Author Talk: Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, “Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art”

Inventing the Modern is a collection of lively profiles of fourteen visionary women who shaped the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in its early decades. It contains engaging essays about MoMA’s three founders, influential patrons, curators, and department directors who were central to the museum’s success.

During the early years, even with the central involvement of prominent individuals such as Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the future of MoMA was uncertain. Visitors took an elevator to rented space on the twelfth floor of an office building. Many considered the collection controversial at best. “At that time, to invent the Modern was just not the heroic enterprise that seems now to have been inevitable,” says Ann Temkin.

Silver-Kohn notes that while it’s widely known that MoMA was founded by three women, “it’s seldom discussed what brought them to that point and how revolutionary it was.” The usual story until now has emphasized the role of MoMA’s first director hired by the founders, Alfred H. Barr Jr.

In the end, of course, the work of these women was spectacularly successful. Their decisions and implementations have had a profound influence on modern art museums everywhere. Their arduous path to these triumphs is the inspiring subject of Inventing the Modern.

Temkin is the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, the first woman to lead that department. Silver-Kohn worked for many years as a researcher in painting and sculpture. Together they commissioned, contributed to, and edited the essays in Inventing the Modern. Temkin is a familiar presence in Cornwall, and garden lovers may remember her entertaining talk on Monet’s gardens at the 2024 Books & Blooms garden event. Silver-Kohn has a home in nearby Sharon.

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