Things have come a long way since the Armory Show of 1913 — that’s the true genesis of all that might be called modern art in America and the first in-depth look Americans got at European modernism. In New York, 85,000 people attended; in Chicago, attendance was 188,000. American salon impresario Mabel Dodge wrote to Gertrude Stein that in New... See more

That the masses might mock avant-garde art is so familiar today it’s hard to believe no one had bothered to do it before modernism (though it had happened in the rarefied air of the French and English salons). But why would anyone have bothered before? Until modernism, no art movement had ever made anything as totalizing and threatening as the... See more

Fifth, there was modernism’s grand teleology — the whack-rationalist idea that history was to proceed in a predefined order. If you didn’t fit, know, or care, or were a visionary, an artist of color, or female, tough luck. Only the things in its timeline were deemed progress. Progress was to be the goal of all art.

In modernism, only newness was given value. Everything old was considered passé, inadequate to address the times, which meant modernism claimed not just a monopoly on newness but also on importance. One Dadaist said, “Art is dead.” Case closed.Of course, all art was once new. Cave painters painted over older cave paintings; Roman pots sport artist... See more

In 2004, when MoMA reopened in a then-new glass-and-steel campus, only 5 percent of the art on view in the permanent collection was by women. Today, the museum estimates that 28 percent of the works on view are by women, and 21 percent by artists outside of Western Europe, the U.S., and Canada — that’s gigantic for MoMA, modernism, and art.

But in general, the story was one of rigid progression that looked, on the museum walls, almost inevitable. Which is exactly as the museum intended: An institution that came of age at the imperial height of the American Century, funded during the Cold War in part with CIA money meant to exalt and export a showcase of free expression (sometimes... See more

If modernism wasn’t the end point of art history and the ultimate form of artistic expression, then what was it? If we don’t let it bully its way to the front of the line and center stage, crowding out everything that came before, during, and whatever comes after, what does it look like? And what will it look like as it recedes farther and farther... See more

This kind of change has happened before, of course — a movement conquering the world, then passing into the past. Usually, it happens much faster. The heyday of tremendous rococo artists like François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Antoine Watteau lasted just 15 years, at which point neoclassicism deemed it girlie and gauche. Instead, artists... See more

And while we take our parents to the Met to appreciate old art, tradition, and “good technique,” we go to MoMA because modernism is cool, still — a sequence of revolutionary gestures, shocks, and succession stories that, we think, tell us something about radicalism and experimentation.

That reputation and those succession dramas are not an accident... See more