An Introduction to Jere Abbott's Russian Diary, 1927–1928*
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An Introduction to Jere Abbott’s Russian Diary, 1927 –1928* LEAH DICKERMAN In 1978, in its seventh issue, October published the travel diaries written by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who would go on to become the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, during his two-month sojourn in Russia in 1927–28. They were accompanied by a note from Barr’s wife, Margaret Scolari Barr, who had made the documents available, and an introduction written by Jere Abbott, an art historian and former director of the Smith College Museum of Art who had returned to his family’s textile business in Maine. Abbott and Barr had made the journey together, traveling from London in October 1927 to Holland and Germany (including a four-day visit to the Bauhaus) and then, on Christmas Day 1927, over the border into Soviet Russia. Abbott, as Margaret Barr had noted, kept his own journal on the trip. Abbott’s, if anything, was more detailed and expansive in documenting its author’s observations and perceptions of Soviet cultural life at this pivotal moment; and his perspective offers both a complement and counter - point to Barr’s. Russia after the revolution was largely uncharted territory for Anglophone cultural commentary: This, in combination with the two men’s deep interest in and knowledge of contemporary art, makes their journals rare docu - ments of the Soviet cultural terrain in the late 1920s. We present Abbott’s diaries here, thirty-five years after the publication of Barr’s, with thanks to the generous cooperation of the Smith College Museum of Art, where they are now held. *** Jere Abbott and Alfred Barr met at the Sunday concerts held at George and Ethel Rowley’s house in Princeton, where music by modern composers such as Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, and Francis Poulenc was played. 1 Abbott had con - * We are grateful to Smith College Museum of Art for their cooperation in publishing Abbott's journal, and wish to thank Jessica Nicoll, David Dempsey, Linda Muehling, and Aprile Gallant in partic - ular for their support of this project. Our thanks to the family of Jere Abbott and to Colby College for their generous help. For research and other aid, I am grateful to Jodi Roberts, Masha Chlenova, MaryKate Cleary, and Jenny Harris. 1. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge and London: the MIT Press, 2002), pp. 86–87. OCTOBER 145, Summer 2013, pp. 115 –124. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00150 by guest on 26 September 2021 116 OCTOBER templated a career as a concert pianist: Having just returned from a year in Paris (1923–24) where he studied music and art, met Gertrude Stein, and befriended Virgil Thompson, he was now pursuing the life of an academic, doing graduate work in art history at Princeton. Barr also was in Princeton, serving as a precep - tor for courses in Italian and nineteenth-century painting, but he was complaining openly about the conservative curricula there, particularly the lack of any serious study of contemporary culture. At the end of the year, Barr accepted an invitation to teach a course in modern art of his own design at Wellesley for the academic year 1926–27. Encouraged by Barr, 2 Abbott applied to go to Harvard, to study in Paul Sachs’s famous “museum course,” begun in 1922. The course was distinctive in combin - ing historical investigation with the study of individual works. Using examples drawn from the Fogg Museum’s collection, students defined and classified structuring principles—a formalist approach, novel in this country, which became known as the “Fogg method.” Under his tutelage, Sachs’s students also focused on museological topics (also rare in an American graduate curriculum at the time): They traced the historical development of the museum; compared the structure of different institutions and collections; and organized experi - mental, thesis-based exhibitions in the Fogg galleries. Sachs carefully built a roster of international contacts—art historians, collectors, and museum per - sonnel. He encouraged his students to travel and sent them forth with dozens of long introductory letters; they in turn were expected to bring back names and addresses, bibliographies, books, and photographs. Many recall Sachs con - tinually updating the two little black books he maintained for contacts. 3 Barr and Abbott roomed together in Cambridge, at 34A Irving Street, with Barr commuting the half-hour to and from his teaching job. 4 He failed to get two fellowships for which he had applied, and Abbott paid Barr’s share from the allowance provided by his family, explaining in a letter to his father that “I look upon paying his share of the rent as a sort of monetary compensation for his company, we get along very well together, his ability, much greater than meager mine, which I draw on continually, and his kindnesses in introducing me where the entre [sic ] might have been difficult.” 