SynopsisThe way in which modern American and European art is studied is in large part due to the work and life of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. In 1929, Barr was appointed as first director of in New York City. As Director until 1943 (when he was forced to resign), Barr was instrumental in promoting the art of established modernists like , , and . Additionally, there was perhaps no greater champion in America for the work of . Barr sought out many of the artist's pieces and arranged the well-known retrospective at MoMA in 1946, Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art.
Key Ideas / Information
ChildhoodAlfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. was born in Detroit to Alfred Hamilton Barr, Sr., a Presbyterian minister, and Annie Elizabeth Wilson, a homemaker. The family soon moved to Baltimore, Maryland where Barr spent his childhood.
He was valedictorian of his high school class, graduating at the age of 16, and then went on to study at Princeton University in 1918. Two years later he chose Art History as his major.
Post-World War I yearsBarr graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton in 1922, and soon thereafter began teaching at Vassar College while simultaneously pursuing his Ph.D. at Harvard.
Between 1925 and 1928, Barr also taught art history and courses on modern art at Princeton University and Wellesley College.
While at Harvard, Barr studied under Dr. Paul J. Sachs (of the Goldman & Sachs banking family), the associate director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. Under Sachs's tutelage, Barr curated the very first modern art show at the Fogg. Around this time, Barr also met Philip Johnson, who Barr would later appoint to direct The Museum of Modern Art's architecture department.
In 1927 Barr traveled to Dessau, Germany to educate himself in the Bauhaus school of art, founded by , and home to artists such as , and . Barr was quite interested in the Bauhaus, and would eventually purchase several paintings, sculptures and lithographs on behalf of The Museum of Modern Art.
Early in 1929, Sachs, along with the philanthropist Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (the wife of John D. Rockefeller), a wealthy art collector named A. Conger Goodyear, and several other people all formed a committee to raise funds for a new museum devoted to modern art. On Sachs's recommendation, they chose Barr as the museum's director-to-be.
At MoMA's first show, Barr met Margaret ("Marga") Scolari-Fitzmaurice, an Irish-Italian woman who at the time was teaching art history at Vassar College. The two married in 1932.
Barr and his wife traveled to Germany in 1932-33, while Barr was taking a year-long sabbatical from the museum, and rented a home in Stuttgart, a city known for its modern art and architecture. Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany while the Barrs were there, and the two witnessed first-hand the closing of Stuttgart's art galleries and museums by the newly-empowered Nazi party. Not long after this, Barr sponsored the German art historian and professor Erwin Panofsky (and one of Panofsky's students) to come to the U.S. and receive a full-residency professorship.
Shocked by what they had seen, the Barrs traveled to Ascona, Switzerland and briefly took up residency there. In Switzerland, Barr wrote a series of articles about what he had witnessed in Germany. When they returned to the U.S., Barr tried to get his articles published but no newspapers or magazines would publish them. Mrs. Barr once recalled, "Everybody said he was hysterical, exaggerating - it couldn't be as bad as that!" One of the articles was printed in a small magazine called Hound and Horn, but none of the other articles saw a printing press until the entire set was published in Magazine of Art in 1945.
Barr's first major acquisition for MoMA was Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror, which he purchased in 1938 for $10,000 with the help of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim.
During the 1930s, Barr curated an impressive number of groundbreaking shows at MoMA, including a van Gogh exhibition in '35, Cubism and Abstract Art in '36, a Bauhaus show in '38, and a Picasso retrospective in '39.
In 1943, MoMA exhibited a one-man show by a relatively unknown slipper manufacturer-cum-artist named Morris Hirshfield, who was referred to as a "primitive painter": the figures in his paintings were infamous for having two left feet. The exhibition was scorned by critics, and though Barr had little to do with the Hirshfield show, MoMA's chairman of the board of directors, Stephen Clark, blamed Barr for the debacle. Clark and Barr clashed on nearly everything, and Barr was forced to resign as Museum Director that same year.
