Volume 50, Number 18 · November 20, 2003
The Saint
By Michael Kimmelman
Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art
by Sybil Gordon Kantor
MIT Press, 472 pp., $39.95; $18.95 (paper)
Even now, thirty-six years after he retired and more than twenty years after he died at seventy-nine, Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. remains a figure of fascination and contention. No one had a more profound effect on the direction of American museums over the last three quarters of a century, and no museum director or curator, or anyone else for that matter, except perhaps the artists themselves, did more to shape the national perception and discussion of art in the twentieth century. Barr brought about circumstances that changed the world, or at least the world of modern art. He was the founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, which opened auspiciously in 1929 with a show of Cézanne, Seurat, van Gogh, and Gauguin in a six-room space on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue just nine days after the stock market crashed.
Review, 4439 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |