Arthur Justin Drexler (13 March 1925[1] – 16 January 1987) was a museum curator and director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for 35 years.
Life
Drexler was born in Brooklyn[1] and attended the High School of Music and Art, and The Cooper Union studying architecture and served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the Second World War.[2]
After the war Drexler worked with the office of industrial designer George Nelson and was Architecture Editor of Interiors magazine. Drexler joined the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951 as Curator of Architecture and Design and was promoted to Director of the Department in 1956 succeeding Philip Johnson.[3] Drexler has lectured at New York University, Yale University, Harvard University, Pratt Institute, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other universities and institutions.
Drexler had the longest curatorship in the Museum of Modern Art history. Over thirty-five years Drexler conceived, organised and oversaw trailblazing exhibitions that not only mirrored but also foresaw major stylistic design developments in industrial design, architecture and landscaping. During Drexler’s curatorship, MoMA played a central role in examining the work and reinforcing the reputations of twentieth-century architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.[4] Drexler explored unexpected subjects: from the design of automobiles (he was the first to include automobiles in art museums)[5] to a reconstruction of a Japanese house and garden. Drexler’s pioneering shows promoted new ideas about architecture and design as modern arts[6] and left an indelible mark on the course of midcentury modernism.[7]
