Alfred Barr, Philip Johnson and Margaret
Barr, Cortona, Italy, 1932.
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The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
NY: Margaret Scolari Barr Paperes.
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While he held a lecture on modern art in his final year,
1922, for the Club of Art Journalists, open conflict arose in the course
on modern painting given by his professor
Frank Jewett Mather (1868-1953). The course began with the Renaissance
masters and concluded, to Barr's great disapproval, with the
Impressionists. Mather, a former art critic of the
New York Evening Post, regarded the Modernists with profound contempt.
Although his stylistic analyses were brilliant, he was unable to liberate
himself from his conservative views in historical judgment. Like many of
his colleagues, he felt that an "strangeness and apparent ugliness" lie at
the heart of the works of the avant-garde. Although he conceded that
Cézanne possessed a high degree of intellectual competence, he dismissed
him as an "amateur." The modernist program seemed to him spoiled by
exaggerated impulsiveness and hyperbolic intellectualism - "in plainer
words, … either crazy or cranky."
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Paul Cézanne: Der Badende, ca. 1885,
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York Erworben durch: Lillie P. Bliss
Bequest
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Marcel Duchamp: Fahrrad-Rad, 1951, ©
Succession Marcel Duchamp/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
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Even though Barr continued to maintain friendly contact to
his professor, respectfully according him a "philosophical objectivity,"
it seems as though conflicts of this kind only served to strengthen his
will to pursue an individual path. In the early twenties, Modernism was
still highly controversial in America. Only a few years before MoMA
opened, New York's Metropolitan Museum
was still debating whether Impressionism, at the time already half a century
old, was something "invented in the absinthe shops of Paris," as Roland
Redmond, the Met president, sniffily put it. MoMA's great exhibitions on
Cubism, Surrealism, and Dada would only take place later, in 1936, after
Cubism was already thirty years old and the Dada revolt had long since
subsided. The American public had a hard time with this kind of art.
Barr's genius not only consisted in his strong-mindedness, but also in his
keen sense for advertising and his talent for influencing people. Years
after finishing his education, he was to become the first director to
employ a PR staff member in his museum.
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A Modernist and Gentleman
Barr's graduation from Princeton in 1923 was followed by a "five year plan."
In order to secure his education, he planned to earn money teaching in
annual intervals and then to study and travel in between. During his first
teaching assignment at Vassar College
in 1923, he met a patroness of modern art at a
Kandinsky exhibition who was to take on great importance throughout the
course of his long career. Supported by
Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp
,
Katherine Dreier (1877-1952) founded the
Société Anonyme, a group that constituted a forum for
avant-garde artists from America and Europe. In many respects, the
Société Anonyme can be regarded as a "prototype" of the
MoMA. The organization maintained a reference library with contemporary
catalogues and writings from all around Europe and initiated exhibitions
throughout the country at universities, museums, and galleries. In
addition, it sustained its own collection, organized symposia and
lectures, and published books and pamphlets. The society's first
exhibition opened on April 30, 1920 with works by artists such as van
Gogh,
Francis Picabia, Juan
Gris, and
Constantin Brancusi. In 1922, Dreier visited the
First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin and purchased works by
Kandinsky, Malevich,
Popova, and
Naum Gabo. These were shown at the Société, as were
the representatives of
de Stijl and Bauhaus.
Early on in his studies, Barr's interest in modern art was primarily
aroused by illustrations in newspapers and books; over the years, he came
into more and more frequent contact with modernist works and with a
network of collectors, artists, and European dealers that acquainted him
directly with the movement, for example the emigré J.B. Neumann, who
exhibited the German avant-garde surrounding
Max Beckmann and Paul
Klee in his gallery,
Alfred Stieglitz with his gallery 291, and the collector
Albert Barnes, who showed the works of Matisse,
Picasso, and Derain
in his Pennsylvania foundation
side by side with the
Post-Impressionists. Barr's ideas did not spring out of thin air. In the
mid-nineteen-twenties, modern art was becoming increasingly
institutionalized and was gaining support in the United States, as well;
the hour of its breakthrough was imminent. The catalyzing effect that Barr
was to exert as the founding director of MoMA was based on his ability to
look forward while simultaneously gazing back at the past.
Paul J. Sachs, Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art
Up into the nineteen-thirties, thinking at Harvard, where Barr resumed his
studies after a trip to Europe in 1924, was marked by the codex of
"genteel tradition," a refined behavior that allowed for anything as long
as art retained its "good taste" and "morality."(more
here) Part of this tradition was also the educational mission art was
expected to fulfil. As Sybil Gordon Kantor remarks in her biography on
Barr, "the concept of the museum functioning as an educative tool was
democratic in aim and peculiarly American." The ideas of European
Modernism, particularly those of the Bauhaus, which Barr advocated
vehemently, were also to reanimate this original version of the populist
American museum - and Barr couldn't have found a better person to learn
the necessary skills from than Paul J. Sachs, professor and Associate
Director of the Fogg
Museum at Harvard. While Barr brought Modernism closer to Sachs, the
latter introduced the young student to museum life. It seems that Sachs
was the opposite of Barr in every sense: a stocky, lively man with a
propensity for outbursts, both of rage and joy, who set great store by
conviviality. He had ended a long career on Wall Street at the age of 37
in order to dedicate himself entirely to his passion for art and
collecting. As a financier and a partner of the family business
Goldmann Sachs, he brought not only his extensive knowledge of art to
Harvard, but also the business prowess of a banker, which he quickly
applied to his activities in the art world.
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