Spence News

Joan Mertens ’64 Celebrates Margaret Scolari Barr in 28th Annual Lecture

A student in Margaret Scolari Barr’s art history class would be expected to be cooperative, friendly, studious and expressive about her dislike of or fondness for a piece of artwork.
 
Joan R. Mertens ’64, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a former Scolari Barr student, delivered the annual Margaret Scolari Barr lecture to Upper School students, faculty and several alumnae on Wednesday, January 11, 2017.

 
 
The annual lecture was established in 1989 by the Class of 1964 to honor Scolari Barr’s long tenure at Spence from 1943 to 1980. Several members of the Class of 1964 attended the lecture and the reception in the Drawing Room afterward. Mertens, who each year helps guide the annual lecture, headlined this year’s program about Scolari Barr in honor of the School’s 125th anniversary celebration.
 
Mertens provided an overview of Scolari Barr’s life, including her birth in Rome in 1901, her job as a bilingual secretary at the American Embassy while going to college in Italy and her stint teaching Italian at Vassar College. Her presentation was rich with personal anecdotes, archival audio clips, as well as historical photos and documents that highlighted the contributions and legacy of Spence’s famed art history teacher.

[Click here to see a gallery of photos]
 
Scolari Barr first met her husband, Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, in November or December of 1929 at the museum’s “smashing” exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh. In an audio recording, she recalled their first meeting, as well as going out to tea and dinner. The two got married in Paris in 1930, and they had a daughter, Victoria, in 1937.
 
Victoria Barr, who was also in attendance at the Spence lecture, described her mother as a “very intelligent, multi-faceted woman who adored teaching art history.” She was able to sit in on her mother’s class once or twice, and complimented her mother’s facility to involve students in whichever work of art she was lecturing about.
 
Scolari Barr traveled extensively in Europe acting as Alfred’s “right hand” as they organized exhibitions at MoMA and witnessed the rise of the Nazis and World War II unfold.
 
In 1943, Scolari Barr accepted a teaching offer from Spence’s Head of School Dorothy Osborne, and she started her nearly four-decade tenure. Mertens gave the audience a flavor of her force of personality and style by sharing some of the specific class rules she expected the girls to follow.
 
  • Students should communicate “pleasure and emotion, positive or negative.”
  • Students should not sing or hum.
  • If students saw her working at her desk they should “say nothing to me and whisper.” She noted, “Please understand that I am violently thinking and planning.”
  • Students should interrupt her if they have a comment or question, but interrupting four or five times in each period was too much.
  • Students should sit as close to the screen as possible—especially those who were near-sighted.
 
Scolari Barr also encouraged students to take good notes and to read them over after class and to review them once a week to prepare for the monthly test. She told students she would be “delighted” to show them previous examples of tests because she did not want the girls to be anxious.
 
“Nerves are the very worst thing, and I would like you to learn to take the tests as if they were an amusing challenge,” she wrote. “…I spend a great deal of time devising interesting tests.”
 
On art, Scolari Barr thought it was important that students freely express their dislike, as well as admiration of works. She said the “ignorant tourist” who walks around a museum calling everything beautiful was essentially a fool.
 
“Not all of [art] is—at first sight—beautiful, little of it is pretty, all of it is interesting, and the more you know about a work of art, what preceded it, what followed it, the reasons why it is the way it is, the more it will come to life for you,” she wrote.
 
Scolari Barr retired in 1980 and was made an honorary member of the Alumnae Association. In a 1980 letter to Juliana Schmemann, the head of school at the time, she wrote humbly that she preferred to remain invisible at Spence.
 
“All teachers should come and go with no claim to fame,” she wrote, several years before her death in 1987. “Some may endure in the memory of the students, but it is what they tried to teach that is valuable.”
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