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Old Fogg Museum Sculpture Gallery
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Fogg interior, workshop with
students, 1932
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Throughout the twenty-five years it took to amass his
collection of art prints and drawings, Sachs cultivated and developed what
Sybil Kantor calls an "old boy-network" comprised not only of some of the
richest men in America as well as the Rothschilds and
Wildensteins, but also a worldwide network of art dealers, editors,
critics, collectors, and museum curators. Sachs used these contacts to
train the future museum people in his class. During their travels, his
students broadened these connections, making new contacts and discovering
new places of relevance. They wrote articles for magazines or organized
exhibitions for the Fogg Museum affiliated with the university, filling
them with loans from Sachs' partners or former students. Indeed, Barr was
to curate his first exhibition here in 1925, which focussed on the
avant-garde movement of the
Paris School. Equipped with up to one hundred letters of recommendation,
Sachs' students embarked on their European travels; they were expected to
collect detailed information on the art world, which Sachs then added,
country by country, to his list of names, addresses, collections,
paintings, and galleries. At the same time, this solution also proved to
be of immense value to his students. Whoever earned Sachs' favor could be
sure of a later position of employment. Not only does his relationship to
Barr testify to this; so do Sachs' relationships to other participants in
his museum class, among which were
Henry Russel Hitchcock, Paul Vanderbilt, and Kirk Askew, all of whom went
on to become world famous art historians and to play an important role in
Barr's career and, hence, the history of the MoMA.
Tradition and Revolt
It was only at the very last
minute that Barr informed his parents of the curriculum for the Modernism
course he was about to teach at
Wellesley College in 1927, where he began working following his
studies at Harvard and Princeton. "Tradition and Revolt" was the course's
title: "The achievement of the past - especially in the nineteenth
century. The 20th century, its gods and isms. The painter, critic, dealer,
collector, the museum; the academies; the public. Contemporary painting in
relation to sculpture, the graphic arts, architecture, the stage, music,
literature, commercial and decorative arts. Fashionable aesthetics, fetish
and taboo. Painting and modern life. The Future." The seminar at Wellesley
was probably the first college course to concern itself with the art of
the last hundred years. Back then, Barr showed color slides - in those
days a rarity - of the works of
Bonnard ,
Feininger, de
Chirico, and
Chagall, and initiated his students into Cubist and Futurist art. Included
among the "isms" he treated was also a young movement he called the
"Superrealists," as the term "Surrealism" had not yet been coined.
Inspired by
Le Corbusier's book Towards a New Architecture (1922), he had his
classes visit train station buildings and factories, such as Necco,
which were then discussed every bit as much as the design of everyday
objects, furniture, or automobiles.
Piet Mondrian: Composition in White, Black and Red, 1936, Gift of the Advisory
Committee, Museum of Modern Art, New York
The
entirely innovative approach of Barr's course on Modernism clearly
demonstrates that Barr was anything but unprepared when he, midway in an
academic year, embarked on a European tour with his friend and later MoMA
assistant
Jere Abbott in 1927 that lasted several months and that was to acquire
tremendous meaning for the establishment of the future museum.
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Although Barr had seen the photographs of the Bauhaus
school designed by
Walter Gropius at the Machine Age Exposition of the
Little Review shortly before he left New York, visiting the actual
building in Dessau far surpassed all his expectations. Starting in
Holland, where they studied the works of
Piet Mondrian,
Theo van Doesburg, and other members of the de Stijl group in museums and
private collections, Barr and Abbott traveled to the
Bauhaus via Berlin, where the connection between Harvard tradition and the
Modernist adventure seemed to come full circle. Barr later recalled: "This
multi-departmental plan [of the Museum] was (…) inspired by Rufus Morey's
class in Medieval art (…) and equally important, the Bauhaus of Dessau.
Morey, who used to lose his temper and swear about the Bauhaus, would be
surprised at this parentage, but there are real similarities between the
Bauhaus and the Medieval art course when you come to study them."
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Machine -Age Exhibition (The Little
Review, Mai 1927)
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Bauhaus Dessau Südansicht, Foto:
Lucia Moholy, 1927,
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©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
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Barr's sojourn in Dessau must have been something like an
initial kindling that fortified his idea of a total culture and infused
Walter Gropius' guiding principle with life: "Let us desire, devise, and
together create the building of the future, which shall be everything in a
single form: architecture and sculpture and painting." Barr was impressed
by the school's internationality and by the formal studies taught in its
workshops as well as by Feininger's enthusiasm for the Bauhaus jazz band,
Gropius' seriousness, his encounters with Paul Klee, and his debates with
Moholy-Nagy. The huge amount of ground the two Harvard men covered on
their European trip attests to an urgency to use every chance possible to
absorb Modernism. Departing from Berlin, Abbott and Barr traveled to the
Soviet Union. "He was constantly preoccupied with the
Constructivists," remarked
Philip Johnson in this context. "The Constructivists were on his mind all
the time. Malevich was to him, and later to me the greatest artist of the
period. And you see, the Constructivists were cross-disciplinary, and I'm
sure that influenced Alfred Barr, both that and the Bauhaus." Barr's
encounters in Moscow could have easily comprised an address book of the
Russian avant-garde. Friends organized cinema parties for him, introduced
him to theater directors or arranged visits with
Tatlin,
Lissitzky, and
Rodchenko. Regardless of whether he was hunting down icons in museums,
watching
Sergei Eisenstein as he edited
October, buying a watercolor from
Diego Rivera, who was staying in Moscow at the time, or studying the
architecture of modern apartment buildings - everything Barr did was done
with great intensity.
Alfred H. Barr Jr., Jere Abbott, and their
interpreter, Petra Likhatchew, Moscow, February 13, 1928.
The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY: Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 9.F.71.
Back in Germany, Barr embarked on a tour of the country; he discovered some
"wonderful small museums" in Darmstadt and Mannheim and wrote to Sachs
that Germany had "forged new paths in museum technology" following the
war. The later success of his 14-year career as MoMA director was also
based on exhibition techniques adopted from his European travels: the
explanatory labels in Russian museums, the portable display walls of
Hanover's Sprengel Museum,
the separate, rotating "artist rooms" at Berlin's Kronprinzenpalais.
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