The Woman Who Made MoMA Truly Modern

I n early summer 1934, Dorothy C. Miller called the Museum of Modern Art’s director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and asked, “Remember me?” Without doubt he did. 

Miller had briefly worked part-time at the Museum of Modern Art while Barr was away in Europe on sabbatical, and in the past year, the director had offered her a job—twice. Both times, though it pained her to do so, she had been forced to decline because of prior commitments. Finally free in June 1934, she phoned Barr and asked rather timidly if “maybe there might be a job for me?” It was his turn to say no, but he told her to come to his office anyway. “So I got dressed up in my best hat—we wore hats then—and I went to see him,” she recalled some 40 years later.

At 30, Miller was an unusual blend of “lady” in the most traditional sense and “villager” in the most bohemian. Intelligent, well-spoken, elegant and “sensationally beautiful,” she mingled easily in acceptably cultured circles, though she often found them “deadly.” She felt most at home in the studios where artists worked and the cheap dives where they drank and ate, but mostly argued. She loved art, and she admired deeply the people who made it.

Barr needed help with just that lot. It was the height of the Depression, and artists desperate for assistance besieged him daily, carrying their work to the museum for him to look at while they regaled him with tales of their troubles. An orderly man, Barr found himself engulfed in chaos. What he required was an assistant to manage the asylum while he attended to running a five-year-old museum that was already the most prominent modern art institution in the country. He knew that Miller, who by then had ample experience behind her, could do this.

But at that first meeting in his office, Barr was noncommittal, and Miller grew “petrified.” She told him, “I have to have a job and I’ll have to look around in other museums very quickly unless you think there’s some chance. This is the only place I want to work.” While she made her appeal, Barr appeared distracted, almost as if he had forgotten her. “I sat there feeling I should get up and run,” she recalled. Finally, returning her gaze from behind his small round spectacles, he explained that the question of a job was not his decision to make. It was up to MoMA’s board of trustees. She left the museum feeling “totally hopeless.”

Barr kept Miller waiting weeks before sending her a letter saying that the trustees had indeed agreed to hire her as his assistant. She was to begin in September, in time to help Barr prepare the museum’s fifth-anniversary exhibition. Miller accepted immediately, eagerly, with an enthusiasm that would not wane for the 35 years she worked at MoMA. Over the course of her career she assumed all the myriad roles of a museum curator presiding over a growing collection: making acquisitions, choreographing gallery displays and juggling an endless parade of responsibilities ranging from conservation and framing decisions to judgments on loan requests. At the same time, she organized numerous temporary exhibitions and oversaw the publications that accompanied them.

Miller’s renown, however, rests most of all on her seven groundbreaking “Americans” exhibitions, presented between 1942 and 1963, which collectively introduced more than 100 contemporary artists to the public. And while not every artist achieved lasting success, many did, and Miller became known for her “uncanny eye for quality.” Years later the art historian Irving Sandler acknowledged her importance: “Dorothy was really second in command, next to Alfred Barr, and in many ways, she was in advance of him.”

The museum staff was tiny: likely fewer than 20 people, including the crew and guards. Miller was thus, by necessity, involved in everything. “[Barr] said, ‘There are dozens of things I want you to do to help me, but the first one is to interview all these artists that are on my neck. I can’t get any work done because they’re coming in droves.’” Miller recalled that few galleries at the time would even look at the work of unknown artists; there was simply no market for new American artists. In that context the museum assumed significance as a place where artists could share their work and receive feedback, though there were almost no funds available for purchases. Miller described her “terribly sad job of seeing all these artists who were starving. ... There’d be the occasional crazy one and I’d have to run screaming, ‘Help.’”

Miller was rescued—the art community was rescued—the next year by the intervention of the federal government. President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to extend Works Progress Administration benefits to artists under the auspices of the Federal Art Project. “The WPA really saved art in this country,” Miller said. “Suddenly all these artists who could qualify as professional artists were on relief. And it was a magnificent thing.”

By late 1935, Miller had been appointed assistant curator of painting and sculpture. The first show she organized on her own was “New Horizons in American Art,” a fall 1936 exhibition of works by artists associated with the Federal Art Project. The previous year, curator Edgar Holger Cahill, Miller’s boyfriend, had been named national head of the project, which entailed his traveling across the country visiting artists in their studios. Miller’s show gave her the opportunity to travel with him. “In each city every good artist would be on the Project, and a great many new, young artists were being discovered,” she later recalled. Those studio visits became the next phase of Miller’s education. “I mean, doesn’t one learn everything one knows about art from artists?” she once asked an interviewer rhetorically.

