19
At the time he saw the John Quinn memorial show, there was little about Alfred Barr that suggested he was destined to transform the American art world. Physically slight to the point of frailty, he had large round glasses and boyish features that made him look even younger than his twenty-three years. He was also reserved and scholarly, and tended to speak in measured paragraphs followed by excruciatingly long silences. Outside of his studies, he limited himself to such serious pursuits as organ concerts, chess, and occasional tennis; he was not known for dating. Frequently, he was in precarious health. And where most of his Harvard classmates came from cosmopolitan backgrounds of wealth and privilege, Barr was a scholarship student who had grown up in a parsonage.
He also had had remarkably little direct exposure to the art that interested him most. In New York and Boston, works by modern and avant-garde artists remained scarce; and Barr’s sole experience of Europe was a conventional sightseeing trip to Italy and France, which he had undertaken, on a shoestring, with a childhood friend at the end of college. (Like Quinn on his first trip to France, he had visited Chartres Cathedral.) As he confessed to his mother after starting graduate school, his own knowledge of modern painting was “woefully superficial”; when he had a rare opportunity to see an actual abstract painting by Kandinsky, he initially dismissed it as “hashish.”[1]
Yet, like Quinn, Barr sensed early on that an extraordinary cultural upheaval was under way, and mainstream resistance made him all the more intent on fighting for it. “It’s…a feeling for the underdog,” he once commented. “I like to see him win.”[2] He also shared the lawyer’s relentless self-drive and determination to master all that was new. By 1926, finding the material he absorbed from books, magazines, and other sources insufficient, he began asking J. B. Neumann, a modern art dealer who had recently arrived from Berlin, to import European publications for him; to many of his classmates, and a few of his professors, his intellectual precocity was somewhat terrifying. After meeting Barr in the late twenties, the British modernist Wyndham Lewis, Quinn’s old friend, commented that “he looks like a defrocked Spanish Jesuit.”[3] Philip Johnson, at the time a somewhat unfocused Harvard undergraduate, had the impression that “he was nearly God.”[4]
In fact, Barr did have a religious background, though not in the denomination Lewis suggested. Born in Detroit in 1902, Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr., came from a line of Presbyterian clergymen going back to the seventeenth century. When Barr was nine, the family moved to Baltimore, where his father became minister of the First Presbyterian Church; Barr was enrolled at the conservative Boys’ Latin School, where he excelled. Early on, though, it was not religion but the natural world that gripped him. Equipped with an unusually analytical mind and a passion for taxonomy, he was drawn to butterfly collecting and birdwatching; in his high school newspaper—which he edited—he was described as a “born scientist with a real desire for things bizarre, grotesque, and occult.” He also was fond of grand strategy, and liked to restage decisive battles like Gettysburg and Waterloo on his living room floor. By sixteen, he had graduated as “Head Boy” and won a scholarship to Princeton.[5]
In college, he planned to study paleontology, but he abandoned fossils after taking a course in medieval art during his sophomore year. Led by an innovative scholar named Charles Rufus Morey, the class catered directly to Barr’s scientific bent. Rejecting prevailing understandings of art as an expression of national history and limited to painting and sculpture, Morey sought to trace the common evolution of all art forms across huge sweeps of time and space. At the center of Morey’s radical project was an effort to discipline the bewilderingly complex and poorly understood world of medieval art—a thousand-year morass—into a single, geneaological story, an approach that seemed to do to art what Kepler’s laws had done to astronomy.[6]
For the empirically minded but visually stimulated Barr, the class made an indelible impression and soon after, he switched his major to art history. But the tools Morey offered seemed far more exciting when applied to the modern era. Inspired by his magazine reading and by John Quinn’s post-Impressionist show at the Metropolitan, Barr began to seek out as much information as he could about the new art movements in Europe. By the time he had finished a year of Harvard graduate school, he could assert that he had already “passed through” most of the significant epochs of art, including Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque, and that he was now mainly interested in an epoch that no one was teaching: the present. “Contemporary art is puzzling and chaotic,” he wrote in one application for funding, “but is to many of us living and important…as a manifestation of our amazing though none too lucid civilization.”[7] Like Quinn, he was beginning to sense that “living” art could often speak more powerfully than any historical masterpiece. It also was still awaiting its Kepler.
At Harvard, Barr socialized little, but he gradually fell in with an ambitious group of young men who shared his ardor for modernism. Beginning in 1925, Barr formed an especially important friendship with Jere Abbott, a brilliant young pianist and physicist who had studied music in Paris, and who had, on Barr’s recommendation, decided to study art history at Harvard. In Cambridge, they became roommates and constant companions, and Abbott sometimes came to Barr’s lectures to play polytonal pieces by Milhaud and Stravinsky for his students. Dazzled by Barr’s genius, Abbott quickly embraced his ideas about modern art.
Most of Barr’s professors, however, did not. In one of his first courses at Harvard, Picasso was held up to ridicule. “After the tittering subsided the professor told three funny stories,” Barr complained.[8] Another prominent faculty member had long tried to keep modern art out of the city’s museums altogether. In one of Barr’s first attempts to organize an exhibition on campus, he was unable to locate any works even by the founders of the modern movement. “It is actually impossible,” he wrote in a blistering attack in The Harvard Crimson, to find “a single painting by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, masters who are honored the world over.”[9]
Soon Barr was gaining a reputation as a young Jacobin. At Wellesley, he launched a controversial course in twentieth-century art, the first of its kind in the country. Showing up in mismatched suits, he asked his students to read James Joyce and Luigi Pirandello rather than art books, to visit factories and train stations rather than museums. (One assignment was to study the new Necco candy factory in Cambridge, which was one of the very few modernist buildings in the area.) Local critics, responding to his strident modernism and his disparagement of the local culture, began to savage him as “the very modern Mr. Barr of Cambridge and Wellesley.”[10]
Like Quinn, Barr seemed to enjoy the controversy. “I have had some good fights over modern art,” he told one friend.[11] His outspoken fervor did not endear him to the Harvard faculty, though. Seeking a travel grant to Europe—essential in a field in which much of what he was interested in could not be found in the United States—he was repeatedly turned down. By the late 1920s, Barr complained that he was living “hand to mouth,” and his determination to become the country’s first scholar of modern art was beginning to look distinctly unpromising. “I have no funds to travel with or buy books and material,” he wrote.[12]
Still, he had at least one powerful ally: Paul J. Sachs, the associate director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum. A small, courtly man from the Goldman Sachs banking family, Sachs was unlike other members of the faculty. He had come to Harvard after a fifteen-year career in international finance and regarded himself more as a connoisseur than as a scholar. As a distinguished collector of prints, he was well connected in the European art world; he was also deeply concerned by the state of American museums, which he felt had become stale repositories for rich men’s treasures. He preferred to teach in the long living room of Shady Hill, his large nineteenth-century estate near Harvard, where he could surprise students with unknown objects from his art collection, rather than in a classroom. In his pioneering “museum course,” he set out to give a new generation of art scholars the combination of eye training, business expertise, and social skills he felt was needed to manage an elite public museum collection. Though Barr lacked the poise of some of his wealthy peers, Sachs recognized his unusual gifts, and quickly adopted him as a protégé.
Crucially for Barr, Sachs was also open to modern art. While he steered clear of Cubism and abstraction, he knew some of the modern dealers in Europe and felt that the movements they were promoting should be better known in the United States. As early as 1920, when hardly any Americans apart from Quinn were pursuing Picasso’s work, Sachs had bought a Picasso drawing from Paul Rosenberg—initiating a transatlantic friendship with the dealer that would one day prove vital in ways that neither of them could imagine. Sachs also understood that Barr needed direct exposure to the European art world. And when Barr was unable to secure funding, Sachs paid for the trip himself.
Spanning an entire academic year, Barr’s Wanderjahr in 1927–28 upended his understanding of modern art. For any ordinary American scholar of the time, it was natural to visit the art capitals of Western Europe. While Barr spent several weeks in London and Paris, however, his primary interests lay elsewhere. Where Quinn had sought to identify and support the most important artists of his time, Barr wanted to witness how these artists were changing civilization. Together with Abbott, who was paying his own way, Barr traveled to Holland, where the De Stijl movement had produced a flourishing scene of advanced design and architecture. Even more important, though, were the months they spent in two other countries farther east, the same two where Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had first established the avant-garde art market a generation earlier: Germany and Russia.
