A dream has come true for artists, art history enthusiasts, art students, scholars, collectors, and everyone interested in the development of modern and contemporary art from the perspective of one of the leading museums in the world. You are now able to view thousands of images on The Museum of Modern Art website at moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/history
Yes, it’s true! After years of planning and digitizing the museum offers visitors an opportunity to be transported back in time with modern artists and art. The Museum of Modern Art declares its devotion to Modernism by sharing a comprehensive treasure trove of historical photographs of its exhibitions from its inception in 1929 to today.
33,000 Photographs of Over 3,500 Exhibitions
The thousands of images are searchable so that visitors can choose from almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, most never previously available online.
This platform features over 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through today, illustrated by primary documents such as installation photographs, press releases, more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, and 800 out-of-print catalogues and primary documents, as well as lists of included artists.
Viewers can be transported through decades of Modern art and events.
Photographs capture historical occasions such as the first big show “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” that took place in the fall of 1929.
Other photographs reveal special moments of high-minded glamour such as in a photograph of Audrey Hepburn, in 1957, where she is shown admiring a Picasso with Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s first director.
Another photograph shows a view of the “Bauhaus: 1919-1928” exhibition that took place in 1938-39.
And, the 1939 exhibition “Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity,” the museum’s first solo show devoted to a female artist, Dahlov Zorach Ipcar, can be enjoyed.
This huge project, supported by the Leon Levy Foundation, will continue to add documents from more recent years and also plans to add archives from the museum’s film and performance departments.
Michelle Elligott, chief of the museum’s archives, undertook the project with Fiona Romeo, the director of digital content and strategy. She commented that the project, that required translating documents from the physical to the virtual, has revealed many historical discoveries. For instance, as the museum has long suspected but could never quite say definitively, Picasso is the artist who has been included in more than 320 exhibitions at the museum — that’s more than any other artist to date.
As stated on the museum’s website “By making these unique resources available at no charge, the exhibition history digital archive directly aligns with the Museum’s mission of encouraging an ever-deeper understanding of modern and contemporary art and fostering scholarship.”
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