
18 x 32" (45.7 x 81.3 cm).
New York. Abby Aldrich
Rockefeller Fund

The nineteenth-century women’s movements were testa-
ment to a newly created consciousness of the collective
experience of women as women in a world that was
restricting what they could and could not do or be in clear,
gendered, and gendering terms. Alfred Tennyson’s poem
“The Princess” (1847) declared starkly:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey:
All else confusion.10
Public and private spheres were gendered masculine
and feminine, respectively. Changes in and challenges
to these concepts and the relations of gender generated
conservative ideologies that moralized motherhood
and privatized domesticity as much as incited feminist
demands for women’s equal rights to education, economic
independence, sexual freedom, and self-determination.
In various forms—political, social, and cultural—the
questions of sex, sexuality, and, above all, the meanings
of gender as a power relation run like brightly colored
thread through modern societies and agitate all forms of
their culture; they are still unfinished business to this day.
The anxieties created by destabilizing traditional rela-
tions between the sexes and exploring new terms for the
experience of gender across the new cities—public and
private spaces, workplaces and entertainment sites—
constituted a vital theme in modernist culture that was
manifested in visual art, literature, opera, dance, poetry,
theater, and film.
Yet literary theorist Rita Felski has posed the question:
“What is the gender of Modernity?”11 Can a historical
period have a gender? No. Felski argues that the selective
and self-interested representations that scholars have
made of modernity have created a gendered orientation.
Thus the exemplary figures of modernity—Faust, Karl
Marx, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, and Pablo
Picasso, for instance—render masculine experience typi-
cal, reducing the complexity and ambivalence of cultural
history as it struggled with change and the diversity of
resulting possibilities. We are taught to understand
modernity’s gender politics through the crass opposition
between the flâneur (a figure of masculine sexual freedom
and intellectual mobility, identified since Baudelaire with
the image of the modern artist) and the double imaging of
woman as prostitute (a sexual object) or hysteric (muted
and/or mad, hence like the childish masses).12 Cultural
historian Andreas Huyssen has argued that authentic, seri-
ous high-modernist culture has generally been identified
with masculinity and self-restraint and structurally opposed
to a mass culture that is itself represented as intrinsically
“feminine.” This use of gender to create not only an oppo-
sition but also a hierarchy creates a problem of “the per-
sistent gendering as feminine as that which is devalued,”
and vice-versa.13 Hence, in modernist discourse the femi-
nine becomes not one face of a multifaceted modernity
but modernism’s defining other: the matter, materiality,
and nature that culture masters and refigures as art. To
be properly modern, all traces of feminine gendering must
be effaced, allowing the masculine to present itself as
universal and exclusively modern. According to Huyssen:
“The universalizing ascription of femininity to mass
culture always depended on the very real exclusion of
women from high culture and its institutions.”14 He notes:
The deeper problem at stake here pertains to the
relationship of modernism to the matrix of mod-
ernization which gave birth to it and nurtured it
through its various stages. In less suggestive terms,
the question is why, despite the obvious heterogene-
ity of the modernist project [emphasis mine], a
certain universalizing account of the modern
has been able to hold sway for so long in literary
and art criticism, and why it is even today so far
from being decisively displaced from its position
of hegemony in cultural institutions.15
the immense creativity of those distinguished men selected
by MoMA as the representatives of major modernist art
and culture, we cannot accept that women somehow are
just less creative than men, less intelligent, less innovative,
less thoughtful, less important articulators of modern
human experience. It is unhistorical. It would, moreover,
be completely unmodernist to do so.
Modernization, Modernity, and Modernism
A museum of modern art negotiates three interconnecting
terms.“Modernization” refers to the radical transforma-
tion of economic, social, and political processes through
industrialization and urbanization; “modernity” refers
to the cultural consciousness emerging in this epochal
change that reshaped the world; and “modernism” is the
cultural negotiation and critical representation of this
new consciousness. The rights of “man” [sic] were boldly
declared but just as quickly restricted and betrayed. The
inclusion of women and of working-class and nonwhite
men had to be struggled for again and again. Traditional
forms of social authority were contested by revolution,
and new, dynamic urban-industrial economies were
formed, generating cities with their urban subjectivities
and all the attendant issues of labor, consumption, and
sexuality. Campaigns against enslavement, for workers’
rights, and for the emancipation of black men and all
women typify modernizing society. From the moment
British writer Mary Wollstonecraft wrote “A Vindication
of the Rights of Women” in 1792 to the meetings of the
first American feminists at Seneca Falls in 1848 and on
to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which
gave all American women the vote on equal terms with
men, in 1919 (in Britain this occurred in 1928), gender was
an important feature of and issue for modernity. Gender,
in fact, became a central symbolic axis of power and
meaning as caste and estate waned and the possibility
of change became fundamental to modernizing societies.
7. International Exhibition
of Modern Art: Arranged
by the Société Anonyme
for the Brooklyn Museum,
November–December 1926,
exhibition catalogue with
cover illustration composed
by Katherine S. Dreier
and Constantin Aladjalov.
Katherine S. Dreier Papers/
Société Anonyme Archive,
Yale Collection of American
Literature, The Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library

invested, and selective versions of modernism. Modern-
ism was never a one-sided project that (white) men simply
did better. Nonetheless, whatever it was that modernist
women were introducing into culture through their newly
emancipated and active embrace of the modernist revolu-
tions in aesthetics was both recognizably new and suffi-
ciently different to have seemed “other” to the early
masculinist curators. Was that because of the latter’s
deployment of specific, already-gender-impregnated art-
historical models for categorizing modern art? Or was it
because of the concomitant mythologies of the artist that
already prejudged art and artist as fundamental, symbolic
enunciations of idealized masculinities? Gender ideology
was always-already at work in art history and its sustaining
mythologies. Far from being gender-neutral and indifferent,
museological art history has been a powerful inscription
of a self-reflecting, narcissistic, masculinist vision in
which men act and create and “woman” is positioned
as other, a resource for art, a part of the world of nature,
reproduction, and matter which masculine creativity strives
to master and reform in an activity—artistic creation—
that makes (the) man. Such processes occur at levels
beyond individual consciousness, intent, or even purpose-
ful understanding.
Modeling Art History for Modern Art
So how did the manner in which people were trained to do
art history and develop it into curatorial strategies produce
this contradiction whose effects we are now seeking
to undo? During the 1920s, when men like Barr and his
highly educated Harvard colleagues, who would direct so
many key American museums, were traveling to discover
firsthand what was happening at the Bauhaus and in
Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Prague, and Warsaw, they would
have seen for themselves the widespread participation
of men and women in modernism—in Constructivism,
Surrealism, Dada, design, cinema, dance, art dealing, and
art writing. In cases of specifically revolutionary culture,
such as the first decade of the Soviet experiment, the
equality of the sexes was axiomatically fostered. Spending
time in Paris would have meant experiencing that, again,
Paris was a woman.
