On the 70th Anniversary of Cubism and Abstract Art: Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s Legacy
This paper was originally written in 2006 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the passing of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the 70th anniversary of the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the passing of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. coincides with the seventieth anniversary of his seminal exhibition and catalog Cubism and Abstract Art [1] These two anniversaries taken together are a powerful reminder that “modern art” is definitely no longer contemporary art or, in Barr’s words, “art in our times”. [2] These anniversaries further invite a retrospective look at Alfred Barr’s contribution to the shaping of the understanding and presentation of modernism and its context in contemporary museum practices, as well its broader reception by society at large.
The Contents of a Modern Museum
In less than a decade, starting in 1929 with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Alfred H. Barr was able to establish not merely a museum dedicated to modern art, but a canon of modernism that was coherent to a broad general public, not only to an art world elite. This canon eventually became pervasive in museums throughout the country and the world; so pervasive in fact, that sometimes how profound its development was is all but forgotten. Inclusion of architecture, industrial design, typography, photography and film in museums devoted to the art of the twentieth century is now so orthodox that their absence would today seem like a radical statement. Yet integration of these departments at MoMA was quite new when Barr introduced them.
Furthermore, Barr left out certain disciplines of art and design; a clear example of this is the exclusion from MoMA of fashion. To this day, despite its lavish funding, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is relegated to the basement and critics and the museum going public alike often question the curatorial judgment of this department.[3] When considered analytically, this is not entirely logical. For in many ways, including fashion is far less problematic than including architecture, which Barr was among the first to favor. Clothing, like furniture and industrial design can be displayed in a museum; architecture cannot be. Instead surrogates for architecture are displayed: drawings, photographs and models. Seeing these items in a museum context is really quite odd, though we are so used to it that we rarely question it. Plans, sections and elevations are really merely coded instructions, like a musical score, not the actual work of an architect, which is of course, a building. Looking at such material without professional expertise can be confusing. Yet we are now so used to this that many art lovers have learned to read architectural drawings. Further, one could argue, such museum practices has led to the invention of the profession of the “paper architect”; could Zaha Hadid or Peter Eisenman really have such successful careers without such ideas of architectural drawings as works of art?
This discussion of architecture and fashion in the museum is not raised to challenge Barr’s decision. It is merely raised to remind us that his decisions were not as obvious as they might seem today. Barr’s modernism was a modernism of gravitas; this gravitas is perhaps the through-line that connects all of the artists and movements represented in the famous diagram Barr published on the dust-jacket of Cubism and Abstract Art. In this context it is not hard to leave out Coco Chanel. Such inclusions and exclusions also belie what Barr saw as being the important and representative works of the art of his times. Fashion is an arena which is always engaged in change, as suggested even by the word’s two definitions; for this reason, perhaps a term like avant-garde fashion is even redundant. The exclusion of fashion from the museum’s program is thus an important element in defining a very important aspect of Barr’s view of pre-World War II modernism.
The Museum as Laboratory
Barr conceived the museum as a laboratory “The Museum of Modern Art is a laboratory: in its experiments the public is invited to participate.” [4] He stated that some works and artists that appeared important today might not seem so in the not too distant future. He articulated this view particularly clearly when dealing with what he called the younger generation. Looking at Cubism and Abstract Art, however, it would seem that his experiments had very positive results. Very few of the artists there represented have been removed from the laboratory. The same can be said for the work in his companion exhibition and catalog Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, also of 1936.[5] Barr’s laboratory was not intended merely for curatorial experiments however; the public were also participants. Barr repeatedly challenged museum-goers to deal with difficult works of art.
His catalogs and exhibitions were truly educational, designed to explain and, to some extent, decode the very complex ideas underlying the artistic movements of the early twentieth century. For this reason he has been labeled an “evangelist” for modern art.[6] But he was more than this, for he did not want viewers to embrace modernism through a sort of “justification through faith alone” as the religious analogy implies. Rather Barr strove to rationally explain the sophisticated arguments contained in both the rational and irrational strains of modern art through a rigorous study of form, history and their interrelations. The subject of experimentation in Barr’s laboratory was as much the museum-going public as it was the works of art on exhibit. He felt that if the public open-mindedly experimented with modern art, they could gain at least some level of understanding and appreciation of even the most complex abstract works.
The Narrative of Modern Art
As illustrated by the classic dust-jacket of Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr conceived of the history of abstract art as a roughly progressive chronology of movements linked together and effected by outside influences (“negro” sculpture, Japanese prints) unfolding over time. Like the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, this begins in the 1890s and runs through (though does not end) with the present. While lacking a visual aid such as this diagram, Barr proceeds along similar lines in presenting the development of modern figurative (or at least non-abstract) art in the companion catalog and exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. What separates Barr’s narrative from mere chronology is the fact that it is both quantitative and qualitative. Furthermore, the qualitative aspects are explained in a way that nearly eliminates at the same time it identifies the author’s prejudice.
