By Jann Haynes Gilmore, PhD, AWA Board Member

Gertrude Stein famously said, “You can be modern, or you can be a museum.”  Her characteristically succinct writing style aptly summarizes this inconsistency.  Museums traditionally preserve the past, and the term ‘modern’ defines the present.  The Museum of Modern Art was founded by three women: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, followed by a cadre of visionary women who greatly helped form the museum. ¹

A recently released book: Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, published in 2024, is the story of fourteen American women, including the three founders, who were early forces within the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). ²   This book contains a chapter on each of these women, written by different authors who not only share their own perspectives on the modern movement but also provide detailed biographies of these talented, lesser-known women who used their personal power at MoMA. For brevity, I have focused on only one of these women. Still, I encourage the reader to become familiar with these other remarkable women whose careers were groundbreaking contributions to modernism. ³

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902-1981) was an American art historian and the first director of the newly formed Museum of Modern Art in 1929.  Hired as an associate professor to teach art history at Wellesley College in 1926, he offered his first undergraduate course on modern art, “Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting.” This class introduced new subject matter with an unconventional pedagogy: the nine students were referred to as faculty, and each was responsible for mastering and teaching some of the course content. Barr believed in a broad knowledge of culture in order to understand any individual artistic discipline.  While there was no required reading for the class except Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New Masses magazines, plus numerous class trips to art-historical locations, Barr created a quiz of fifty cultural questions that a small group of women students had to pass before he admitted them to his class. ⁴

After discovering Barr’s 1927 Wellesley quiz, this writer has enjoyed a dialogue with a distinguished bibliophile, and I was gifted an original copy of Vanity Fair, August 1927, which published Barr’s quiz.  I share that several art historians, friends of mine, have failed this test… including me, who could answer only 50% of the questions. A link to the quiz on Vanity Fair’s website is included below. Only one question remained for us two researchers: did any of Alfred Barr’s students follow him into the world of modernism?  Inventing the Modern provided us with a resounding answer: Ernestine Fantl Carter.

Ernestine Fantl Carter (1906-1983)                                                                   Juliet Kinchin

Ernestine Fantl (Carter) was a student of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. at Wellesley College. Before she married Brit John Carter in 1936, Fantl spent five short years at MoMA, albeit making a profound impact on its exhibitions, departments, and publications. She grew up in Savannah, Georgia. Her father was a textile merchant and a member of the cotton exchange.  Descended from a European Jewish family, she attended Pape School in the city.  Pape was renowned for its diversity and creative teaching. The family eventually moved to New York City, where her father became successful in the international fashion market.  It was Fantl’s senior year at Wellesley that shaped her life and career, when she passed Barr’s quiz and accepted an invitation to take Barr’s “Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting” class (considered the first modern art class taught in an American college).  One question the quiz asked was the artistic importance of Saks Fifth Avenue, and Fantl drew on her background in fashion and advertising. Barr’s course “stretched the definition of arts . . .  with an interdisciplinary approach including cinema, jazz, automobile design . . . along with painting and sculpture.” ⁵

 

Fantl graduated in 1927, and through Barr, she found a job at a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery in New York that featured German art (German culture during this period being the focus of several questions in the Barr quiz).  At this time, Fantl also modeled for Elizabeth Arden and other firms.  Photographer Ralph Steiner, an avant-garde photographer, introduced her to film and music as her New York arts contacts list grew.  In 1930, she worked with William Lescaze, a Swiss architect, who helped bring the International Style of Architecture to the USA. Soon, she became an employee of MoMA.

In 1931, the Architectural League of New York rejected submissions by two Fantl associates, both followers of Le Corbusier, and Fantl and Barr, by then friends and coworkers, along with modern architect Philip Johnson, organized a rival show titled Rejected Architects at MoMA.  Johnson was then an employee of MoMA, and he and Fantl worked together on the first architecture exhibition on the International Style, organizing, preparing press material, and the exhibition catalogue for publication. For the exhibition, Fantl imposed her own design theory of non-adornment for exhibition installation spaces, similar to design theory in modern architecture.

In 1932, Fantl moved from assisting Johnson to her own role in the museum’s expanding projects in modern architecture, taking on a motley list of tasks. She produced shows on the Museum Board’s collections of modern art and curated a much-celebrated exhibition on industrial design, featuring objects such as cookie cutters purchased for one dollar.   When Philip Johnson left the museum in that year for political reasons, Fantl filled his position and became MoMA’s first woman head of the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design.

During this period, the advertising industry and graphic design were also emerging as design disciplines parallel to modern architecture. Fantl was no stranger to printing and typography, and she applied graphic design principles across all aspects of MoMA’s programs, including exhibitions and catalogues. Also influenced by Helen Resor, the first woman executive at a leading advertising agency, Resor introduced Fantl and the museum to European poster art. In planning the design for a poster art exhibition, Fantl selected the typography and layout, using typefaces that have since been continually linked to the MoMA. In 1936, Fantl mounted a show on Henry Hobson Richardson, arguing that Richardson’s 19th-century American buildings were a forerunner of modernism.  She stepped into activism with another exhibit on Architecture in Government Housing and Modern Exposition Architecture. Fantl was also assisting Director Barr with his seminal survey exhibitions of Cubism, Abstract Art, Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism in the same year.

