The MoMA Legend:
Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Emergence
of Modernism in America
From
February 20 to September 19 2004, Berlin's New National Gallery will be
showing over 200 masterpieces from the Museum of Modern Art in the only
European presentation of its kind. Deutsche Bank is the exclusive sponsor
of this unique event. On the occasion of the exhibition MoMA in Berlin
our article series "The MoMA Legend" will be introducing individuals and
works of art that have contributed towards making this institution the
most famous museum for modern art worldwide.
What were
MoMA's origins? Oliver Koerner von Gustorf on the Harvard spirit,
the Bauhaus influence, and the visions of Alfred H. Barr Jr. , the
founding director of MoMA who left an indelible mark on 20th-century
museum history.
An Art Quiz in Vanity Fair
"What is
the significance of each of the following in relation to modern artistic
expression?" This question, formulated in August of 1927, was not
addressed to the students of an art history class, but rather to the
readers of the American magazine Vanity Fair, who were invited to test
their knowledge of modern art in a culture quiz.
Henri Matisse, George Gershwin,
Gertrude Stein, Frank Lloyd
Wright, Le Corbusier
, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the sculptures of
Aristide Maillol, and the Suprematism of
Kasimir Malevich: while the list of persons on this legendary quiz today
reads like a "Who's Who" of 20th century avant-garde, it also conveys a
sense of the mood of the time, a creative awakening in which art shattered
borders separating disciplines, schools of thinking, and forms of
expression. Moreover, it gives testimony to the fact that the public had
finally become conscious of the modern movement. And something else
emerges, as well - the vision of a total interdisciplinary culture that
accords an equal place to fine arts, applied arts, design, architecture,
and photography. It must have seemed radical indeed that the author of the
quiz, the 25 year-old Alfred H. Barr Jr., included
Saks Fifth Avenue's window display in his quiz as an important influence,
because, as he put it, "this department store has done more to popularise
the modern mannerism in pictorial and decorative arts than any two
proselytising critics."
Gertrude Stein, Foto: Man Ray, 1926
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©Man Ray Trust, Paris/ VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2004;
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Alfred Stieglitz: From An American Place,
Looking North, 1931; George Gershwin; Walter Gropius: Director´s Office,
Foto: Lucia Moholy; Herbert Bayer: isometric drawing of the director´s
office, 1923; Bauhaus-Szene 1926, Photo: Erich Consemüller (if not
mentioned, all:
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©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004)
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At the time, no one could have guessed that only two years
later Barr would be appointed founding director of the first American
museum dedicated solely to contemporary art. On November 9 1929, only a
few days after the great stock market crash, the
Museum of Modern Art opened under Barr's direction in the rented
12th-floor rooms of the
Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue with a show of works by
Cézanne,
Gauguin, Seurat
, and van Gogh.
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As Sybil Gordon Kantor describes in her biography Alfred
H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art,
published in 2002, Barr's personality hardly corresponded to today's
standards of how a dynamic museum man is imagined to be.
Alfred Barr, Photo: Jay Leyda, 1931 - 1933
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Digital Image © 2004 The Museum of
Modern Art, New York
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Throughout his lifetime, Barr, born in Detroit in 1902 as
the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, suffered under stomach ailments and
insomnia; although impeccably polite, he was a taciturn and almost cold
man of petite stature who found his profession to be taxing. In 1932, a
bout of exhaustion led him to take a year's leave of absence as director.
Nevertheless, Barr succeeded in furthering the modern cause with more
rebellion, more farsightedness, and more discipline than any of his
contemporaries. He exerted a greater influence on the agendas of American
museums and did more to determine the reception of 20th century art than
any other museum director or curator of the time. Works of astute and
illuminating art historical analysis such as Barr's books on Picasso and
Matisse and the bestseller What is Modern Painting? have lost
nothing more than a small fraction of their significance, even now, half a
century later. In retrospect, it seems as though Barr had been preparing
himself to pursue an unparalleled career from the very beginning. But what
led the diligent, shy student, whose academic education had been
overwhelmingly classical, to diverge from this secure path and dedicate
himself to the rebellious, experimental approaches of Modernism?
"Strangeness and Apparent Ugliness"
Upon being appointed
director of the MoMA, Barr wrote to his mentor, the art historian, museum
expert, collector, and Harvard professor
Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965): "This is something I could give my life to -
unstintedly." The ambivalence that characterized Barr's personality had
also been influenced by the strict code of behavior and comprehensive
education at Princeton and
Harvard. The two universities had founded their art historical faculties a
mere ten years apart from one another, yet a trenchant discrepancy existed
from the very beginning between Princeton's emphasis on the historical and
iconographic and the praxis-oriented teaching policy at Harvard, where
styles and techniques underwent formal investigation. Barr began his
studies at Princeton in 1918 at the age of sixteen. His first professor
was
Charles Rufus Morey (1877-1955). Morey's courses on medieval art were, as
Barr later recalled, "a remarkable synthesis of the principal medieval
visual arts as a record of a period of civilization: architecture,
sculpture, painting on walls and in books, minor arts and crafts were all
included." Morey's influence on Barr can be discerned in the
charts Barr drew up, both throughout his years of studying and
subsequently as
MoMA director. Barr employed detailed diagrams to visualize the
development of various art movements and styles and to classify the
sources and influences of Modernism into a historical context. Princeton
had supported the precision in Barr's approach to modern art, in which he
disregarded national and regional constraints while systematically
connecting movements that initially seemed intrinsically different from
one another; later, this precision found its expression at the MoMA, as
the various interdisciplinary departments were founded. Barr's concept of
exhibiting the collection in a sequence of white-box galleries to enable a
dramatically charged and historically ordered story to unfold was to
become a model for modern museums around the world.
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