(Q711362)

English

Alfred H. Barr

American art historian and museum director (1902-1981)

  • Alfred Hamilton Barr
  • Alfred Barr
  • Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
  • Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr.

Statements

Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. (English)
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Barr secretly enlisted Valentin as his agent in the Fischer auction, with funds supplied by his trustees. The museum acquired five artworks that day: Kirchner’s Street Scene and Lehmbruck’s Kneeling Woman, both confiscated from the Berlin National Gallery; Klee’s Around the Fish, from the Dresden Gallery; Matisse’s The Blue Window, from the Folkwang Museum in Essen; and Derain’s Valley of the Lot at Vers, from the Cologne Museum. The day after the auction, Barr wrote to a MoMA colleague from Paris: “I am just as glad not to have the museum’s name or my own associated with the auction. . . . I think it very important that our releases on our own German acquisitions should state that [the works] have been purchased from the Buchholz Gallery, New York.”That is exactly what happened. Two months later, MoMA announced that it had purchased the five paintings through Valentin’s gallery, which by then he owned in full, having bought out Buchholz. (He changed the name in 1951 to the Curt Valentin Gallery.) Art publications hailed the acquisition as a repudiation of the Nazi regime and its policies toward so-called degenerate art. (English)
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In 1929 he advised Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to hire one of his students, Alfred H. Barr., jr., to be the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (English)
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Identifiers

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Alfred H. Barr
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