This course was notable not only for the novelty of its subject-matter but also for its unconventional pedagogy: Barr referred to all nine students in the class as "faculty", making them each responsible for mastering and teaching some of the course content.
For example, on a trip to Cambridge, the class passed over the wealth of Harvard's museums to experience the "exquisite structural virtuosity", in Barr's words, of the Necco candy factory.
[5] In 1929, Barr was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship, which he intended to use to complete the requirements for his PhD by writing a dissertation during the following academic year on modern art and Cubism at New York University.
[2] But greater ambitions obliged him to shelve that intention when Anson Conger Goodyear, acting on the recommendation of Paul J. Sachs, offered Barr the directorship of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art.
Assuming the post in August 1929 aged only twenty-seven, Barr's achievements in it accumulated quickly; the Museum held its first loan exhibition in November, on the Post-Impressionists Vincent Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat.
By the time Barr left MoMA in 1968, modern art would be considered as legitimate an art-historical field of study as earlier eras such as the Renaissance.
[19] In 1936 Barr had drawn the "now famous"[20] diagram, originally published on the dust jacket of the MoMA catalog of the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art.
[21] The vertical (time) axis starts at the top with diverse influences like Japanese prints, synthetism, neo-impressionism, Van Gogh and Sézanne.