After their marriage in 1938, she and Cahill eventually took up residence in a two-room apartment in the heart of the Village on East 8th Street, , down the block from Washington Square Park. They filled their home with work they bought from friends who needed money to eat. At the height of the Depression, Miller and Cahill took painting lessons from Arshile Gorky “as an excuse to pass a few dollars” his way. And in spring 1941, when Gorky was to have his first solo museum exhibition, at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Miller bought a painting so that he could afford to drive there. “I did everything I could for the people that I thought were the best artists,” she later said.

In 1939, the Museum of Modern Art moved to its newly built home on West 53rd Street. “Art in Our Time,” an exhibition organized to celebrate MoMA’s 10th anniversary, heralded the new building’s inauguration. The opening party attracted 7,000 people. Just hours before the viewing started, three small sculpture galleries had yet to be installed. Barr left to change into a dinner jacket, while Miller continued to work until guests began arriving. She was so tired by the end of the installation that instead of going home to change her clothes, she went home and collapsed. She missed the party.

In January 1942, Miller, now associate curator, mounted the first of her “Americans” shows, “Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States.” The exhibition included only artists living outside of New York. It meant that Miller spent much of summer 1941 on the road visiting studios. It was a job she relished: “There’s nothing more exciting to me than looking at all the art activities in this country.”

“Americans 1942” included a variety of approaches, such as the social realist paintings of Jack Levine, of Boston, and the Surrealist-inspired work of Helen Lundeberg, of Los Angeles. Miller closed her catalog introduction with a nod to the war raging in Europe, Asia and Africa, associating the diversity of styles on view with American freedom. “All this is possible only in the liberty which our democracy gives to the artist. No regimentations, no compulsions or restrictions could call forth such richly various expressions of a people’s creative spirit.” Miller’s equation of political and artistic freedom, developed during the Depression, remained a core conviction throughout her career.

U.S. involvement in the war brought drastic change to the New York art scene. Americans went off to fight, and European artists fleeing the Nazis sought shelter in Manhattan. Very much in parallel with the sensibilities of the many European Surrealists who had arrived in New York, Miller conceived of a show called “Americans 1943: Realists and Magic Realists.” In addition to 26 contemporary artists, Miller selected 16 19th-century predecessors, including William M. Harnett, known for his trompe l’oeil still lifes, and folk artist Edward Hicks. She devised a third category for Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler, whom she labeled 20th-century pioneers.

Over time, Miller began to take on the role of MoMA’s expert in American art both contemporary and historical. She directed solo exhibitions and group shows like “Romantic Painting in America,” in 1943, which included works by members of the Hudson River School, and contemporary artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe.

Right before “Romantic Painting in America” opened, Stephen C. Clark, who in 1939 had become the museum’s chairman of the board, ousted Barr from the directorship. Without consulting his fellow board members, Clark sent Barr a letter in October 1943 informing him of his demotion to a role titled “advisory director.” Clark disliked many of Barr’s artistic choices, in particular those involving folk and self-taught artists; he also thought Barr was a terrible administrator.

“We were afraid it was going to kill Alfred Barr,” Miller later said of his dismissal. “The museum was his entire life. … He stayed in his bedroom for 30 days, 32 days ... and finally he pulled himself together.” With Barr relegated to a desk in the library at half his previous salary, the museum was initially run by a committee of trustees. But gradually officials realized that they were, in Miller’s words, “simply wasting [Barr], and they needed him very badly.”

Slowly Barr regained increasing responsibility and, in March 1947, was appointed director of Museum Collections. At the same time, Miller was appointed curator of Museum Collections. In these roles they would oversee all acquisitions and would be directly involved with paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. Miller also held the title of acting director of painting and sculpture from October 1946 through 1949.

Each Saturday, in search of new work, Miller and Barr roamed the city’s few galleries. “Somehow, when the two appeared,” the art critic John Gruen recalled, “the temperature of a gallery would mysteriously change. A magic circumference of silence surrounded them, and no one dared approach either.” Miller and Barr played a game of noting what they liked and why, and later comparing their remarks. When an artist was selected by Barr and Miller for collection or exhibition, Gruen continued, “the art world knew of it within 24 hours, for in those years, to be shown at the Museum of Modern Art was tantamount to having achieved international success.”

