Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum

Artists have often taken rational, material existence as a starting point forengagement with metaphysics and mysticism, but no book until now has traced a similar strategy onthe part of curators. In Curating Consciousness, Marcia Brennan focuses on oneof the transformational figures of twentieth-century curatorial culture, and the main protagonist ofthis (until now) unacknowledged curatorial practice. James Johnson Sweeney (1900--1986) was hired byAlfred H. Barr, Jr., to be the Director of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in1935. He went on to become the Director of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1950s and the Museum of FineArts, Houston, in the 1960s. Throughout his career, Sweeney provocatively engaged motifs ofmysticism in order to cast the modern museum as a secular temple of art. Brennan describes how thesemotifs informed Sweeney's curatorial and textual engagements with specific artists and projects,including works by Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Burri, Pierre Soulages, Jean Tinguely, and EduardoChillida.

Marcia Brennan is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She is the author of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (2002) and Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (2006), both published by the MIT Press.