Rene d'Harnoncourt (also René)

Rene d’Harnoncourt facilitated the institutionalization of modern European art in the United States during his tenure as a curator, exhibition designer, and later director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He was also an advocate for the appreciation and study of artworks from the Americas and, in this capacity, became an advisor to the influential collector Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Born to a noble family in Austria and trained as a chemist, d’Harnoncourt moved to Mexico around 1925. Surrounding himself with a community of like-minded artists, writers, and scholars including noted avant-garde painter and writer Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), he developed an expertise in both historical and contemporary Mexican art forms. He first worked as a graphic designer, then as a consultant for antiquities dealers, but eventually became a buyer for the dealer Frederick Davis and organized exhibitions of modern artists in Davis’s Mexico City shop, the Sonora News Company. D’Harnoncourt developed his reputation there and established relationships with members of the Mexican government and the United States Foreign Service.

In 1930, d’Harnoncourt organized an exhibition of Mexican art ranging from the colonial period to the present day under the auspices of the American Federation of the Arts. Aptly titled Mexican Arts, it toured to fourteen venues around the United States for two years, beginning in New York at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. While traveling with the exhibition, d’Harnoncourt met his future wife, the editor Sarah Carr, and obtained a visa to relocate to New York. There, d’Harnoncourt was employed as a pundit on the Art in America radio program as well as a lecturer at Sarah Lawrence College and the New School for Social Research. In 1939, building on contacts established in Mexico City, he became general manager of the Arts and Crafts Board at the U.S. Department of the Interior, a title he held until 1944, when he began his twenty year career as an administrator at MoMA.

In 1939, in his role as general manager of the Arts and Crafts Board, d’Harnoncourt collaborated with Denver Art Museum curator Frederick Douglas on the major exhibition Indian Art of the United States, which traveled from the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco to MoMA. The project played an important role in drawing public attention to Indigenous North American art. Featuring backgrounds and lighting evocative of the natural environments in which the artworks were produced, Indian Art of the United States included not only two- and three-dimensional objects but also live demonstrations by contemporary practitioners. Among those impacted by the exhibition, the artists of the New York School, most notably Jackson Pollock, frequently cited it in discussions of their artistic development.

In 1940, while planning the exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art for MoMA, d’Harnoncourt met Rockefeller, then president of the museum’s board of trustees. A knowledgeable collector of Indigenous art, Rockefeller asked d’Harnoncourt to act as his personal advisor and to join MoMA as a vice president. D’Harnoncourt helped to shape Rockefeller’s growing collection of African, American, and Pacific art, developing lists of desired objects with detailed sketches, supplemented with photographs of objects in private and public collections. By 1953, the year that the collection was displayed at the Century Association, a prestigious private artists’ club, both men identified the need for a public institution dedicated to the Indigenous arts of Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Four years later, the Museum of Primitive Art opened its doors in the Beaux-Arts townhome adjacent to MoMA. In 1967 d’Harnoncourt, acting as Rockefeller’s advisor and consultant for the Museum of Primitive Art, and Thomas Hoving, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, signed an agreement to establish a permanent department at The Met devoted to these fields. The core of this new department consisted of former holdings from the Museum of Primitive Art as well as Rockefeller’s personal collections.

D’Harnoncourt became director of curatorial departments at MoMA in 1948 and director of the institution the following year. He held this position until 1967, the year before his death. D’Harnoncourt helped to shape the institution not only programmatically, but physically: under his leadership, in 1953 the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, designed by Phillip Johnson, was completed. D’Harnoncourt also stewarded the museum through an expansion—its first since its establishment in 1939—which added 45,000 square feet of space for galleries, art storage, and administrative offices. His last exhibition, The Sculpture of Picasso, in 1967, brought record-breaking crowds to the museum.