![]() ![]() ![]() The pioneering course in modern art that Barr initiated at Wellesley is said to be the first of its kind in the American academy. Modern art was not yet, of course, an accepted subject for study in the universities. It was a mark of Sachs’s esteem for Barr that he also provided him with the funds he needed for further study in Europe. ![]() Sachs-himself a collector and connoisseur-the now legendary Museum Course gave Barr his first practical training in the aesthetic and administrative aspects of museum work. Barr later attributed his famous 1929 plan for the establishment of the various curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art to Morey’s course.Īfter Princeton, in his graduate studies at Harvard with Paul J. Morey’s teaching methods prompted Barr’s interest in the sources, patterns, chronology, and spread of a style-an approach that he would apply to modern art, first in his teaching modernism at Wellesley in 1926–1927, and then in the very structure of the Museum of Modern Art and its multidepartmental organization. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, “Barr’s interest in history was already piqued… when his Latin teacher, William Serer Rusk, awarded him Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres as a prize.” It was in his sophomore year at Princeton, however, in Charles Rufus Morey’s course in medieval art, that Barr decided on a career in art scholarship. His intellectual history actually began in high school when, as Sybil Gordon Kantor writes in her forthcoming biography, Alfred H. In his own generation, the young Alfred Barr was uncommonly well-prepared to undertake the daunting task that had been offered to him. They were the ideas and judgments of a man who was not yet thirty years old when the museum opened its doors to a wary, uninformed public in the first year of the Wall Street crash. The ideas and the aesthetic judgments that shaped the formation of MOMA in the early decades of its existence were primarily Barr’s. With one exception, moreover-the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921-none was so clearly the creation of a single governing intelligence. ![]() Of the many museums that were founded in the United States in the course of the last century, none has exerted a greater influence on public taste, on American intellectual life, and on the life of art itself than the Museum of Modern Art, which made its debut in New York in 1929 under the directorship of Alfred H. And they should be made accessible to other scholars and intelligible to the man off the street. The mystery of its creation, its history, and the rise and fall of its esthetic, documentary, sentimental, and commercial values, the endless variety of its relationships to the other works of art, its physical condition, the meaning of its subject, the technique of its production, the purpose of the man who made it-all these factors lie behind a work of art, converge upon it, and challenge our powers of analysis and publication. A work of art is an infinitely complex focus of human experience. ![]()
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