A clear case in point is provided by Barr’s treatment of the very difficult subject of the Italian Futurists. Barr clearly articulates the early dates of the first Futurist manifestos (1909 for the movement, 1910 for Futurist painting), their investigation of the portrayal of movement (Boccioni, 1912) before Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of Armory Show fame, and Marinetti’s inclusion in the first Dada exhibition. While the warmongering, proto-Fascist rhetoric of the Futurists was as disturbing then as it is now, it was an important movement in the development of both abstract art and in the intellectual positioning of art in society by artists. Barr makes very clear that the development of modernism at this time was not a simple battle between a leftist avant-garde and a reactionary right. Barr takes seriously the theoretical writings of the Futurists and investigates their often less satisfactory realizations in practice. This is clearly articulated in his discussion of “lines of force” (linee di forza); yet this interest in kinetic energy first shown by the Italian Futurists is an extremely important contribution to the history of twentieth century art.
The above mentioned information Barr provides is factual and quantitative. Within this framework he is then able to make qualitative judgments concerning the relative success of the Futurist contribution. Here he can claim without ambiguity that Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is more successful a work than the earlier Futurist attempts at addressing the problems of motion and time. Likewise he can seriously address what the French Purists tried to achieve in painting and go on, qualitatively to state that the only substantial contribution to come out of their efforts was the tangent of the architecture of Le Corbusier.
Alfred Barr is clearly among the most successful of art historians in his ability to synthesize history, theory and what can only be termed connoisseurship. Indeed, in the latter category few of his choices are ever seriously questioned. However, his ability to argue for the historical and theoretical importance of lesser work is what makes his narrative truly educational and useful; it is not merely the greatest hits of modern art, but an analysis of the course of modernism. He is able to articulate that important thoughts that lead to dead-ends in the works of specific artists went on to inform the successes of others. Further, in purely aesthetic terms, there is little separating movements of the left from movements of the right (at least outside of Nazi Germany) before the Second World War. The language of modernism and abstraction was far too sophisticated to limit the socio-political compositions within it. Indeed, only a very close analysis of an artist and his or her work can lead to an understanding of such underlying themes; they are not to be found in the provenance of such notions as abstraction versus figuration or geometric versus non-geometric composition.
While contemporary critical theory might challenge the linear progression of the famous diagram, the diagram itself hints at the sophistication of the relationships under investigation and reading the analysis within the two 1936 catalogs shows a much deeper understanding of ambiguity and cross-pollination than could possibly be illustrated following another graphic representation. Doubtless a bubble diagram following Venn’s model of set theory might be less controversial; but it is the force of the self-conscious arrows, “linee di forza”, that permeate the artists’ own theory and work of the time which give this narrative meaning.
In the introduction to Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr states that he is offering little which is new; this is true: what he presents is synthesis. The narrative he proposes comes largely from the criticism and theory of the very art movements he investigates; yet he is able to put all of these cacophonous ideas into coherent and resonant whole. At a time when many art historians strove to reveal the hidden sophistication of such seemingly simple notions as iconography in old master painting, Barr was able to achieve the much more difficult goal of revealing to a mass audience a relatively coherent and understandable narrative of the seemingly exceedingly complex and sophisticated world of modern abstract and fantastic art.
Barr’s Legacy in Contemporary Museum Practices
Twenty-five years after Barr’s death and seventy since the exhibitions Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism much has changed in the exhibition and discussion of twentieth century modernism. Since Barr’s passing in 1981 seemingly countless museums have been built, renovated or re-hung. Some of these museums follow Barr’s philosophies, some challenge them, but none are unaffected by them. Perhaps the greatest threat to the legacy of Alfred Barr in contemporary museum practice is endemic to our times at the beginning of the twenty-first century; this is the model of the entertainment industry becoming the all-pervasive template grafted onto virtually all enterprises.
Where modern art and Barr’s presentation of it sought to address the pressing issues of its times, “post-modern” art all too often merely addresses itself and the micro-culture from which it comes, while its display is designed to take the viewer into yet another “alternative reality”. This problem is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that most museums now feel the need to separate the “education” department from the “curatorial” department. One of the strengths of Barr’s practice was the fact that these two functions, the educational and the curatorial, were one and the same. The thrust of an exhibition or installation was gleaned from looking at works of art and reading relatively small amounts of text; it was not necessary to listen to an audio presentation as you looked, nor was it necessary to watch a film before looking.