Biographical studies of Barr’s formative travels indi-
cate that he was not unaware of women as artists; he met
Lyubov Popova with Aleksandr Rodchenko in Moscow
(no. 8), saw Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers at the Bauhaus,
and invited Meret Oppenheim to exhibit at MoMA in
1936 (no. 9). We also know that when solicited by Peggy
Guggenheim in 1942 for names of women artists he res-
pected, he was forthcoming, naming five “female abstract
painters who on the whole seem to me as good as the best
of the men in the American Abstract Artists group.”17
Yet no department of MoMA had a one-woman exhi-
bition until 1940, when the photographer Thérèse Bonney
was thus honored.18 The first woman painter to be featured
was Josephine Joy in 1942, followed over the course of the
next seven years by photographers Genevieve Naylor and
Helen Levitt; industrial designer Eva Zeisel; painters
Georgia O’Keeffe, Florine Stettheimer, and Loren MacIver;
and textile designer and printmaker Anni Albers. Joy
(no. 10) was a self-taught painter who worked for the
WPA California Project, showed in Los Angeles, and was
brought to the attention of New York dealer Sidney Janis,
who included her in his book They Taught Themselves
(1942). A few of her paintings were purchased and shown
at MoMA, and the artist was recognized posthumously
in 1981 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
in Washington, D.C., in the exhibition In Their Own
Way, and in 2009 in a show at the Galerie St. Etienne
in New York, under Janis’s title. Stettheimer, for all
her interesting work, might also appear eccentric to the
mainstream modernist story.
In 1936 Barr organized two definitive companion
exhibitions: Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art and
Dada. Barr bifurcated modern art into a rational strand,
which included both geometric and organic abstraction,
What has kept in place such an obviously selective,
canonical, masculine version of the history of art, despite
the evidence for a more complex history of modernism
produced by the last forty years of critical scholarship?
To answer this question we might turn to psycho-
analysis, which can shed light on why we invest in certain
ways of seeing the world. Looking at art historians of
his moment, Sigmund Freud asked: what do we desire
from the stories of art, from the writing that so often cel-
ebrates art through the mythic figure of the artist? Freud
suggests that art history combined theological and narcis-
sistic tendencies. The story of art as a story of great men,
and only men, registers a specifically masculine narcissism;
primary, infantile idealization of the father gives way to,
and is compensated for by, the creation of a hero, who
must be like the heroizing self but also an idealization,
a figure elevated above that self. As French philosopher
Sarah Kofman, analyzing Freud’s aesthetic theory, writes:
The cult of the artist is ambiguous in that it
consists in the worship of father and hero alike;
the cult of the hero is a form of self-worship, since
the hero is the first ego ideal. This attitude is
religious but also narcissistic in character. . . . This
religious and narcissistic attitude toward artists
can be observed at all levels of cultural production.
It explains for instance people’s interest in biogra-
phies. . . . Yet it is essential that distance be pre-
served: the artist and his work must remain “taboo”
in a sense. . . . Freud’s unmasking of this dynamic,
however, consists in showing that the theological
attitude of worship toward the artist is simply the
other side of narcissistic identification.16
Thus we can recognize the psychological investment
in an art history that is shaped as a history of great men.
Those who determine the history of art seek in their nar-
ratives of exceptional individuals a gratifying but heroic
reflection of themselves, an ideal other, embodied in the
mythicized figure of the creative artist. For a masculine
establishment in control of the discourse and evaluation
of art, which then shapes the whole discipline and practice
in its own image, the artist cannot be a woman and per-
form this function. Even women entering the discipline
professionally learn to become intellectual “transvestites”
by identifying with masculinity, the only ideal, precisely
because the devaluation of the feminine offers no com-
pensatory gratification for those who would study artists
who are women.
Not a mere reflex, modernism emerged as the critical
site of refractions of, and reflections upon, both the
articulated issues and the unspoken, even unconscious,
dimensions of radically changing, heterogeneous experi-
ences, social relations, and subjectivities in industrial,
urban, colonizing, and later imperial lifeworlds. The
structural transformations typical of urban-industrial-
imperial modernization undid the former fixity of ideas
about masculinity and femininity and opened up the
destinies of men and women, promising and betraying
the possibility of determining what those destinies could
be. During modernization, some women became the
pillars of powerful and conservative groupings in modern
society, while others embraced the radical potential for
change. As writers, poets, dancers, thinkers, designers,
filmmakers, and artists, avant-gardist women embraced
the opportunities offered by modernity, translating them
into the newly open and experimental forms of modernist
culture. Flocking to the mostly European centers of modern
cultural practice, such as Paris, from Shanghai, Tokyo,
Seoul, Berlin, Prague, Moscow, Bern, Worpswede, Tallin,
Warsaw, Budapest, London, and New York, modernist
women entered the cultural field in substantial numbers
between 1900 and 1940.
What is needed is not a belated recognition of hitherto-
neglected women modernists as a second tier in the great
modernist pantheon. We shall need different systems
or modes of seeing, assessing, and understanding art in
order not to perpetuate fundamentally flawed, psychically

8. Lyubov Popova (Russian,
1889–1924). Untitled. 1917.
Cut-and-pasted colored
papers on paper mounted
on board, 9 3/8 x 6 1/8" (23.9
x 15.6 cm). The Museum of
Modern Art, New York. Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Deutsch
9. Meret Oppenheim (Swiss,
1913–1985). Object. Paris,
1936. Fur-covered cup, saucer,
and spoon, cup 4 3/8" (10.9 cm)
diam., saucer 9 3/8" (23.7 cm)
diam., spoon 8" (20.2 cm) long,
overall height 2 7/8" (7.3 cm).
New York. Purchase

galleries designed by Frederick
Kiesler, Guggenheim organized
a range of shows that would
include several exhibitions
devoted to individual women
(Irene Rice Pereira, Janet
Sobel, Pamela Bodin, Virginia Admiral, Marjorie McKee,
Sonja Sekula).19 On January 5, 1943, Guggenheim opened
Exhibition by 31 Women. Two years later a second show,
titled simply The Women, was held. Poorly archived and
difficult to research, these two exhibitions tell us some-
thing extremely important about the situation of modern
art in New York as perceived by another woman who,
enabled by family wealth, played a leading role in sustain-
ing modern creativity. Guggenheim clearly felt that there
was a need to focus attention on many women, to provide
space for numbers of women artists that was otherwise
unavailable in New York.
