Dorothy Canning Miller

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Dorothy Canning Miller (born February 6, 1904 in Hopedale , Massachusetts , † July 11, 2003 in Greenwich Village , New York City ) was an American curator and one of the most influential people in modern American art of the 20th century. She was the first professionally trained curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and one of the few women of her time to hold a leading position in a museum.

biography

Dorothy Miller was the daughter of Arthur Barrett Miller, an architect and engineer, and his wife Edith Almena Canning. She spent her youth in Montclair , New Jersey .

She graduated from Smith College in 1925, then she was trained by the librarian and museum director John Cotton Dana (1865-1929) at the Newark Museum . After completing her training, she worked at the Newark Museum from 1926 until Dana's death in 1929. There she met the curator Holger Cahill , with whom she then worked on an exhibition for progressive American art, in particular on the First Municipal Art Exhibition 1934 project . This exhibition piqued the interest of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) director, Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. , who then hired Dorothy Miller as his assistant. In 1934 she was appointed the museum's first female curator.

When Holger Cahill became director of an art project in Washington in 1935, he also offered Miller a job there - which she refused. She found her position at MoMa to be the best in the museum sector. In 1936 Miller presented her first own painting exhibition New Horizons in American Art at MoMa , for which she selected works by Arshile Gorky , Morris Graves and Willem de Kooning . This was the first museum exhibition for all three artists. The following year she presented an exhibition on William Edmondson , the first black artist to be shown in this museum.

In 1938 Miller and H. Cahill married. From 1942 to 1963 she worked on a project called Americans , which showed various exhibitions by unknown artists from various styles of the United States. In 1969 Dorothy C. Miller, who was also a member of the Chase Manhattan Bank Art Commission and advised many art collectors, withdrew. In 1984 she was made honorary curator of the Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibitions about artists

Americans 1942: 18 artists from 9 states (Original: “Americans 1942: 18 Artists From 9 States”)

1946: 14 Americans (Original: “Fourteen Americans”)

1952: 15 Americans (Original: “Fifteen Americans”)

1956: 12 Americans (Original: "Twelve Americans")

1959: 16 Americans (Original: "Sixteen Americans")

Americans 1963 (Original: “Americans 1963”)

The New American Painting

"The New American Painting" is considered to be Miller's most important exhibition because it presented a new perception of American art, known as Abstract Expressionism , in Europe . Between 1958 and 1959, at the request of various European institutions in eight cities, including Basel, Milan, Berlin, Brussels, Paris and London, 81 paintings by 17 different artists of the first generation of the so-called Abstract Expressionists were exhibited. Critics such as B. Harold Rosenberg , at that time, however, no longer saw any “avant-garde” in this art and missed the new generation of artists who were already waiting in the show .

Artist

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Message from MoMA dated March 11, 1958 (accessed January 13, 2013)
  2. ↑ HumanitiesWeb website (accessed January 13, 2013)
personal data
SURNAME Miller, Dorothy Canning
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American curator
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Hopedale , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH July 11, 2003
Place of death Greenwich Village , New York City