Paul Mocsanyi (originally Mocsányi Pál), who initiated and directed the New School Art Center for more than a decade, was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1900 to a grain merchant family. He attended various universities in Budapest, Vienna and Paris studying art and music, without pursuing a degree. German and Hungarian were his native languages and he spoke fluent English and French.

In 1928, the financial crisis drove the company Mocsanyi had inherited from his father into bankruptcy. He went on to serve, from 1933-1939, as a Budapest correspondent for the French News Agency, Agence Havas. Much later, in an employment application to the Central Intelligence Agency, Mocsanyi reported that he had fled Hungary in 1938 after the government accused him of "disseminating information harmful for the Hungarian economy." He continued working for Havas from Paris as head of their radio listening post (1939-1940). During this time he also worked as a news analyst for the French Foreign Office.

In 1935, Mocsanyi married the Vienna-born Edith Wachtel, a renowned pianist. The couple moved to the United States in 1941, a year after the Nazi defeat of Paris. Soon after arriving in New York, Mocsanyi started working for the United Press, and stayed with the agency for sixteen years, first as the head of their radio listening post, later as head of the library and art critic for the foreign desk. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1946.

Mocsanyi taught music and art history at the New School from 1958, and was appointed director of the newly founded Art Center in October 1960. In the first year of the Center he organized two major exhibitions, The Creative Process, which later travelled North America, and Mechanism and Organism, which was favorably received by the professional art community. Also in the Center's first year, Mocsanyi invited such figures as art historian Ernst H. Gombrich and art critic Clement Greenberg to speak at the Art Center. Mocsanyi resigned his post in January 1962 over conflicts about the terms of his employment. He was rehired, however, on his own terms, in August 1962 following the recommendation of the Art Center Committee, chaired by philanthropist and art collector Vera List. Mocsanyi ran the Center until he was pressed to resign in 1975, although he stayed on as curator of exhibitions for two years after his resignation.

According to documents in this collection, Mocsanyi was a member of the Purchase Committee of the List Art Purchase Fund from its beginnings in the 1950s, which later grew into the university’s Art Collection. Mocsanyi devoted more time to the Art Collection after retiring from the Center, and remained involved with the school into the 1980s.

Mocsanyi wrote monographs of Karl Knaths and Alfred Van Loen, in 1957 and 1960, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs. He published more than six hundred art reviews.

Paul Mocsanyi died in 1993 in New York, eleven years after his wife. Mocsanyi was born into a class of society that vanished in Hungary with the Soviet occupation, and his life story can be viewed as a reflection of the political and social upheavals that transformed Europe over the course of the first half of the twentieth century.

The New School Art Center was established in the fall of 1960 with a significant gift by the Albert J. List Foundation, and remained in operation until the mid-1970s. The Center's original mission statement describes its ambitious project:

[The Art Center represents] a continuing effort by the New School for Social Research to manifest its interest in art as a major endeavor of man and society. The Art Center embraces no particular movement or group, but serves as a forum for all noteworthy expression by artists of this and other nations. It attempts to make its own unique contribution to the cultural life of New York City, rather than to duplicate efforts of the many excellent art institutions in this community.