Plaut, James, and Nelson Aldrich. “The Boston Manifesto.”

Entitled “Modern Art and the American Public,” it is written by director and the board chairman of the Boston Institute of Modern Art. Released on the 35th anniversary of the opening of the Armory Show in New York City, it declares, “[Modern art has become] a cult of bewilderment . . . playground for double-talk, opportunism, and chicanery at the public expense . . .[and] signify for millions something unintelligible, even meaningless.” The statement sparks a protest by local artists in March 1948,* but Judith Bookbinder serves as “the final emancipation of the Boston institution from its parent in New York and proposing a new definition of avant-garde art.”