IN THE SUMMER of 1970, as part of the group exhibition “Information,” one of the first major surveys of conceptual art, the artist Hans Haacke presented a work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called “Poll of MoMA Visitors.” Museumgoers were given slips of paper to deposit into one of two plexiglass boxes. On the wall was a sign about Nelson Rockefeller, then in his third term as governor of New York and running for a fourth. “Question,” it read, “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November? Answer: If ‘yes,’ please cast your ballot into the left box; if ‘no,’ into the right box.”

The Rockefeller family helped found MoMA in 1929. In 1963, Nelson’s brother David was elected the chair of the museum’s board of trustees. As governor, Nelson Rockefeller had begun calling for a broadening of the war in Vietnam and a South Vietnamese-led invasion of Cambodia and Laos as early as 1964. That wasn’t the family’s only connection to the conflict. Henry Kissinger, who worked for the Rockefellers in the 1950s and advised Nelson on his presidential campaigns beginning in 1960, was also Nixon’s national security adviser and the chief architect of the secret carpet bombing campaign of Cambodia that began in 1969 and is estimated to have killed more than 150,000 civilians. It led to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which Nixon announced on TV on April 30, 1970. The following day, students began demonstrating across the country in numbers that would soon reach the millions and, on May 4, the National Guard opened fire on protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four.

Tensions were high at MoMA as well, where “Information” opened that July. Haacke kept the exact content of his work secret until he had finished installing it. Unlike a lot of conceptual art, it was simple but, in looking critically at a figure of great behind-the-scenes power at MoMA from the vantage point of an artist exhibiting at the museum, Haacke had created an entirely new art form. David Rockefeller was furious about the exhibition; Nelson Rockefeller’s office called John Hightower, the museum’s director, to ask for Haacke’s poll to be removed, but the work remained. It was among the factors that eventually led to Hightower’s forced resignation. Haacke would quickly become an art-world pariah. For a Guggenheim Museum show scheduled for the following year, he had created a new work called “Shapolsky et al.,” for which he used public records to chart the real estate holdings and shell corporations of the New York City landlord Harry Shapolsky, whom the district attorney had accused of being “a front for high officials of the Department of Buildings” and who had been found guilty of rent gouging. Because of the Shapolsky work, as well as another similar piece about a pair of real estate developers, the Guggenheim’s then-director, Thomas Messer, canceled the exhibition, describing Haacke’s work as “an alien substance” that he would not allow to “[enter] the art museum organism.” The curator Massimiliano Gioni, who co-organized a 2019 solo show of Haacke at the New Museum — the only major American museum ever to give him one — compared the Guggenheim’s censoring of “Shapolsky et al.” to the “legendary refusal of ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Cubo-Futurist painting that was rejected from a Paris exhibition for being, as Duchamp would later describe it, too disrespectful of the nude form. “It’s such a defining moment,” Gioni said of Haacke’s canceled show. “It must have shocked him, but it also proclaimed his integrity, which is at a level that is still uncomfortable for some institutions.”

Before Haacke, museums were considered, in the words of the New York Times critic Holland Cotter, “genteel and politically marginal.” Robber barons might have donated to them to enhance their social clout, but such cultural largess was seldom questioned. Today, though, when phrases like “artwashing” and “toxic philanthropy” have entered the lexicon to describe the role that museums and other cultural organizations play in boosting the images of corporations and billionaires, Haacke’s work is more than just relevant — it’s prophetic. With persistent clarity, he seemed to understand, half a century before anyone else, the stakes of the uncomfortable relationship between art and politics.

ImageA visitor to MoMA responds to Haacke’s “Poll of MoMA Visitors” in 1970. Haacke asked about the political prospects of the then-New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller, whose family were also important patrons of the museum.Credit...© Hans Haacke/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

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