5 Barr attended the Sachs course with Abbott “when convenient,” 6 and both were part of the tight social circle that formed among the cohort of students in the course, including Julien Levy, A. Everett Austin, James Rorimer, R. Kirk Askew, Jr., and Henry Russell 2. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr , Jr. , p. 88. 3. Cited in ibid., p. 55. Paul Sachs, “Tales,” part 1, vol. 1, p. 42, CORP. 4. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr , Jr. , p. 104. 5. Letter from Jere Abbott to his father, postmarked April 7, 1927. Jere Abbott papers, Bowdoin College Archives. 6. Abbott’s written recollection reprinted in Rona Roob, “Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: A Chronicle of the Years 1902–1929,” New Criterion (Special Issue, 1987), p. 12. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00150 by guest on 26 September 2021 Petr Likhachev (left), Jere Abbott (center), and Alfred Barr (right) in Moscow. 1928. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00150 by guest on 26 September 2021 118 OCTOBER Hitchcock. (Hitchcock, together with Philip Johnson, would organize the land - mark “Modern Architecture. International Exhibition” held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932.) Friends in their group commented on the unusual close - ness of Barr and Abbott’s arrangements: Hitchcock described them in a gossipy letter to Virgil Thompson as “cette ètrange [ sic ] ménage.” 7 The description for Art 305, Barr’s course at Wellesley, read, “Contemporary Painting in relation to the past, to the other arts, to aesthetic theory and to modern civilization.” 8 It was perhaps the first at any American college to survey the arts of the last fifty years: The syllabus began with post- Impressionism and Symbolism (Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Redon), using large-scale color reproductions, and then moved assertively into the present day. It was also impressively multidisciplinary. Students read, for example, Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (Towards an architecture, 1923), and went to see the Motor-mart and Necco factory in Cambridge. 9 Abbott tagged along with the group, and his photographs of the Necco building were published in the first issue of Hound & Horn .10 Film was also covered: Metropolis was analyzed in terms of “primitive and barbaric art, the psychology of expressionism, the discipline of cubism and constructivism, and the importance of the machine.” 11 Abbott and Randall Thompson, a music professor at Wellesley, gave a recital after the final take-home exam: The program included music by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Bartók, and Satie. 12 The course stands as Barr’s first effort to approach the field of modern art systematically. Barr left for London in mid-July 1927 on a travel fellowship personally funded by Sachs, intended to help him define a dissertation topic—both the machine and the primitive as sources for contemporary art were topics he had floated. 13 Abbott joined Barr there in October, and they stayed as paying guests at the home of Percy Horton. 14 According to Abbott, Russia was not originally on the itinerary. In London, the pair met Wyndham Lewis; through Lewis they were introduced to Nina Hamnett, who had recently returned from a trip to the Soviet Union. Hamnett, in Abbott’s description, “was enthusiastically Communist in spirit. There was discussion about Russia. We decided to go 7. Cited in Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago and New York: Contemporary Books, 1989), p. 48. Letter from Henry Russell Hitchcock to Virgil Thompson, September 27, 1928, Music Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven. 8. Reprinted in Roob, “Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: A Chronicle,” p. 9. 9. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr , Jr. , pp. 102–103. Mary Bostwick (a student in Barr’s course), “Wellesley and Modernism,” Boston Evening Transcript (April 27, 1927), p. 10. 10. Jere Abbott, photographs of the Necco factory, Hound & Horn 1, no.1 (September 1927), p. 36. Barr wrote an article about the building for The Arts 13 (January 1928), pp. 48–49. 11. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr , Jr. , p. 104. 12. Ibid., p. 103. 13. Ibid., Alfred H. Barr , Jr. , p. 146. 14. Roob, “Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: A Chronicle,” p. 14. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00150 by guest on 26 September 2021 An Introduction to Jere Abbott’s Russian Diary 119 there. It was that simple.” 15 There are suggestions, however, that Barr may have begun to focus on Russia as a destination already in August 1927, before Abbott arrived in London: He mentions “the trip to Russia and Germany” in a letter to the dealer J.