21
Three and a half months after Barr began his new job, an Italian graduate student named Daisy Scolari invited her friend Agnes Rindge down to New York City for Thanksgiving weekend. Rindge was a brilliant young Radcliffe Ph.D. who was teaching art at Vassar; Scolari was a svelte, dark-haired woman from Rome on a prestigious art history fellowship at New York University. They had both heard about the new museum that was stirring up an enormous fuss on Fifty-seventh Street and they wanted to see it. For weeks, there had been lines of people waiting to get in the building; a few days earlier, the museum had announced it was adding special hours for art students, because the crowds were too large for sketching. Rindge suggested they go together, and one morning, they set out for Midtown.[1]
By its location alone, the Museum of Modern Art was unlike any public art gallery in the world. At the time, the prevailing American museum ideal was still some variant of a neoclassical temple, usually set back from its surroundings or placed in a park. The new venue, by contrast, was halfway up a Midtown high-rise known as the Heckscher Building, where its fellow tenants included a cigar company, a bank, and several interior design firms. The museum had no presence at street level, and, as the Times had explained, in order to reach its galleries, “you take the elevator up to the twelfth floor.”[2]
As Scolari and Rindge approached the entrance, the elevator line was spilling onto Fifth Avenue. When they finally got up to the right floor, they found themselves in a series of spaces that were as unusual as the museum’s address. According to prevailing tastes, museum galleries usually featured elaborate moldings, columns, and paneling to create a luxurious setting; walls tended to be covered in rich red or dark green brocade. Here, everything was the exact opposite. Clean and Spartan, the rooms were completely devoid of decoration and color save for the paintings themselves. “If the walls were not totally white then they were the palest possible grey, absolutely neutral,” Scolari recalled.[3] Even the rugs and few pieces of furniture were light gray. In fact, it was the beginning of an approach that would one day spread throughout the international art world: the so-called “white cube” gallery, in which walls, ceilings, and floors serve as neutral backdrops for pure contemplation of the art itself. By the late twentieth century, the approach would become so dominant that it would provoke a backlash. For Americans in 1929, though, it was utterly novel.
And then there was the art. Spread across every available wall in the museum’s seven small galleries were nearly one hundred paintings by Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Though these were founding figures of the modern movement, their work was still relatively rare in New York, and they had never been shown on this scale. For the two young art historians, though, as striking as the paintings themselves was the way they were hung.
In the early twentieth century, many museums displayed paintings in the popular “salon style,” with paintings organized symmetrically by size and hung in vertical stacks that sometimes went up to the ceiling. It had a decorative effect as wall cover, but it was a terrible way to look at art. Here, instead, the paintings were mounted in a single row at eye level and arranged so that they told a sequential story. Even the wall labels were interesting. Rather than merely listing titles and dates, they provided crucial information about a work’s significance and meaning. “Such a thing had never been done before,” Scolari recalled.
Around the margins, there were indications that the whole operation was considerably more bare bones than its fresh look suggested. For one thing, the galleries were small, crowded, and poorly ventilated; the windows had been papered over, and the existing spaces had to be divided up by partitions to provide enough wall space. Even so, they had run out of room: Two Cézanne self-portraits and a Van Gogh interior were hanging over closed doors. And the paintings themselves were all borrowed and would be going home the moment the show was over. If this was a museum, it was certainly doing a good job of hiding the fact.
Then, as they pushed their way into one of the larger galleries, Rindge recognized the thin young man who had installed the show: Alfred Barr. They had known each other since Harvard, where she, too, had attended Sachs’s museum course, and she ran over to greet him. After they chatted for a while, she introduced her friend. “Of course you know Daisy Scolari?” she said. Scolari had already heard a lot about the young iconoclast from Harvard who was supposed to have been her classmate at NYU but had taken the museum job instead. They began to talk. Reticent and excited at the same time, Barr must have been distracted watching the crowds react to the paintings. But he found Scolari amusing. She had a way of anticipating his words with her own. He told her he hoped they would see each other again. And then she and Rindge left.
—
By outward appearances, at least, Barr’s first show had been an improbable success. People were clogging the elevators at the Heckscher Building; the critics were almost unanimously positive. “If the exhibition has a flaw it is that of too great power,” Art News declared. The Times put it more succinctly: “Quality disarms.” More dramatically, The Nation asserted that the new museum marked the end of the “long and bitter struggle for modern art” that had gone on ever since the Armory Show, noting that modernism had finally found “acceptance by respectable society.” To hear these critics tell it, Quinn’s battle had been won.[4]
Barr knew otherwise. In large part, the response owed to the extraordinary care he and Goodyear had put into the selection of paintings: They had insisted on only the most outstanding works, and Barr had even letter-graded potential candidates. (Barr may be one of the few curators to have given Cézanne a B on some of his canvases.) But as he was acutely aware, there was another explanation, too. Despite all the fanfare, the works they had packed into the Heckscher Building were hardly very modern. The museum was showing the work of four late-nineteenth-century painters who were already internationally recognized, artists whom Quinn had once referred to as “men who are dead.” This was certainly not the wild Cubist and Futurist work that had provoked bitter struggles at the Armory Show, and there was no guarantee that the public, or even his own trustees, would be equally receptive to the advanced twentieth-century art whose interpretation he saw as the museum’s chief task. Meanwhile, they were using rented spaces and relying almost entirely on borrowed art. In many respects, they were hardly a museum at all.
