Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years, 1951-1986

摘要

The two books reviewed here, by Mardges Bacon and Thomas S. Hines, use the methods of biography to offer new insights into the Museum of Modern Art's engagement with architecture from its founding years until the mid-1980s. During that period, the exhibitions sponsored by MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design (A&D) garnered significant attention from the popular and trade presses, and the institution took seriously its self-appointed role as arbiter of the modernist canon. In the realm of architecture and design, the figure of Philip Johnson loomed large, but these books usefully refocus attention on the creative and administrative skills (or lack thereof) of two other men who made MoMA's history as vital and dynamic as it was: John McAndrew, curator of A&D from 1937 to 1941, and Arthur Drexler, who served first as curator of architecture (1951-56) and then as director of the Department of Architecture and Design (1956-86). To be sure, Johnson plays a crucial role in the early stages of both books. Johnson and McAndrew overlapped in their time as students at Harvard but did not meet until they were both touring Germany in 1929. As Bacon describes, the two "kindred aesthetes" (50) then traveled across Europe, seeking out examples of the new modern architecture, such as J. J. P. Oud's Kiefhoek housing estate in Rotterdam and Gropius's Bauhaus campus in Dessau. Their travels provided the foundation of Johnson's research into the architecture that, a few years later, became the basis for MoMA's Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932), which Johnson curated in partnership with Henry-Russell Hitchcock. McAndrew came to MoMA in 1937 through his connections with founding director Alfred Barr, his travels with Johnson having exposed him to the architectural vanguard, especially its use of industrial materials and unorthodox color schemes. These ideas shaped his own design of the Vassar College Art Library and Art Gallery, as well as his scholarly understanding of modernism. Drexler was hired at MoMA by Johnson in 1951, the two having met when Drexler was working in George Nelson's office and writing an article about Johnson's Glass House in 1949. Johnson at the time was director of the Department of Architecture and Design, and he hired Drexler, then twenty-six years old, as MoMA's curator of architecture. Drexler remained at the museum for three and a half decades, long after Johnson's departure.