In the apocryphal account of Barr's forced resignation, Barr refused to leave, and instead secluded himself in the museum's library, running the day-to-day operations from behind the scenes. This story has since been confirmed as untrue. However, Barr was re-hired by the museum after a special administrative post was created for him, which came with a significant pay cut.
Post World War II YearsSince Barr had left Harvard to run the museum in 1929, he was never able to complete his Ph.D., but with the publication of his book Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art in 1946, Harvard accepted the book as Barr's dissertation and awarded him his Ph.D.
Soon after this, Barr was appointed to "Director of Collections" at MoMA, and moved back into his old office.
In 1960, the New York Times art critic John Canaday referred to Barr as "the most powerful tastemaker in American art today," a title which Barr resented, inferring that the Times was suggesting he was the dictator of the art world.
Later Years and DeathBy the late 1950s, Abstract Expressionism had long been established as the leading artistic style of the modern era, and various offshoots were gaining favorable attention from critics as well, including Pop art, Color Field Painting and Post-painterly Abstraction. Barr (and, consequently, MoMA) were late to embrace these newer modern styles.
Barr officially retired from the museum in 1967 and settled in his Connecticut home. He fell ill with Alzheimer's disease in 1975, and passed away in a rest home six years later.
LegacyBarr is arguably the catalyst for the American public's acceptance of and enthusiasm for modern art in the latter half of the 20th century. His work with The Museum of Modern Art helped secure modern art's place as an institution, rather than just a fleeting trend. Art historian and critic Thomas B. Hess once praised the work of Barr, and stated he was a man "whose taste and knowledge has set an international example to all who are interested in the fields of modern art."
One of Barr's more ambitious goals was to help establish a permanent collection at MoMA, to which the Museum's Board of Trustees finally agreed in 1953. Barr saw a permanent collection at MoMA as something that would secure modern art's place in the annals of Art History, and would finally make the Museum what he intended it to be from the beginning: a home to the greatest collection of modern art in the world. The works he selected for display at MoMA by artists such as Picasso, Matisse, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin (many of whom are in the Museum's permanent collection today), eventually formed the canon of modern art history.
Among his greatest innovations was the establishment of six different curatorial departments at MoMA: Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Film, Photography, and Architecture and Design.
Barr may or may not have coined the term "International Style" for a movement in modern, Bauhaus-influenced architecture made popular by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. Some have attributed the term's origin to the architects rather than Barr.
Introduction to Alfred Barr's Theories and WorkAlfred H. Barr, Jr. was an art history scholar and in many regards a formalist. He tended to group eras and movements of art history into schools of thought and technique, or what are commonly called -isms (i.e. Expressionism, Cubism, etc. etc.). Throughout his time working for MoMA, Barr's whole approach was to create a house of scholarship, whose chief goal should be not to discover the new but to classify the old.
On making MoMA what it is TodayThe Museum's original founders did not share Barr's grand vision of a permanent home for modern art. Dwight Macdonald wrote in his 1953 profile of Barr for The New Yorker, "They had in mind nothing more complicated than an American version of the Luxembourg - a refuge for Modern art until it was 'ripe' enough to be accepted to our Louvre, the Metropolitan." When approached in 1929 by the committee to run MoMA, Barr responded with detailed plans for a multi-departmental museum, complete with sections devoted to modern architecture, film, photography, theatrical design sets, commercial art, and industrial art. The Museum of Modern Art would be more than a house for modern painting and sculpture; as far as Barr was concerned, if it was modern and culturally significant, it had a place at MoMA.
Barr on Abstract ExpressionismBefore World War II, Barr was heavily criticized by many contemporary American artists and critics for not including in MoMA's collection much of the abstract art being produced in the very city Barr's museum called home. In 1940, a group calling itself the American Abstract Artists, led by Ad Reinhardt, picketed The Museum of Modern Art and distributed a leaflet that opened with the provocation, "HOW MODERN is THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART? WHAT DOES 'MODERN' MEAN? Does it mean ALL THE GREAT ART OF ALL TIME? .. Shouldn't 'Modern' conceivably include the 'Avant-garde'?"
