Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981), known as
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an art historian and the first director of the
Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the...
in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward
modern artModern art refers to artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
; for example, by arranging the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."
Barr graduated from the
Boys' Latin School of MarylandBoys' Latin School of Maryland is a private, all-boys, college-preparatory school located in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1844, it is the oldest independent, non-sectarian secondary school in the state of Maryland. The school is divided into Lower, Middle and Upper Schools...
.
Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981), known as
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an art historian and the first director of the
Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the...
in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward
modern artModern art refers to artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
; for example, by arranging the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."
Life
Barr graduated from the
Boys' Latin School of MarylandBoys' Latin School of Maryland is a private, all-boys, college-preparatory school located in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1844, it is the oldest independent, non-sectarian secondary school in the state of Maryland. The school is divided into Lower, Middle and Upper Schools...
. Barr received his B.A. in 1923 and his M.A. in 1924 from
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
, where he studied art history with
Frank Jewett MatherFrank Jewett Mather was an American art critic and professor.He was born at Deep River, Conn., and graduated from Williams College in 1889 and from Johns Hopkins in 1892: he studied also at Berlin and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris...
and
Charles Rufus MoreyCharles Rufus Morey was an American art historian and professor and chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University from 1924 to 1945, best known for his expertise in medieval art and his Index of Christian Art...
. In 1924, he began doctoral work at
HarvardHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
, but left after completing Ph.D. course requirements to pursue teaching. He would not be awarded the Ph.D. until 1946.
Barr was hired as an associate professor to teach art history at Wellesley College in 1926, where in the same year he offered the first-ever undergraduate course on modern art, "Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting." This course was notable not only for the novelty of its subject-matter but also for its unconventional pedagogy: Barr referred to all nine students in the class as "faculty", making them each responsible for mastering and teaching some of the course content. Although, per its title, the course ostensibly focused on painting, Barr thought a broad understanding of culture was necessary to understand any individual artistic discipline, and accordingly, the class also studied design, architecture, film, sculpture, and photography. There was no required reading aside from
Vanity FairVanity Fair is an American Hollywood magazine of pop culture, fashion, and politics published by Condé Nast Publications. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1981 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition...
,
The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications...
, and
The New MassesThe New Masses was a prominent American Marxist publication edited by Michael Gold, and briefly by Whittaker Chambers.-History:...
, and the numerous class trips were not to typical locations of art-historical interest. For example, on a trip to
CambridgeCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, a nexus of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Notably, Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent...
, the class passed over the wealth of Harvard's museums to experience the "exquisite structural virtuosity", in Barr's words, of the Necco candy factory.
In 1929, Barr was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship, which he intended to use to complete the requirements for his Ph.D. by writing a dissertation during the following academic year on modern art and Cubism at
New York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian, research university in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. But greater ambitions obliged him to shelve that intention when Anson Conger Goodyear, acting on the recommendation of
Paul J. SachsPaul Sachs was Harvard associate director of the Fogg Art Museum, a partner in the financial firm Goldman Sachs and the developer of one of the early museum studies courses in the United States.-History:...
, offered Barr the directorship of the newly founded
Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the...
. Assuming the post aged only thirty, Barr's achievements in it accumulated quickly; the Museum held its first loan exhibition in November, on the Post-Impressionists Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat. Perhaps Barr's most memorable and enduring accomplishment in his directorial capacity was the Picasso retrospective of 1939-1940, which caused a reinterpretation of the artist's work and established the model for all future retrospectives at the Museum.
In 1943, Museum of Modern Art president
Nelson RockefellerNelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States, the 49th governor of New York, a philanthropist, and a businessman....
, to whom Barr had been personal art advisor for many years, dismissed Barr as director of the Museum, though he was allowed to stay on as an advisory director (working with his successor
Rene d'HarnoncourtRene d'Harnoncourt was a director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1949 to 1967.Of Austrian, Czech, and French descent, Count Rene d'Harnoncourt was born in Vienna, the son of Count Hubert d'Harnoncourt and his wife, the former Julie Mittrowsky, and although he showed an interest in art...
); later Barr was given the title Director of Collections. By the time Barr left MoMA in 1968, modern art would be considered as legitimate an art-historical field of study as earlier eras such as the
RenaissanceThe Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe...
.
Essays
- "Chronicles." Painting and Sculpture in The Museum of Modern Art 1929-1967. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977, 619-650.
Further reading
- Barr, Margaret Scolari. "Our Campaigns: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Museum of Modern Art: A Biographical Chronicle of the Years 1930-1944." The New Criterion, special summer issue, 1987, pp. 23-74.
- Fitzgerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
- Lynes, Russell, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Athenaeum, 1973.
- Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the Modern. New York: Contemporary Books, 1989.
- Reich, Cary. The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908-1958. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
- Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002, pp.443-51.
- Roob, Rona. "Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: A Chronicle of the Years 1902-1929." The New Criterion, special summer issue, 1987, pp. 1-19.
External links