Skip to main content

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

March 2023
1min read

Missionary for the Modern

by Alice Goldfarb Marquis; Contemporary Books; 431 pages.

When Alfred Knopf asked Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to write his autobiography in 1963, the usually humorless founding father of the Museum of Modern Art replied that other unfinished projects would “fortify” him against “the folly of autobiography.” “Should senility overtake me,” he assured the publisher, “I will keep Knopf in mind.” Now, eight years after Barr’s prolonged struggle with Alzheimer’s disease ended in death, Alice Goldfarb Marquis has undertaken the task of telling the fascinating life story Barr refused to recount.

As the guiding spirit behind MOMA for nearly forty years, Barr changed the way Americans thought of art, introducing them to the study of architecture, film, photography, and commercial design as legitimate forms of creative expression. His immensely popular shows helped build the reputations of artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso to Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.

Barr’s groundbreaking work brought him into conflict with political leaders such as Harry S. Truman (who told Barr that viewing modern art put him “in almost the same frame of mind as after I have had a nightmare”) and Nikita Khrushchev. Earlier, Barr’s travels took him to Hitler’s Germany, where he sought to rescue artists from the Nazi onslaught, and to Stalin’s Russia, where he warned the movie director Sergei Eisenstein of what he saw as Hollywood’s own form of censorship: “timidity, vulgarity, prudery and … a severe temptation to cheapen … art.”

Barr’s all-consuming passion for his work had its dark side. Although he enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with his wife, Margaret (“Marga”) Scolari-Fitzmaurice, their daughter Victoria received little attention from either of her too-busy parents. On the job Barr became a lightning rod for criticism both of his sloppy managerial style and of his consistent disdain for the work of American, female, and minority artists.

In her narrative Marquis makes much of Barr’s strict Protestant upbringing and family legacy of theological duty. Casting Barr in the role of a proselytizing prophet, she reveals him as both a visionary and a zealot. His pulpit was the Museum of Modern Art, and under his authority it became “a center for all that was new and provocative in the visual arts, a missionary chapel proclaiming the gospel of Modernism, loudly and persistently.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "July/August 1989"

Authored by: The Editors

John Philip Sousa and his seventyfive-piece band were brought to town to celebrate the building’s opening.

Authored by: The Editors

James Madison and the Republican Legacy

Authored by: The Editors

Missionary for the Modern

Authored by: The Editors

Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876–1986

Authored by: The Editors

A Biography

Authored by: Garry Wills

When the French Revolution broke out two hundred years ago this month, Americans greeted it enthusiastically. After all, without the French we could never have become free. But the cheers faded as the brutality of the convulsion emerged—and we saw we were still only a feeble newborn facing a giant, intimidating world power.

Authored by: The Editors

The ubiquitous legacy of America’s favorite Frenchman

Authored by: John Kobler

In the years between the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and the First World War, the Divine Sarah was, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, the single most compelling embodiment of the French Republic

Authored by: Mark Jenkins

Remember the excitement of the 1924 Olympics in Chariots of Fire? That was nothing compared with what the U.S. rugby team did to the French at those games.

Authored by: Albert B. Stephenson

The Tin Lizzie carried us into the twentieth century, but she gave us a hell of a shaking along the way. Now a veteran driver tells what everybody knew and nobody bothered to write down.

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.