Emulation of the entertainment industry begins with museum buildings that, in the desire towards spectacle, vie with the art contained within their walls. While this tradition surely goes back at least to 1956 with the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the inexplicable need for large void spaces in museums desperate for gallery space has more recently become ubiquitous. Recent examples of this tendency can be seen in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the recent expansion of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This article does not wish to engage in a discussion of the architectural merits of these important works of contemporary architecture by Mario Botta, Frank Gehry and Yoshio Taniguchi respectively. Rather a criticism of the programs which led to such design decisions based on large central voids is here offered. All these spaces are fundamentally theatrical, at best in many ways like updated versions of the vestibule of the Opera Garnier in Paris; at worst they can recall the theatrical corporate spaces of shopping malls and airports. They demand that the museumgoer interact with them. This already begins to derail Barr’s notion of the museum as laboratory. Such staging contextualizes works of art as much as their arrangement within a gallery; it further limits a curator’s freedom and runs the danger of reducing works of art to architectural decoration.
Yet not all recent museums have gone this route. One very notable exception is the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, designed by Renzo Piano and built between 1983 and 1986. Here a very intimate and human-scaled modernist building dissolves externally into its suburban Houston context, while internally it beautifully subordinates itself to the works of art on exhibition in its galleries. Further, the Menil collection is in many ways a living tribute to Alfred Barr’s narrative of modern art. Not only does it largely preserve the organization and progression of modern art described by Barr in 1936, but it further incorporates many of the historical pre-modern and non-western works of art that Barr included in his exhibitions, but did not acquire for the Museum of Modern Art. Chief among these works is the excellent collection of African art; this is complimented by antiquities and medieval art that also can be seen as precedents for the modern or which were documented by modernists as being influences and inspirations; they include Cycladic idols and medieval icons.
The suburban context of the Menil Collection further allows for expansion and the inclusion of contemporary art in a very satisfactory way: the actual building of separate structure in walking distance of the main collection. In addition to the renowned Rothko Chapel, pavilions were built housing the work of Cy Twombly and Dan Flavin. In all these cases, it is the work which is central in a beautiful, but non-theatrical or competing context. The main building provides very little limitations on the curators as is evidenced by the radically different installations that have been mounted within it. For this author, what is most compelling about the Menil Collection is the fact that visiting it today is perhaps the closest one can come to visiting Alfred Barr’s two exhibitions of 1936. Indeed, it does in many ways feel like a visit to a laboratory and inside this laboratory the viewer can interact very intimately with a collection of disparate works that is organized in a way which is very coherent. Seventy years after Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, such guided looking at excellent representative modernist works still excites in the mind of a viewer the debates that consumed art and society in the period between the wars through the end of the twentieth century.
It is perhaps the case that the Menil Collection is an exception that proves a rule: a museum that pitches its narrative on the level that Alfred Barr once insisted on cannot make money in the twenty-first century world of attention deficit disorder. The Menil Collection is free; its bookstore is across the street in an old bungalow, and there is no café. Its generous endowment permits it to follow its own muse. The huge theatrical museum-cum-entertainment centers demanded by today’s free market need to bring in large sums of money to go on. Unfortunately, going on requires staying up to date which requires more entertainment and theatricality, which requires more money and creates a vicious circle. Within such a context compromises must be made. Novelty and change are required to keep people coming back, and often times this leads to re-hanging galleries and changing narratives in ways which lack the depth of vision, knowledge, subtly and understanding that was present in Barr’s laboratory.
Concluding Thoughts
What is hardest to reconcile with an entertainment oriented museology is the fact that, as Barr said, modern art can be difficult and puzzling. It requires an effort from the viewer and a desire to struggle with its substance. Architectural theater and crowd noise spilling in from atria do little to encourage the difficult concentration and contemplation necessary to appreciate difficult works. Whatever narrative is to be seriously explored, the earnestness of Barr’s program is necessary. Whether one wants to continue Barr’s program or to challenge it, something of the seriousness and thoughtfulness of the period of the art’s creation must be preserved in the spaces created for its contemplation. While today Cezanne, Picasso, Dali and Duchamp are perhaps better known names than Ingres or Corot, their work is no easier for the uninitiated to understand now than it was seventy years ago. Understanding must come from knowledge deeper than mere recognition.
Too much time is spent today flattering the knowledge of the informed or giving blockbuster retrospectives of accepted great masters to the uninformed. What makes Barr’s contribution so significant was his ability to educate; to make complex works accessible to a broad public and to make that public ask interesting questions and address serious works of art in a serious, thoughtful manner. Few would argue with the works of art that Barr helped to bring forward. What can be debated is how these works should be addressed and in what contexts. After seventy years Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s positions on these issues are still among the most compelling.
