Partners In Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson

Organized by the Liliane and David M. Stewart Program for Modern Design, Montréal, in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson is the first exhibition to explore a pivotal development in the evolution of American design: the collaboration between the first director of the Museum of Modern Art Alfred Barr, who taught the first undergraduate course in modern art at Wellesley College in 1926, and Philip Johnson, MoMA’s first curator of architecture. Together these men endeavored to bring modernism to North America, particularly the innovative ideals of rational and functional design developed at the Bauhaus school at Dessau, Germany between the World Wars I and II. Barr and Johnson experimented personally with modernism in their own residences and went on to organize influential exhibitions at MoMA on Modern Architecture, Machine Art, Bauhaus: 1919–1928, and the Useful Objects series that introduced a broader audience to new ways of thinking about domestic space and design in the twentieth century. The exhibition features furniture from Barr’s and Johnson’s apartments, examples of Bauhaus graphic design, as well as an array of objects celebrated for their design in Barr’s and Johnson’s influential exhibitions at MoMA.

Generously supported by the Sandra Cohen Bakalar ‘55 Fund, the Alice Gertrude Spink Art Fund (1963), and Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis.