Modern Art, Inc.: The Museum of Modern Art v. Huntington Hartford

摘要

In 1959, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) sued Huntington Hartford, socialite and heir to the massive A&P grocery fortune, who had announced his intention to build a museum in Manhattan that he would call the Gallery of Modern Art. MoMA wanted to prevent Hartford from using the words modern art in naming his new museum because it felt that Hartford's version of modern art was in direct conflict with its own. Instead of heeding prevailing opinion about what constituted modern art, Hartford personally financed the $7-million effort (about $52 million in today's dollars) to create an institution that would showcase what he considered legible, figurative, moral art, an accessible alternative to the abstract version of modernism he thought MoMA was promoting. Not only did Hartford call his museum the Gallery of Modern Art, but he strategically sited his building less than a mile from MoMA, commissioning his rival institution's architect, Edward Durell Stone, to design it. Hartford intended his museum to draw upon and directly compete for the cultural cachet that MoMA had come to embody in its thirty-five-year existence. Although created to appeal to the taste of the general public, just five years after its construction in 1964, the Gallery of Modern Art closed.