Only O’Keeffe was in a position strong enough to
decline to participate. I do not imagine that feminist
O’Keeffe’s refusal to show as a “woman artist,” as cited in
the letter she wrote in response to Guggenheim’s offer,
was a rejection of solidarity with women.20 It was more a
recognition of the dangers of a move that, however neces-
sary, only consolidated the sex segregation against which
the modernist woman was fundamentally struggling. To be
an artist and a woman is to integrate the whole of one’s
humanity into an open contribution to the world; to be
labeled a “woman artist” is to be disqualified by sex from
membership to the group known as “artists.” We radically
misunderstand those earlier-twentieth-century women
who wanted to be considered artists if we fail to grasp
Huyssen’s point that femininity in any form had become
antithetical to, and could entirely disqualify, authentic
modernism or that, when discerned, it would become the
only quality for which the work was recognized and by
which it was then diminished and set apart.
Guggenheim’s initiative reveals the parlous situation
in which artists who were women were already placed: to
be seen through the hospitality of Guggenheim’s pointed
initiative highlighting the necessity of bringing women
into view was also to risk being labeled, like Édouard
Manet at the Salon des Refusés, one hundred years before,
with outsiders, to be put in a category whose gendered
framing immediately undid the term “artist.” Without any
qualifying adjective, the term disguises its normal coloni-
zation by the masculine sex.
The idea behind Exhibition by 31 Women was proposed
to Guggenheim by Duchamp (long associated with Dreier’s
more open modernism) to counter the dominant Surrealist
myth of woman as only mistress, muse, or femme-enfant.
With the exception of Guggenheim herself, the jury
and its antithesis: the irrational, the fantastic, the uncanny.
What does it tell us that the first women to have a special
exhibition of a few works were artists so completely
contradicting the deeply logical, formally interrelated
system created to tell the story of modern art? MoMA had
acquired The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) by autodidact Henri
Rousseau in 1939, donated by Olga Hirsch (Mrs. Simon)
Guggenheim. Vincent van Gogh, before Rousseau, repre-
sents the powerful effect of an untutored but imaginative
painter in the newly opened field of modernist experi-
mentation. But both of these men now take their place
in the grand narrative and are not sequestered to a special
category of outsider artists, of whom—along with children,
the mentally distressed, and the non-European—
European modernists have been so freely appropriative.
The women who were exhibited during the 1940s
were all American artists and designers, and promoting
American modernism was an important part of the
Museum’s mission. But without a more complete inter-
national representation of women from the earlier
moments of modernism on both sides of the Atlantic,
such women could only appear as
exceptions, tokens, outsiders by virtue
of their gender. Furthermore, most of
the more recent one-woman exhibitions
at MoMA have originated at other
institutions, including the Victoria
and Albert Museum, London
(Clementina, Lady Hawarden, 1990);
the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
(Hannah Höch, 1997); The Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
(Yayoi Kusama, 1998); The Art
Institute of Chicago (Julia Margaret
Cameron, 1999); and the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Lee
Bontecou, 2004). To gain a sense of proportion, we
can note that of the 2,052 exhibitions at MoMA since
1929, ninety-five have focused on a woman (five percent)
and seven have been group shows with all women exhibitors
(three percent).19
The Women: Peggy Guggenheim and the Art
of the Century
Peggy Guggenheim arrived in New York in 1942, in flight
from Nazi-occupied France, having had to give up her idea
of creating a museum/gallery of modern art in Paris and,
before that, in the later 1930s, in London. She opened the
gallery Art of This Century in October 1942 at 30 West
Fifty-seventh Street (no. 11) with a women-only exhibition
she had organized, only her second exhibition of any kind.
By 1942 it was already necessary to produce a specific
exhibition to show the work of artists being ignored or
marginalized by MoMA and the other institutions deter-
mining the public knowledge of modernism. Alternating
between abstraction and Surrealism in the two special
10. Josephine Joy (American,
1869–1948). Prisoner’s Plea.
c. 1935–37. Oil on fiberboard,
23 7/8 x 28" (60.8 x 71.0 cm).
Smithsonian American Art
Museum. Transfer from The
Museum of Modern Art
11. Peggy Guggenheim seated
on Frederick Kiesler's Correalist
Rocker (1942) in Art of This
Century gallery, New York, c. 1942.
Visible are René Magritte, The
Voice of the Air (1931); Leonor
Fini, The Shepherdesses of the
Sphinx (1941); Leonora Carrington,
The Horses of Lord Candlestick
(1938); and Joan Miró, Dutch
Interior II (1928).

selecting the show was, however, composed exclusively
of men, including critic James Johnson Sweeney and
MoMA curator James Thrall Soby. As I mentioned before,
Barr was consulted, and he offered the names of Suzy
Frelinghuysen, Pereira, Esphyr Slobodkina, Gertrude
Greene, and Eleanor de Laittre. Guggenheim’s show
included the first three of these artists as well as Djuna
Barnes, Xenia Cage, Leonora Carrington, Maria Helena
Vieira da Silva (no. 12), Eyre de Lanux, Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven, Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Nevelson,
Frida Kahlo, Buffie Johnson, Oppenheim, Hedda Sterne,
Dorothea Tanning, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sekula, and
Jacqueline Lamba.
Let me expand on just one of the artists included.
Slobodkina (no. 13) was born in Siberia and during the
Russian Revolution moved to China, where she studied art
before emigrating to the United States in 1929. With her
Russian husband, Ilya Bolotowsky, as well as Josef Albers,
Hananiah Harari, and Rosalind Bengelsdorf, she founded
the American Abstract Artists in 1936, an artist-run
organization that still operates today. In 2008 the AAA
curated a memorial exhibition for her at the Painting
Center in New York. In her work she expanded a flattened
abstract style by collaging various materials, including
wood, plastic, metal, and disassembled typewriters. She
also became renowned as an illustrator. She is represented
in the collections of most major American museums,
except MoMA. I have to say that until doing this research,
this feminist art historian was unaware of Slobodkina,
her work, or her foundation. None of the women identified
by Barr in his letter to Guggenheim were collected by
MoMA. Most of the artists had to wait until art historians
inspired by second-wave feminism began recovering their
work and restoring it to its place in the history of art.
In the summer of 1945, Guggenheim showed another
thirty-three artists, including Krasner, Blaine, Louise
Bourgeois, MacIver, Pereira, Charmion von Wiegand, and
Sobel. MoMA would acknowledge two of these artists, but
belatedly: Bourgeois in 1982, by then seventy-one years
old, and Krasner in 1984, after her death. The 1982 retro-
spective for Bourgeois occurred thanks to the arrival of
Deborah Wye, who was already engaged in a curatorial
project on Bourgeois before her appointment as a curator
in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books. The
posthumous exhibition devoted to the relentlessly inno-
vative and self-renewing Krasner (no. 14) came much
too late for her to figure in the archive of exhibitions
contemporary with her Abstract Expressionist moment,
from which future scholars will derive their sense of
what was considered important and influential during the
1940s, 1950s, and on to the 1980s. Nothing can now undo
the effects of such failures to create the shows in time
that would have educated the public, generated the
scholarly studies, and constituted the material records
for future histories of an inclusive twentieth century.