In both the Weimar Republic and the young Soviet state, modernist ideas had taken hold to a degree that was almost unimaginable in the United States. In Germany, Barr found advanced museums in almost every town they visited. They also spent four days at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where they met Walter Gropius and most of the other artist-leaders who were seeking to bring new aesthetic and design principles to everything from the color patterns of rugs to the shape of door handles. In Moscow, Vsevolod Meyerhold, the avant-garde theater director, showed them his Cubist stage sets and Sergei Eisenstein let them watch him edit October, his latest revolutionary film; they also visited the Museum of Modern Western Painting No. 1—the nationalized prewar collection of Sergei Shchukin—which housed the largest collection of Picassos and Matisses in the world. Even as America’s biggest cities had yet to embrace contemporary painting and sculpture, Barr observed, “little German industrial towns such as Halle and Erfurt, Essen and Mannheim, Russian cities such as Witebsk and Kharkov, have galleries devoted primarily to modern art.”[13]
But as they lingered in Moscow, Barr and Abbott also discovered something else: that modern art depended on political freedom. At the time of their visit, Joseph Stalin was just beginning to consolidate power over the Soviet state; during their stay, Trotsky was arrested and bundled onto a train for forced exile in Kazakhstan, part of the sweeping purge of the party’s main opposition faction. To ordinary citizens, the ideological hardening was not yet apparent, and Barr and Abbott were able to move freely around the country. But already, a chill had descended over avant-garde art, which was seen as insufficiently socialist. In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, Moscow had had one of the most dynamic art scenes in the world, with painters like Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova and sculptors like Alexander Archipenko pushing Russia to the forefront of abstract art. By the time of Barr and Abbott’s visit, however, many of the country’s leading artists had gone into exile or given up painting altogether. “That’s all in the past,” the painter Aleksandr Rodchenko told them.[14] They also discovered, despite the exhilarating work of Eisenstein and Meyerhold, a growing climate of censorship in film, theater, and public exhibitions. In fact, they were witnessing the final twilight of the Russian avant-garde. Shortly after their departure, the Shchukin museum would be shut down and most of its Matisses and Picassos locked away; over the next few years, Stalin would formally repudiate modern art in favor of Socialist Realism, and many modern artists and writers would be persecuted. Eisenstein would soon have trouble getting his films made; Meyerhold would eventually be executed.[15]
For Barr, the European sojourn provided a tantalizing sense of the promise, and peril, of the new art. He was fascinated by the extent to which novel aesthetic ideas were spreading across culture, and soon he was lecturing Wellesley undergraduates about Soviet cinema and the Bauhaus. But it was also his first exposure to the conflict between modern art and antidemocratic politics. The rise of Stalin would not be the last time he witnessed up close the advent of a totalitarian regime and its consequences for a society with an advanced art culture. Years later, Barr would reflect that “painting and sculpture were perhaps the first arts to succumb to cultural tyranny.”[16]
Barr returned to the United States in the summer of 1928 filled with ideas. Given all that he had experienced, he was more determined than ever to study modern art. Yet he soon realized how difficult this might be. Forced to take on a heavy teaching load, he had no time to begin his Ph.D., or even to assimilate what he’d seen. More ominously, his supervisors were less than convinced by his proposal to write about what he called “primitive” tendencies in modern art—a subject for which Picasso’s work would be central. That fall, despite his stellar academic record, and unusual knowledge of Germany and Russia, both Harvard and Princeton declined to give him funding. It was a serious setback, and Barr thought he might have to rethink his plans altogether.
Once again, Sachs came to the rescue. “You must not be discouraged by your failure,” Sachs wrote him in early 1929.[17] First, he suggested that Barr transfer to New York University, which seemed more likely to support his unorthodox subject. A few months later, with Sachs’s support, Barr was able to obtain a one-year Carnegie fellowship there to begin his dissertation. Just as he was preparing to transfer to NYU, however, Sachs wrote him with an even more unusual opportunity in New York, one that went to the core of John Quinn’s unfulfilled legacy: Would Barr like to run a new museum that was going to be devoted entirely to modern art?