Beginning in 1932, Philip Johnson, the Museum of Modern Art’s first curator of architecture (a department that his family wealth also funded), was one of the figures responsible for popularizing the aesthetic of modernist design. By showing off the stark industrial furniture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and others, which appeared shocking at first, in the space of a museum, Johnson gradually made it palatable. In the 1960s, the Belgian-born Henry Geldzahler worked as a curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum, gradually focusing on living artists, which was rare at that time for such
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