Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Quotes

• The historical museum has to be very conservative and careful in its choices. The modern museum, on the other hand, has to be audacious, to take chances. It has to consider the probability that it would be wrong in a good many cases and take the consequences later.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Museums, Hands, Choices

  12 Copy quote

• The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Art, Museums, People

  9 Copy quote

• While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Art, Airplane, Innovation

  7 Copy quote

• The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Cezanne, Tradition, Form

  16 Copy quote

• Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Art, Generations, Problem

  7 Copy quote

• Except for the woman, nothing interests the eye of the American man more than the automobile, or seems so important to him as an object of esthetic appreciation.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Appreciation, Eye, Men

  6 Copy quote

• As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Movement, Cubism, Heretic

  25 Copy quote

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