Art: Beautiful Doings

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Thus the Museum of Modern Art moved from a Center to a citadel. In its own handsome house it became one of the most completely visible institutions in the U. S. Ten years of work — and the intelligent use of wealth—had given it a national reputation, national responsibilities. Liberal Ladies. For years after Manhattan's huge Armory Show of Post-Impressionism in 1913 the "modern art" controversy remained, to the public at large, barbaric and obscure. During those years two rich and modest women, Nelson Rockefeller's mother and her friend, the late Lillie Plummer Bliss, quietly bought whatever modern works they enjoyed, quietly deplored the fact that the art of living men received little or no institutional support in Manhattan. In the late spring of 1929 they and one or two other liberal ladies laid plans for a new museum. To head their organizing committee they chose A. Conger Goodyear, a solid, sensitive industrialist (lumber) with practical experience as a trustee of Buffalo's Albright Art Gallery. Mr. Goodyear knew a number of good men to have on the board of trustees, among them Harvard's eminent scholar and mentor of curators, Professor Paul Joseph Sachs. As Professor Sachs returned from a trip abroad in June 1929, Mr. Goodyear shook his hand and asked him to name the ablest candidate available for the directorship of a modern museum. He named Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr.

Charioteer. Alfred Barr was then 27, an associate professor of fine arts at Wellesley. Born in Detroit, brought up in Baltimore, son of a Presbyterian minister who had a taste for medieval art, he had majored in science until his last year at Princeton, intending to become a paleontologist. This training served him well when he came to deal with the data of Dada. After graduate work in art and archeology, he taught at Vassar, Harvard, Princeton, and launched at Wellesley in 1926 an ambitious course in modern art. It involved "driving a seven-or eight-wheeled chariot," handling not only modern sculpture and painting but architecture, industrial art, cinema, photography and whatever music and literature came in handy. Its purpose: "to equip people to face contemporary civilization." This course led Professor Sachs to recommend him to Mr. Goodyear. It was the subject matter of this course, in a new incarnation, which visitors last week saw displayed in the Museum of Modern Art.

Attempts to treat the diversity of contemporary arts had been made before at the Bauhaus in Germany, but they were fancy business in America in 1929. No zealot, Director Barr concentrated on paintings, the main interest of such trustees as Samuel A. Lewisohn and Stephen C. Clark, and bided his time. He got a secretary and five small exhibition rooms in a Fifth Avenue office building. The trustees met for the first time in October, armed with pledges for $200,000. In November the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors with an exhibition of Lillie Bliss's fine Cezannes and other first-rate French paintings borrowed by President Goodyear in Europe. Reporters discovered young, lean, black-haired Mr. Barr looking tired, a description which it has been safe to apply ever since. The way people piled in, it might have been Madison Square Garden.