‘Life, Work, and Architecture’

As the Museum of Modern Art approaches its centenary at the end of this decade, no facet of its history seems too specialized for scholarly study. A veritable academic industry—one might call it MoMAology—owes much to the tireless efforts of Rona Roob, who had been the secretary of the Modern’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. She eventually became the museum’s first archivist in 1989 and laid the groundwork for countless research projects, but was only one of many imaginative, gutsy, underappreciated women who have had a formative impact on MoMA’s development. Fourteen of them—benefactors, curators, administrators, even Barr’s wife, the art historian Margaret Scolari Barr (though alas not Roob)—are memorialized in Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, which for good measure was written entirely by women.

This multiauthor compendium, published by the Modern and edited by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, might strike cynics as revisionist image adjustment. After all, only in 2008 did Temkin become the first woman named to head the museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. That may explain why this effort somehow feels doubly defensive—half apologia, half atonement. Interestingly, the well-illustrated book omits Barr’s famous 1933 diagram that posits modern art as “a torpedo moving through time.” With the categories “French,” “School of Paris,” “Rest of Europe,” “Mexicans,” and “Americans” listed in descending order at the forefront, it had a decisive effect on what was accepted into and excluded from his “Ideal Permanent Collection.” Sometimes a torpedo is just a torpedo, but considering MoMA’s decidedly male premillennial bias, feminists might well see Barr’s projectile as something else.

Inventing the Modern begins with MoMA’s founders, the most cited triad of female artistic enablers since the Three Graces: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Early in 1929 they decided to create a new kind of museum for a new kind of art, and by the end of the year they brought it to reality. However, that too-oft-told tale, necessary though it may be to the narrative at hand, is not as fresh as the book’s profiles on lesser-known women who dedicated their professional lives to the museum—the “brides of the Modern,” in the parlance of my friend Suzanne Stephens, an architecture editor who worked there in the 1960s.

I was captivated, for instance, by Sloane Crosley’s portrayal of Sarah Newmeyer, a peppy Memphis gal who became MoMA’s first publicist in 1933 and from the get-go promoted the fledgling institution with all the shameless moxie of a Broadway press agent. In Crosley’s lively telling, Newmeyer comes across like an antic character in one of Dawn Powell’s satirical New York novels, minus the nonstop drinking. Here she energetically finagles newspaper photo ops, newsreel segments, gossip column items, consumer magazine features, and other clever stunts to drum up interest in MoMA exhibitions, then crows about her victories with disarming glee. “We played the Van Gogh exhibition like a polo game,” she said of the museum’s 1935 retrospective on the artist, “dribbled the ball down the field first, and then, bang, right between the goal posts! It was a honey, if I do say so myself.” After fifteen years of such effective if not always dignified shenanigans, she was eased out in the preferred MoMA fashion as the museum morphed into a far grander enterprise in the postwar era.

Equally engaging but much different in tone is Brenda Wineapple’s retrieval of Nancy Newhall from undeserved obscurity. The wife of MoMA’s first photography curator, Beaumont Newhall, she took over his post in 1942 when he went into the army. In his absence she mounted important exhibitions (on Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Helen Levitt, among others), but she was nonetheless subjected to a combination of institutional sexism and museum officials’ lingering ambiguity about whether or not photography was an art form. In a twist on women losing their promotions when men came back from the war, both Newhalls decided to leave MoMA in 1946 after Edward Steichen was brought in over their heads as the Department of Photography’s director by a starry-eyed Nelson Rockefeller. (The capstone of Steichen’s tenure would be his 1955 show “The Family of Man,” the most popular and cloying photography exhibition in history.)

Given my interest in the building art, however, my attention gravitated to the chapter of Inventing the Modern on the architecture curator Elizabeth Bauer Mock Kassler (to list her successive surnames), who worked at MoMA from 1937 to 1946 but is now remembered mainly by specialists. Written by Jennifer Gray, the director of the Taliesin Fellowship, this thoughtful reappraisal of an early advocate for modern architecture at its most inclusive raises a host of timely questions about who gets remembered in the long view of history, how, and why. Most importantly, it addresses the once-routine sexism that has dogged MoMA no less than other institutions, and builds on the excellent essay on Elizabeth Mock, as she is now generally known, by the historian Wendy Lesser that appeared in Places Journal in 2022.

