This past Sunday, November 17th, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened a new exhibition called Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern. The show focuses on a fascinating story: the contributions of one of the museum’s founders. Specifically, it looks into how she influenced the MoMA and modern art connoisseurship in the United States.
Lillie Plummer Bliss was a Massachusetts-born New York socialite, the daughter of a successful dry goods and textile merchant. At age 45, she attended an exhibition of the work of Arthur Davies, marking the beginning of her personal journey into the world of modern art. After buying one of his paintings, Davies recommended she learn more about the modernists active in Europe at the time, including Cézanne and Degas. From then on, she started collecting modern European art and displaying it in her home. In time, she became one of the premier collectors of Cézanne paintings in the United States. She went on to become a major source of funding for the 1913 Armory Show, one of the first modernist art exhibitions in North America. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s purchase of a Cézanne landscape from the Armory Show is often seen as the moment when modernism entered the mainstream art establishment in the United States. Many, however, were not enthused.
We often look back with shock and disappointment when confronted with the way many people viewed modernist art in the early twentieth century. The fascist regimes in Europe are the main targets of our contemporary derision. However, Nazi Germany was not the only place where modernism was looked upon disapprovingly. When Bliss helped organize a Metropolitan Museum exhibition of paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Degas, and other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters, an organization called the Committee of Citizens and Supporters of the Museum referred to the exhibition’s contents as “Degenerate ‘Modernistic’ Works”. In their publications, they likened modern art and its appreciation to supporting communism, membership in a satanic cult, and “mental degeneracy”.
On a trip to Jerusalem in 1929, she met with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who later introduced her to Mary Quinn Sullivan. Upon returning to the United States, the trio drew up their plans to found a museum dedicated to modern art in New York. By November of that year, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in a rented office space at 730 Fifth Avenue, about four blocks from where the MoMA stands today. The opening was widely publicized, in no small part thanks to a sort of Streisand effect brought on by modern art’s critics. In 1931, Bliss passed away from uterine cancer. Her personal papers were destroyed, but she bequeathed her entire collection to the museum on the condition that the museum “is able to prove financial stability within three years of her death”. She also allowed the MoMA to sell and exchange works from her collection to make future acquisitions. The Bliss collection serves as the core of the entire museum collection even today. Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern included several major paintings from the MoMA originally from the Bliss collection, including The Bather by Cézanne and the portrait of Anna Zborowska by Amadeo Modigliani. However, the museum was sure to include not just works from the Bliss Collection but works the MoMA acquired thanks to funding made possible by Bliss, including Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Museum visitors crowding around Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the Lillie Bliss exhibition
Bliss not only collected modern masterpieces but also recognized the connections between them and older art forms. The exhibition included textiles from the third to sixth centuries CE, the designs of which could have easily been created in the 1920s by a symbolist painter like Odilon Redon. A series of Gauguin’s Polynesian-inspired woodcut prints was just around the corner from the textiles. However, one of them, entitled Te Atua (The Gods), finished in 1894, reminded me not of the Pacific islands but, with its black figures against a reddish background, reminded me of ancient Greek pottery fragments.
By looking at Lillie Bliss in this way, as a collector, a philanthropist, and a source of funding for modern art in the early twentieth century, the museum tackled several subjects that need highlighting today. First is the role that collectors and benefactors play in the trajectory of art in the modern world. There is also the question of what Bliss’s life may say about women’s place in the arts. Large swaths of the art world, especially in the past, served almost like a no-girls-allowed treehouse club. Women are drawn to the arts just as much as men, yet gender roles imposed upon them often make many feel socially obligated to refrain from pursuing such a career. Sometimes, women are even intentionally excluded from such spaces. Failing to address the gender question more explicitly may be the exhibition’s sole shortcoming. With all the resistance Bliss faced in the promotion of modern art and the establishment of the museum, how did her gender play a role in the way that she was perceived? Of course, this question is made difficult by the fact that she remained anonymous when donating funds and loaning works to various exhibitions. Her gender may have played a role in her decision to do so. Yet, I wouldn’t put it past Americans in the 1920s to use gendered language when discussing Bliss’s involvement in modern art and the MoMA’s foundation.
While Bliss was not an artist herself, she used her wealth and privilege to collect and promote art that many at the time thought was negatively influencing society. I feel rather embarrassed and ashamed that, until this exhibition, I had no idea that a trio of women were the ones who founded the Museum of Modern Art. Hopefully, after they’re done taking their selfies with Starry Night in the background, more museum visitors may just remember Lillie Bliss alongside other famous names like Guggenheim and Getty, famous collectors and patrons who helped shape modern art in the United States.