Stieglitz was against it.

Discussing the founding in 1929 of the Museum of Modern Art, Richard Whelan says in his biography of Alfred Stieglitz that he hated the very idea of institutions run by committees and denounced them as “contrary to the spirit of art.” There’s a sense in which Stieglitz himself was an institution, who dominated the photography scene in the early decades of the 20th century by the pictures he took, by the magazines he edited, by his involvement in photographic organizations, by the enormously influential galleries he ran, and by his ceaseless talk. MoMA would challenge his autocratic dominance.

“I know the gang called Trustees,” Stieglitz wrote to the painter Arthur Dove. “None but the Rich need apply – & of course those who bend the knee to their arrogance are the only welcome servants.” An easy sentiment for a man who lived his whole life on someone else’s dime.

In the spring of 1936, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s director, had Beaumont Newhall begin preparation for an exhibition covering the entire history of photography: It would fill all the museum’s galleries and commemorate the medium’s centennial. Newhall was the museum’s young librarian, but he was an amateur photographer and very knowledgeable about photography’s history. According to Whelan, “Newhall rushed over to An American Place to ask Stieglitz to be chairman of his advisory council. Not only did Alfred refuse to participate in the preparation of the show, he also declined to lend any of his own prints. … He told Newhall ‘that in spite of its good intentions the Museum was doing more harm than good.'”

“The exhibition was a pivotal one,” according to Russell Lyons in “Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art” (Atheneum). “For the first time in America photography was given the same full dignity in an art museum that had heretofore been reserved for painting, sculpture, and prints.” Newhall’s catalogue was published by the museum in 1938 as “Photography; A Short Critical History.” This book was revised several times and, now called “The History of Photography,” is still in print (Aperture), an important document in our understanding of the medium.

In 1939 David McAlpin, a wealthy collector, was encouraged by Ansel Adams to give the contribution to MoMA that let it become the first major museum to establish a department of photography. Newhall headed the department and wanted its first exhibition to be a full-scale Stieglitz retrospective. Stieglitz at first refused, then relented, then refused again when Barr wrote in the catalog of a Picasso exhibition that the painter’s first show in America was “probably” the one at 291, Stieglitz’s gallery. Stieglitz resented the qualifier.

But he let Newhall, McAlpin, and Adams coax him into allowing one photograph, a 1920s picture of his wife Georgia O”Keefe’s hands, to be included in “Sixty Photographs,” the department’s first show.

Newhall left MoMA to serve in World War II, and the department of photography was ably run by his wife, Nancy, while he was away. But he was sandbagged on his return in 1945 when Thomas J. Maloney, the wealthy publisher of U.S. Camera magazine, promised the museum $100,000 a year for the department if Edward Steichen was made its head. The museum accepted. Newhall was offered a position as Steichen’s curatorial deputy, but he loathed Steichen, and he had his dignity, so he resigned. Two years later Beaumont Newhall became the director of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, the second great institution he organized.

Stieglitz and Adams were bitter about MoMA’s treatment of their friend Newhall. Adams wrote to Nancy Newhall in 1946 that he and Stieglitz would rather destroy their prints than let the museum have them while Steichen remained. When Stieglitz died on July 13 of that year, Georgia O’Keefe honored his wishes. She let the museum organize an enormous exhibition of his work in 1947, but none of the pictures was donated to its collection. Instead of being in New York, a city he loved and photographed lovingly, 1,550 of his finest prints went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

“The Family of Man” exhibition in 1955 was the major event of Steichen’s tenure. It was controversial when it opened and it remains so, not just quibbles over whose work was in and whose not, or the dramatic layout of the exhibition by architect Paul Rudolph, but more substantially over the its ideology, the generic mid-century pablum of well-intentioned liberalism. Still, “The Family of Man” may be the most successful exhibition of photography ever. Lines circled the block waiting to get in. It traveled for years to major cities around the world. The catalog is one of the most popular books of photographs ever published, and is still readily available (Museum of Modern Art).

Ansel Adams hated “The Family of Man.” He said Steichen had transformed the one picture he had in the show, his “Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California” (1944) into “expensive wallpaper.” He wasn’t reconciled to the Museum of Modern Art until John Szarkowski became director of the department of photography in 1962. Adams wrote in his autobiography, “MoMA, always a focal point in the world of art, for better or worse, finally and unequivocally recognized photography for what it is and might be: a creative art, not a sociopolitical platform.” If he could have gotten out of the way of his own ego, Stieglitz would probably have assented. And Mr. Szarkowski was a brilliant director of the department of photography, remembered for the exhibitions he organized and the lucid writing in his several books.

MoMA has made the reputations of many of the most important photographers of the 20th century – Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus – the list is too long to include here. But great photographers, like great artists in general, tend to have outsize personalities. And museums, like all institutions, are only run by people. There will be conflicts and controversies, but if they are the right conflicts and controversies, the artists and the institutions are strengthened, and the public is engaged.

Photography is on the third floor of the new building. The first space one comes to is the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, an undistinguished space, but probably serviceable. The inaugural exhibition is a selection of works from the museum’s considerable permanent collection. Good luck.