Visual art
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
1902–1981 · art historian, museum director
Detroit-born art historian who became the first director of New York's Museum of Modern Art and shaped how the world sees modern art.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Died
Salisbury, Connecticut
aged 79- Birth name
- Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr.
- Also known as
- Alfred Barr
- Detroit years
- 1902–1911
- Field
- Visual art
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Barr was born in Detroit in 1902, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and spent his early childhood in the city before the family moved to Baltimore when his father took a new post. He studied art history at Princeton and Harvard and taught at Wellesley College, where he gave one of the first American courses on modern art. In 1929, aged 27, he was chosen as the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There he organized landmark exhibitions, including Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), with its famous flow chart of modern movements, and a 1935 Van Gogh show that helped create the painter's enduring popularity in America. He built the museum into a model of how to collect and explain modern art across painting, photography, film, architecture and design. His Detroit connection is his birth and first years; his career belonged to New York.
Highlights
- Born in Detroit in 1902
- Founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (1929)
- Organized Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) with its famous chart
- His 1935 Van Gogh exhibition was a popular sensation