Alfred Barr (1902–1981), founder and first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), managed to curb the natural disaster that was twentieth-century art. In this book—part intellectual biography, part institutional history—Sybil Gordon Cantor (1927–2013) tells the story of the rise of modern art in America and the man responsible for its triumph. Drawing on interviews with Barr's contemporaries as well as his extensive correspondence, Cantor paints vivid portraits of Geri Abbott, Catherine Dreyer, Henry Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Lincoln Kirstein, Agnes Mongan, Israel B. Neumann, and Paul Sachs. Following the trajectory of Barr's career from the 1920s to the 1940s, Cantor dispels the positive and negative myths that surround Barr and his achievements.