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

This catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in April 2016 tells how Bauhaus-inspired modern design became woven into the aesthetic fabric of North America owing largely to the efforts of Alfred Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson. Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Johnson, the first MoMA department of architecture head and later an architect himself, were lifelong friends and passionate supporters of Bauhaus design and designers in the 1920s and 1930s. The two were responsible for a series of influential exhibitions that not only brought Bauhaus and contemporary design to a new audience but helped raise architecture, industrial design, and other "lesser arts" to the stature of the fine arts. Essays by scholars including Hanks (curator of the Liliane and David M. Stewart Program for Modern Design and catalog editor) examine the major exhibitions on which Barr and Johnson collaborated, how their own apartments functioned as "laboratories," and other related topics. The descriptive entries provide a wealth of context for the objects from the Stewart Collection and elsewhere that make up the exhibition.