Vietnam “Moratorium”

This memo confirms the intention of MoMA staff to support anti-Vietnam War protest actions, including those organised by the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), planned for October 15, 1969, at the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim and MoMA, in New York. Such support confirms an early success for the AWC’s Moratorium of Art to End the War in Vietnam and the Coalition’s attempts to draw MoMA and its reluctant Trustees into anti-war actions. The signatory of the MoMA memo, Walter Bareiss, was a German-American businessman and art collector who was not only a MoMA Trustee from 1964 to 1973, and joint interim Director in 1969 and 1970, but also on the governing board of Yale Art Gallery for half a century.