Full Name: Barr, Margaret Scolari
Other Names:
- Daisy Scolari
- Margaret Scolari Fitzmaurice
- Marga
Date Born: 18 January 1901
Date Died: 30 December 1987
Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy [Rome, Lazio, Italy]
Place Died: New York, NY, USA
Overview
Museum of Modern Art scholar. Scolari was the only child of Virgilio Scolari (d.1916), an Italian antique dealer, and her Irish-Protestant mother, Mary Fitzmaurice, a language teacher. Despite her family’s financial hardship following her father’s early death, Fitzmaurice insisted that Scolari pursue higher education. In 1920, Margaret enrolled in medicine at the university in Rome but later switched to humanities and language studies. She worked on an art history thesis under Adolfo Venturi. Scolari used her connections with the American embassy to be offered a position to teach Italian at Vassar College. She immigrated to the United States in 1925 to teach, leaving her thesis and degree unfinished. While teaching, she received an M.A. in art history from Vassar College in 1927. She immediately enrolled in a graduate program in art history at New York University to extend her visa while commuting between NYC and Poughkeepsie to teach. She met and befriended Henry-Russell Hitchcock at Vassar College. After receiving a Carnegie fellowship to study art history in 1928, she moved to New York and continued her graduate program. In 1929, her friend Agnes Rindge introduced her to Alfred H. Barr Jr. at MoMA’s first exhibition; they were engaged the following year. Soon after, she was appointed to a teaching position at Smith College, later assuming the director role at its Museum of Art. In the same year, she married Alfred Barr holding weddings in New York and Paris.
In 1931, she contributed the first complete English translation of Matisse’s 1908 essay “Notes of a Painter” for the catalogue of the Museum’s exhibition, Henri-Matisse. However, her work received no credit. She also worked as a researcher and translator for Erwin Panofsky when he arrived in the U.S. as a visiting professor at NYU, and they developed a lifelong friendship. In 1932, while attending a Picasso retrospective in Paris she met and spoke with the artist, learning information for her husband’s research on Picasso and their “Campaigns” in Europe. In 1936, she became the first to translate into Italian the catalogue of the Museo Cristiano by the Princeton medievalist Charles Rufus Morey.
The Barr’s had only one daughter, Victoria, born in 1937. After Alfred Barr was dismissed from his role as director of MoMA in 1943, Scolari started teaching art history at the Spence School to bring in income. Starting in the late 1940s, she began receiving payment from MoMA as her work was officially acknowledged under her name, though she was never formally employed by the museum. Her only monograph, Medardo Rosso, was published in 1963. She served as an advisor to Peter Selz, who was mounting a Rosso exhibition the same year at MoMA. In 1980, She retired from Spence. After Alfred Barr’s death in 1981, Scolari and MoMA’s archivist, Rona Roob (1938-2014), undertook the task of organizing his documents and the history of MoMA. With Roob’s support, Scolari wrote and published in 1987 Our Campaigns, a chronology of her work with Barr and her contributions to the field of art history. A few months later, she died of colon cancer.
Scolari’s work was essential in connecting European artists with the US. Traveling with her husband in Europe, her role as translator, interpreter, and assistant helped establish connections with European artists. She played an important goal in persuading Georges Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Breton, and Eluard to participate in MoMA’s Exhibition: Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. During WW II, Scolari assisted artists from Europe to emigrate to the US, which is a work his husband was unable to deal with. Assisted by the Emergency Rescue Committee and journalist Varian Fry, she obtained visa and raised travel money for artists including Duchamp and Mondrian, cultivating the art scene in the New York. However, her wartime work was uncompensated and little known until years later.
Scolari’s work was essential in connecting European artists with the U.S. (Tattersall) While traveling through Europe with her husband, she served as a translator, interpreter, and assistant, helping to establish relationships with key European artists. She played a crucial role in persuading Georges Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, André Breton, and Paul Éluard to participate in MoMA’s 1936 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. After World War II began, Scolari took on the critical task of assisting European artists in emigrating to the U.S., a responsibility her husband “was unable to cope with” (Tattersall). With the support of the Emergency Rescue Committee and journalist Varian Fry (1907-1967), she secured visas and raised travel funds for artists, including Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian, helping to cultivate New York’s modern art scene. Her wartime efforts remained unrecognized until years later.
She was also a friend of the art historians Philip Johnson and Bernard Berenson. Her students include photographer Tina Barney, art historian Joan R. Mertens and curator Elizabeth Easton.
Selected Bibliography
- translated, Barr, Alfred H., Hugnet Georges,and Arp, Jean. Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism: New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1936.
- Medardo Rosso. United States: Museum of Modern Art, 1963.
- “Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Museum of Modern Art: A Biographical Chronicle of the Years 1930-1944.” The New Criterion. 5, (1987): https://newcriterion.com/article/our-campaigns-1930-1944/
- and Rona Roob. “Our Campaigns: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., And the Museum of Modern Art: A Biographical Chronicle of the Years 1930-1944. New York: Foundation for Cultural Review, 1987.
Sources
- Tattersall, Lanka. “Margaret Scolari Barr (1901-1987)”, in Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, 97-121. United States: Museum of Modern Art, 2024.
Archives
Margaret Scolari Barr papers, 1883-1989, bulk 1925-1987 , Museum of Modern Art, NY. https://www.moma.org/research/archives/finding-aids/MargaretScolariBarrp.html
Contributors: Yuhuan Zhang