Alfred H. Barr, Jr
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Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981) was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward
modern art Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the tradi ...
; for example, his arranging of the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert, was "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."


Life and education

Barr's life and work are the subject of Hugh Eakins's 2022 book about efforts by Barr and others to bring Picasso's work, already celebrated in Europe, to the United States. Barr graduated from the Boys' Latin School of Maryland. Barr received his B.A. in 1923 and his M.A. in 1924 from Princeton University, where he studied art history with Frank Jewett Mather and Charles Rufus Morey. In 1924, he began doctoral work at
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, but left after completing PhD course requirements to pursue teaching. He was not awarded his PhD until 1946. He married the art historian Margaret Scolari on 8 May 1930 in Paris. They had one daughter, Victoria Barr, who is a painter.


Career

Barr was hired as an associate professor to teach art history at
Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...
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 Fair'', '' The New Yorker'', and '' The New Masses'', and the numerous class trips were not to typical locations of art-historical interest. For example, on a trip to Cambridge, 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 The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world. Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped to establis ...
, which he intended to use to complete the requirements for his PhD by writing a dissertation during the following academic year on modern art and Cubism at New York University. But greater ambitions obliged him to shelve that intention when Anson Conger Goodyear, acting on the recommendation of
Paul J. Sachs Paul Joseph Sachs (November 24, 1878 – February 18, 1965) was an American investor, businessman and museum director. Sachs served as associate director of the Fogg Art Museum and as a partner in the financial firm Goldman Sachs. He is recogniz ...
, offered Barr the directorship of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art. Assuming the post in August 1929 aged only twenty-seven, Barr's achievements in it accumulated quickly; the Museum held its first loan exhibition in November, on the Post-Impressionists Vincent Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat. Perhaps Barr's most memorable and enduring accomplishment in his directorial capacity was the
Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...
retrospective of 1939–1940, which caused a reinterpretation of the artist's work and established the model for all future retrospectives at the Museum. When Barr put Picasso's "Demoiselles" on display in New York in 1939, and declared it 'the beginning of a new period in the history of art', he was also shaping the formalist approach to art. As a formalist he advocated for technical radicalism and the potential of art's formal aspect. In 1930, Barr married Margaret Scolari, whom he met at the inaugural exhibition of MoMA in 1929. According to Sybil Gordon Kantor in her book ''Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art,'' Frank Crowninshield art critic, journalist and editor of '' Vanity Fair'', was one of Barr's mentors and one of the founding trustee members of the Museum of Modern Art along with several others. In 1941, in collaboration with his wife and Varian Fry, he helped many artists escape from France, occupied by the Nazis, one of them being
Marc Chagall Marc Chagall; russian: link=no, Марк Заха́рович Шага́л ; be, Марк Захаравіч Шагал . (born Moishe Shagal; 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernism, modernist, he was associated with se ...
. Barr helped secure American visas as well as the sponsorship of 3000 dollars requested to get the visa. Barr also helped the art dealers Curt Valentin and Otto Kallir to gain entry into America. Both supplied the MoMa with modern works of art. Some of these were subsequently the object of claims for restitutions from the heirs of Jewish collectors that had been looted by the Nazis. In 1943, Museum of Modern Art president Stephen Carlton Clark dismissed Barr as director of the Museum, though he was allowed to stay on as an advisory director (working with his successor
Rene d'Harnoncourt René d'Harnoncourt (May 17, 1901 – August 13, 1968) was an Austrian-born American art curator. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1949 to 1967. Background Of Austrian, Czech, and French descent, Count Rene d'Harnoncou ...
); 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 Renaissance. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1952. In recognition of Barr's legacy as an art historian and first director of MoMA, the College Art Association established the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship in 1980. The award is given annually to the author of an outstanding catalogue produced through a museum, library, or public or private collection. After his death in 1981, he was interred in Lincoln-Noyes Cemetery in Greensboro, Vermont.


Selected works


Books

*''Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art'' (1946) *''Matisse, His Art and His Public'' (1951) *''Cubism and Abstract Art'' Cambridge: Belknap Press (1986). *''Art in America in Modern Times'' (1934) *''Vincent van Gogh, with an introduction and notes selected from the letters of the artist'' (1935)


Essays

*"Chronicles." ''Painting and Sculpture in The Museum of Modern Art 1929–1967''. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977, 619–650.


References


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. * Eakin, Hugh. ''Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America.'' New York: Crown. 2022. * Kantor, Sybil Gordon. ''Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art'' * 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. (Marquis also wrote a novel about Barr, "Brushstroke!") * . * . *Reich, Cary. ''The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer 1908–1958''. New York: Doubleday, 1996. *
Rockefeller, David David Rockefeller (June 12, 1915 – March 20, 2017) was an American investment banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation. He was the oldest living member of the third generation of the Rockefeller family, a ...
. ''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


Alfred H. Barr Jr. papers in the Museum of Modern Art Archives

Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, 1974 February 22 – May 13
from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art {{DEFAULTSORT:Barr, Alfred 1902 births 1981 deaths American art curators American art historians Directors of museums in the United States People associated with the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Harvard University alumni Princeton University alumni Wellesley College faculty 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Commanders Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany 20th-century American male writers