This meticulously researched account relates how, from 1951 until 1986, the curator and director Arthur Drexler gave the influential Architecture and Design department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art “a new purposeful cohesiveness.” More compelling is Thomas Hines’s behind-the-scenes revelations of the pitfalls of insider museum politics.
Drexler’s career is a tale of triumph and tragedy. It was a triumph that Drexler, who came from a modest Jewish family in Brooklyn and was educated in public schools (albeit the selective High School of Music and Art), and did not finish his architecture studies at Cooper Union, went to work for leading architect and designer George Nelson and then was embraced by MoMA’s patrician and Harvard educated curator, the architect Philip Johnson. Johnson, the founder of the museum’s department of Architecture and Design—and two-time head of the department—was so impressed by Drexler’s writing on the Glass House (1949) for Interiors magazine that he hired the brilliant young critic in 1951 as the architecture curator; in 1956, Drexler was named department director. It was a tragedy that his tenure was later compromised, according to Hines, by the critical failure of two of his major exhibitions, Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux Arts (1975) and Transformations in Modern Architecture (1979).
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