Formalism, Abstraction, and the Artist
in MoMA’s Modernism
MoMA’s masculinism can be understood as a symptom
of the story of modern art created by Barr. We can
acknowledge Barr’s brilliance in being the first to chart
the apparently chaotic profusion of radical stylistic
communities and intellectual coteries that composed the
distinctive modernist moment of art-making between
1880 and 1935. In place of confusion, however, he reduced
diversity to a coherent and logical progression toward
a single telos in art: abstraction.
Some background is needed to understand Barr’s
project. Modernist art-making shifted from the nineteenth-
century practices of official, often centralized, state-
organized or -sponsored salons or academies to being
created and sustained by independent, private enterprise—
what has been named “the dealer-critic system.”21 Non-
centralized innovation offered many new spaces and
generated diversity rather than conformity in art practice.
During the same period (1870–1920), the academic
13. Esphyr Slobodkina
(American, born Russia. 1908–
2002). Tamara Abstraction.
1945. Oil with mixed-medium
attachments on wood board,
19 1/2 x 41 1/2" (49.5 x 105.4 cm).
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Frank B. Bemis Fund and
A. Shuman Collection
12. Maria Helena Vieira da
Silva (French, born Portugal.
1908–1992). Dance. 1938. Oil
and wax on canvas, 19 1/2 x
59 1/4" (49.5 x 150.5 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Alfred Flechtheim Fund

discipline of art history developed rapidly from its initial
nineteenth-century foundations in the German university,
swiftly taking root in the United States in the midcentury
when the first university chairs in art history were granted.
The major schools of art history sought to establish
methods for studying visual culture. These were dominated
by concepts of art as an intelligible succession of styles
placed within national cultures subject to chronological
periodization. Thus around 1929, when MoMA was
founded, modernist art’s diversification encountered art-
historical systematization; the latter tamed the former into
the story MoMA and all other modern museums and
art-history textbooks have subsequently told.
We now know that the many trajectories within
modern, and certainly postmodern, art have made Barr’s
assumption that art inevitably progresses toward abstrac-
tion untenable. If art was moving inexorably toward
abstraction and losing figuration as a mirror of the human,
the cult of the artist emerged as compensation. The artist,
even while making abstract art according to geometric
or organic principles, provided modern art with human
interest. The heroic modern artist was presented as an
active agent in the changing of styles, as well as an entre-
preneur of an independent, free-enterprise system, after
art-making had been unmoored from larger structures
such as ecclesiastical, state, or aristocratic patronage and
government-regulated art training, rewards, and censor-
ship. Individuation created a new concept of the artist for
modern capitalist times.22 In Barr’s art-historical narrative,
the concept of the artist was reshaped in mythic terms:
adventurer, explorer, individualist, entrepreneur. All these
terms were coded in modern culture as masculine, as were
the qualities of leadership and creative authority, even
while women as much as men embraced the view of the
artist as a singular and free adventurer.
Barr linked his studies of systematic stylistic evolu-
tion, undertaken with Charles Morey at Princeton, with
a third element to constitute his new discipline of art
history: connoisseurship, which he had experienced in
the museum course with Sachs at Harvard. Typically
connoisseurship performs a curious combination of two
apparently antagonistic elements. The first involves
discerning the imprint of distinguishing artistic and
figurative habits by which artworks can be attributed to
a specific artist. Once a body of work has been created as
an oeuvre with a single creator, a persona can be produced
for that creator, which then allows for the emergence of
the deeper, humanistic significance of the work, symp-
tomatized by these formal habits. Thus the seemingly
impersonal formal elements of an art object become
attached to an explanatory biography of the subject of art:
the artist. Hence Barr is also remembered for monographic
projects, for establishing the oeuvres and artistic evolution
of modernist masters Picasso and Henri Matisse.23
This conjunction of formalism and persona remodels
both the artist and art in relation to deeper concepts of
modernity itself, as it suggests that art is always going
somewhere, moving on, developing from and reacting
against what has been. It means that we think of modern
art as driven by an inner logic. Modern art becomes an
unfolding story that can be mapped as a flow chart, as
Barr famously did for his important Cubism and Abstract
Art exhibition in 1936, then translating the image—an
indeed brilliant model of the relations between artists’
coteries and events between 1890 and 1935 (no. 15)—into
the architecture of the Museum itself: a chain of rooms
experienced by the visitor as both a pedagogical passage
and a spiritual adventure. Here artworks become elements
of a story, like sentences in a book or shots in a film.
Such combinations may in fact suggest important,
formal relations that matter art historically. Stylistic
innovation is a feature of, and undoubtedly a driving force
behind, modernist art consciousness. The point, however,
is that it is not the only one. Emphasizing formal relations
to the exclusion of all other factors and possibilities
has distorting effects. Doing so makes many evidently
important aspects of the modernist enterprise in which
women participated, alongside men, apart from men, and
in their own voices, unthinkable, invisible, unassimilable
to modern art as it was charted by Barr.
14. Lee Krasner (American,
1908–1984). Gaea. 1966. Oil
on canvas, 69" x 10' 5 1/2"
(175.3 x 318.8 cm). The
Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Kay Sage Tanguy Fund

and persistent traditions in imagery, visually remembering
and encoding human experience and emotions. These
mnemonic figurations Warburg named pathos-formel:
the image as a formalization of remembered and intense
feeling.25 For Warburg, art was not merely a formal,
problem-solving exercise. The image as formalization
negotiates, visually and aesthetically, fundamental aspects
of human experience: pain, death, suffering, love, jealousy,
power, anxiety, hatred, violence. If we approach art in
Warburg’s iconological manner (which does not and cannot
ignore the precise forms by which such visual engagements
with meaning and experience are performed and renovated),
we may be able to understand more of what was produced
in the modern period by more artists, while also under-
standing the specific symbolic narrative enacted in
The Museum of Modern Art as an institutionalization
of a modernism that negotiated an anxious and heroic
masculinity.26
As early as 1979 art historians Carol Duncan and
Alan Wallach offered such an iconological analysis of the
hanging of, and the visitor’s subjective experience passing
through, MoMA’s formalist display.27 These authors were
the first to analyze a museum display in this way and to
make such a reading of the classic arrangement of MoMA’s
galleries at the time. In 1989 Duncan would provide a
comparable reading of the 1984 reinstallation of the main
galleries.28 (Recent rehangings have become more experi-
mental and inclusive while still rehearsing the fundamental
narrative for the earlier twentieth century.) It was not,
however, for its absenting of women that Duncan and
Wallach critiqued MoMA’s hangs. Paradoxically, they were
pointing to the massive presence of the feminine, but not
as artists. The feminine was everywhere as image, in what,
drawing indirectly on Warburg’s antiformalist model,
Duncan and Wallach identified as the Museum’s icono-
logical program. Reading the Museum as the producer of a
narrative experience through the carefully plotted display
of major works, Duncan and Wallach argued that MoMA
can be read as a form akin to ancient, ceremonial architec-
ture in which the viewer undergoes not merely instruction
in the history of art but a transformation of his or her
consciousness and self-perception through orchestrated
encounters with symbolically and affectively charged
images. Entry into a specially designed building, with its
flights of stairs or vast halls and atria, separates the viewers
from the everyday world outside in order to prepare them
for another level of nonprofane experience. The interior
spaces are laid out in a series of interlocking rooms, passage
through which becomes an ordeal similar to classical
adventures in the labyrinth, where the hero was challenged
to survive an encounter with a monstrous other. In the
case of MoMA, the monstrous other the viewer encoun-
ters through art is almost always represented by a female
figure, prime among which are the staring prostitutes
of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which is
always placed prominently in the Museum’s art-historical
narrative. If the hero of the adventure is confronting the
monstrous feminine as its other, irrespective of his or
her actual gender or orientation, the experience of this
adventure masculinizes the spectator.29
In this artistic labyrinth, the visitor is inducted,
through a series of symbolic encounters mediated by the
paintings and sculptures, into a mythic ordeal of menaced
but ultimately triumphant masculinity while also being
ideologically restructured as the individual subjectivity
typical of the capitalist system:
But inside the labyrinth, the principle of creativity
is defined and celebrated as a male spiritual
endeavour in which consciousness finds its identity
by transcending the material, biological world
and its Mother Goddess. . . . The labyrinth ordeal
is articulated by the iconographic programme.
