Lady in the Dark, by Robert Sitton

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Portrait of Iris Barry by Sasha (1929).  (Courtesy of Getty Images)

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n the first of August 1935, Iris Barry addressed a glittering crowd assembled at Pickfair, the Hollywood mansion of cinema megastars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, inviting their involvement in establishing a film library at the Museum of Modern Art. Pickford had been a movie star even before her name appeared in credits, when the plucky, curltopped character she portrayed was known simply as “Little Mary.” Fairbanks was the handsome, kinetic star of the original Robin Hood and Thief of Baghdad movies. They accepted an offer to host a dinner party on behalf of John Hay Whitney, board chairman of the new film library and the man who introduced Technicolor to Hollywood. The guest list included illustrious figures from in front of and behind the camera, among them Charlie Chaplin, whose Little Tramp character was known the world over; Mack Sennett, creator of slapstick comedies that set an industry standard for zaniness; Lewis Milestone, director of All Quiet on the Western Front; Walter Wanger, the producer whose films had launched the careers of the Marx Brothers and Greta Garbo; and the cartoonist Walt Disney.

After dinner Whitney introduced the new director of the film library, 27-yearold John E. Abbott, Iris Barry’s husband. Abbott was a meticulous man whose Wall Street brokerage experience impressed the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. He looked the part of the Wall Street banker, tall and tuxedoed with slicked-back hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He spoke briefly about the drawbacks of leaving film preservation up to the producing companies. Why not turn your valued images over to a museum equipped to take care of them? he asked. Why not circulate your films to new audiences at colleges and universities? To those in attendance whose reputations had been made in more mundane circumstances—often in the flea-pit cinemas of the urban poor—the Museum of Modern Art seemed a step up indeed.

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When Abbott turned the podium over to his wife, the film library’s new curator, few in the crowd could have known that the speaker was an established writer whose poems had appeared in the pages of Poetry and other prestigious magazines, attracting the attention of Ezra Pound and luminaries of the post–World War I British avant-garde. They did not know she had lived in Bloomsbury among artists and writers such as T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford, or that she was the mother of two children born out of wedlock with the eccentric Mr. Lewis. They did not know of her pioneering work as a film critic for the Spectator, or that she cofounded the influential London Film Society in 1925.

The crowd at Pickfair did not know these things because polite society did not inquire about them. Women were not expected to be powerful or to lead influential professional lives, and matters of maternity were considered strictly personal. Barry was skilled at keeping her past to herself and minding her appearance. With her clipped British accent and sensible attire, she easily could have passed for an Oxford graduate from the upper social echelons. Who would have guessed she was a convent-school dropout born in a farming outpost of Birmingham, daughter of the noted Madame Pandora, gypsy seer from the Isle of Man? Looking splendid in paisley silk, her dark eyebrows arched and brown hair neatly coiffed and fashionably short, Barry won over most of the stars and studio moguls that night. She appealed to their desire for immortality, telling them how regrettable it would be if future generations knew nothing of their cinematic achievements. She was prepared to rescue them from this fate, if only they would lend her their films.

Walt Disney eagerly offered to cooperate, although he was skeptical about museums and wondered if Pablo Picasso was an artist. Harold Lloyd offered his films. Charlie Chaplin played coy for a while, but eventually allowed his works to be deposited at the Museum. Pickford, who produced and owned her own films, offered some titles but decided to hold tightly to others, even if she would miss out on future audiences. Walter Wanger and other producers made agreements with the Museum to circulate their films and store preservation negatives for future safekeeping.

After Pickfair, Barry and Abbott traveled to the archives of Europe and the Soviet Union, convincing their leaders to exchange films with the Museum. As a result, cinema students before there were university film departments began to study and appreciate films. For this effort Iris Barry was named Lifetime

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President of the International Federation of Film Archives, an organization she cofounded in 1938.

As the Museum of Modern Art’s first Curator of Film, Barry was essentially an architect. Her vision went beyond expressing points of view about particular films to the deeper infrastructure of a world she was engaged in building.