“When she died on February 8, 1998, at age eighty-six, little notice was taken,” Gray writes. “Leading architectural historians urged the New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp to write an article, but he declined, saying he had never heard of her”—quite an unlikely excuse from a well-informed architecture writer. One wonders if Muschamp rejected those entreaties because MoMA’s founding architecture curator, Philip Johnson, had a contentious history with Mock, which Gray details. As she concurs with Johnson’s two biographers, he was instrumental in ousting Mock as architecture curator in 1946, after he was discharged from the army when World War II ended and hankered to run the department again. (Johnson had parted ways with the museum in 1934 along with a fellow MoMA official, Alan Blackburn, to build an American fascist movement modeled on the Nazis. It was called the National Party, and according to Johnson’s biographer Mark Lamster, it had “no platform aside from vague assertions about the need for populist agitation, though they did have designs for a uniform and a symbol”—gray shirts and a flying wedge.)

Astonishingly, Gray reports, “Mock maintained that she always had a good relationship with Johnson,” and insisted that she left MoMA on her own to assist her first husband, Rudolph Mock, a Swiss-born architect, on his new job to design workers’ housing for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Perhaps she suppressed her true feelings because of pride or resignation, since the duplicitous Johnson had such a close rapport with Barr and the Rockefeller family, the Modern’s principal backers. She admitted to being shocked only when two male MoMA officials lamented her departure in her presence and inadvertently disclosed they’d have to pay a man twice as much. “I was just open-mouthed,” she later recalled, but “I didn’t say anything.” 

Johnson was adept at retrospective fabrication: in a 1990 MoMA oral history he mendaciously denigrated Mock, claiming she “wasn’t strong.… Nobody thought she was a permanent star.” He was even more blunt when he told my wife, the architectural historian Rosemarie Haag Bletter, that “Betty Mock didn’t know anything about architecture.” Undoubtedly his aestheticized interests were antithetical to her social concerns, but although her political beliefs were left-leaning, she remained firmly within the orbit of New Deal progressivism, quite unlike the right-wing fanaticism Johnson embraced in the 1930s. In architecture he wanted works of art with perfect surface finishes; she wanted affordable dwellings with adequate storage beyond toddlers’ reach. Though he belittled her focus on “housing and on doing good,” his malice was also personal. “She wasn’t the one who would throw me out,” he let slip in the oral history. Franz Schulze, in his biography of Johnson, relates that “Philip recalled a luncheon he had with her and Barr at which, by his own admission, he so pointedly ignored her that she was nearly reduced to tears.” Johnson thereby exposed not only his deep-seated misogyny but also jealousy over Mock’s undeniable success in the job he invented. 

Better than most of her male peers, Mock understood that if modernism was to succeed, especially in this geographically and socially diverse country, it must present a more human face to the general public. This was a realization being made simultaneously in Scandinavia, where the Finnish architects Alvar Aalto and his chief collaborator, his wife Aino Marsio-Aalto, were creating buildings and interiors that employed natural materials and organic forms. Their schemes were much more comfortable than the machine aesthetic favored by adherents of the International Style, which Johnson heralded at MoMA as the one true modernist faith. Mock’s ability to speak directly and convincingly to the average museumgoer, combined with superb taste second to none in her generation—borne out by the number of buildings in her shows that have become enduring classics—made her a reliable bellwether for the best modern architecture of her time, clearer now than it was then. 

Elizabeth Bauer was born in 1911 to Alberta and Jacob Bauer in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Her father was the state’s chief highway engineer and introduced the cloverleaf interchange to America. Her magnetic older sister, the pioneering housing expert Catherine Bauer, outshone her during most of their lives but was an inspiring role model and supportive confidante. Betty, as she was known to intimates, followed her sibling to Vassar and earned a BA in English literature in 1932, a year before Mary McCarthy, who three decades later fictionalized their college contemporaries in The Group. 

