Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981), known as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
American art historian and administrator who played an enormously important and controversial role in establishing an intellectual and institutional framework for the study and appreciation of modern art. He was born in Detroit, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and studied art and archaeology at Princeton University, graduating in 1922 and taking an MA degree the following year. After several months travelling in Europe, he returned to the USA and taught art history in several leading institutions including Wellesley College, where he taught the first course at an American college devoted solely to 20th-century art. In 1929 he was appointed director of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art.
An abstract expressionist, he made his mark with large black-and-white paintings featuring architectonic forms constructed from broad, slashing lines. Swaths of black paint, sometimes applied with a housepainter’s brush, are held in tension with intervening white areas, also vigorously brushed, so that his compositions avoid figure-ground relationships in favor of a flat surface. Decentralized compositions suggest space continuing beyond the edge of the canvas, creating with very different means the effect of boundlessness seen also in Jackson Pollock‘s all-over paintings. The bleakness and raw power of Kline’s paintings suggest the eastern Pennsylvania industrial landscape that framed his early life. A number of titles alluding to the region confirm the emotional and visual power it held for him. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Franz Rowe Kline was educated after his father’s death in 1917 at Philadelphia’s Girard College, a residential free school for orphan boys. From 1925 he lived with his remarried mother in Lehighton until 1931, when he began four years of study at Boston University, followed in 1937–38 by additional training in London. Upon his return he settled permanently in New York. Through most of the 1940s he painted representational works, mostly figure studies and landscapes, which generally feature simplified massing of forms and distinct value contrasts. Stimulated by the early development of abstract expressionism and particularly by his friendship with Willem de Kooning, in the late 1940s Kline pushed his images toward abstraction. While viewing slides of his own sketches, he suddenly grasped the abstract potential of greatly magnified line. Introduced to the public in 1950 at his first New York gallery show, his signature style won Kline a distinctive place among the best known action painters.
