Please Touch: Giant sculptures like Charles Despiau's "Assia" in MoMA's outdoor garden have visceral appeal that transcends questions about meaning.

“Horrible.”

“Shameful.”

“Obscene.”

When the early impressionists began exhibiting their works in the 1800s, the art critics of Europe couldn’t find enough words to attack their paintings. “Shocking.” “Degenerate.” “Works of idleness and impotent stupidity.”

The public could be just as critical. A visitor to an exhibit of Matisse and Picasso works gave a typical verdict: “Godalmighty rubbish.”

Had those long-ago critics controlled public opinion, modern art would have died in its infancy. Today, painters would be competing with photographers to produce pictures in life-like detail.

But modern art survived and eventually earned general acceptance. Today, we barely notice the cubist still-life hanging in a bank lobby or the enormous abstract painting in a restaurant. Furthermore, the works of Van Gogh and Monet, so loudly condemned in their day, are among the most popular paintings in the world. In 1990, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million, making it one of the world’s most expensive paintings.

But what does it mean? A perplexed museum-goer confronts a Henry Moore sculpture (Figure, 1937) in this photo from "The Museum and the Redhead," April 1947.

How did modern art survive and gain a popular following, despite the hostile reception that critics and the public gave it?

According to a classic article in the Post (“The House that Art Built,” January 1965), much of the credit goes to The Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA. The then-revolutionary museum opened on November 7, 1929, barely a week after the great stock market crash. Its first exhibit contained paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Seurat, drawn from the collections of three women. For one of them, art collector Lillie P. Bliss, the exhibit was a chance to bring her Picassos out of the attic, since her mother had forbidden her to hang them in their house.

Visitors were enticed to the museum by its innovative and unpredictable exhibits. They also appreciated its informal atmosphere, and the fact that the museum didn’t take itself too seriously. After all, the museum’s director admitted, not all the works on display could be masterpieces. The museum would be lucky, he said, if one-twelfth of its paintings kept their value for 20 years.

Real life imitating art? A pair of visitors to the MoMA in front of Picasso's "Girl Before A Mirror."

Still, the new museum proved surprisingly popular with the public. The growing crowds at exhibits forced the museum to keep moving into larger galleries. Ultimately it came to rest in a Manhattan building that a 1947 Post article (“The Museum and the Redhead,” April 1947) described as “a fancy, six-story jack-in-the-box that is continually popping out with something new and remarkable.”

The MoMA also helped create the city’s booming market in contemporary art. The Post reported that, between 1930 and 1965, the number of New York galleries dedicated to contemporary art had grown from less than a dozen to 400.

Many visitors were still baffled and challenged by the museum’s experimental works from such artists as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. But even if they didn’t understand it, they seemed to accept modern art as significant. Americans’ opinions about new art were changing, said a museum lecturer told the Post. He could tell because people used to tell him that a 5-year-old could paint as well as the artists whose works hung in the museum. “Now, it’s gone up to 7- or 8-year-olds.”

But one museum, alone, couldn’t have lead to Americans’ growing acceptance of modern art. A larger influence was at work in the U.S., as Brenda Ueland observed in her 1930 article “Art, Or You Don’t Know What You Like.” (Continued on page 2.)

How America Learned to Love Modern Art The Saturday Evening Post