Awards

Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award

The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship was established in 1980, in honor of the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art and a scholar of early-twentieth-century painting. This award is presented to the author or authors of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. Catalogues of public or private collections or significant portions thereof and exhibition catalogues are eligible. The 2013 award year covers catalogues published between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012.

In 2009, CAA established a second Barr award for the author(s) of catalogues produced by smaller museums, libraries, and collections with an annual operating budget of less than $10 million dollars, or by smaller exhibitions within larger museums.

2013 Finalists

The two finalists for the 2013 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award are:

Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds., Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012)
Luke Syson with Larry Keith, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (London: National Gallery, 2011)

The jury has also shortlisted two catalogues for the second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions:

Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, eds., Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012)
Anne T. Woollett, Yvonne Szafran, and Alan Phenix, Drama and Devotion: Heemskerck’s “Ecce Homo” Altarpiece from Warsaw (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012)

The winners of this year’s prize, along with the recipients of eleven other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January and presented during Convocation in New York, in conjunction with the 101st Annual Conference.

2012 Winners

Maryan Ainsworth, ed., Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, the Complete Works (2010)

Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance, the Complete Works (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010) is a “summa” of Maryan W. Ainsworth’s decades-long exploration of the artistic legacy of this place and time. Using a variety of methods—technical analysis, connoisseurship, archival research, biography, iconography, and sustained attention to each object—she and the other authors place Gossart at the center of a rich world of intertwined relationships. Together they reveal the artist’s groundbreaking engagement with Rome and antiquity, his intent study of architecture and sculpture, his carefully crafted experimentation in a variety of media, and his amazing versatility as a painter of religious scenes, mythological subjects, and innovative portraits over a long career. The book is also significant for the insightful way in which it situates Gossart among his contemporaries, including the painters Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, the sculptor Conrad Meit, and the patron and connoisseur Philip of Burgundy.

With The Gernsheim Collection (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Press, 2010), Roy Flukinger has crafted an exceptional catalogue of the Helmut and Alison Gernsheim Collection, one of the earliest and most comprehensive collections of photography in the world. One hundred and twenty-six items are beautifully illustrated and analyzed in readable, absorbing prose that traces the story of the couple’s achievements as sleuths, gatherers, connoisseurs, photographers, devotees, and champions, while at the same time recognizing and examining their (sometimes controversial) role as architects of the study of photography. Contributions by Alison Nordström and Mark Haworth-Booth illuminate the role this collection has played in the history of photography as well as the Gernsheims’ commitment to the medium as a form of fine art. In this way, the book considers the process (in addition to the underlying principles, assumptions, and implications) of canon formulation in an emerging discipline.

Past Winners

CAA gave the first Barr award to Kurt Weitzmann, Margaret English Frazer, et al. in 1981 for Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1979. Many more award-winning catalogues produced at that museum followed, including four of the last eight.

Publications for exhibitions held at many other institutions nationwide have been recognized by CAA for their excellence, including The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art at the Kimbell Art Museum (1988), “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1993), and Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York at the National Museum of American Art (1997).

Read a list of all winners of the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award from 1981 to the present, a list of recipents of the second Barr award, and a list of finalists for both awards from 1996 to the present.

Award Nominations