In 1943, Miller had proposed an exhibition for the following year titled “Americans 1944: The American Artist and the War.” It was not accepted by the exhibition committee; and so it happened that the third installment of her series became “Fourteen Americans,” which after two postponements would not open until September 1946. Miller’s selections ran the gamut from the playful abstraction of Robert Motherwell’s collages to the biting wit of Saul Steinberg’s ink drawings. She selected a number of artists whom she had known for years, such as Gorky (whose 1941 painting “Garden in Sochi” was owned by the museum), Isamu Noguchi, Mark Tobey and Loren MacIver. But there were others she was uncertain about, among them the future Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. The museum had purchased his 1943 painting “The She-Wolf” through Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery. But Miller felt it was too soon for him to appear in an “Americans” exhibition.

Miller seldom wrote more than a short foreword for her “Americans” catalogs. Instead she asked the artists to contribute statements, claiming that their insights “prove the best introduction.” This practice of emphasizing the artist’s perspective over her own often resulted in others failing to recognize Miller’s curatorial voice. Moreover, because her working relationship with Barr was so close, her work was sometimes assumed to be his. Philip Johnson, director of the museum’s department of architecture, later said Miller was Barr’s “alter ego.” Inevitably there were rumors that the museum director and his beautiful colleague were lovers, although this has never been substantiated. Miller did nothing to dispel the gossip, telling an interviewer who asked in the mid-1980s, “It’s not anybody’s business. Lots of women were in love with Alfred.”

It was not until 1952, six years after her previous installment, that Miller was given the opportunity to present “Fifteen Americans.” By this point the Abstract Expressionist scene had exploded, and social life in the Village intensified in tandem. In 1948, the Club opened on East 8th Street, near Miller’s apartment. It was a shabby, invitation-only salon where artists and their circle met to talk, dance and drink whiskey from paper cups. Miller never missed the chance to go there. The pivotal exhibition that originated with the Club crowd would be called the “Ninth Street Show.” Held in spring 1951, it was an answer to all the galleries, museums and critics who, unlike Miller, ignored the New York artists’ work. The message: We don’t need you.

The show, held in an abandoned furniture store on East 9th Street, had a tremendous impact. Its strength lay in the realization that the 72 artists in the exhibition weren’t moving in a new direction; they had already arrived there. It was an unequivocal artistic statement written in a new abstract language.

That language would be very much at the heart of what would become “Fifteen Americans.” Early on in the process, Miller was faced with the difficult task of winnowing down the list she had assembled of about 40 artists. “I couldn’t listen to anybody’s suggestions,” she recalled. “I just had to feel it.” Word that Miller was putting together another show shot through studios. And yet the artists Miller wanted seemed strangely reticent.

Willem de Kooning had agreed to be in it and allowed Miller to visit his studio to select work. Sometime later, he told her abruptly and without explanation that he wanted out. The architect and artist Frederick Kiesler agreed to participate but proved exhausting. Miller wanted one large sculpture, “Galaxy,” to be the only work in his gallery. Kiesler wanted the room filled with his art. “He’d call me six times a day. At 10 o’clock at night when I was trying to get out of the museum and go home, he would call me and insist that I come to his studio.” Miller’s normal 10-hour day stretched into the morning as she attended to Kiesler’s demands.

But Mark Rothko was the worst. Miller considered him a friend, which was why his behavior during the 1952 show was completely unexpected. He objected to the way she wanted to hang his work (he wanted the paintings two inches apart), and “he also wanted a special great floodlight so that the place would be blazing.” This decision would have canceled out the work of artists in adjoining galleries. She later remembered telling Barr, “This is my show. I invited him to be in it and I want it to look the way I want it to look. If his demands were reasonable, OK, but they’re just not.” Eventually they reached a compromise.

Jackson Pollock was, by contrast, unconditionally agreeable. Miller wanted, among other works, his 17-foot-long 1950 painting “Autumn Rhythm: Number 30,” his 18-foot-long 1948 painting “Summertime: Number 9A” and a painting on glass that he had done for a film about him by Hans Namuth. Pollock agreed to all Miller’s requests and said that he didn’t need to be involved in the hanging. “You go right ahead,” she remembered him telling her. “I’m not going to interfere with you.”

“Fifteen Americans” opened on April 9, 1952, and featured more than 100 works of art, many of them exceptionally large. Critics almost universally panned the exhibition. “Everybody said, ‘Congratulations Dorothy! You’ve done it again. They hate it.’” Letters poured into the museum. A painting by Clyfford Still was vandalized. But before the show even opened, the trustees, whom Miller had worried about, bought a number of works for their personal collections. Miller’s role as a cultural arbiter was now firmly established.