Having decided to become an architect, she hoped to attend the Bauhaus after college, but the Depression decimated her family’s finances, and the revolutionary German art and design school closed under Nazi pressure two months before her commencement. She found an American alternative at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, the architecture-academy-cum-design-office he created in 1932 at his rural Wisconsin retreat to save his practice during a professional slump that had begun long before the crash. 

Although I never met Mock, we interacted frequently by mail and telephone when, as the twentysomething editor of the McGraw-Hill imprint Architectural Record Books, I worked on the essay she contributed to In the Cause of Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright (1975). This reprint collection of the career-defining articles Wright wrote for Architectural Record early in the twentieth century also incorporated reminiscences by other Taliesin alumni. Wright died in 1959, but he had already receded so far into history that Kassler, though only in her mid-sixties when I encountered her, seemed unchallengeably venerable.

She did not gloss over the disillusion that set in when she soon realized that the Olympian Wright and his imperious wife, Olgivanna, were less concerned with formal education than with using the students as virtual indentured servants. In her text, which she titled “The Whole Man,” she asks:

Why was there no instruction, and no work in the drafting room other than when a hungry Chinese friend would accept my desserts in return for setting up a tracing job? If architecture is indeed the mother art, why was the execution of menial chores held equally important and subject to the same demand for attention?

She lasted there just four months, but she told her sister that the experience gave her a great realization: “Life, work, and architecture as a harmonious whole, as one and the same thing—that is what one must try to get.” In old age she averred that Taliesin was “the biggest influence on my life, and the most rewarding thing that ever came into it, in every way.” 

In 1933 she married Rudi Mock, a fellow Wright apprentice, but with no employment prospects in the US the newlyweds settled in his homeland. At Basel’s Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, Gray writes, “she acquired the fundamentals of drafting and construction she had often longed for at Taliesin.” Shortly after she and Mock returned to America in 1937, she heard that MoMA was looking for a new architecture curator. She applied for the job, but Barr chose John McAndrew, an architect and Vassar art history professor. She sufficiently impressed McAndrew, however, that he soon hired her as an assistant.

Her main task was adapting MoMA exhibitions to portable formats for the extensive tours with which the young museum hoped to build a national audience for modern art, architecture, and design. She also devised original traveling shows of her own, a responsibility not usually given to curatorial aides and an indication of her abilities. These touring exhibitions included “Stockholm Builds,” a survey of recent Swedish modernism, and “The Wooden House in America,” a comprehensive historic overview. Mock’s remit steadily increased, and though she took a leave of absence when she became pregnant with her first child, nicknamed Fritz, in 1941, she returned to MoMA later that year. In the interim McAndrew had been fired, notwithstanding Barr’s objections, and after much hesitation on her part she became acting curator two years later. With America’s entry into World War II, Mock was among many women throughout the workforce promoted because of the civilian labor shortage, but those new positions were anything but secure when the boys came marching home. 

Mock’s two most conspicuous accomplishments at MoMA were the back-to-back exhibitions “Built in USA, 1932–1944,”which opened in that latter year, and “Tomorrow’s Small House” in 1945. “Built in USA” comprised more than fifty examples of innovative American architecture in a broad range of categories: residential, education, manufacturing, health care, retail, defense, and infrastructure. It emphasized multi-unit housing, most of it for workers and low-income residents but at least one private development, Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles. The architects included such significant figures as Clarence Stein, Richard Neutra, Oscar Stonorov, Louis Kahn, and William Wurster (who married Catherine Bauer in 1940). Mock chose more than twenty private houses that shared simplified vernacular forms, warm natural materials, flexible interior layouts, and graceful integration with the landscape—for as she wrote in the catalog, there must be “some process of humanization” before modernism “could be whole-heartedly accepted by the average man.” Among them were Wright’s Goetsch–Winckler house in Okemos, Michigan (1939), a prime example of his relatively economical late-career Usonian designs, and John Yeon’s Watzek house in Portland, Oregon (1937), a sprawling ranch-style scheme with pitched roofs that anticipated by a decade America’s predominant suburban residential format of the postwar period.