This complex of museum film programs, film societies, preservation archives, specialized film theaters, independent film distributors, and degree programs in film is now familiar to us. Iris Barry, who was born when the movies were born and worked to legitimize film as an art form throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was a central player in this construction. She was not alone, of course, nor was she necessarily the first to do what she did. She was not always consistent in her vision. But where she may not have been the first, she was steadily the most consequential. In 1915, American writer Vachel Lindsay published one of the earliest books making the case that film was an art. Iris Barry followed in 1925 with her more comprehensive Let’s Go to the Pictures and cofounded a flagship film society as well. C. J. Lejune preceded her as a female writer on film in the London popular press, but Barry wrote for journals that artists and intellectuals looked up to, making a persuasive argument that film should be taken seriously.

What Iris Barry achieved was to lay down an infrastructure for the film component of what philosopher Arthur Danto has termed an “art world.” Weighing in on the controversy about how to define the limits of “art,” Danto approached the question by positing that art might be anything an “art world”—the world of artists, curators, critics, collectors, and patrons of art—recognizes it to be.

Barry was an architect of the film component of the art world, and this is the core of her contribution.

When she began to study film in London in the 1920s, the motion picture was regarded as lower-class entertainment. From cold-water flats in ethnic neighborhoods, viewers flocked to cinemas to laugh at the foibles of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Iris spent many hours in these dark pits, sometime accompanied by Wyndham Lewis or sent there by him to get her out of the way while he saw other women. Iris first met Lewis in 1917 through their mutual friend, Ezra Pound, who had corresponded with and mentored Iris as a poet, passing on to her the philosophy of writing he would later publish as The ABC of Reading and Guide to Kulchur. While living with Lewis, in discussions with him and through her own observations, she began to formulate a view that cinema could be a significant medium of artistic expression. As she plied her

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early career as a film critic at the Spectator and the Daily Mail, it became her responsibility to make the case that films—especially British films—were not to be taken as a mere amusement but instead bore marks of a new and influential art form.

This phase of her career coincided with a dawning awareness that the medium she was dealing with was vulnerable. The cellulose nitrate film stock invented by George Eastman was physically flexible enough to pass through the curving spools of a projector, but from the day it left the factory it began to deteriorate. Oxidation commenced immediately and accelerated with age until the film stock became volatile. Movies stored in metal cases and left in the sunlight at the back doors of theaters were sometimes known to explode. Early attempts at archiving films led to major fires. Exit lights became mandatory in film theaters and fire marshals were called upon to certify theaters as safe.

Barry would soon lead a campaign to raise industry awareness that ephemeral motion pictures were deserving of protection and should be kept for posterity.

Barry became concerned with preserving this new artistic medium in the mid-1920s, just as exemplars of the new art form were cultivating their first audiences. In America the ever-ambitious D. W. Griffith had earlier gained notoriety for implementing narrative and dramatic effects of scores of techniques such as the close-up, flashback, flash-forward, parallel editing, screen masking, tinting, musical accompaniment, and the myriad applications of the mobile camera. Griffith had shown that film distribution itself could be an art, accompanying his films with posters, lobby cards, previews, fan magazines, and contracts facilitating state-by-state distribution to reach the largest audience.

Barry saw Griffith’s work in its infancy, and watched as it blended with the innovations of German and Russian filmmakers such as Friedrich Murnau, G. W. Pabst, Sergei Eisenstein, and V. I. Pudovkin. Before there was a canon of great films, she studied the gliding camerawork and minimal intertitles of Murnau’s The Last Laugh and the incandescent achievement of Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. Between 1924 and 1930, in numerous magazine and newspaper articles and in her 1926 book, Let’s Go to the Pictures, she looked with fresh eyes and saw that what these filmmakers were doing was an art.

Barry faced a further challenge as the twenties came to a close. Motion pictures learned to talk. Much of what she and others had learned to think about film had been identified with the silent cinema: the empathetic subjectivity of events viewed through a character’s eyes—the longing for respect of Emil Jannings as an imperious doorman reduced to the status of washroom attendant in The Last Laugh, for example; the ubiquity of a mobile camera floating across

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a set identifying significant objects; the immediacy of music played without dialogue, giving a direct sense of mood or wish or dream; the visual clash of montage in Soviet cinema. All this seemed threatened by sound. Characters whose inner states revealed themselves easily in images could be reduced to mere verbalizers of emotion. The floating cameras of German film might have to be anchored to one place, encased in a soundproof box to serve the needs of the microphone.

Barry took these changes in stride. She kept her eye on her central goal, to find audiences for good films, however they might be made. She had come to appreciate some of the foundational needs for the new art form—that film must be understood through study and comment, preserved for posterity, and presented to the public in quality programming with informative program notes.

In short, she began to envision filmgoing as an institution, moving beyond small cine-clubs and into museums.

The opportunity to cofound the London Film Society in 1925 gave Iris Barry the chance to place innovative films before a new audience. Her experience there formed the basis of her later programming style at the Museum of Modern Art. She and her London colleagues, Ivor Montagu, the naturalistturned-filmmaker, and Sidney Bernstein, who owned a circuit of theaters in England, hoped the model established by the London Stage Society could be transferred to their organization. The Stage Society was founded to introduce Londoners to recent and challenging dramas. As a private subscription group exempt from censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the Stage Society could be adventurous. The Film Society founders expected their program to be similarly protected, allowing them to bring controversial films into the country and exhibit them free of interference. Although this did not always prove to be the case, the London Film Society was wildly successful and became the prototype for the later British Film Institute and film societies throughout Europe and the United States.

Iris Barry was “sacked,” as she put it, by the mighty Daily Mail in 1929. It seems she failed to appreciate the cinematic charms of an actress her boss, Lord Rothermere, had treated to dinner the night before and assured of a favorable review. Additionally, Rothermere felt she was not playing her assigned role of championing British films over their American competitors. Barry decided to move to the United States, bringing along her first husband, the Oxford poet Alan Porter, literary editor of the Spectator. Barry and Porter struggled in Depression-era New York for the better part of five years, the wolf never far from the door. She published occasional articles about America for readers

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back home (a role later taken up by her friend, Alistair Cooke), edited a book on Afghanistan, and ghostwrote a directory of dreams under the pseudonym “Jonathan Westerfield.” Porter taught English at the New School for Social Research. In the early thirties he joined the English department at Vassar College, remaining there after his divorce from Iris in 1934.

Also in the early thirties Barry was taken in by a circle of emerging modernists in New York. Bright young men and women from Ivy League schools such as Harvard’s dance-minded Lincoln Kirstein and the young architect Philip Johnson; the Princeton-educated Alfred Barr, Jr., Director of the new Museum of Modern Art; the composers Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson; the theatrical producer John Houseman; and the Vassar art historian Agnes Rindge all regularly attended a Sunday salon held at the home of Kirk and Constance Askew.

Kirk Askew was the New York representative of London’s Durlacher Brothers, leading art dealers at the time. Iris had heard of the Askews through her friends, the actors Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, who would be invited to the Askews when in town. As she was introduced to the salon, Iris was befriended by Philip Johnson, who bought her a new dress and found her a job, without pay at first, at the fledgling modern museum. She was to be its first Librarian. Although she had no library training, she once had worked as a secretary to Arthur Waley, who developed a library at London’s School of Oriental Studies. Iris promised to take some library classes. Johnson helped out with a small stipend.

The friendships she formed at the Askews, begun in the casual banter of cocktails in Depression-era New York, sustained Iris Barry throughout a life lived before the era of government safety nets and Facebook pages. They led to a long skein of lively correspondence and some surprising acts of kindness.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Iris Barry flourished. At first she “set her cap,” as curator Dorothy Miller put it, for Alfred Barr, the Museum’s director. Barr, however, was notoriously abstemious and already married to the art historian, Margaret Scolari. Iris settled for John E. “Dick” Abbott, then working on Wall Street and living with a roommate in the apartment above hers in the neighborhood of the Museum. Abbott liked film and was discontent with Wall Street life. With Abbott, Barry began to lobby for a film department at the Museum, a function already envisioned by Alfred Barr. Together they researched its feasibility through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1935 a new film activity grew out of Iris’s library work, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. Abbott was made Director and Iris its first Curator.

The new library brought with it the possibility of adding film preservation to Iris’s list of structural requirements for sustaining film as an art. She realized

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that now she might combine film preservation with distribution, especially if she could convince the holders of copyrights to allow her to keep preservation materials and make copies to be circulated to college campuses. This goal is what brought her to Pickfair in 1935. She subsequently launched a study program at the Museum and an exhibition program in a theater built especially for film. With Abbott she developed a film study course at Columbia University that served as a model for future academic programs.