In 1956, Miller’s “Twelve Americans” introduced second-generation Abstract Expressionists to audiences who were still recovering from her 1952 show. Alongside by then well-established figures like Franz Kline and Philip Guston, she included younger artists such as Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers. Both were offspring of the Abstract Expressionists, and both had begun to allow figures, interiors, even urban scenes into their work. For a change, reviews were good. People outside the museum were starting to take notice. Even before “Twelve Americans” opened in May, members of Chicago’s art community reached out to Miller to ask her to visit, offering to provide a car and driver. The art dealer John Bernard Myers later said that by then the consensus was that the “Museum of Modern Art was the only, only thing in America that had any sense of ... what was up.” And that was largely due to Miller’s shows. Her exhibitions made lasting impressions on people.

Even with this growing recognition, the period of working on “Twelve Americans” would one of Miller’s most difficult. Her parents were ill, and Cahill’s precarious health took a turn for the worse. By summer 1956, he was out of the hospital and “Twelve Americans” was finally hung. Miller, Cahill and Hartigan went to Miller’s family home in Stockbridge, Mass., to rest. It was there that they heard shocking news: Pollock was dead. They rushed to Long Island for his funeral. With his death there was a new sense of urgency: Contemporary artists were recognized as mortal, and serious attention to their work suddenly seemed essential.

Even before Pollock’s death there was growing interest outside of the U.S. in the work of the New York School. With the monumentality of the previous decade becoming clear, MoMA was approached about preparing an exhibition of recent work to send to European capitals. “It was one of those impossibly hard jobs that one loves to do,” Miller later recalled. She was assisted by the young poet Frank O’Hara, who was working for the International Program at the time. The show, called “The New American Painting,” would feature works by 17 artists, 12 of whom had already been featured in Miller’s “Americans” shows.

On March 28, 1958, dozens of crates containing paintings set sail for Europe on the S.S. America. “The New American Painting” traveled to eight countries, sparking furious debate and setting attendance records along the way. Its impact cannot be overstated. The collector Ben Heller, who lent work to the show, called it “the equivalent of the Armory Show in reverse,” because it rattled European audiences as much as the 1913 show had upset Americans.

In selecting the artists for her 1959 exhibition “Sixteen Americans,” Miller faced a new dilemma: how could she continue to pay tribute to those she had championed while also showing a new generation she found thrilling. Among the artists she featured, only two of them, Louise Nevelson and Landès Lewitin, had been on the scene since the 1940s. The others, such as Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Jay DeFeo, Robert Mallary and Alfred Leslie, were relative newcomers. The artists included in the exhibition understood the effect it would have on their careers. Years later Stella observed that Miller’s “‘Americans’ shows set the tone for my time. You were either in or you were not. They were exhibitions of what was going on, pointing to the future, and they were definitive. Or if they weren’t definitive, they were certainly exciting.”

Miller’s next and last “Americans” show, “Americans 1963,” reflected the changing visual sensibility of the new decade. The work of artists like James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana and Claes Oldenburg embodied the emerging Pop sensibility with their attention to daily life, the urban scene and American culture. There were four women (out of 15 artists), the most to appear in an “Americans” show: Sally Hazelet Drummond, Lee Bontecou, Chryssa and Marisol (Marisol Escobar). It is remarkable for the time that Miller included at least one or two in all of the “Americans” exhibitions except for that of 1952.

In 1969, Miller retired. But not before mounting one more show. She and Barr had known Nelson Rockefeller since he was in his early 20s visiting galleries with his mother, MoMA cofounder Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, as he developed an eye for art. Barr and Miller often provided collecting advice to Nelson, who served in various leadership roles as a museum trustee for over 30 years. By 1969, Governor Rockefeller’s collection was vast and included works spanning continents, decades, mediums, and styles. “Twentieth-Century Art from the Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller Collection,” Miller’s “final fling” at the museum, opened in May of that year. The exhibition was the largest of her career and a major triumph. Thomas B. Hess, editor of Art News, wrote in the summer of 1969: “In July, Miss Miller will retire from her post as Senior Curator; the Rockefeller show and catalogue thus become her farewell achievements and they appropriately epitomize her deep sympathy with and detailed knowledge of modern art—in its established as well as still-radical phases. If ‘Alfred Barr’ could be a term for the ethos of the Museum, ‘Dorothy Miller’ has stood for its heart.”

From “Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art,” “Dorothy Miller” chapter by Mary Gabriel, published by the Museum of Modern Art. © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.