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Margaret Scolari Barr

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Barr in Venice in 1948

Margaret Scolari Barr (1901–1987) was an art historian, art critic, educator, translator, and curator.

Life

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Margaret Scolari Barr was born in 1901 in Rome to the Italian antiquities dealer, Virgilio Scolari and his Irish wife Mary Fitzmaurice Scolari.[1] She attended the University of Rome from 1919 to 1922 before moving to the United States in 1925. She taught Italian at Vassar College until 1929, where she also started her MA in art history in 1927.[2] During this time, she started working at the American embassy in the office of the naval attache (from 1922-24).[3] At Vassar College, she was introduced to the young art historian Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by her colleague Henry-Russell Hitchcock. At this time, she was offered a position at the Smith College Art Museum, but turned it down to move closer to Barr. In 1929, she moved to NYC where she started taking classes at New York University in art history. She married the art historian and curator Alfred Barr on 8 May 1930 in Paris.[4] She and Barr had one daughter, Victoria Barr who is a painter.[5] Scolari Barr died of colon cancer in New York in 1987.[6]

Work

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Scolari Barr taught Italian at Vassar College (1925–29). After moving to New York, she taught art history at the Spence School (1943–73), where she became friends of other art historians like Erwin Panofsky and Bernard Berenson.[1] Throughout her marriage with Barr, she collaborated with him on a number of projects with everything from translations and research, to writing and editing.[7] She was fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and German. She was integral to a number of Barr's projects at his workplace, MoMA, including the 1936–37, exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.[8] She translated the essay in the exhibition's catalogue by George Hugnet.[9]

In 1933, she published a review of the most recent Triennale di Milano in The New York Times.[10] This Triennale was the first to be held it its new building, funded by the Italian Fascist regime.[11] Scolari Barr was allowed into the Triennale early, before its public opening, because of her connections to the Ghiringhelli brothers, the owners of the important Milanese Galleria del Milione.[12] When war came to Europe, Scolari Barr and her husband worked within the Museum of Modern Art to help bring artists being persecuted by the National Socialist regime to safety in the US.[13][14] Their friend, the collector and curator Peggy Guggenheim, also helped bring her soon-to-be-husband Max Ernst to the USA. Guggenheim, Ernst, and the Barrs were close friends in New York.[15]

She continued teaching at the Spence School and researching and writing throughout her life. Scolari Barr was brought on by McGraw-Hill Publishing Company as a translation editor in 1957 (till 1959).[3] She published the first English-language monograph on the Italian modernist sculptor Medardo Rosso in 1963, which was published to coincide with a retrospective of Rosso's work at MoMA.[16] She was very involved in educational avenues, which have supported other women with guided research.[17] The same year as the monograph, she published an article on Rosso and his Dutch collector Etha Fles.[18] In the 1960s, Scolari Barr also lectured on topics of contemporary art at Milton Academy, where her daughter had attended as a child.[19] In 1974, she gave an oral history interview for the Archives of American Art detailing her and her husband's work.[3] In 1978, she added the Forward to an interview between Barr and Jere Abbott for October.[20] Her most comprehensive recounting of her and Barr's work in the inter-war and post-war period came in an article for The New Criterion in 1987.[13] In 2010, her contribution to MoMA was highlighted in the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art.[21][22] In 2015, her work at MoMA was made public in their archives.[23]

References

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  1. ^ a b Kantor, Sybil Gordon (2002). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 14.
  2. ^ "Margaret Scolari Barr Papers in The Museum of Modern Art Archives MargaretScolariBarr". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  3. ^ a b c "Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, 1974 February 22-May 13". www.aaa.si.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  4. ^ Kantor, Sybil Gordon (2002). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 14.
  5. ^ "Barr, Margaret Scolari (1901–1987) | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  6. ^ Brenson, Michael (1987-12-31). "Margaret Scolari Barr, a Teacher And Art Historian, Is Dead at 86". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  7. ^ Brenson, Michael (1987). "Margaret Scolari Barr, a Teacher And Art Historian, Is Dead at 86". The New York Times. p. A24. Retrieved 6 March 2020.
  8. ^ "Margaret Scolari Barr Papersin The Museum of Modern Art Archives MargaretScolariBarr". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  9. ^ Barr, Alfred H. Jr. (1936). Fantastic art, dada, surrealism (PDF). New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
  10. ^ Scolari, Margaret (1933-08-06). "IN THE TRIENNALE, INTERNATIONAL STYLE TRIUMPHS; Important Exhibition of Architecture and the Decorative Arts At Milan Brings Modern Theory and Practice to the Fore". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  11. ^ "Triennale di Milano - Archivi". triennale.org (in Italian). Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  12. ^ Barr, Margaret Scolari (1987). ""Our Campaigns" Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Museum of Modern Art: a biographical chronicle of the years 1930-1944". The New Criterion. Summer: 34.
  13. ^ a b "Our Campaigns: 1930-1944". newcriterion.com. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  14. ^ "MoMA | In Search of MoMA's "Lost" History: Uncovering Efforts to Rescue Artists and Their Patrons". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  15. ^ "Our Campaigns: 1930-1944". newcriterion.com. Retrieved 2020-03-06.
  16. ^ Barr, Margaret Scolari (1963). Medardo Rosso. Museum of Modern Art.
  17. ^ Art, Center for Italian Modern (2016-11-13), Elena Cordova on the Margaret Scolari Barr Papers at the MoMA Archives, retrieved 2021-01-26
  18. ^ BARR, MARGARET SCOLARI (1962). "Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness Etha Fles". Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (NKJ) / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art. 13: 217–251. doi:10.1163/22145966-90000348. ISSN 0169-6726. JSTOR 24705310.
  19. ^ "Oral history interview with Victoria Barr, 1977 January 11-February 18". www.aaa.si.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-22.
  20. ^ Barr, Margaret Scolari; Abbott, Jere (1978). "Foreword". October. 7: 7–9. doi:10.2307/778382. ISSN 0162-2870. JSTOR 778382.
  21. ^ "Modern Women / A Partial History". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  22. ^ "Museum of Modern Art's "Margaret Scolari Barr Papers" – CFSHRC". 16 June 2020. Retrieved 2021-01-26.
  23. ^ "MoMA | The Margaret Scolari Barr Papers: Now Open for Research at MoMA Archives". www.moma.org. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
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