"...While MoMA has received accolades for its rehang in protest of the so-called Muslim ban, the issue brings up many questions about the work that never gets shown and why.
Many of the art works featured in MoMA’s protest against the travel ban were in fact acquired by the museum in the 1960s. Typically, the artworks were shown only once in exhibitions of recent acquisitions and then taken to storage where they remained for decades. I have called this art “a closeted modernism.”
… At the time, Artforum noted, “Tate Modern has made a commitment to expanding — or even exploding — the Euro-American canon of postwar art.”
Number of times artists in 1966 Recent Acquisitions show were exhibited at MoMA (graphic courtesy the author, and data culled from http://spelunker.moma.org) … The following year, in 1966, MoMA’s recent acquisitions exhibition was organized by Dorothy C. Miller with Barr serving as an advisor. The exhibit included abstract paintings by Moroccan Ahmed Yacoubi and Iranian Mohsen Vaziri-Moqaddam, as well as an earthwork canvas by Iranian Armenian Marcos Grigorian. None of these works would ever be exhibited at MoMA again, until Grigorian’s work was included in the protest against the travel ban. Using data accumulated by MoMA, I’ve assembled the following information on the artists featured in the 1966 exhibition.
… So the paintings and sculptures by artists from Iran and the Arab world underwent a rather strict vetting process. The various committees and the Board would have ensured that these artworks met the aesthetic and art historical mandates of the museum. The questions remains, why then were they stored away for half a century?
…“The politics of art are only a diminutive parody of the politics of real power,” observed the critic Robert Hughes. Were Cold War exigencies at play in establishing a canonical view of modern art as fundamentally Western? Art was a powerful tool of Cold War politics. On the occasion of MoMA’s 25th anniversary, in October 1954, President Eisenhower spoke at the museum: To me, in this anniversary, there is a reminder to all of us of an important principle that we should ever keep in mind. This principle is that freedom of the arts is a basic freedom, one of the pillars of liberty in our land … But, my friends, how different it is in tyranny. When artists are made the slaves and the tools of the state; when artists become chief propagandists of a cause, progress is arrested and creation and genius are destroyed.
…The Middle East was a primary theater for Cold War politics. And in this articulation, modern art was a measure of tyranny versus freedom. To show that the artists in this region were already imbued with a sense of the modern was to counter the narrative that the Middle East needed to become modern by entering the Western sphere of influence. Did Cold War politics, in which Barr and MoMA were embedded, lead to a political decision to exclude Iranian and Arab art from the canon of modernism? If the decision to show the works in 2017 as a protest against the travel ban was ultimately a political one, so too was the choice to keep the work off MoMA’s walls for half a century."