Alfred H. Barr (1902–1981) was the founder and the first director of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and offered a groundbreaking perspective on how a museum could form and develop.
Not only did his innovative approach enable the museum to gather a unique collection of twentieth-century avant-garde art, but it radically transformed the understanding of modernism in the USA, affirming its significance as an art movement.
Sybil Gordon Kantor traces Barr’s biography from his intellectual explorations of the 1920s to the institutional experiments of the 1940s. She shows how, by combining strict formalism and an openness to experiment, Barr created a museum model in which collections, exhibitions, and publications were informed by a single vision.
This is a revised and expanded edition in a new design, with many new illustrations added from the archives of Harvard University and MoMA.
Sybil Gordon Kantor (1927–2014) was an independent American scholar and art historian.
