‘There has to be drama’: MoMA’s Dorothy Miller broke boundaries as a female curator and champion of American art

In 1973, while still in graduate school, an art student named Wendy Jeffers was working as a curator on the side to earn a little extra money when she received a phone call requesting her assistance with the curation of Citibank’s collection. To help complete the installation, the bank requested Jeffers bring in Dorothy Miller, the influential American curator who had served over three decades as curator for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as well as acting as a trustee and art advisor for prominent institutions including The Rockefeller University and the Empire State Art Collection in Albany, and as board member for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, and the Rothko Foundation. It was the start of a years-long relationship between the two women.

‘Miller had bought a collection of art to grace the halls of three floors in the building,’ says Jeffers, who helped Miller install the works at the bank’s headquarters in Manhattan. ‘Largely because of her encouragement, my work as a writer and curator became the focus of my career. My training as an artist, however, is the foundation of my profoundly satisfying, ongoing education about art.’

Jeffers has gone on to enjoy a prolific career as writer and curator and has served as chair of the board of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.  Most recently, she has completed a forthcoming biography of Dorothy Miller, titled The Clairvoyant Curator:  Dorothy C. Miller and American Art. ‘I faced the daunting task of explaining not only her life but also the context of her career,’ she says. ‘Like Miller, I am profoundly committed to looking at contemporary art, something that continues to inform my thinking and my interests.’

Here, she speaks to Christie’s about the legacy of Dorothy Miller’s groundbreaking vision.

Could you share with us some insight into the mindset of Dorothy Miller in the early years of her tenure as curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art?

Wendy Jeffers: ‘In October 1934, Dorothy Canning Miller became the first curator hired by the Museum of Modern Art, where she joined a staff of thirteen that included the receptionist, the switchboard operator and the man who sat at the front desk. “We were all so young that we stayed up all night every other night working….when you have a small staff everything is interrelated,” Miller reminisced in her oral history. The founding director of the museum was Alfred H. Barr Jr., whose field was European modernism. Dorothy was hired because of her broad knowledge of American art.

‘Miller trained as a curator at the Newark Museum apprentice program, graduating in 1926. She continued working there until Newark’s visionary director, John Cotton Dana, died in 1929. She then found work cataloguing the Native American art collection of Mrs. Henry Lang, who was planning to give her collection to the Montclair Art Museum. Miller stayed in touch with her Newark colleagues and together, they travelled to New York City to see every exhibition at the new Museum of Modern Art. “Everybody was terribly excited about the Museum of Modern Art,” Miller would later recall. “That’s one thing that I think all of us when we talk about the Museum fail to convey — the idea that it was so exciting.”’

What did Miller do differently — or rather, how did she think differently — that was groundbreaking?

WJ: ‘At MoMA she became the pivotal curator of her generation, championing American artists at a time when few curators were even paying attention to them. Beginning in 1942, through a series of exhibitions titled The Americans, she introduced five generations of American artists to a sceptical and often openly hostile audience. Opening in New York City, the exhibitions then travelled across the United States and eventually abroad. Miller’s ability to identify new talent was unparalleled. Most curators focus on a single generation of art makers, something called “period eye.” Over the course of her 35-year career at MoMA, Miller introduced the work of over 90 artists. The art historian Robert Rosenblum recalled that Miller’s Americans exhibitions “had something of the excitement and glamour, the sense of the near-divine judgment we might associate with the Oscar and Pulitzer Prizes. There was endless speculation and gossip beforehand about who was in and who was out, and no less controversy afterwards.”

‘Her career began as the future Abstract Expressionists were honing their skills and eclipsed in the 1970s, as Minimalism and Pop art were beginning to emerge. More than once, after the opening of one of her exhibitions, an outraged MoMA trustee would call for Miller’s resignation, citing both embarrassment and incredulity at the work she selected to include. “Congratulations Dorothy,” Alfred Barr remarked after the opening of one of her exhibitions, “you’ve done it again, they all hate it!”

‘Typical of the vitriolic criticism of her exhibitions was one review by the chief art critic of the New York Times John Canady, who in 1959 wrote that her Sixteen Americans featured “sixteen artists slated for oblivion” and that there should be a “prohibition against exhibiting . . . all works of art created during the last ten years.” The artists in that exhibition included Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Alfred Leslie, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Jack Youngerman.

Miller was renowned for recognising new talent. How did Miller engage with the artists she presented to the world?

WJ: ‘Miller listened to artists with empathy, and she closely observed their development. One of her colleagues once remarked laughingly that Dorothy Miller bought paintings from artists as they were being painted, ahead of everyone else. It’s true that she made studio visits with regularity and purpose, and she tracked the progress of many artists at once. However, her studio visits were carefully timed and anticipated with great enthusiasm. She maintained that she learned everything she knew about art from artists, and she was often there to see them make their breakthrough work.

‘Once she began working at MoMA, Miller launched what became The Artists Records, an archive of correspondence, observations and opinions about more than 4,000 artists who brought or sent work to the Museum for consideration. In these files one discovers how Miller encouraged scores of artists early in their careers — including artists she never exhibited such as Forrest Bess, James Lee Byars, Cy Twombly, David Parks and Richard Diebenkorn. She wrote letters of support, recommended them for grants and introduced them to galleries. Her early interest in their work was foundational.’

In the 1950s, while she was a curator at MoMA, Miller was enlisted to help curate the art collection of The Rockefeller Institute — now The Rockefeller University. What can you tell us about Miller’s influence on the University collection throughout her years connected to the institution?

WJ: ‘At about the same time (1957) that The Rockefeller Institute, as it was then known, was beginning to collect art, Miller also began working with David Rockefeller on the Chase Bank Art Collection. Both Chase and The Rockefeller Institute had a policy that artworks were to be sent over for approval before being purchased. In both cases, a committee was formed to vote on the art. Miller would make comments and presentations about the works to introduce the art committee to artists they had likely never seen.

‘Describing formal attributes of the works, Miller sometimes added incidental facts about the artists and in the case of Joan Mitchell, she likely told the committee that the artist had spent time in Paris where the works Rockefeller would go on to acquire were painted.

What can you share with us regarding Miller’s appreciation of Joan Mitchell and why Miller was drawn to Mitchell’s work?

WJ: ‘In 1958, Miller bought two paintings by Joan Mitchell for the growing art collection of The Rockefeller Institute. At the same time, she recommended Mitchell’s work to a private collector from Cleveland, Ohio, who later wrote Miller that she fell in love with Mitchell’s gay abandon. Mitchell, however, was quick to assert that “The freedom in my work is quite controlled.” The architect Philip Johnson also bought a painting by Mitchell at this time on Miller’s recommendation — Mitchell’s work was just breaking out, and Miller was tracking it. Two years earlier, Miller had included Philip Guston’s abstract paintings in one of her Americans shows; however, Mitchell’s work was less expensive than that of Guston, and Miller was working on a small budget.’

Where do we see Miller’s influence and her legacy today?

WJ: ‘Today, there are scores of women working in the art world. When Miller started her career she was often the only woman in the room. When I interviewed Philip Johnson about Miller, he said his first memory of her (1932) was how strikingly beautiful she was. He went on to describe her as a powerhouse who made her preferences very clear. Few women during her lifetime had the opportunity or the courage to challenge the male-dominated museum world, particularly in the field of contemporary art. Described by Russell Lynes, author of Good Old Modern: An intimate portrait of the Museum of Modern Art, as having a “musical voice” that expressed itself in “a very upper-class Eastern Seaboard accent and manner of speech”, Miller worked diligently to make that voice heard. She was America’s first museum curator of contemporary art.’