Through March 29
MoMA, Floor 2, The Paul J. Sachs Galleries

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern offers a long-overdue reconsideration of a figure whose impact on the institution—and on modern art in America—cannot be overstated. Much like the uprooted pine tree that symbolized the Armory Show, Bliss stood firmly at the forefront of modernism’s arrival in New York, financing its radical vision while shunning the spotlight.

Curated by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, the exhibition brings together 40 works from Bliss’s collection, a selection that underscores her “well-nigh matchless tact of selection.” Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples, Redon’s Silence—where a spectral figure holds a finger to its lips as if to hush the doubters—Seurat’s ethereal drawings: each piece is a testament to her unerring instinct. “Criticism, even ridicule… had no effect upon her whatever,” her friend Eleanor Belmont once wrote. Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern vividly reconstructs this determination, inviting visitors to step into her world, where modern art was not an indulgence but a necessity.

The exhibition makes clear that Bliss was not merely a collector but an architect of the modern. Her pivotal role in funding the 1913 Armory Show, which “sought to challenge the old ways” of defining artistic value, is often overshadowed by more visible patrons. Yet, as one of the primary financial backers, she ensured that New York audiences encountered the seismic shock of European avant-garde art. It was there that she acquired works such as Cézanne’s lithographs of Bathers, a decisive moment in shaping her future legacy.

Bliss’s lasting contribution, of course, is MoMA itself. Her bequest—one that included the stipulation that works could be sold to acquire new ones—allowed the museum to build a collection that would endure. The exhibition, enriched by an accompanying podcast and archival material, also gestures toward what remains unknown. Bliss burned her personal papers before her death, a final act of discretion that leaves historians sifting through the artworks she left behind. “One longs to hear Bliss’s own words above the noisy racket of critics,” Walbert writes, “but we are met, once again, with that familiar silence.”

In its reverence and its restraint, Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern is a fitting tribute to a woman who, in shaping the course of modern art, insisted on standing behind it.