MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online

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The Museum of Modern Art, which has defined Modernism more powerfully than perhaps any other institution, can often seem monolithic in the mind’s eye, essentially unchanged since its doors opened in 1929: a procession of solemn white-box galleries, an ice palace of formalism, the Kremlin (as the artist Martha Rosler once called it) of 20th-century art.

But a more complicated story has always been told by the hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the museum’s archives, a vast accumulation of historical detail that has been accessible mainly to scholars. Beginning Thursday, after years of planning and digitizing, much of that archive will now be available on the museum’s website, moma.org, searchable so that visitors can time-travel to see what the museum looked like during its first big show (“Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” in the fall of 1929); during seminal exhibitions (Kynaston McShine’s “Information” show in 1970, one of the earliest surveys of Conceptual art); and during its moments of high-minded glamour (Audrey Hepburn, in 1957, admiring a Picasso with Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s domineering first director).

Michelle Elligott, chief of the museum’s archives, who undertook the project with Fiona Romeo, the director of digital content and strategy, said that translating documents from the physical to the virtual yielded some real-world historical discoveries. Yes, as the museum has long suspected but could never quite say definitively, Picasso is the artist who has been included in the most exhibitions (more than 320).

Archivists also found the first solo show devoted to a female artist, earlier than previously believed, but not exactly momentous. Opened in 1939 in a gallery focused on education, it was called “Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity” and featured work made from the age of 3 to the age of 22 by Dahlov Zorach Ipcar, a budding artist who was chosen, as a news release stated, because she was “neither a genius nor a prodigy” but a “normal healthy child” whose art facility might demonstrate that anyone could become creative “with proper stimulation and encouragement.” (Ms. Ipcar, now 98, went on to have a modest but active career.)

The digital archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, most never previously available online, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (The project, supported by the Leon Levy Foundation, will continue to add documents from more recent years and also plans to add archives from the museum’s film and performance departments.)

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