Since the architectural script has cast you as pure
subjectivity [suspending everyday life and time],
at any point within the labyrinth, the iconography
tells you what your consciousness should be. In
other words, once you are inside the labyrinth, the
labyrinth is inside you.30
Look again at Barr’s infamous image for Cubism and
Abstract Art. It did confer intelligibility and dignity on
what might have seemed to those not yet converted to
modernism an anarchic mess, a cacophonous clamor of
juvenile noise and fury signifying nothing so much as
the breakdown of culture itself. Instead, Barr provided a
coherence of mutual influence and expanding relations
by means of which visitors could move from work to
work, from room to room, and see all of it as exemplifying
the inevitability of abstraction as it occurs over a
unidirectional sequence of time.
What disappears from such diagrammatic represen-
tations of influence, however, is history, which shaped
modern art and artists with all the immense traumas and
significance attached to World War I and its terrifying
industrialization of conflict, its vast numbers of dead or
mutilated bodies, its radical rewriting of the European
map, its linking of the United
States and Europe through
conflict, its transforming of the
experience and roles of women
while men were at the front, which served to hasten the
victory for the vote.24 To have chronology without history
means ignoring the Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin’s
rise to power, the rise of Italian and German Fascism, the
economic catastrophe of the Depression, the rise of the
Left, the New Deal, the development of the motorcar, the
airplane, telephones, communication systems, new kinds
of consumption and urban service employment. It misses
the invention of cinema, discoveries in philosophy and
science, and the emergence of psychoanalysis, all of which
provided new ways of understanding ourselves. Artists
were deeply impacted by these epoch-making changes,
which occurred on all fronts: travel, technology, revolution,
civil rights, sexuality, race relations, immigration, politics.
Modern art negotiated its historical conditions in many
ways, and in that negotiation differences were generated
according to a multitude of factors shaping the subject
positions from which that modern history was being
experienced and represented by men and women of differ-
ent classes, ethnicities, cultures, locations, sexualities,
and histories. Without abandoning the insights of formal-
ism, inclusive histories of modern art must be complex,
expanded, and multifocused.
An Iconological Reading
In nineteenth-century art history, formalizing and con-
noisseurial trends that classified art only through period
and style were countered by other intellectual trends.
Aby Warburg argued that art is not merely a formal process;
it is also a symbolic activity that produces images and
meanings by which cultures address topics of great impor-
tance to human thought and feeling. Art both registers
new situations and revives, where necessary, long-lived
15. Cubism and Abstract Art
exhibition catalogue, by Alfred
H. Barr, Jr., with cover chart
prepared by Barr (New York:
1936). Offset, 10 1/8 x 7 3/4"
(25.7 x 19.7 cm). Alfred H. Barr,
Jr., Papers, 3.C.4, The Museum
of Modern Art Archives,
New York

Thus stylistic succession laid out through the historical
galleries celebrates enlightenment through the progressive
mastery over and abstraction from the world of the every-
day, from matter and materiality, which has been identified
as feminine. Yet at the same time the Museum is crowded
with images of women, as lovers, prostitutes, tarts, and
entertainers who are socially debased and often formally
disfigured. The female nude from Paul Cézanne and Paul
Gauguin to Picasso and Matisse and on to de Kooning and
Tom Wesselmann is often the recurring site of major sty-
listic and individual statements. Duncan suggests that we
must acknowledge that these paintings, which plot out
such individual stylistic innovation and implant the sig-
nature of that creative individual mastery of the challenge
posed by the world to the artist, also enact a deeper
psychic drama about sexual identity. Thus the search for
spiritual transcendence through aesthetic victory over
materiality does not seem contradictory “if we understand
the modern-art museum as a ritual of male transcendence,
if we see it organized around male fears, fantasies and
desires, then the quest for spiritual transcendence on
the one hand and the obsession with a sexualized female
body on the other, rather than appearing unrelated or
contradictory, can be seen as parts of a larger psychologi-
cally integrated whole.”32
Clearly never consciously planned, the Museum’s
cultural scripting of experience through the works it has
selected and this double narrative it tells have real effects
on its ability to see the work of women artists and
integrate what they created from their sexually different
experiences and psychic economies. Thus Duncan
tellingly concludes,“Since the heroes of this ordeal are
generically men, the presence of women artists, in this
mythology, can only be an anomaly.”33 Their numbers or
coexistence with the male artists could never be allowed
to dilute the unconscious masculinity of this fundamen-
tally mythopoetic space or to degender the masculinizing
ritual of the passage through it.
Where to Now?
The Museum, therefore, must be confronted as an author
of a specific narrative and the architect of a cultural
experience whose structural elements actively render the
acknowledgment of women’s place as creators in the mod-
ernist enterprise difficult to imagine or integrate, even as
some initiatives are being made to place more works by
more women on view. Anyone who visits recent installa-
tions of contemporary art at MoMA that are genuinely
inclusive will already experience a different ethos in the
spaces, perhaps a sense of more possibilities, shifting per-
spectives, varied moods, each indicating the sensibility/
intellectuality of the artist, man or woman, and offering
something expanded and polyphonic. How people inter-
pret this variableness is open. For the Museum to change
and enable visitors to experience modernism as diverse,
created from heterogeneous, even conflicting positions,
articulating through formal experimentation and icono-
graphical invention varied ethnic, sexual, gendered
cultural experiences of a multifocalized world, we shall
need to open ourselves to radically different models
of understanding the whole of modernist culture.
