Once at MIA: Amazed by modern art

Archives_Viewing PicassoLet’s assume this was staged. The flood lighting, the dramatic expression—it’s as though the girl had seen a ghost, not a Picasso. The Minneapolis Times-Tribune photographer shooting Harriet Johnson and Donald Knox at the MIA in 1941 had probably asked for a reaction, and got one.

But even museums struggled with modern art. “Whether we like it or not,” the MIA Bulletin opined in 1926, “modern art has become an established fact that can no longer be ignored by intelligent people.” What an endorsement.

Two years earlier, the museum had gleefully declared, “It has been common gossip that le cubism est mort. Also that many other ‘isms,’ along with the franc, have gradually dwindled in value.” It lamented, “One views with alarm the growing tendency to accept every extremity with a kind of blind and uncritical belief that, because it is ‘different,’ it is ipso facto good.”

By mid-century, the MIA had decisively changed its mind, acquiring as much modern art as it could. As for its value, poor Harriet Johnson might be surprised by that, too.

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