Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (born January 28, 1902, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.—died August 15, 1981, Salisbury, Connecticut) was an American museum curator who, as the enterprising first director (1929–43) of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, expanded the realm of the traditional art museum to include departments of architecture, education, industrial design, and photography, as well as sculpture and painting. His activities over nearly four decades at MoMA defined Modernism and laid the groundwork for its acceptance in the United States.

Barr was the son of a Presbyterian minister and was raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from the Boys’ Latin School in 1918 at the top of his class and, at age 16, moved on to attend Princeton University, where he studied art history and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1922 and a master’s degree the following year. His formal studies at Princeton covered the spectrum of the history of art. Barr’s primary interest, however, was in the work of living artists, which was not yet part of the university’s curriculum. Thus, he chose to pursue it on his own. Barr then attended Harvard University beginning in fall 1924 to pursue a Ph.D. (which he did not earn until well after he began his career as a museum professional). At Harvard he enrolled in the museum course taught by Paul J. Sachs, who trained his students in connoisseurship and general museum practices. Barr also began a teaching career in 1923 at Vassar College, and between then and 1927 he also taught at Princeton and Wellesley. At the latter he taught a groundbreaking course called “Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting,” the first at any university on the topic of living artists.

In 1929 Sachs recommended Barr to be director of a new modern art museum to open soon in New York City. In November of that year, Barr inaugurated MoMA (located then in six rented rooms in the Heckscher Building at 57th Street and 5th Avenue) with the exhibition “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh.”

Barr envisioned a museum that exhibited and collected the whole of contemporary culture—both high culture and low. He organized the institution into what would eventually constitute departments of traditional art forms (painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings), as well as departments of architecture (established 1932), film (established 1935), and photography (established 1940). From the start, he freely experimented with a gamut of exhibitions, treating the museum as his laboratory. The groundbreaking “Machine Art” (1934), curated and designed by the museum’s director of the department of architecture, Philip Johnson, showcased modern industrial design. Objects such as faucets and boat propellers manufactured by industrial design companies were displayed like fine art, and the public was polled on the most beautiful object in the exhibition. “Bauhaus: 1919–1928” (1938–39) showed to American museumgoers nearly 700 objects produced in the span of less than a decade at the famed German school of design founded and directed by Walter Gropius. Barr had visited the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1927 and was integral to introducing its aesthetic and philosophy to the broader American public.

The study and exhibition of contemporary architecture was an important part of the museum’s mission. “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” (1932), curated by Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, demonstrated to the public how architecture might be exhibited in a museum. The curators also coined the term “International Style” to describe the latest in European architectural innovation, a minimalist aesthetic of glass and steel construction. In 1939 MoMA opened in a permanent space, a new building designed in the International Style by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone. The building, located at 11 West 53 Street, introduced an entirely new type of museum architecture. One of the first buildings in America designed in the International Style and modeled, in part, on Bauhaus holistic design, the museum building, with its stark geometric exterior, reflected the mission evident in the museum’s collection—to be entirely new and of its time.

A highly respected tastemaker and connoisseur of modern art, Barr was also a risk taker and a polemical figure; among his colleagues he was known for having a dictatorial manner and an unrelentingly dogmatic approach. His unconventional and innovative exhibitions broadened the definition of art as well as the mission of a 20th-century museum, making it a forum for cultural dialogue and, often, controversy. He caused uproars by displaying objects such as a gasoline pump designed by the Standard Oil Company (1934), Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup (1936), and an elaborate shoeshine stand (1942) made by its owner, Joe Milone, an Italian bootblack.

Other notable exhibitions organized under Barr’s directorship include “Vincent van Gogh” (1935–36), arguably the art world’s first blockbuster exhibition; “Cubism and Abstract Art” (1936) and “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” (1936–37), a pair of shows that introduced America to the finest avant-garde artists working in both Europe and the United States; and “Photography 1839–1937” (1937; curated by Beaumont Newhall), the museum’s first exhibition on the fairly nascent medium—an ambitious survey of photography’s nearly 100-year history explicated with more than 800 works on display.

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After nearly 15 years at the helm, in 1943 Barr was replaced as director. Over the next few years he remained an active presence at the museum, but he also retreated enough to complete his dissertation, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946)—his second monograph on the artist—for which Harvard awarded him a Ph.D. Then, in 1947, MoMA rehired him as director of collections. Soon after that, he published Matisse: His Art and His Public (1951), an extensive review of the artist and his work that emerged from Barr’s 1931 Henri Matisse exhibition and catalog.

Barr established MoMA as one of the most-influential museums for modern art. In doing so, he also shaped the canon of modern art. Barr’s hand-drawn flowchart of the development of the art of his time—printed for the first time in the dust jacket of the 1936 “Cubism and Abstract Art” exhibition catalog—became a fundamental visual aid in America’s understanding of what Barr called “geometric” and “non-geometric” art.

Barr retired from MoMA in 1967, having redefined museums as places in which viewers can learn and interact rather than as institutions dedicated to collecting and preserving art with little regard for their audience. He continues to be recognized in the 21st century as one of the foremost contributors to America’s understanding of Modernism and the role of the art museum in society.