page_title: Anson Goodyear
section_title: Art collector and Museum of Modern Art
hierarchical_section_title: Anson Goodyear / Career / Art collector and Museum of Modern Art
caption_attribution_description: English: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo &amp; Anson Goodyear
context_page_description: Anson Conger Goodyear was an American manufacturer, businessman, author, and philanthropist and member of the Goodyear family. He is best known as one of the founding members and first president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
context_section_description: A noted philanthropist and avid collector of late 19th- and early 20th-century American and European art, Goodyear had a personal collection containing several important works by Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching. He also had works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, George Seurat, Honoré Daumier, and Edgar Degas.
  He was invited by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Mary Quinn Sullivan, and Lillie P. Bliss to help establish the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He served as its first president (1929–39), and as a member of the board of trustees of MOMA, after moving to New York City.
  Goodyear traveled to Europe at his own expense to collect paintings for the museum's first showing. While there, he visited England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, and borrowed 25 paintings valued at $1.5 million (equivalent to $22,334,000 in 2019). In 1939, on the eve of the opening of the museum building on 53d Street, Nelson A. Rockefeller, later the Governor of New York, succeeded Goodyear as MOMA's chief executive.
  Goodyear was also the author of several nonfiction works, including:
  A Memoir: John George Milburn, Jr. (1938), with Milburn, Jr. Milburn Jr. became a lawyer and was son of prominent New York lawyer John G. Milburn; John Jr's older brother was Devereux Milburn, an internationally known polo player.
  American Art Today: Gallery of American Art Today, New York World's Fair (1939), with Grover A. Whalen
  The Museum of Modern Art. The First Ten Years (1943)
caption: Artists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Goodyear (on the right) in 1931
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