Critical feminist, postcolonial, and queer museological
and art-historical theory has experimented with ways of
creating new and inclusive, rather than merely corrective
or supplementary, ways of representing the histories
of art.“Inclusive” means understanding that modern art
was created by diverse men and women, side by side, in
various forms of conversation, rivalry, and difference.
I vividly recall a visit to the modernist galleries of the
National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1986, where
in the darkened and cavernous spaces paintings were
suspended on wires so that they floated in space, allowing
the visitor to pass among them. It was there that I first
saw a Krasner painting (Cool White [1959]) that was hung
in the same space as a Jackson Pollock (Blue Poles [1952]),
not side by side, for this hanging system allowed each
painting to be met in its own discrete space. The impact
The proposed path through the story told by The
Museum of Modern Art works through the selection of
objects that deal with dramatic struggles with material,
bodies, and desires. As we progress, this journey reveals
an attenuation of subject matter in favor of resolved
formal solutions: abstraction. (Here the two systems of
formalist logic and iconography converge.) The passage
plotted out by a selective version of the history of modern
art can be read as performing the celebration of thought
over matter, light over darkness, masculine logic over
feminine materiality. It leads toward the mystical triumph
of the spirit. Punctuated by major paintings such as Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon or Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I
(1950–52) or majestic sculptural female bodies by
Aristide Maillol or Pierre-Auguste Renoir, one’s journey
is menaced by the dangerous encounter with, and inspired
by the ultimate transcendence over, the multifaced
Gorgon-Whore whose many manifestations constitute
the feminine otherness that is represented in art as being
in contrast to the energetic signature of the masculine
creator: the artist. This inflects our very understanding
of gendered values in the modern:
But the passage through the labyrinth is not simply
a mythical struggle between male and female con-
sciousness. This iconographic programme encodes
a structure of ideas and cultural values. In the laby-
rinth, the female spectator—the Mother Goddess—
stands for lived, sensuous experience, human needs
and human love . . . which must be renounced . . .
[in favor of purely] aesthetic detachment. . . . The
ritual clarifies social experience by recreating it
imaginatively in symbolic form. In this way the lab-
yrinth nightmare exalts as positive values the com-
petitive individualism and alienated human relations
that characterize contemporary social experience.31
Two vital points emerge here. First, the Museum
layout helps to determine the detached nature of the
subjectivities that come to be experienced within it.
Second, the collection and display of the representative
works of the major movements of twentieth-century art
can be read to disclose a deeper, unconscious script that
would not be visible in, and will not be noticed through,
the dominant forms of published art history, which focuses
on individual artists or on groups, styles, and movements.
Duncan and Wallach argue, therefore, that there is a
mythic dimension of sexual difference in the canonized
selection and display of modern art in the Museum. They
indicate the ways in which the orchestration of “an ordeal
and a triumph” of a historically specific form of masculine
subjectivity (modern, adventurous, individualistic, com-
petitive) over the materialized and often monstrous repre-
sentation of the maternal/prostitutional feminine can be
revealed as the underlying story of the modern, capitalist
subject that we encounter when we visit the Museum,
thinking we are there merely to learn a sequence of styles
and marvel at individual genius displayed with objective
scholarship on the neutral walls of a museum space.
In her 1989 review of the 1984 reinstallation of
MoMA’s core historical collection, Duncan drew once
again upon the iconological tradition in art history to
explicate more fully how the DNA-like double helix of
the narrative plotted in the Museum’s galleries works,
furthermore, to make the very idea of woman as artist
impossible to accommodate. One strand is a formalist
story of the progressive struggle for artistic and spiritual
transcendence over matter, darkness, and nature, repre-
sented by the victory of abstraction in the battle against
a feminized materialism, sometimes figured, sometimes
signified by medium itself. The other strand provides
for the viewer/visitor a performative encounter with a
symbolic drama of masculine anxiety in the face of,
and the conquering of the image of,“Woman,” whose
evacuation from representation is tracked in many artists’
development and presented as artistic innovation, leading
us to value above all else dissociation from ordinary,
daily, lived human relations.

(when modernist experimentation was contested by the
rise of fascism), the 1960s–’70s (when new social move-
ments put forth ideas of second-wave feminism, antiracism,
and decolonization), and the 1990s (after the fall of the
Berlin Wall and when globalization was under way). De
Zegher, however, introduced into the manifold ways we
could identify key cultural moments and politico-historical
conjunctions a specific focus on the history and negotiations
of sexual difference. Thus her elliptical traverse not only
discerned new continuities across three generations of
artists, from different countries, cultures, and practices,
clustering around various modalities and problematics
rather than styles; it also showed how a retrospective
review allows the present moment, the “now-time”
(Jetztzeit) in Walter Benjamin’s terms, to bring a formerly
indecipherable past into view and recognition.37
De Zegher deployed both psychoanalytical notions
of the reversal of time (anamnesis and the return of the
repressed) and the idea of the now-time.“Anamnesis”
refers to the undoing of forgetfulness or repression of the
past, while the “return of the repressed” suggests that
what was traumatic and could not be fully assimilated at
the time may have been repressed or become latent and
can return either to haunt and torment us or to be inte-
grated retrospectively into an expanded and de-repressed
present. Christine Buci-Glucksmann explains:
To the empty linear time of a cumulative succession
of events, Benjamin opposes the necessity of a
temporal break, an interruption in time disclosed
by the imaginaries of history. Jetztzeit is an inten-
sive, qualitative time which becomes visible in
“states of emergency,” the moments when “culture
engenders barbarism” and the infinitely repressed
memory of “those without a name” (Namenlosen)
finally reappropriates a history dominated by the
historicism of the rulers.38
Neither seeking to add the hitherto “unnamed”—
that is, artists who have not registered as the authors
of significant artistic events in the grand narrative of
modernism—nor proposing an alternative version of the
same type of period-style-master-oeuvre-work history of
art, a feminist curatorial écriture in this field explores a
radically different sense of how to encounter an expanded,
heterogeneous, inexhaustible series of artistic events that
collectively reveal to us deeply significant dimensions
of culture and subjectivity, history and struggle, by means
of aesthetic formalizations and practices.
An elliptical traverse that linked and repositioned
the overlooked or marginalized past through what it had,
often without contemporary recognition, seeded into
culture, to flower decades later, was most significantly
defined as “in, of, and from the feminine.” Although the
exhibition brought to light thirty-three artists who were
women (including Anna Maria Maiolino [no. 16]), it could
have shown work by men. It was not a women’s show
whereby the mere fact of gender formed the absolute bond
between the exhibiting artists, who would thus be made
only to exhibit this generalizing and unenlightening dif-
ference. Instead, the singularity of each artistic inscription
could emerge precisely because the artists who were
exhibited were so significantly diverse in terms of age,
culture, sexuality, ethnicity, historical experience, and
aesthetic choices and strategies, even while the discerning
critic-curator could suggest, on this reading, deeper, symp-
tomatic genealogies in the groupings she made around
four themes: fragmentation and the body; inscription,
silence, and textuality; weaving as practice and metaphor;
and enjambment (the breaking of a syntactic unit so that
meaning flows across the rupture). Indeed the artists
demonstrated what Julia Kristeva has defined as the
potential of aesthetic practices to bring forth “the singu-
larity of each person . . . and . . . the multiplicity of every
person’s possible identifications . . . the relativity of his/
her symbolic as well as biological existence, according to
the variations in his/her specific symbolic capacities.”39
I cannot underline sufficiently the difficulty we face in
overcoming the gross exclusion of women from the canon
of modernism and even from contemporary art through
was immediate and extraordinary, as I sensed the deep,
long, and often difficult conversation between two equally
brilliant, ambitious, and extraordinary painters. No doubt
they talked about killing shallow space, felt Greenberg and
Barr as éminences grises looming over them as they won-
dered every day if the work they had each done was indeed
a painting. They also shared an interest in Surrealism, in
indigenous cosmologies, in ancient art, myth, and ritual.
Using anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s study of culture as
a form of deep play typically associated with gambling in
sport, I suggest that the most powerful and affecting works
of art are those that work with the deepest of plays.34
I am also suggesting this: that for an artist like Krasner to
choose to live and work in the most intimate proximity
with an artist like Pollock, whom she considered to be one
of the most significant forces emerging in the New York
art world, in whose creation she ambitiously desired to
share while daring also to create beside it her own vision,
was one such deep play. Art history remains impoverished
for not yet fully being able to recognize Krasner’s paint-
ings, one of which, for instance, used to be shown only
intermittently at Tate Britain (before the creation of Tate
Modern and its innovative thematic hangs). Typically,
the Krasner was exhibited strictly when the Pollock was
not. Thus the very nature of the deep play that occurred
during and after their time together was never visible
for us to experience in the art ring.
Another inclusive and non-Eurocentrically interna-
tional model is organized around the terms “generations”
and “geographies.”35 This involves exploring the specific
and singular axes and moments from which each artist
produces his or her work. Art is made in relation to time,
family, and larger collective social and cultural histories:
generations. It is also made in space, in relation to geopo-
litical configurations that may include home or migration,
exile or displacement, national identity or cosmopolitan-
ism: geographies.36 Each artwork or practice is produced
across these axes but does not represent or exemplify them.
From specific locations and singular histories, artists
speak to the world in particular modes whose specificities
the art historian aims to plot out and indicate as the
ground from which a particular aesthetic gesture is being
made. Thus the aim is not to categorize, confine, classify,
or render exemplary, but to ask: What am I seeing? Who
is speaking? From where?
A vital curatorial project was curated by Catherine
de Zegher at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston
in 1996, titled Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse
of 20th Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine. Rather
than offering an alternative canon of missing women, the
exhibition framed a series of complex encounters and
groupings of artists, each working from generational and
geographical specificity. More significant is what was
implied by the subtitle and its phrase “in, of, and from the
feminine.” De Zegher made three important interventions
in the curation, exhibition, and interpretation of twentieth-
century art created by women.
The exhibition was focused around a temporal con-
cept—the twentieth century—rather than an art historical
category: modern art or any of its stylistic subcategories
that form part of the model created by Barr’s Museum
of Modern Art for us to understand as a flow of mutually
influencing stylistic movements: isms. By this means she
refused the directional telos of a developmental, formalist
schema for the unidirectional advance of modern art
that makes it structurally impossible for art history
to recognize the contributions and interventions made
by creative women in the twentieth century that do not
conform to this ahistorical chronological evolution of
styles and movements.
De Zegher, therefore, proposed that that there are
several ways to plot the histories of art made during the
long twentieth century. Hers was an elliptical traverse, a
crisscrossing backward and forward as well as a circling
movement across the terrain of aesthetic practices that
involved placing in new and revealing relations artworks
made from three moments of historical and cultural sig-
nificance. Determined not by the formalist schema but
by intersections of cultural history and sexual difference,
the moments she brought together were the 1920s–’30s

to today. That in itself requires bold gestures of scholarly
recovery, while at the same time we have to deconstruct
the resulting tendency to generalize these artists as merely
exemplars of a gendered collective: women, a sexualizing
nomination by which they are, as a category, lumped
together, their singularity annulled. As “women artists,”
not artists who are women, they are excluded a priori from
the category “artist,” which has been symbolically reserved
for men. We must bring women together as diverse artists
who share, in unpredictable ways, their experience of sex-
ual and other significant differences, in order to see their
work (because of continuing marginalization and oblivion)
and in order to find out, for the first time, what in fact
each woman in her artistically signified yet gendered/sex-
ual singularity is offering to the world, to us all, to attain
more complete knowledge of that world as it is lived and
thought from multiple positions over time and space.
Thus the work being done in this first-ever review
of the women artists, designers, filmmakers, sculptors,
and architects in the collection of MoMA cannot be
viewed under the terms that dominated the formation of
the Museum and its continued habits of exhibition. Four
decades of research and analysis have identified major
issues in museum and academic art-writing and offered
new models for creating an inclusive, expanded, and
self-critical presentation of the art of the modern and the
contemporary. This clearly involves the active, creative,
and mutually respectful encounter between museum,
curator, and scholar so that expanded methods of cultural
inquiry can radically open us up to the heterogeneity
and creativity of the past, the present, and the future we
may otherwise miss.
16. Anna Maria Maiolino
(Brazilian, born Italy 1942).
Buraco preto (Black hole)
from the series Os buracos/
desenhos objetos (Holes/
drawing objects). 1974. Torn
paper, 27 x 27" (68.6 x 68.6 cm).
New York. Purchase
1. Frances Weitzenhoffer, The
Havemeyers:Impressionism
Comes to America (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1986).
2. Kathleen D. McCarthy,
Women’s Culture:American
Philanthropy and Art, 1830–
1930 (Chicago:University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
3. Calvin Tomkins, Merchants
and Masterpieces:The Story
of the Metropolitan Museum
(New York:Henry Holt, 1989).
4. Clement Greenberg,“Avant-
Garde and Kitsch,” 1939;
reprinted in Greenberg, Art and
Culture:Critical Essays (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 3–21.
“No culture can develop with-
out a social basis, without a
source of stable income. And
in the case of the avant-garde,
this was provided by an elite
among the ruling class of that
society from which it assumed
itself to be cut off, but to
which it has always remained
attached by an umbilical cord
of gold.” Ibid., p. 8.
5. Russell Lynes, Good Old
Modern:An Intimate Portrait
of the Museum of Modern Art
(New York:Atheneum, 1973),
pp. 4–8.
6. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred
H. Barr,Jr. and the Intellectual
Origins of the Museum of
Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2002).
7. See Jennifer R. Gross, Société
Anonyme:Modernism for
America (New Haven:Yale
University Press, 2006).
8. Andrea Weiss, Paris Was a
Woman:Portraits from the Left
Bank (London:Rivers Oram
Press/Pandora Press, 1995).
9. Claude Roger-Marx,
“Les Femmes peintres et
l’impressionisme:Berthe
Morisot,” Gazette des beaux-
arts, December 1, 1907, p. 50.
10. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The
Princess:A Medley, 1847,
section 5, lines 437–41.
11. Rita Felski, The Gender of
Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press,
1995), p. 1.
12. Ibid.
13. Andreas Huyssen,“Mass
Culture as Woman:Modernism’s
Other,” in After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (Theories of
Representation and Difference)
(Basingstoke, England:
MacMillan Press, 1986), p. 53.
14. Ibid., p. 62.
15. Ibid., pp. 55–56.
16. Sarah Kofman, The
Childhood of Art:An
Interpretation of Freud’s
Aesthetics, trans. Winifred
Woodhull (New York:Columbia
University Press, 1995),
pp. 19–20.
17. Alfred H. Barr,Jr., letter to
Peggy Guggenheim, September
24, 1942;quoted in Susan
Davidson and Philip Rylands,
Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick
Kiesler:The Story of Art of This
Century (New York:Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, 2005),
p. 292.
18.This and other historical
facts about The Museum of
Modern Art were gathered from
the Museum Archives, with
the assistance of Romy Silver,
Research Assistant, Modern
Women’s Initiative, Department
of Drawings, and Michelle
Elligot, Museum Archivist.
19. On Sonja Sekula, see Nancy
Foote,“Who was Sonja Sekula?”
Art in America, September–
October 1971, pp. 73–80;and
Ann Gibson,“Universality and
Difference in Women’s Abstract
Painting:Krasner, Ryan, Sekula,
Piper and Streat,” Yale Journal
of Criticism 8, no. 1 (Spring
1995):103–32.There is also
an informative Web site
dedicated to the painter:
www.sonja-sekula.org/.
20.Jimmy Ernst, A Not-So-Still
Life:A Memoir (New York:St.
Martin’s Press/Marek, 1984),
p. 236;cited in Davidson and
Rylands,“Exhibition by 31
Women,” in Peggy Guggenheim
& Frederick Kiesler, p. 291.
21. Harrison C. White and
Cynthia A. White, Canvases and
Careers:Institutional Change
in the French Painting World
(Chicago:University of Chicago
Press, 1965).
22.Those artists who opposed
capitalism during the Soviet
experiment specifically mod-
eled their practice on socialized,
collective, nonindividuating
production.
23. Barr, Picasso:Fifty Years of
His Art (New York:The Museum
of Modern Art, 1946), and
Matisse:His Art and His Public
(New York:The Museum of
Modern Art, 1951).
24.The critique was first
mounted by Meyer Schapiro in
“The Nature of Abstract Art,”
Marxist Quarterly 1 (January–
March 1937):77–98;reprinted
in Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th
and 20th Centuries (Selected
Papers) (New York:George
Braziller, 1979), pp. 185–212.
25. Aby Warburg’s neologism
first appears in “Dürer and
Italian Antiquity,”1905;reprinted
in Warburg, The Renewal of
Pagan Antiquity, trans. David
Britt (Los Angeles:Getty
Publications, 1999), pp. 729–31.
For the evolution of this term,
see Gertrude Bing,‘‘A. M.
Warburg,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 28 (1965):299–313.
A useful introduction to
Warburg’s iconological project
is Giorgio Agamben,“Aby
Warburg and the Nameless
Science,” in Potentialities,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, Calif.:Stanford
University Press, 1999),
pp. 89–103.
26. Warburg’s follower Erwin
Panofsky brought this
approach to the United States,
where iconography has domi-
nated the studies in medieval
and Renaissance art history.
There is a distinction to be
made between iconography—
the study of symbols used in
the visual arts, e.g., keys in the
hand of a man suggest Saint
Peter—and iconology, which
attempts to explain the overall
symbolic activity of art in
relation to larger cultural
processes and meanings and
to the meaning of symbolic
activity in human life.
27. Carol Duncan and Alan
Wallach,“MoMA: Ordeal and
Triumph on 53rd Street,” Studio
International 194, no. 1 (1978):
48–57.
28. Duncan,“The MoMA’s Hot
Mamas,” Art Journal 48, no. 2
(Summer 1989): 171–78;
reprinted in Duncan, The
Aesthetics of Power:Essays in
Critical Art History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 189–207.
29.This point draws on Laura
Mulvey’s feminist theory of cin-
ematic spectatorship, which
shows how irrespective of one’s
social gender the spectating
position for a classic Hollywood
film identifies the spectator with
a masculine psychic position of
desire, mastery, and sadism.
Mulvey,“Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16,
no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–30.
30. Duncan and Wallach,
“Ordeal and Triumph on 53rd
Street,” p. 52.
31. Ibid., pp. 55, 57.
32. Duncan,“The MoMA’s Hot
Mamas,” p. 192.
33. Ibid., p. 193.
34. Griselda Pollock,
“Cockfights and Other Parades:
Gesture, Difference, and the
Staging of Meaning in Three
Paintings by Zoffany, Krasner,
and Pollock,” Oxford Art Journal
26, no. 2 (September 2003):
141–65. Clifford Geertz,“Deep
Play: Notes on A Balinese
Cockfight,” in The Interpretation
of Culture (New York: Basic
Books, 1973), pp. 412–53.
35.This art historical model
for inclusive, international
postcolonial feminist studies
is introduced by a team of
scholars in Pollock, ed.,
Generations and Geographies in
the Visual Arts:Feminist
Readings (London: Routledge,
1996).The project was inspired
by the work of Third Text, an
international journal dedicated
to providing critical perspec-
tives on art and visual culture.
36. For more on geographies of
art, see Irit Rogoff, Terra
Infirma:Geography’s Visual
Culture (London: Routledge,
2000).
37. Walter Benjamin, “Theses
on the Philosophy of History
XIV,” 1940, in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry
Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973),
p. 263.
38. Christine Buci-Glucksmann,
Baroque Reason:The
Aesthetics of Modernity, trans.
Patrick Camiller (London: Sage
Publications, 1994), p. 44.
Citations from Benjamin,
“Central Park,” New German
Critique, no. 34 (Winter
1985): 36.
39.Julia Kristeva,“Le Temps
des femmes,” 33/44:Cahiers
de recherche de sciences des
textes et documents, no. 5
(Winter 1979): 19; translated by
Alice Jardine and Harry Blake
in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva
Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986), p. 210.

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