May 10, 1939: The Museum of Modern Art Opens

May 10, 1939: The Museum of Modern Art opens, at 11 West 53rd Stret, between 5th and 6th Avenues in Midtown Manhattan. It was the brainchild of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr. The Rockefeller family has always had art collections, and Abby made substantial donations from her own collection.

There would later be donations from her children, including Nelson, later Governor of New York and Vice President of the United States; and David, longtime director of Chase Manhattan Bank. Nelson was president of the museum from 1939 until his 1st election as Governor in 1958, and David succeeded him.

The original "MoMA" opened on November 7, 1929, in the Hecksher Building (now the Crown Building) at 730 5th Avenue and 57th Street. It stayed until 1932, then moved to temporary locations until the current building opened. As seen above, the building itself is a work of modern art, in contrast to many of the surrounding buildings, which, typical of post-World War II architecture in New York, are really bland.

Among the legendary paintings on display, in chronological order: The Bather by Paul Cézanne, Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso, The Dance I by Henri Matisse, I and the Village by Marc Chagall, and Campbell's Soup Cans by Andy Warhol. Each of those painters has other works on display there.

MoMA is the 4th-most-visited museum in America, behind the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art uptown.

And yet, despite living close to New York my whole life, I never visited until 2022. I should have gone years earlier. 

The author, in front of van Gogh's Starry Night.

This was 2 years after the COVID outbreak,

and the museum was still insisting on masks.

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May 10, 1939 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the St. Louis Browns, 7-1 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Lefty Gomez was injured after getting the 1st out, and ended up missing his next 2 starts. Bump Hadley went the rest of the way for the win. Joe DiMaggio did not play, and Lou Gehrig had taken himself out of the lineup (for the last time, though that wasn't yet known) 8 days earlier. But Bill Dickey and George Selkirk hit home runs.

* The New York Giants lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-0 at the Polo Grounds. Rip Sewell pitched a 6-hit shutout, and helped his own cause with a home run. Paul and Lloyd Waner each went 1-for-4 with a walk, and Lloyd added an RBI. Mel Ott went 1-for-3 with a walk.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 10-5 at Ebbets Field.

* The Boston Bees beat the Chicago Cubs, 6-2 at National League Park in Boston. After a disastrous 1935 season, the Boston Braves, as we would say today, "rebranded" as the Boston Bees, and Braves Field was renamed National League Park, and nicknamed the Bee Hive. The new names never caught on, and in 1941, they switched back.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-3 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 7-4 at league Park in Cleveland. Bob Feller went the distance for the win.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 5-1 at Briggs Stadium (now Tiger Stadium) in Detroit. Hank Greenberg went 0-for-4, but had an RBI on a groundout.

* And the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox were postponed at Comiskey Park in Chicago. According to Baseball-Reference.com, it wasn't due to rain, but to "cold" -- on May 10. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader on July 18. The Red Sox won the opener, 13-10. Elden Auker didn't get out of the 2nd inning, but hit a home run, and Boston won, anyway.

The White Sox won the nightcap, 8-5. Over the 2 games, Jimmie Foxx went 4-for-9 with a home run, a walk, and 3 RBIs, and rookie Ted Williams went 6-for-10 with a home run and 4 RBIs.

January 29, 1932: Salvador Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" Is Introduced

January 29, 1932: La persistència de la memòria -- "The Persistence of Memory" -- a painting by Salvador Dalí is first publicly displayed, at the Julien Levy Gallery, at 602 Madison Avenue at 58th Street.

Levy was an art dealer from New York, and had opened his gallery the year before. He could do this because he had befriended many European painters, including Dalí, then 27, and a native of Figueres, Catalonia, in eastern Spain. He had previously introduced photographer Henri Carter-Bresson to America, and would later do the same for the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

On January 29, 1932, Levy opened America's first multi-media exhibition of "Surrealist" work. He had bought The Persistence of Memory, and displayed it along with works by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, and others.

The Persistence of Memory is certainly surreal: It shows a coastline with four pocket watches that all appear to be melting. The one in the middle is draped over a human-looking (but not that human-looking) facial profile with its eye closed. Dalí claimed that this was a "self-portrait," and that the closed eye and the fact that the figure isn't clearly formed is meant to suggest that both he and the viewer are "in a dream state," and that he (Dalí) was trying hard to remember what the figure actually looked like -- hence, "the persistence of memory."

The watch in the lower left corner is orange, and covered with ants. Dalí often used ants in his paintings as a symbol of decay. The watch next to it has a fly on it, perhaps as a symbol of uncleanliness. And another watch is draped over a branch of a dead tree in the upper left.

The painting is often called "The Soft Watches" or "The Soft Clocks." Ilya Prigoine, a Russian chemist who defected to Belgium and won the Nobel Prize, once asked Dalí if the soft watches were inspired by Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Dalí said no, that the real inspiration was a Camembert cheese, melting in the Sun.

Dalí had painted it the year before Levy introduced it, which was also the year that the Spanish Republic was established, overthrowing the centuries-old monarchy of Spain. This was also the era after World War I, in which Spain was neutral, but most of Europe had suffered terribly, and this suffering was often depicted in art, especially in Germany the nation that was the war's main aggressor and biggest loser. (Unless you consider Russia to be a bigger loser, which might be accurate.)

It was also during the Great Depression, which would lead to, among other things, the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, which would lead to, among other things, the fall of the Republic and the establishment of a Fascist state that lasted until 1975. Picasso, a native of Málaga in Andalusia, in southern Spain, whose painting Guernica depicted the horrors of the aerial bombing of that city, did not live to see the fall of Fascism in Spain, but Dalí, who praised Franco's Falangists and returned to Spain in 1948, did.

Dalí kept up his surreal work, and his surreal lifestyle, including walking unusual pets such as an ocelot or an anteater around whatever city he was in, until his death in 1989, at age 84. From 1929, marrying her in 1934, until her death in 1982, he lived with Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, a Kazakh known as Gala Dal. They had no children together, but she had a daughter from her previous marriage, Cécile Éluard, who lived until 2016. 

Julien Levy died in 1981. Today, a men's clothing store named Always In Vogue is on the site of the Levy Gallery.

Since 1934, The Persistence of Memory has been on display at the Museum of Modern Art, at 11 W. 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. On March 23, 2022, I finally visited MoMA for the first time, and saw it -- although I didn't know it was there. I figured some of his work would be, and some of his well-known works are. But I was there to see Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. (van Gogh died 14 years before Dalí was born.)

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January 29, 1932 was a Friday. English soccer player Tommy Taylor, one of the Manchester United "Busby Babes" who died in the Munich Air Disaster of 1958, was born on this day.

Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And there were no games scheduled in the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.

I could have done an entry for the date on which Dalí finished the painting, to get some scores, but I couldn't find an exact date for that.