I’ve been alerted to a lovely short video about the Museum of Modern Art’s* Modern Women book, which was published last spring as part of the museum’s effort to be more attentive to women artists. It’s posted on a website called Brain Pickings.
The video (here) features MoMA’s museum archivist Michelle Elligott explaining how MoMA came into being after the (in)famous 1921 Impressionist show at the Metropolitan Museum. Nice, though we probably know all that. What’s new is a little story Elligott tells about Sarah Newmeyer, MoMA’s first publicist, aka MoMA’s “red-headed press agent.” (She is pictured at left.)
As Elligott relates, it was Newmeyer who, seeing that MoMA was getting no credit for arranging a nationwide tour of Whistler’s Mother, wrote in for a job, got it, and proceeded to publicize it so that “more than two million people visited their local museums to view the work and the United States Postal Service created a stamp featuring it”
That last quote is drawn from a partial history of Modern Women posted online.
That entry continues: “For the 1935 exhibition Vincent van Gogh, Newmeyer issued advance releases announcing Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s trip to Europe to select works and giving highly sentimental descriptions of the artist’s life. During the show, police had to be brought to the Museum to control the crowds.” And there’s more, if you follow the link.
In 1947, Newmeyer even merited an article in the Saturday Evening Post.
How times have changed.
Photo Credit: MoMA Archives, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
*I consult to a foundation that supports MoMA.