Art: The Reluctant Tastemaker

In company with Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, Tammany Boss Carmine De Sapio and other worthies, Museum of Modern Art Director Alfred H.

Barr Jr. sat for an Esquire Magazine photograph last summer of New York’s “Decisive Dozen”—tastemakers who “make decisions which affect the lives of at least the articulate members of the national community.” Now he is not so sure how he feels about the honor.

Paying homage to Tastemaker Barr, Esquire gushed that he “commands what could be called a beautiful speaking voice. He constructs sentences of an almost eighteenth-century complexity without pausing to take breath.”

Where to Go? Speaking beautifully about modern art, Barr said that in the last dozen years “we have had a movement, abstract expressionism, which has enjoyed an international reputation and great success here. The vigor and quality of this movement is bound to generate a reaction—but where we are going to go, I am not willing to prophesy. What I see is a new concern with figure, and a movement toward a severe style.” Last week, in sentences of 20th century hedging, Barr was busily trying to shake loose from the implications of his words.

New York Times Art Critic John Canaday, describing Barr as the “most powerful tastemaker in American art today,” called Barr’s statement a “body blow” to abstract expressionism, the impulsive painting of things unrecognizable, hoping for fortuitous results. “There is not a dealer in town, nor a collector, nor yet a painter who hopes to hang in the Museum of Modern Art who doesn’t study each of Mr. Barr’s syllables. If Mr. Barr sees a ‘new concern with figure,’ there is going to be a rush toward the art stores where those little books called ‘How to Draw’ are for sale.”

What to Do? In a reply to Timesman Canaday last week, Tastemaker Barr tried to explain that his “rather garbled remark” had been “eagerly misinterpreted as an obituary. It was not. American abstract expressionism, in its robust middle age, is going strong”—despite “the hostile attitude of the head critics of the leading New York newspapers.” But what caused Barr real pain was his unwanted reputation as the most powerful taste-maker in America. “I am more than embarrassed,” he wrote, “I am dismayed. Any influence I may have is largely dependent upon the institution where I work. Now it is true that the Museum of Modern Art has a few times set out de liberately to be a tastemaker. It did a good deal to accelerate revolutionary changes in American architecture and probably affected the design of American furniture, too, even though unfortunately it failed in its repeated attempts years ago to influence the design of American automobiles. The museum is aware of its power. But what should museums do? Abandon their concern with recent art. . .? In conclusion, may I propose that reluctant ‘tastemakers’ like me and those like you who exaggerate the power of ‘tastemakers’ both ponder Aesop’s fable of two flies who, perched upon the axletree of a chariot, complacently remarked to each other: ‘What a dust we do raise!’ ‘: