GREATGARAGES M0MA –– CARS ON THE WALLS
They’re beautifully parked at the distinguished Museum of Modern Art in New York City, world renowned for its modern and contemporary holdings in painting, photography, design, illustrated books, films and other collectibles.
America’s first museum devoted to modern art, MoMA opened on November 7, 1929, in the Heckscher Building in Manhattan, through the dedication of Lillie P. Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of mega-millionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who, ironically, disliked modern art. The first exhibition that month comprised paintings by masters such as van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Seurat.
Twenty-two years later, MoMA scheduled its first car exhibition, 8 Automobiles, in 1951. This and immediately ensuing exhibitions discussed the subject largely from an aesthetic standpoint, explains Paul Galloway, the collection specialist for the museum.
In this spirit, one of the 20th-century’s great architects, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), compared motorcars to ancient Greek temples, and linguist/philosopher Roland Barthes echoed that, likening them to “the great Gothic cathedrals . . . the supreme creation of an era.”
But when the museum began its car collection in 1972 with the first entry, a 1946 Cisitalia 202 GT, curatorial interest broadened. “Increasingly over thein 2019. “There’s engineering, of course, and how they tap into broader stories. It’s how they look, how they’re put together and how they’re objects of industrial design but also great magnets of cultural history."
