Word: barre
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Harvard's eminent scholar and mentor of curators, Professor Paul Joseph Sachs. As Professor Sachs returned from a trip abroad in June 1929, Mr. Goodyear shook his hand and asked him to name the ablest candidate available for the directorship of a modern museum. He named Alfred Hamilton Barr...
Charioteer. Alfred Barr was then 27, an associate professor of fine arts at Wellesley. Born in Detroit, brought up in Baltimore, son of a Presbyterian minister who had a taste for medieval art, he had majored in science until his last year at Princeton, intending to become a paleontologist. This training served him well when he came to deal with the data of Dada. After graduate work in art and archeology, he taught at Vassar, Harvard, Princeton, and launched at Wellesley in 1926 an ambitious course in modern art. It involved "driving a seven-or eight-wheeled chariot," handling...
Attempts to treat the diversity of contemporary arts had been made before at the Bauhaus in Germany, but they were fancy business in America in 1929. No zealot, Director Barr concentrated on paintings, the main interest of such trustees as Samuel A. Lewisohn and Stephen C. Clark, and bided his time. He got a secretary and five small exhibition rooms in a Fifth Avenue office building. The trustees met for the first time in October, armed with pledges for $200,000. In November the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors with an exhibition of Lillie Bliss's fine...
Thus a bold onset was followed by adroit changes of pace. Director Barr, whose fragile look is deceptive, stopped short at no dilettantism, worked like hell. Stage designing, posters, industrial design, children's art illustration and many an-other branch of art came in for special exhibitions, each worked up by the Museum's characteristic method: thorough research, orderly classification of the work shown, equal respect for every experimental artist whether probably great or palpably minor, explanatory notes for the public. Not all the Museum's shows have been revelations, some have been merely precious...
...What? Director Barr spent his spare time last week warning himself against the perils of Bigness and Popularity. So far the Museum has amply proved its intellectual honesty, to the dinner-table discomfiture of certain conservative trustees. Director Barr is delighted and others are somewhat surprised that the trustees have supported him so well...