MoMA would not be what it is today without Lillie Plummer Bliss. In 1929, after years of advocating for modern art in New York, Bliss, together with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan, founded The Museum of Modern Art. When she died, at 66, just two years later, Bliss left a large part of her art collection to the museum—a visionary act that fundamentally changed MoMA’s trajectory.

Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern brings together 40 works from Bliss’s collection, including paintings and works on paper by Paul Cézanne, Odilon Redon, Georges-Pierre Seurat, and Pablo Picasso. Bliss was a fierce supporter of these groundbreaking artists at a time when modern art was often met with suspicion or ridicule. “They have something to say worth saying and claim for themselves only the freedom to express it in their own way,” she declared. Her uniquely generous gift, which allowed for the sale of her works to fund new acquisitions—including Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night—provided the young museum with a means to develop its collection far into the future.

Bliss’s remarkable contribution to the history of modern art in the United States remains under-recognized. This is partly due to her wish to stay out of the spotlight; at the end of her life, Bliss requested that her personal papers be burned. While much of her story remains left to the imagination, Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern illuminates this pivotal figure through the works of art she loved most.