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.

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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.

In 1556 Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89), patron of Bembo and Vasari, commissioned Giacomo Vignola to build a villa at Caprarola, 55 kilometres (35 miles) north of Rome; the building was erected on the foundations of an earlier villa begun by Antonio Sangallo the Younger. The villa was finished in 1583, and is widely considered to be the finest in Italy. Villa Farnese is built on the scale of a palace, and so is sometimes called Palazzo Farnese; it is sometimes confused with the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, which was built by Sangallo for an earlier Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (later Pope Paul III).

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Painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, and theater artist. His declared intention to “act” in the “gap” between art and life, as he put it in 1959, succinctly characterized his contribution to art history. In the 1950s he broadened abstract expressionism to include non-art elements. His recognition of the aesthetic potential of ordinary objects stimulated the development of pop art, while his interest in incorporating in the art object signs of its own making opened the way for process art. Other aspects of his work resonated in minimal, conceptual, and performance art. However, his multifarious and inclusive approach always remained beyond the reach of any single art movement. He also facilitated the use of photography as an unremarked component of fine art and fostered acceptance of hybrid genres of all sorts. Over time, he increasingly became a sort of reporter, witnessing and assembling representations of the newsworthy events and ordinary minutiae of his time. As a generator of ideas, he numbered among indispensable figures of late twentieth-century art.

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Painter, sculptor, and printmaker. An abstract expressionist who set precedents for color field painting, he is known for enormous solid-color canvases broken only by one or more stripes or “zips,” as he preferred to call them. Like other abstract expressionists, he accepted art as a calling of high seriousness, inherently concerned with existential truths and mystical insights. Nevertheless, the work appealed to younger artists who generally relinquished metaphysics in favor of the reduced expectations of minimalism. Although active in abstract expressionist circles as a theorist and writer during the 1940s, Newman did not have his first one-person show until 1950 and did not attract much interest in his work, even among artists, until the 1960s. A lifelong New Yorker, Newman was given the first name of Baruch, which his parents later Americanized. Everybody called him Barney. Although he began his art studies at the Art Students League in 1922, during his final year of high school, he did not launch a professional art career until more than two decades later. He continued taking drawing classes while attending the City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1927. He then joined a family business, expecting to leave after two or three years to follow his interest in art. However, the Depression dashed those plans, and Newman remained with the firm until 1937. From 1931 until 1947 he also worked as a substitute art teacher in the public schools. In the 1930s, he dabbled in politics, revealing an anarchistic passion for social justice that he never relinquished. He painted off and on in his spare time but later destroyed virtually everything he had done. In the early 1940s he became so interested in botany and ornithology that he studied during the summers of 1940 and 1941 at an Audubon Society camp in Maine and at Cornell University, respectively.

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One of the pivotal figures in early sixteenth-century German art, Cranach the Elder was the Reformation artist par excellence. A close friend and follower of Martin Luther (they were godfathers to one another’s children), Cranach collaborated with Luther in producing numerous single-sheet woodcuts and book illustrations that were crucial for the spread of the new evangelical theology in the early years of the Reformation in Germany. The “Passional Christi et Antichristi” (Wittenberg, 1521), for example, contrasts the holy life of Christ with the decadent life of the pope and the venal customs of the Curia Romana in thirteen antithetical pairs of woodcuts, with brief texts from the Bible and papal decretals composed by Philipp Melanchthon and Johann Schwertfeger. The epilogue was perhaps written by Luther himself. In 1529 Cranach created the quintessential new Reformation image, the “Allegory of Law and Grace,” contrasting mankind’s damnation under the law of Moses with his hope of salvation under the New Testament’s offer of grace in Luther’s interpretation. The allegory was typically produced both as a woodcut (London, British Museum) and as a panel painting (Gotha, Schloßmuseum) and was often copied. Portraits by Cranach and his son, Lucas the Younger, of Luther (Weimar, Schloßmuseum), Melanchthon (Frankfurt am Main, Städel), and the other reformers (Toledo Museum of Art), as well as the many copies and variants made from them by workshop assistants, have determined our perception of the reformers to the present day.

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The historiography of art history has been a potent theme in the discourses of the
discipline of the last thirty years. And the approaches and methods in the study of
the visual are probably more varied, and more vigorously debated, than in any
other area of historical enquiry. This is so much so that the interest in the practice
and history of the history of art history has at times appeared to be equal to
object-based study and it is arguable that this now forms part of the archive of the
discipline. There is of course no doubt that since the inception of art history as a
field of academic study, works of art have been ‘read’ in a variety of ways. These
different modes of description and interpretation inscribe meaning in to art and
it is here that art and its history are perhaps most intricately linked.
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Iconoclasm a religious movement of the 8th and 9th C. that denied the holiness of Icons and rejected icon veneration. Clerical opposition to the artistic depiction of sacred personages had its roots in late antiquity. In the 4th C. Eusebios of Caesarea, evidently drawing on the christology of Origen, denied the possibility of artistically delineating Christ’s image. There was also an Iconoclast movement in 7th-C. Armenia . In the early 8th C. several bishops in Asia Minor, notably Constantine of Nakoleia and Thomas of Claudiopolis, condemned the veneration of images, citing traditional biblical prohibitions against idolatry. Their views became a movement when Emp. Leo III began to support their position publicly in 726. His order to remove an icon of Christ from the Chalke gate caused a riot. In 730 Leo summoned a silention that forced Patr. Germanos I to resign and issued an edict commanding the destruction of icons of the saints. Persecutions under Leo appear to have been limited to instances of destroying church decorations, portable icons, and altar furnishings; there is no solid evidence of martyrdom.

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