Thus began the most productive years of Iris Barry’s life. The Film Library was established as a separate corporation with its stock wholly owned by the Museum, and though the two were legally separate, they were never truly independent. Throughout the late thirties Abbott curried favor among influential trustees and became part of a network of aspirants for the power vested in Alfred Barr at the Museum. Eventually Abbott assumed most of the administrative power Barr originally possessed. The powerful role Abbott played in the Museum’s operations and development in the early 1940s is a little-known chapter in the history of the Museum.

It is widely assumed that Alfred Barr was “fired” in 1943 by Museum board president Stephen C. Clark, heir to the Coats and Clark and Singer Sewing Machine fortunes. Looking at Barr’s tenure from the vantage point of the Film Library, however, we can see that Barr’s troubles began much earlier—that he sustained numerous coup attempts, both known and unknown to him, and that the crown never rested securely on his head.

Several historians have analyzed the “politicization” of the Museum as a Cold War phenomenon, when Alfred Barr helped to provide a theoretical framework for understanding American Abstract Expressionism as related to Western democracy. But following Barry’s career reveals that the politicization of the Museum began much earlier and was centered in the Film Library.

From his first days at the Museum until his death at the age of 43 in 1952, John “Dick” Abbott enjoyed the support of Nelson Rockefeller, son of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a cofounder of the Museum. Abbott did Rockefeller’s bidding and provided the link between Rockefeller’s political agenda and the Museum’s programming. Through Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Iris Barry and her Film Library staff spent the years before and during World War II in service to the U.S. Government. They led a propaganda campaign against Nazism in Latin America and worked closely with the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Barry and her staff facilitated the Why We Fight documentary series, which was responsible for the recruitment of thousands of soldiers near the end of the war.

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After the war the Film Library led the effort to build a national film collection at the Library of Congress. Ironically, the Film Library at MoMA was constantly under threat from right-wing detractors who saw Iris and her staff as a cadre of Bolsheviks. Among the snipers were the film historians Seymour Stern and Terry Ramsaye and the film director Iris immortalized in her 1940 book, D. W. Griffith: American Film Master. Their attacks damaged the careers of her longtime staff members, Theodore Huff and Jay Leyda, as well as the celebrated filmmaker Luis Buñuel, whom Iris had hired to translate propaganda films for Latin American audiences.

At the war’s end Barry faced a time of ambivalence at the Museum. Her marriage to Abbott, long the source of tension between Iris and others on the staff, fell apart. Abbott gradually was replaced in influence by Rene d’Harnoncourt, who brought tact and diplomacy to his role as the Museum’s new director. Iris found herself waylaid by medical problems and was diagnosed with cancer in 1949. She disappeared from New York in 1950, abandoning the small apartment she had been lent by Constance Askew after her marriage to Abbott collapsed.

She later was seen at Cannes on the French Riviera, where at a dance club she attended with a French olive oil smuggler named Pierre Kerroux, she was abducted at gunpoint by a Corsican gangster and whizzed in a sports car on the curvy roads above Antibes. With Kerroux, she spent all but the last year of her life in the small French village of Fayence, living in a tumbledown seventeenthcentury townhouse owned by Wadsworth Atheneum Director A. E. “Chick” Austin, whom she had met at the Askew salon.

Many who knew Barry thought that she severed her relations with the Museum in 1950. On the contrary, she retained a position with the Museum until her death in Marseilles in 1969. Her ties to MoMA, and especially to its cofounder’s son, Nelson Rockefeller, sustained her through years of struggle for survival and brushes with the government over politics and passports. Iris never really left the Museum.

Iris Barry is buried in an ordinary grave in the cemetery on a hill above Fayence. A marble slab states simply “Iris Barry—1895–1969.” There is no mention of her accomplishments. But the film world she helped to construct remains her enduring legacy. When the Film Society of Lincoln Center opened in 1962, it honored Iris Barry as a founder not only of the London Film Society but also of the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art, cosponsor of the festival.

When the American Film Institute was created in 1967, it derived its structure from a Stanford Research Institute report recommending that AFI undertake

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the same preservation, exhibition, education, and distribution functions Iris pioneered. In a sense this world, the world of film, is Iris Barry’s monument.

For her part she accepted credit for only one achievement. If there was a single thing she was proud of, she said toward the end of her life, it is that films are “dated, like wine.”