1934, Janis was invited to join the Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art. The following year, nineteen paintings from his private collection were shown at MoMA, and in 1936 they were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1939, as Chairman of MoMA's Art Committee, Janis helped arrange the loan of Picasso's Guernica to New York for the benefit of Spanish Refugee Relief. Sidney Janis closed the shirt business to devote his time to writing on art in 1939. He collaborated with his wife Harriet on books such as Abstract and Surrealist Art in America in which he explores the burgeoning styles of art rarely before discussed in America. The work exhibits a wide array of artists who were successful in conveying the surrealist and abstract styles such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur B. Carles, Man Ray, Leon Kelly, Mark Rothko, and Ray Eames. The Sidney Janis Gallery Then, in 1948, when Janis was 52 years old, he and Harriet opened the Sidney Janis Gallery which was located at 15 E. 57th Street in Manhattan sharing the fourth floor with the Betty Parsons Gallery. The gallery soon acquired a strong reputation by mounting scholarly, curated exhibitions of Léger, Mondrian, the Fauves, the Futurists, and de Stijl artists. In the 1950s, the gallery became a powerhouse of contemporary avant-garde art. In 1952, Janis gave Jackson Pollock the first of three solo shows. Also in this decade, the gallery represented Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Phillip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, and Josef Albers. In addition to his promotion of the Abstract Expressionists, Janis become the first blue chip gallery to show Pop art. In the fall of 1962, he organized the exhibition, the International Exhibition of the New Realists, a survey of contemporary Pop art and the seemingly related Nouveau Réalisme movement. The exhibition was located in a temporary rented storefront at 19 W. 57th Street. Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Phillip Guston and Adolph Gottlieb left the gallery as a protest. The Sidney Janis Gallery soon became a leading exhibitor and dealer in Pop art, representing Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Öyvind Fahlström, and Marisol. Janis exhibited the work of acknowledged masters alongside that of emerging artists. By placing the new work in the context of great modern art, Sidney Janis focused critical eyes on contemporary art in a different, brilliant and