Educational Publishing in the Expanded Field
This series of posts celebrates the 80th anniversary of The Museum of Modern Art’s formal commitment to museum education. Jennifer Tobias is Reader Services Librarian at the MoMA Library.
When scholars use the verb ‘publish,’ they usually have in mind writing a catalogue raisonné, a definitive monograph, or a learned article for a learned periodical . . . . By publication I mean not only the scholarly treatise but also the popular article or book, the classroom or public lecture, the gallery talk, publicity releases, various kinds of reproductions, the film, the museum label, the broadcast and the telecast. –Alfred H. Barr, Jr.[1]
As MoMA’s founding director, Barr put that verb into action, mobilizing diverse media in service of art education. Several historical and contemporary examples are discussed here, including conventional print publications but also, as Barr envisioned, art reproductions and traveling exhibitions, among others.
Print publishing started early at the Museum, coalescing into a robust program directed by Monroe Wheeler, MoMA’s publisher from 1940 to 1967. An early example intended for general readers is Barr’s 1943 booklet What Is Modern Painting? Also during this period, Victor D’Amico, the director of MoMA’s Department of Education from 1937 to 1969, developed a How to Make book series based upon successful practices in highly popular interactive spaces (revived today as MoMA Studios). In addition, Elodie Courter’s long-running Circulating Exhibitions program took a truly expansive approach to publishing, sending innovative shows-in-a-box to thousands of diverse sites beginning in the early 1930s.
In a similar spirit, in 1935, Iris Barry, a curator in MoMA’s Film department, initiated what would become the Circulating Film Library; its many reels (and now digital media) are still shipped daily to educational institutions. In addition, the Museum experimented with radio and television broadcasting to spread the modern art message.
Together these efforts can be seen as precursors to today’s expanded field of educational publishing, including traditional books (such as recent children’s books) but also dedicated websites (such as MoMA Learning and Meet Me at MoMA), massive open online courses (MOOCs), a YouTube channel (including a personal favorite), and ever-emerging social media engagement.
The Verb “Publish”
The Museum published over 300 books under Wheeler’s tenure, setting a high standard for scholarship and design. Incorporating several clever business strategies, the program sustained both scholarly and popular titles, including, as he put it in 1946, “a kind of book that is quite useful in art education[:] the inexpensive paperbound handbook or monograph . . . .”[2]
In addition to business sense, Wheeler brought editorial expertise to MoMA publications, recognizing the educational and strategic value of appealing to the broadest possible audience:
No public museum today will concentrate upon historical scholarship to the neglect of the needs of its potential public. There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the highest view of art, with its most scrupulous and scholarly standards, and the educational responsibility.[3]
What Is Modern Painting?
[A]lthough we may have seen a million pictures in our lives we may never have learned to look at a painting as an art. For [painting] is like a language you have to learn to read . . . Some pictures . . . are prose, others are poetry, and still others are like algebra or geometry.[4]
The debut of Alfred Barr’s booklet What Is Modern Painting? in 1943 marked one of the Museum’s longest lived, most versatile, and most widely disseminated educational publications. Published in 10 editions from 1943 to 1988, the text was developed into a slide talk shown at over 200 sites in the mid-1940s, an educational installation at the Museum in 1945, and a traveling version that was installed in over 400 venues between 1944 and 1956.
The 43-page paperback is organized around images of artworks, genially narrated by Barr. It begins:
What is modern painting? It is not easy to answer this question in words, for writing is done with words while paintings are made out of shapes and colors. The best words can do is give you some information, point out a few things you might overlook, and if . . . you feel that you don’t like modern painting anyway, words may possibly help you to change your mind.[5]
Barr begins by comparing three pairs of paintings: landscapes, war images, and portraits. Comparison remains a powerful way to critically engage with art, and he runs with it, discussing works such as a birds-eye view battle image by Richard Eurich and José Clemente Orozco’s impassioned Dive Bomber and Tank (1940) before asking, “Which means more to you? This is a free country and you can take your choice or, perhaps, find much to like in both.”[6]
Barr then chats through further examples, introducing art movements such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. He concludes with a forceful afterword about artistic freedom, emphasizing both his core beliefs and the wartime context.
Once published, the book engendered comments from diverse readers, indicative of its popularity. A note from journalist, designer, and polemicist George Nelson got at its strengths:
I may know nothing about art . . . but I happen to know a great deal about the terrific difficulties involved in presenting complicated ideas in simple form. What impressed me so much in your booklet was that this was achieved without writing down in any sense and without any sacrifice of essential accuracy.[7]
How to Make It
Later in the 1940s, Victor D’Amico organized a series of How to Make publications: How to Make Pottery and Ceramic Sculpture (1947), Modern Jewelry (1949), and Objects in Wood (1952).
