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 2012 award year covers catalogues published between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011.
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. Recipients of this second Barr award were named in 2009 and 2011.
2012 Winner
Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2010) is a “summa” of Maryan 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.
2012 Finalists
The two finalists for the 2012 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award are:
- Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley G. Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2010)
- Elizabeth Morrison and Anne D. Hedeman, Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010)
The jury has also shortlisted one catalogue for the second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections:
- James T. Tice and James G. Harper, Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour (Eugene: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, 2010)
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, as well as the recipents of the second Barr award.
Award Nominations
CAA will begin accepting nominations for the 2013 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award in spring 2012.
