Caroline Riley

My book explores the Museum of Modern Art’s first international exhibition, Three Centuries of American Art (“Three Centuries”), as a complex material object displayed in Paris in 1938. With Three Centuries, the young museum laid out an authoritative and provocative vision of American art that contained over 500 architectural models, films, paintings, photographs, prints, watercolors, and folk artworks as well as interpretive documents, including film scripts, maps, and graphs dating from 1620 to 1938. The 320 years of art encapsulated within this international exhibition expressed a vision of American art and culture that was not simply the re-articulation of prior surveys but a new formulation, one that sought to stake a claim for American art as a diplomatic agent in the politically turbulent 1930s. By revealing a multifarious display that evoked a cultural  plurality contingent on interwar politics, my analysis of Three Centuries nuances dominant art-historical scholarship on art and diplomacy, particularly scholarship on post–World War II exhibitions. My project examines the exhibition’s ontological boundaries and the mechanics of display in order to consider the  internationalization of American art, modernism, politicized art, and the invention of cultural categories and artistic media. Through this process, my work excavates one of the seminal histories of modernism lost in the tumult of World War II. The exhibition’s dazzling display invites a fundamental question: How did Three Centuries capture the heterogeneous mix that was American culture in the 1930s and embody it to an international audience grappling with its own political instabilities? My project is not a study of exhibition practices more generally; rather, it explores the importance of framing the history of American art in international terms during the 1930s.