Indeed, Barr was initially reticent to accept works by members of the "New York School" of Abstract Expressionism (at this time also known as Post-Abstract, Biomorphic, and Intra-Subjectivist). It wasn't until after the war that MoMA began purchasing paintings by Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Motherwell and Hofmann, thus embracing the next phase in abstraction. (Barr has been heavily criticized for never purchasing a single painting by Mark Rothko, who was and is widely considered one of the giants of Abstract Expressionism.) Even though Barr was MoMA's Director of Collections after the war, there is little evidence to suggest that he was personally instrumental in launching the museum's post-war favor toward Abstract Expressionism. Nonetheless, under Barr's rule, the Collections Committee's prime focus remained with acquiring and showcasing the works of the modern "Old Masters" like Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Léger.
In the final section of Barr's 1936 book, Cubism and Abstract Art, entitled "The Younger Generation," he wrote: "The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miró and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cézanne and Cubism." Barr's prediction was almost correct. What he couldn't foresee (and few actually did) was that the prevailing trend in abstract art would become a form of free expression that lacked any actual form at all.
Barr on Modern Art's Place in the WorldIn 1937, an article written for a local newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi criticized The Museum of Modern Art because "Majority opinion in America is not friendly to modernism .. Those who stand for hours in front of paintings and rapturously exclaim they are finding new and hidden meanings therein are merely fakers and flourflushers." Barr responded with a letter of his own, exclaiming that while majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile "to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat."
Barr on MoMA's Role in our CultureBarr once remarked in an interview that after the museum had been in existence for nearly 25 years, "The historical museum has to be very conservative and careful in its choices. The modern museum, on the other hand, has to be audacious, to take chances. It has to consider the probability that it would be wrong in a good many cases and take the consequences later." This can hardly be called a premonition; Barr was commenting on a quarter century's worth of experience, having presided over MoMA's many triumphs and failures as the world's supposed leader in showcasing modern art.
Although Barr was criticized in his day for being something of an elitist and a "tastemaker," he never wanted to preside over an institution that catered exclusively to the social elite. In 1944 Barr wrote: "The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time." Even though a part of Barr's legacy is his reluctance to wholly embrace Abstract Expressionism on behalf of the museum, this can be explained by his preoccupation with educating as many as possible about what was significant about the past before focusing on the future.
Writing StyleBarr's approach to scholarship and arts education was simple and chronological: he moved from one movement to the next with stunning clarity and precision. Of Cubism and Abstraction he wrote: "As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism." Barr's writing style is relatable and easy to follow, crafted for the novice who seekst to get a general sense of where different trends in modern art originated and who first made them popular.
Below are Alfred H. Barr's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.
Vincent Van Gogh
Years Worked: 1928 - 1967
Quotes"Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem."
"Abstract art today needs no defense. It has become one of the many ways to paint or carve or model. But it is not yet a kind of art which people like without some study and some sacrifice of prejudice."
Written by BarrDefining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art
Cubism and Abstract Art
What is Modern Painting?
Masters of Modern Art (available for free on Questia.com)
Written about BarrAlfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern
Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1/28/02 - 8/15/1981): A Memorial Tribute
Articles by Barr
Articles about Barr
Abstract of New Yorker profile of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
By Dwight Macdonald
December 19, 1953
Oral History interview of Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr
1974, Feb. 22 - May 13
|The Museum has become the home for some of the greatest works of avant-garde painting, sculpture, film and multi-media art in the world. While MoMA remains true to its roots as a place where new styles of art can circulate, its permanent collection is widely considered the most impressive and diverse assortment of Modern art to ever exist, ranging from late-19th-century van Goghs, Monets and Gauguins to works produced in the present day.
