MOMA AND MODERN ART

REPRINTED FROM: MOMA

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1930. The Archives of The Museum of Modern Art, Chart of Modern art

A video about women in MoMA's early history with commentary by Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist.

ALFRED H. BARR, JR., AND THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929, and from the beginning to the present day it has been the foremost museum of modern and contemporary art in the world.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
The Museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was only 27 years old when he took the post. He had previously designed and taught the first modern art course in the United States, at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

The Museum started out in 1929 in a few rented rooms in a midtown Manhattan office building at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. In 1939, just 10 years after the stock market crash of 1929, the Museum was transferred to a new building on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

From the very beginning, Barr wanted multiple departments, so he established the first art museum departments of photography, cinema, architecture, and industrial design.

In 1933, Barr drew his "'Torpedo Diagram of Ideal Permanent Collection" to suggest that the collection moved like a torpedo through time, with its nose representing the present and its tail being the past. The goal was to have most of the collection focus on the early part of the 20th century.

For the cover of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue in 1933, Barr designed his famous diagram charting the "isms" that preceded, coincided with, and followed World War I. The art historian Robert Rosenblum wrote in 1986:

Amazingly, even now ... Cubism and Abstract Art maintains its fundamental authority. ... Barr's text survives to this day in a strangely timeless and undated way, a combination of historical chronicle with an unfailing ability to single out that work of art whose description will make the most salient points. ... This level of distilled excellence is so consistent that, for the past half-century, most scholars have been refining, amplifying, or diluting Mr. Barr's initial presentation of the Gospel of modern art in 1936.

With our class, we will examine many of these "isms" and look at their relationships to each other. Each week, one main artist will be used as a lens to focus our understanding of key concepts.