Douglas Macagy and the Foundations of Modern Art Curatorship

Giving the history of art museums from the collapse of the over-extended empire of Alexander the Great when Hellenistic monarchs of the Near East began to collect the ruins and fragments of the classic age, Taylor made patently clear what he thought of the state of the American museum. [...] MacAgy recalled two recent examples of innovative showings: one was at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston in which the director placed beside each example of modern art an example from some previous artistic tradition to show the similarity of form and the derivation of the modern work; the other was at the Chicago Institute of Art's Gallery of Art Interpretation, which juxtaposed Picasso's pai [...] Called "Art of the Third Republic/' the exhibit of paintings borrowed from other museums and private collectors showed the progression of art from the downfall of the Second Republic in France in 1870 and with it the authoritarian epoch and the bourgeois standards of taste that prevailed, and the rise of the Third Republic, which fostered a liberal democratic civilization protecting creative cultu [...] It arranged the walls of the exhibition space interestingly and gave the sense of space to the whole interior of the gallery. [...] The first two, comprising the preservation and documentation of the secular relics of a nation's heritage and the acquiring of the important works representing cultural traditions, were practiced by curators at the time.