ArtStory: Museum of Modern Art Page
|Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, commonly associated with the Post-Impressionist period. As one of the most prolific and experimental artists of his time, van Gogh was a spontaneous painter and a master of color and perspective. Troubled by personal demons all his life, many historians speculate that van Gogh suffered from a bi-polar disorder.
ArtStory: Vincent Van Gogh Page
|Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist artist who employed color fields and painterly strokes in his work. He is best known for his primitivist depictions of native life in Tahiti and Polynesia.
ArtStory: Paul Gauguin Page
|Henri Matisse was a French painter and sculptor who helped forge modern art. From his early Fauvist works to his late cut-outs, he emphasized expansive fields of color, the expressive potential of gesture, and the sensuality inherent in art-making.
ArtStory: Henri Matisse Page
|Paul Cézanne was an influential French Post-Impressionist painter whose depictions of the natural world, based on internal geometric planes, paved the way for Cubism and later modern art movements.
ArtStory: Paul Cézanne Page
|Picasso dominated European painting in the first half of the last century, and remains perhaps the century's most important, prolifically inventive and versatile artist. Alongside Georges Braque he pioneered Cubism. He also made significant contributions to Surrealist painting, and media such as collage, welded sculpture, and ceramics.
ArtStory: Pablo Picasso Page
|The German architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar Germany. Along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern architecture.
|A member of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, and later a teacher at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky is best known for his pioneering breakthrough into expressive abstraction in 1913. His work prefigures that of the American Abstract Expressionists.
ArtStory: Wassily Kandinsky Page
|The Swiss-born painter Paul Klee worked in a variety of styles, including expressionism, geometric abstraction, and collage. His most famous works have a mystical quality and make use of linear and pictorial symbols.
ArtStory: Paul Klee Page
|Artist and graphic designer Joost Schmidt was a Bauhaus teacher who is most known for designing the famous poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, Germany.
|Piet Mondrian, a founding member of the De Stijl movement, was a Dutch modern artist who used grids, perpendicular lines, and the three primary colors in what he deemed "Neoplastic" painting.
ArtStory: Piet Mondrian Page
|El Lissitzky was a Russian avant-garde painter, photographer, architect and designer. Along with his mentor Kazimir Malevich, Lissitzky helped found Suprematism. His art often employed the use of clean lines and simple geometric forms, and expressed a fascination with Jewish culture. Lissitzky was also a major influence on the Bauhaus school of artists and the Constructivist movement.
ArtStory: El Lissitzky Page
|Hans Arp (also known as Jean Arp) was a German-French artist who incorporated chance, randomness, and organic forms into his sculptures, paintings, and collages. He was involved with Zurich Dada, Surrealism, and the Abstraction-Creation movement.
|Gertrude Stein was an American writer and supporter of the arts whose Paris salons were key sites for avant-garde art in the early twentieth century. She built one of the earliest collections of modern art, including works by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and others.
|André Breton, author of the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, was an influential theorizer of both Dada and Surrealism. Born in France, he emigrated to New York during World War II, where he greatly influenced the Abstract Expressionists.
ArtStory: André Breton Page
|Cubism was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907-1911, and it continued to be highly influential long after its decline. This classic phase has two stages: 'Analytic', in which forms seem to be 'analyzed' and fragmented; and 'Synthetic', in which pre-existing materials such as newspaper and wood veneer are collaged to the surface of the canvas.
ArtStory: Cubism Page
|Fauvism was an early twentieth-century art movement founded by Henri Matisse and André Derain. Labeled "les fauves" or "wild beasts" by critic Louis Vauxcelles, the artists favored vibrant colors and winding gestural strokes across the canvas.
ArtStory: Fauvism Page
|A movement in painting that first surfaced in France in the 1860s, it sought new ways to describe effects of light and movement, often using rich colors. The Impressionists were drawn to modern life and often painted the city, but they also captured landscapes and scenes of middle-class leisure-taking in the suburbs.
