ABSTRACT
The Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929. Seven years later, the museum's first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., put the institution's principles on display in an exhibition called Cubism and Abstract Art. The show was a gathering of work by more than one hundred artists, designers, architects, and photographers. There were paintings by modernist heavyweights—Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian. There was a rug by a modernist lightweight named Jean Lurcat, a model of Le Corbusier's Savoye House, a poster by the commercial artist A. M. Cassandre, a lamp by the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler.
