“Partnership in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson,” at the Grey Art Gallery in New York, is the story of two men and a whole country. The men are men of the Museum of Modern Art － the first museum with a curatorial department dedicated to architecture and design, which preached the gospel of the International Style both in New York and via touring exhibitions.The country is the United States － to which they imported, wholesale, a European industrial aesthetic meant to wash away Prairie Style organicism and Art Deco ornament.
That they succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination is proved by a thousand StreetEasy listings, promising “contemporary” apartments with furnishings nearly a century old. If you're reading this while seated on a simple, unadorned sofa or chair, these are the men you should thank.
“Partners in Design” plots Barr’s and Johnson’s infatuation with European （principally German） modern design, their advocacy of it in America, their support of exiled Bauhaus designers, and their influence on postwar industrial design and museum programming. The show initially appeared at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, though in New York it has been shrunk to apartment size. But the objects assembled － lounge chairs and side tables, steak knives and chrome toasters － are unfailingly seductive, and, for better or worse, they still look as a la mode as they were in Herbert Hoover’s day.
They were just kids, at the origin. Barr was 27, teaching the nation’s first college course on modern art at Wellesley, when he got the call to become MoMA’s first director in the summer of 1929. Unlike many art historians of the period, he had an abiding interest in architecture and design. He gobbled up the publications of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius’s pioneering design school, and in 1928 he made his pilgrimage to Dessau, Germany, where he met Gropius, Paul Klee and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy － and also slavered over their apartment’s spare, industrial furnishings.
The museum Barr envisioned would, like the Bauhaus, have multiple departments for artistic disciplines. To direct the pioneering architecture and design division, he picked his friend Philip Johnson, then 23 and with yet no architectural training, whom he sent off to Europe with a list of modern buildings to see. The Bauhaus was top of the list, and Johnson, too, fell hard for Gropius’s unadorned facades and industrial fenestration. “I regard it as the most beautiful building we have seen, of the larger than house variety,” Johnson wrote to Barr in October 1929. A model for the Bauhaus is at theGrey, along with publications designed by Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. Other buildings Johnson saw on his European trips included Moscow apartment blocks and the functionalist pavilions and restaurants of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, modernism’s breakthrough in Sweden.
One of the Museum of Modern Art's most important early exhibitions, presented in1932, was "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," for which Jonson and his fellow curator Henry-Russell HItchcock showcased mostly European buildings, with a heavy emphasis on rectiliner forms; surfaces stripped of decoration; and glass and steel, with reinforced concrete construction. Modern apartment blocks in Germany were constrasted with slum photography from the Lower East Side of New York. Johnson wanted one model at least for each of the architects included: Le Corbusier submitted one of his Villa Savoye, in the suburbs of Paris, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was represented by the Villa Tugendhat, in Brno. "Modern Architecture" was the last show staged in MoMA's original home in the chateau-like Heckscher Building at 730 Fifth Avenue - a dedicated building was still years away - and would eventually tour across America, accompanied by a catalog in which Hitchcock and Johnson came up with a new brand: the International Style.
