Mildred Constantine

Who was Mildred Constantine?

Mildred Constantine Bettelheim was an American curator who helped bring attention to the posters and other graphic design in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s and 1960s

Constantine was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York. She received bachelor's and masters degrees from New York University and attended the graduate school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

She worked for the College Art Association from 1931 to 1937 as an editorial assistant on the journal Parnassus. She met Rene d'Harnoncourt, her future boss as director of the Museum of Modern Art, while she was working at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

She traveled to Mexico in 1936 as part of the leftist Committee Against War and Fascism, where she developed an interest Latin and Central American political graphics. A Latin American poster collection she organized was shown at the Library of Congress and became part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's permanent collection.