Particularly threatening to Barr’s plans was the sudden crisis the country was in. The Museum of Modern Art had opened on November 8, 1929, exactly ten days after the largest stock market crash in U.S. history. In a single day of trading, the market lost some $14 billion; by early November, nearly half of the overall value of the market had disappeared. Though the broader effects were impossible to predict, for anyone with significant investments, the impact had been immediate. It was difficult to imagine a less promising moment to start a new museum of any kind, let alone one devoted to a kind of art whose long-term value was highly uncertain.
Before the crash, Goodyear managed to recruit a number of wealthy donors—some two dozen in total—to contribute the $76,000 needed for the first year of operations. Even then, though, there was barely enough to pay for a staff of five people and cover their modest rent. Had Rockefeller and her friends begun planning their museum even a few months later, it is doubtful it would have opened at all.
Following the dire headlines, Barr must have worried if he had been right to abandon his Ph.D. At New York University, he had funding and, with his doctorate and contacts, would likely have landed a tenured position in one of the country’s growing art history faculties. Now he was entirely at the mercy of the museum’s donors, and everything would depend on their continued willingness to support it. Even before the economic crisis, the founders had decided that the museum would rely entirely on art loans for its first two years: Like the inaugural exhibition, shows would be built around paintings borrowed from private collections and dealers that would be returned as soon as the shows were finished. At the cramped Heckscher Building, the museum was on an annual lease, and if the finances proved untenable, the whole operation could vanish as quickly as it had started.
As it was, the economic crisis was only one of the challenges he faced. In trying to set up the first full-fledged modern art museum in America, he also had to contend with the inherent conservatism of his own trustees. Rockefeller, Bliss, and the other founders may have thought of their tastes as modern by New York standards. But they were still catching up to Quinn, let alone the bracing new currents that Barr had witnessed in Germany and Russia. In opting to begin with the four “ancestors” of modernism, the museum had been able to draw from the trustees’ own collections. But they would not be much help in supplying Cubist collages and Surrealist paintings. Bliss, who was the most forward-minded of the founders, owned just two Picasso paintings, one of which was the neoclassical Woman in White; Goodyear had only a few drawings. Even to attempt some of the shows he wanted to do, Barr would have to first persuade the people who had hired him.[5]
Already, Barr found himself being upstaged, at least in intellectual daring, by some of his old circle at Harvard itself. Over the previous year, an upstart group called the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art had started organizing shows in Harvard Square devoted to living avant-garde artists. The society was run by Lincoln Kirstein, a brilliant undergraduate who had been a protégé of Barr’s, and two other undergraduates, and had ambitions, if on a far smaller scale, that closely paralleled Barr’s own. On the same day the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors with Cézanne and Gauguin, the Harvard Society opened its own show of Derain, Picasso, and Matisse. Given the challenge of locating major works by these artists in the United States, the Harvard show was small and uneven. But it included such notable works as Derain’s The Bagpiper, which had belonged to Quinn, and Picasso’s large neoclassical Bathers, which they had managed to get from Paul Rosenberg. In introducing the show, Kirstein made a prescient assessment of Picasso that might have been written by Barr himself. “Only the critic of fifty years from now,” he wrote, “can fully appreciate how profoundly he has altered, controlled, and assimilated European painting of the first quarter of the twentieth century.”[6]
If the Museum of Modern Art was going to change the way Americans thought about art, Barr knew he would have to quickly overcome his trustees’ timorousness. That winter, for his third show, he finally presented a survey of some of the leading living modern artists, including Braque, Rouault, Vlaminck, Matisse, and Picasso. Yet even these works—which were again mostly borrowed from trustees and their friends—provided a peculiarly conservative view of modern art. “American collectors, as a rule, seem rather afraid of Picasso’s strongest and most characteristic arguments,” the French critic and artist Jacques Mauny wrote in The Arts after seeing the show. “They are somewhat like the tourists who order ham sandwiches when they visit Prunier’s oyster bar.”[7]
Barr agreed with Mauny’s criticism. Already he was beginning to think about a far more ambitious show to give the full measure of Picasso’s work. As with so many of his other ideas and plans, however, he was hampered by the severe limitations of what was available in the United States. Overwhelmingly, the artworks he needed were in Europe. In this respect very little had changed since the days when Quinn and his friends were seeking Brancusis and Rousseaus. Barr needed to go to Paris.
First, though, he had something even more important he had to settle: Daisy Scolari, the woman he had met at the opening show. Shortly after they met, Barr invited her to a tearoom near the museum. A few days after that, he asked her to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Then she began coming to the museum. In almost every way, they were opposites. He chose his words with great care; she was quick-tongued and effervescent. He was reserved and strategic; she was energetic and unrestrained. To his physical delicacy, she contrasted natural athleticism. And while he had almost total recall but was hopeless with foreign languages, she could be somewhat scattered but spoke four languages fluently. Almost immediately, they made a powerful connection. “I know of no pair more divergent in background, in emotional inheritance, or in outward manner,” a mutual friend of theirs later observed, “and more devoted or more reliant upon the well-being of the other.”[8]
Born in Rome in 1901, Margaret Scolari-Fitzmaurice was the daughter of an antiquarian dealer from the Veneto and a patrician Irish Protestant mother. The war began during her early adolescence and she experienced it directly: Her father died when she was fifteen and her mother volunteered in military hospitals. Still, she had a free-spirited youth. She attended a coeducational high school, where she had many friends; then she enrolled at the University of Rome, where she briefly studied medicine and then languages. She taught herself Greek, read Proust, and did a perfunctory course in art history, but she never finished her degree. Instead, she got a coveted job as a bilingual secretary at the American embassy.
In 1922, she witnessed Mussolini’s march on Rome and quickly acquired a distaste for Fascism. But the new regime had little impact on her own existence. “I had nice clothes,” she recalled. “I adored dancing and I danced three or four times a week, in the afternoon and at night.” She and her friends often went skiing in the Italian Alps. After a few years, however, she decided she had greater ambitions, and through an embassy connection, she landed a job at Vassar teaching Italian to undergraduate coeds. “It was quite extraordinary,” she said. “After having had this complicated life in Rome so full of young men and flirtations, to land in a female world…I can’t say that I liked it much.”
At Vassar, however, she began taking courses in art history, which fascinated her. Evidently, she was a quick study. Even though she had never completed her undergraduate degree, she was granted an M.A. for her work; then, a few months before she met Barr, she received a Carnegie Fellowship to New York University. By the spring of 1930, she had attracted sufficient notice to be offered a job on the art history faculty at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was also promised the directorship of the Smith College Museum when the current director retired, the following year. Quite apart from her lack of museum experience, the second part of the offer was noteworthy as it would put her on track to be one of the first woman directors of any museum in the country. In March, Scolari accepted the job, which was to begin in the fall. She also found a large apartment in Northampton, with sufficient room for her mother, who had been living alone in Rome, to join her.
By this point, however, she had become seriously interested in Barr. Throughout the winter, she had been making regular visits to the Heckscher Building, and then joining his crowd—Jere Abbott, Philip Johnson, the handsome young Tennessee poet Cary Ross, and the German émigré art dealer J. B. Neumann—for their gatherings after long days on the twelfth floor. The discussion was excited and freewheeling, and despite the financial crisis and the enormous constraints on the museum, there was an intoxicating sense of possibility. “You felt an unbelievable vibration,” Scolari recalled. “It sort of centered around Alfred, but…everybody was adding their contributions, reminding one another of things and saying, ‘We could do this.’ ‘We could do that.’ ”
Barr was inscrutable, but he, too, seemed to enjoy Scolari’s company. He also had definite views, extending to her own name. When she and Barr attended an art history conference together, he found “Margaret Scolari” written on the program and crossed out the last three letters, so it read “Marga.” “Why don’t we do this?” he said. In his own awkward way, he was showing his deep affection, and it stuck. From that point on, she was “Marga” to all but her oldest friends.
By late winter, they were inseparable. “We fell insanely in love with each other,” Scolari said. She was also twenty-nine years old—an age that at the time was considered advanced for a single woman. Still, uncertainty hung over their relationship. Confronting his feelings for her, Barr seemed unsure what to do. “More than naturally, he deeply hesitated about the idea of getting married, or marrying me,” she recalled. As she was well aware, he did not have much of a history with women, and an overwhelming number of his close friends were openly, or somewhat openly, gay; both architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Johnson had confided their boy troubles to her. (“You are the only one who knows about Cary and me,” Johnson wrote her that spring, referring to Cary Ross.[9]) In New York, Barr continued to share an apartment with Abbott, his devoted friend—a curious situation for the director and deputy director of a new museum. He also was incredibly driven and worried about the constraints that marriage might place on his work. “I deeply sympathized with him,” Scolari recalled.
Then, at the beginning of May, to the surprise of almost everyone, Scolari and Barr announced their engagement. It was less than six months since she and Barr had met and less than six months since the museum had opened. All at once, it seemed, Barr had found a new vocation and a new life. For Scolari, though, the change was arguably even more dramatic. She told Smith College she would be turning down the job after all, and more important, forgoing the chance to run a museum of her own. Her mother would stay in Rome. “All this had to be given up,” she recalled. From now on, she would be devoting herself to Barr and his museum.