“Tomorrow’s Small House” featured thirteen schemes for three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses budgeted at no more than $6,000 (about $105,000 today). On view were models for residences designed by, among others, Johnson (who was welcomed back to MoMA after his fascist excursion), Wurster, and the Chicago-based George Fred Keck (celebrated for his dodecagonal glass House of Tomorrow at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair). The press release, likely a collaboration between Mock and Sarah Newmeyer, assures us:

Any of the houses shown in the exhibition could be built now in conventional construction, but each is designed to exploit the potential economies of

Mass-production of walls and roof as standard factory-fabricated panels.

Mass-production of kitchens, bathrooms, and fireplaces as prefabricated units.

Standardized parts need never result in standardized appearance. 

It could not have been a more topical subject. The need for solutions to the severe housing shortage caused by a two-decade construction hiatus was made even more urgent by the impending return of millions of servicemen. The show was followed in 1946 by a book-on-the-wall exhibition, invitingly titled “If You Want to Build a House,” with an instructive publication that became a MoMA best seller—its print run was seven times that of the museum’s previous architecture catalogs. 

Mock had a knack for demystifying architecture and making it not only intelligible but relatable to laypeople. As she later acknowledged, “I’m really a popularizer. That’s been my game.” Rather than discoursing on abstruse design theory, in this book she encouraged people to take an imaginary room-by-room walk-through of a house they’d like to live in, an exercise in personal projection that moved the notion of home ownership from the hypothetical to the conceivable. (In the “Tomorrow’s Small House” exhibition, visitors were encouraged to think of themselves as five- or six-inch-tall Lilliputians, the better to imagine inhabiting the small-scale models set atop pedestals at eye level.) This exhortation of the newly possible came as a thrilling opportunity at a moment when generous government housing subsidies for ex-GIs made it possible for an unprecedented number of Americans to buy homes of their own (apart from Black veterans, who were barred from FHA financing).

Mock’s presentations were bracingly forthright. She encouraged viewers to form their own opinions instead of being cowed by new design concepts. If You Want to Build a House reproduces a publicity photo of a sterile-looking, overly mechanized modern kitchen with ludicrous extras like a built-in waffle maker. But Mock’s caption assures us that “we needn’t settle for a vitamin laboratory and gadgetry…when we can work out more humane solutions.” 

Less than two years after she left MoMA to join her husband in Tennessee, he asked for a divorce, whereupon she and their young son took refuge with the Wrights at Taliesin West while she obtained a relatively speedy Arizona decree. She then taught architectural history at the University of Oklahoma and continued to write books for MoMA, notably The Architecture of Bridges (1949). In 1951 she married the Princeton-based architect Kenneth Kassler and moved to his New Jersey home, near where her parents lived when she went off to Vassar. 

Kassler had two children from his previous marriage, and with the birth of their daughter Katrina in 1956 his new wife expressed contentment with domestic life. “After all those peripheral years,” she wrote to her sister, “everything is now so completely centered…. I love this nesting state so well.” She still wrote for MoMA and Architectural Record, produced one final, important book, Modern Gardens in the Landscape (1964), the same year her husband and sister died, and began teaching at Princeton’s architecture school. 

A decade after she completed her final major project—a directory of the Taliesin Fellowship’s members to mark its fiftieth anniversary—Mock’s last hurrah came when she made a rare public appearance to speak in conversation with the sociologist Robert Gutman at Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture in March 1995. Her daughter drove her from her retirement home in Massachusetts to New York, where an enthusiastic audience greeted her as a heroine. A new generation of admirers had rediscovered in Elizabeth Mock’s publications a champion of socially engaged design conspicuously absent on the American scene since the collapse of the Great Society. 

The capacity crowd delighted at her pungent repartee, and especially at the several bars of “The Internationale” she spontaneously sang as a reminder of her youthful idealism. Still, she professed no grand design behind her checkered, occasionally thwarted, but highly productive career. As she told the Buell Center’s director, Joan Ockman, “I was trying to promote modern architecture, but open it up.” The undeterrable Betty Mock succeeded in that quest to a degree that she may not have fully appreciated herself, but that at last we can.