Dorothy Miller, 99; Promoted American Modern Painters

Dorothy Miller, whose work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art boosted the careers of American modern painters including Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, has died. She was 99.

Miller died Friday of unspecified causes at her home in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Remarkably prescient, Miller became famous -- and somewhat controversial -- for her “Americans” exhibitions. She became not only the arbiter of what was in vogue as modern art, but also the tutor who coaxed the public to accept it.

Miller, who became a curator for the museum in 1934, staged her first “Americans” show in 1942. She selected abstract and figurative artists from across the country, and allowed them to describe their own work in the catalogs.

Critics and the public panned the show, and museum trustees were horrified. Undaunted, Miller continued the shows, organizing them at the last minute in order to be absolutely current and to add the element of surprise about her chosen artists.

Gradually, her selected artists won their following. Her influence was particularly evident with the “New American Painting” exhibition, which she organized to tour Europe in 1958 and 1959, establishing Abstract Expressionism as a respected art form there.

Miller featured Pollock, along with Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, in her 1952 show; showcased Stella, Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1959; and in her final “Americans” exhibit in 1963, touted Claes Oldenburg and Robert Indiana, among others.

Born in Hopedale, Mass., Dorothy Canning Miller grew up in Montclair, N.J., and graduated from Smith College before completing the Newark Museum apprentice program. She was hired by that museum in 1926 and there met her husband, curator and mentor Holger Cahill. Together they staged exhibitions of progressive American art.

Cahill went to Washington, D.C., as director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in 1935, but Miller had been hired by the New York Modern’s director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Her first show for Barr, whom she also credited as a mentor, was of WPA art.

After retiring in 1969, she co-wrote, with Eleanor Price Mather, “Edward Hicks: His Peaceable Kingdom and Other Paintings.”

Miller is survived by a stepdaughter.