Inventing the Modern

Profiles of fourteen women who transformed the country's foremost modern art museum in its fledgling years.

Founded in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art owes much of its success to a group of remarkable women who shaped its future during its first decades. Because there were few precedents for a museum devoted to modern art, MoMA was free to invent itself without the requirements-professional experience, competitive salaries-that traditionally limited an art institution's jobs to men. At MoMA women were able to create and define their roles as founders, patrons, curators, and department directors, changing, as they did so, the course of art history. In this volume, readers are transported to the grit and glamour of midtown Manhattan in the 1930s and '40s through profiles of fourteen pioneering figures who made an indelible mark not only on MoMA but on the culture of their time.