The year 1936 changed her direction again when MoMA staff and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, personally, sent Fantl and Dorothy Miller, another rising woman staffer, to England to scout out modern architecture then being introduced in Great Britain. Both Barr and architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock met with the two women in England, and each was delighted by the “buoyant and progressive” works of the British.  Fantl also met her future husband, John Carter, a rare-book expert, on this trip.  Fantl took several more transatlantic trips to Europe that year, including one ship on which Marcel Duchamp was on board. Her research resulted in Modern Architecture in England, opening at MoMA in February 1937.  Fantl initially received little credit for this pioneering exhibition, but eventually she was recognized for her “rigorous selection of the works.” ⁶

Following the successes of her poster exhibition and the British architecture exhibition, Fantl resigned from MoMA.  At the same time, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. faced internal struggles at the museum and was eventually ousted in 1943. Fantl Carter wrote of her five years at the fledgling museum, observing that it was like “one long fabulous post-graduate course,” recalling “there was a constant feeling of excitement, of us v. the rest.” She continued: “Each exhibition was a landmark, a first of its kind, thrilling some, infuriating others.” In Inventing the Modern, author Juliet Kinchin summarized Fantl’s enduring role: “She left New York having helped to shape architectural and graphic design sensibility in the United States.” ⁷

Soon, Carter found her niche in London, where she and her new husband settled just as Germany declared war on Europe and Great Britain. She teamed up with her former MoMA colleague, renowned photographer and journalist Dorothy Miller, to publish photographs and commentary on the London Blitz.  Noted architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner called the book a “brilliant piece of journalism of the highest standard.” ⁸ In 1942, Carter joined the Ministry of Information to promote the war effort to international audiences, leaning on more political propaganda than she was ever allowed to do at MoMA. During the war, she also served as a liaison with MoMA (which she called the “old firm”), circulating exhibitions between MoMA and England, including War Posters. In 1942, she joined the US Office of War Information in London and brought MoMA’s legendary Road to Victory exhibition to London and Edinburgh. ⁹

 

Fantl-Carter’s last museum work, Britain Can Make It, was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946; it aimed to promote the renewal of British manufacturing through modern design. As fate would have it, she was assigned to the fashion section of the installation and was so successful in this field that she became fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar. For twenty-five more years, she was THE authoritative fashion journalist in England.  Kurchin summarizes her second career: “Her success going forward was due to her witty, lucid writing and her grasp of the power of photography, advertising, and print media . . . [and] she was able to call upon the broad knowledge of painting, sculpture, film, theater, architecture, design, and manufacturing processes that she had acquired at MoMA . . . .” ¹⁰

Carter even wrote a cookbook titled Flash in the Pan, and her last official job was as editor of the “women’s pages” of The Sunday Times in 1955, which allowed her to travel the globe, observing and wearing tailored clothing by the famous designers she promoted.  She eventually became the Times’s associate editor and the first woman to serve as an executive.  She retired in 1972 and lived another decade writing fashion history and her 1974 autobiography titled Tongue in Chic.

Ernestine Fantl Carter’s life journey certainly illustrated the value of a college education and the influence cast in her youth by a young polymath college professor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., first impressing him by passing his required-for-class entry quiz.  Lifelong friends and colleagues, Barr, no doubt, was proud of the student, Fantl, whom he recognized early and mentored.

If you have downtime during the holidays, have fun submitting this quiz to family and friends; a lively discussion will result. Click the link below.

A Modern Art Questionnaire | Vanity Fair | August 1927

 

ENDNOTES:

1. Hilarie M. Sheets, “Present at MoMA’s Founding: In A New Publication and Companion Exhibition, 14 Women Who Shaped The MoMA Come to Focus”, The New York Times, In the Shadows, Sunday, October 27,2024, p. 38.

2. Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, editors, Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Juliet Kinchin is a former curator of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design.

3. A list of the ten additional women who defined MoMA is: Margaret Scolari Barr. (Barr’s wife), Iris Barry, Elodie Courter, Sarah Newmeyer, Dorothy Miller, Dorothy Dudley, Nancy Newhall, Elizabeth Mock, Olga Guggenheim, and Jean Volkmer.

4. Wikipedia provides a succinct biography of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and his teachings, en.m.wikipedia.org.

5. Juliet Kinchin, Ernestine Fantl Carter, Inventing the Modern, p. 125.

6. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, quoted in Kinchin, p. 141.

7. Kinchin.

8. Kinchin, p. 142.

9. “Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War” was an exhibition assembled by Edward Steichen and with text by Carl Sandburg, brothers-in-law, at MoMA in 1942 and was seen by over 80,000 visitors in New York City. The show illustrated the gravity of war only months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on moma.org.

10. Kinchin, p. 144.

  ILLUSTRATIONS:

1. Vanity Fair, Cover, August 1927, Vol. 28, No. 6, Boston: Conté Nast Publications, Inc.

2. Aldred H. Barr, Jr., A Modern Art Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, August 1927, p. 85.

3. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Answers to Art Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, August 1927, pages 96 and 98.

4. Cover, Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2024.

5. Ernestine Fantl, Photograph, Wellesley College Archives, Yearbook, 1927, Inventing the Modern, p. 123.

6. Exhibition Catalogue, Rejected Architects: Models, Projects, Photos, 1932, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, Inventing the Modern, p. 127.

7. Poster: Power: The Nerve Center of London’s Underground, E. McKnight Kauffer, 1930, Museum of Modern Art, Inventing the Modern, p. 135.

8. Ernestine Fantl Carter, Photograph, 1960s, Wellesley College Archives, Inventing the Modern, p. 145.

9. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Photograph, c. 1930, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, Inventing the Modern, p. 38.

10. Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Modern Art, Founder, Lillie Bliss Bequest, 1940, Inventing the Modern, p. 73 [MoMA’s most visited artwork].