How to Get into MoMA: Grace Hartigan, Alfred Barr, and the Problem of Patronage

On 13 November 1953 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Grace Hartigan’s The Persian Jacket (1952). The painting was purchased by personal recommendation of Alfred H. Barr Jr., then working as Director of Collections. Under Barr’s direction, MoMA was to become a patron of Hartigan in the 1950s. The museum bought her paintings and included them in exhibitions. But Persian Jacket is an ambiguous record of the relationship between artist and curator. It bears the concrete traces of Barr’s taste as much as Hartigan’s. This is because, before agreeing to purchase the painting, Barr forced Hartigan to change it.

I reconstruct the alterations to Persian Jacket made by Hartigan at Barr’s instigation, asking how and why it was altered. I argue that such moments of coercion by powerful patrons were much more common in the history of modernism than we like to think – particularly for women and minority artists – and that we need to find new ways of comprehending them. Barr made Hartigan rework her composition so that it conformed with the genealogy of modernism he was building at MoMA. In so doing, he helped turn Persian Jacket into a crucial document in the history of modern art, one that throws light on the evolution of one of the mightiest museums in the world, the impact this had on broader patterns of artmaking, the shifting place of gender within the 1950s New York artworld, and the space these developments left for ambitious, political work.