ArtStory: Impressionism Page
|Perhaps the most influential avant-garde movement of the century, Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by a small group of writers and artists who sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Much influenced by Freud, they believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of the imagination. Influenced also by Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution.
ArtStory: Surrealism Page
|Bauhaus is a style associated with the Bauhaus school, an extremely influential art and design school in Weimar Germany that emphasized functionality and efficiency of design. Its famous faculty - including Joseph Albers and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - generally rejected distinctions between the fine and applied arts, and encouraged major advances in industrial design.
ArtStory: Bauhaus Page
|Ellsworth Kelly is an American color-field and hard-edge painter. Kelly got his start in the late-1950s with showings at the Betty Parsons Gallery and the Whitney Museum. His work often consists of shaped canvases, simple geometric shapes, and large panels of uniform color.
ArtStory: Ellsworth Kelly Page
|Jackson Pollock was the most well-known Abstract Expressionist and the key example of Action Painting. His work ranges from Jungian scenes of primitive rites to the purely abstract "drip paintings" of his later career.
ArtStory: Jackson Pollock Page
|Joan Mitchell was a leading second-generation Abstract Expressionist who painted large works of gestural marks and overlapping, roiled color areas. She was famous for her acerbic personality, and her later work often earns comparison with the late painterly style of Impressionist Claude Monet.
ArtStory: Joan Mitchell Page
|Robert Motherwell was a first-generation Abstract Expressionist whose paintings use hulking shapes, large-scale strokes and calligraphy, and wide expanses of muted color. Eloquent and well-educated, he wrote extensively on theories of art.
ArtStory: Robert Motherwell Page
|Adolph Gottlieb was an Abstract Expressionist painter who commonly used grids, pictographs, and primitive symbols in his work.
ArtStory: Adolph Gottlieb Page
|Meyer Schapiro was an important art historian and theorist who wrote on the social and political dimensions of art and its historiography. He made seminal contributions to the fields of Romanesque and medieval art as well as to theories of modernism, abstraction, and Abstract Expressionism.
ArtStory: Meyer Schapiro Page
|Thomas B. Hess was an art critic and historian, and a proponent of Abstract Expressionism. He served as editor of the influential magazine Art News.
ArtStory: Thomas B. Hess Page
|Stanton Macdonald-Wright was an American abstract painter who, along with Morgan Russell, founded the Synchromist movement in 1912.
|Robert Rosenblum was an American art critic, curator and historian. His greatest contribution to the modern canon was his redefinition of Modern art history, offering that the era began not with Impressionism but with Neo-Classicists of the late-18th century.
ArtStory: Robert Rosenblum Page
|German art historian Erwin Panofsky emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1930s and was particularly known for his theories on iconography and his work on Albrecht Durer.
|A tendency among New York painters of the late 1940s and 1950s, all of whom were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes. The movement embraces the gestural abstraction of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and the color field painting of Mark Rothko and others. It blended elements of Surrealism and abstract art in an effort to create a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma.
ArtStory: Abstract Expressionism Page
|A tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, color field painting was developed by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still in the late 1940s, and developed further by Helen Frankenthaler and others. It is characterized by large fields of color and an absence of any figurative motifs, and often expresses a yearning for transcendence and the infinite.
ArtStory: Color Field Painting Page
|Post-painterly abstraction was a term developed by critic Clement Greenberg in 1964 to describe a diverse range of abstract painters who rejected the gestural styles of the Abstract Expressionists and favored instead what he called "openness or clarity." Painters as different as Ellsworth Kelly and Helen Frankenthaler were described by the term. Some employed geometric form, others veils of stained color.
ArtStory: Post-Painterly Abstraction Page
|Installation art is a genre of contemporary art-making in which two- and three-dimensional materials are used to transform a particular site. Installations may include sculptural, found, sound-based, and performance elements, and can be permanent or ephemeral.