It has long been recognized that the career of the late Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was an uncommonly important one. As the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the man most responsible for assembling its incomparable collections and for devising its influential exhibition programs, Barr played a greater role than any other figure in our history in shaping our understanding of the artistic achievements of the modern age. In the institution he created at MOMA, he succeeded in making those achievements an integral part of American cultural life, and in the standards he set for the scholarly study of modern art, he laid the foundations for an intellectual discipline that could hardly be said to have existed before him. It was not only on the cultural life of the public and on the world of scholarship and connoisseurship, moreover, that Barr’s audacious innovations had a far-reaching effect. His work also widened the aesthetic horizons of every generation of American artists—and of artists elsewhere, too—from the 1930’s to the present day. It thus played a creative role in the life of art in his day, and continues to do so today.

It requires a certain sense of history, however, for us to grasp the nature of Barr’s achievement, for much that he initiated is now taken for granted. Sixty years after Barr introduced his undergraduate course in modern art at Wellesley College, there is hardly a college or university in the country