MOMA's "Pope"

Alfred Barr Jr.: 1902-1981

When Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. became the first director of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art in 1929, he was also its sole employee. The museum was little more than an idea in the minds of its founders. Barr, a Presbyterian minister's son from Detroit, was only 27, a fastidious but boldly original scholar who was teaching the nation's first college course (at Wellesley) on modern art. Although he was ridiculed for his conviction that the art of the day belonged in a museum, he assiduously acquired Picassos, Matisses and Monets until MOMA had the finest collection of 20th century art in the world. Within a decade his enterprise and curatorial skills had established him as one of modernism's most innovative and influential taste makers. It was a status that he retained after his retirement in 1967 and that seemed secure when he died on Aug. 15 at age 79.

Despite his shy demeanor, Barr's near dictatorial power led museum colleagues to call him "the Pope" and caused him to be described as "a man who could make enemies without moving a single muscle of his face." He used his position to campaign tirelessly against the hostility of laymen who condemned modern art after "ten seconds of casual, prejudiced study." The intellectual possibilities of art interested him as much as the aesthetic qualities. He is said to have once rejected a canvas by saying, "It's too pretty; I don't trust it." His insistence on creating departments at MOMA for architecture, film, photography, and commercial and industrial design transformed the traditional structure and function of a museum. He wanted, he said, to "show New York the best of modern architecture, posters, chairs and movies, and attack the complacency with which our successful designers contemplated their modernistic skyscrapers, pompous super-films, banal billboards, and the cynical promotion of artificial obsolescence."

An inspired showman, Barr masterminded hundreds of exhibitions that rarely failed to create an uproar. The avant-garde sculpture he imported for a 1936 show so bewildered U.S. Customs officials that they refused to recognize it as art and tried to levy heavy duties. His decision to display such objects as an oval wheel and a fur-lined teacup irked the museum's trustees, and one show devoted entirely to an elaborate shoeshine stand crafted by little-known Primitive Artist Joe Milone nearly got him fired. But he also presented landmark shows on surrealism, Dada, Bauhaus architecture, machine design and artists from Edward Hopper to Claes Oldenburg. In the process, he enlarged the public's conception of what art is. MOMA, Barr once said, was built on the belief that the art of our time "should belong to us, not merely to the future."

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