The books drew upon techniques developed at the Museum’s popular War Veterans’ Art Center and People’s Art Center (which inspired a new iteration for the 21st-century museum, The People’s Studio). Action-oriented and strongly visual, the books say what they mean and mean what they say. To that end, the pages are packed with understated and uncredited photographs of hands at work. For example, this spread about wood gets my fingers twitching to “bend it, break it, split it, cut it.”[8]
D’Amico’s pedagogy was strongly informed by the philosophy known as progressive education, developed by John Dewey. Applied to art, the approach emphasizes self-directed, hands-on discovery and the integration of the arts into an individual’s personal development. D’Amico believed that the approach ”helps … to keep alive the … imagination and also the will to express it. Experience, and not the project, is the precious aim of art education.”[10] Reading the How To Make series today, one gets a visceral sense of that ethos.
Modernism in a Box
Through text and illustrations in its publications [MoMA] offers thousands of people in distant places the means to understand and enjoy art, [and] to many other thousands in remote and scattered communities it brings original works of art through its loans and, more especially, through its circulating exhibitions.[11]
Beginning in the 1930s with a project to send art reproductions to New York City schools, Elodie Courter built the Circulating Exhibitions program to meet public demand for exposure to modern art and design, especially in locations with limited access to this relatively new ethos. Between 1931 and the apex of the program, in 1954, MoMA circulated 461 exhibitions among 3,700 venues, including K–12 schools, technical colleges, clubs, military installations, and department stores, mostly in the US.[12]
Most material circulated as “panel shows,” though framed reproductions, slide shows, and other media were also available. Produced in a small edition and designed for travel and installation just about anywhere, panel shows blended image and text into a poster-like form. These shows even came packaged with their own publicity, including prewritten press releases, photographs, and strategies for local promotion.
Courter’s Elements of Design (1945) was typical of the form but produced in a larger edition, enabling wider distribution. Also typical is the confident tone, extolling the Museum’s then-strongly held ideas about universal modernism, summarized in the final panel — “The images of design vary with each civilization [but] the elements of design never change”[13] — and illustrated with figurative art from diverse cultures and time periods superimposed on an unattributed background photograph of modern humanity.
In later years, teaching portfolios spread the word even more efficiently. Composed of mini-posters and a booklet organized into a folder and printed in large quantities, teaching portfolios were cleverly designed for easy transport by hand or mail, and to function either as books, individual images, or DIY exhibitions. Greta Daniel’s Useful Objects Today (1954), for example, mobilizes 40 images of “saucepans, mother-of-pearl stamp boxes, crystal champagne glasses and inexpensive Japanese baskets, pigskin attaché cases, screwdrivers and pliers, lamps and clocks”[14] to argue for “the direct expression of a way of thinking as new in its interpretation of the world today as it is old in its return to the basic elements of good design.”
Still an Action Verb
Educational publishing at MoMA has grown from these portfolios and booklets to today’s Piece of Work podcast and Wikipedia Edit-a-thons (save the date for March 3!), continuing to manifest Barr’s idea that “The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time … which is educational in the broadest, least academic sense.”[15]
[1] Barr Jr., Alfred H. “Research and Publication in Art Museums.” Museum News 23, no. January 1 (1946): 6–8.
[2] Monroe Wheeler, “The Art Museum and the Art Book Trade,” Museum News, 24, no. 2 (1946): 8.
[3] Monroe Wheeler, “The Museum as Publisher,” Art in America 34, no. 4 (1946), 219.
[4] Alfred H. Barr, Jr. What is Modern Painting? (New York: MoMA, 1943), 3.
[5] Ibid., 3.
[6] Ibid., 7.
[7] George Nelson to Barr, February 15, 1944. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, B.2.d. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
[8] Kendall Bassett, Arthur Thurman, and Victor D’Amico. How To Make Objects of Wood (New York: MoMA, 1951).
[9] For a study of Dewey and museum context see George E. Hein, “John Dewey and Museum Education,” Curator 47, no. 4 (2004).
[10] Victor D’Amico, Experiments in Creative Art Teaching. A Progress Report on the Department of Education,1937–1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 3.
[11] “Circulating Exhibitions 1931–1954,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 21, no. 3–4 (1954), 20. jstor.org/stable/4058235
[12] Ibid, 10.
[13] Elodie Courter. Elements of Design (New York: MoMA, 1945), panel 24.
[14] “Teaching Portfolio №4, Greta Daniel. Press release, 1954. https://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/1885/.../MOMA_1954_0106_99.pdf
[15] “The Museum Collections: A Brief Report” by Alfred H. Barr, 1944. Reports and Pamphlets, 2.9. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
