“Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson” Exhibition

“Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson” Exhibition

Grey Art Gallery

This event has ended.

New York University’s Grey Art Gallery presents the first exhibition to focus on the groundbreaking collaboration between Alfred Barr, the Museum of Modern Art’s first director, and Philip Johnson, its first curator of architecture. Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson illuminates the roles played by these two pioneers of international modernism in promoting design and expanding its study to encompass quotidian objects. Their revolutionary vision inspired generations of museum professionals to encourage visitors to look at everything around them, not only paintings and sculpture, but also the products of everyday life.

The exhibition features some seventy objects—including furniture, decorative arts, textiles, industrial products, exhibition catalogues, and ephemera—which range from icons of modern design to rarely exhibited items. In short, Partners in Design explores the Bauhaus-inspired vision cultivated at MoMA shortly after its opening in 1929 and examines the museum’s peerless efforts in the 1930s and ’40s to promote a radical new aesthetic within modern American material culture.

[Image: Donald Deskey, Dining Table and Four Chairs, designed c. 1930. Chromium-plated tubular steel, plastic laminate, upholstery, table: 28 1/3 x 60 x 30 in. (71.8 x 152.5 x 76.2 cm); chairs: 32 x 16 x 21 2/5 in. (81.4 x 40.6 x 54.4 cm) (each) Produced by Ypsilanti Reed Furniture Co., Ionia, Michigan The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of Victoria Barr from the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr Jr., D88.139.1–5. Photograph by Denis Farley]

Media

• Architecture
• Furniture

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