New Man at MOMA

When Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was founded 38 years ago, it stood almost alone in the museum field as an institution dedicated wholly to making people see, understand and enjoy strictly modern art. On July 1, MOMA's first director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., 65, who has been its director of collections since 1947, will retire. A year later the current director, Rene d'Harnoncourt, 66, will step down. To replace them, the museum last week announced it had picked Cincinnati-born, Chicago-educated Bates Lowry, 43.

A Renaissance scholar whose Ph.D. was on the Louvre and whose books include a history of Renaissance architecture and a widely used introductory college art text, Lowry at first glance seemed an odd choice for the Modern. But in recent months, Lowry, who is currently head of Brown University's art department, has gained national recognition. Last November, when news of Florence's inundation was spread across the headlines, he and colleagues at Brown got on the telephone, called friends across the U.S., overnight formed the Committee to Rescue Italian Art. Since then CRIA, with Lowry as national executive chairman, has raised $1,750,000 toward restoring the treasures of Florence.

The Modern knew about Lowry, a strapping (6 ft. 3 in.) father of two teenage daughters, long before then. MOMA Curator William Seitz (now at Brandeis) had been impressed by a contemporary-art exhibit, "The Object Makers," that Lowry staged while chairman of the art department at Pomona College from 1959 to 1963. Lowry is frank about what he considers the Modern's primary problem today: "It has suffered from being too successful."

Manhattan supports four contemporary-art museums, plus a score of enterprising galleries--and many of the Modern Museum's spiritual children stage exhibits more modern than its own. All the same, Lowry believes that the Modern is capable of outpacing them all. This will not be done merely by displaying firsts. Bringing a scholar's eye to the contemporary scene, he will rely on the museum's comprehensive collection of paintings, sculpture, films and architectural designs, hopes to use it to make tomorrow's innovators more understandable and enjoyable by placing them in a historical context.

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