Cite as: Evangelos Kotsioris, “Unpacking Barr’s Library: The Paper Trail from the Bauhaus to VKhUTEMAS,”

post: notes on modern & contemporary art around the globe (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), October 17, 2018.
https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1215-unpacking-barr-s-library-the-paper-trail-from-the-bauhaus-to-vkhutemas

ESSAYS

Unpacking Barr’s Library: The
Paper Trail from the Bauhaus to
VKhUTEMAS
By Evangelos Kotsioris Posted on October 17, 2018

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., future director of The Museum of Modern Art, made a trip to
Russia in 1927-28 to investigate the avant-garde, meeting with several Vkhutemas
faculty while he was there. The Vkhutemas school in Moscow has often been termed
the "Soviet Bauhaus" due to its temporal and pedagogical proximity to its more
famous German counterpoint. In this essay, a close consideration of archival material
from Barr's trip help contextualize how such associations have come to overshadow
Vkhutemas's original contributions in art and architecture. A vitrine exhibition in the
MoMA Library— BAUHAUS VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels, on view through
October 26, 2018—features many of the materials discussed below.

"There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from
fringe areas. . . . some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses,
others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and
certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library." —Walter Benjamin1

In 1927, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the American art historian who would become the
founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, embarked on an extensive
European trip. Taking a break from teaching art history at Wellesley College, the
twenty-five-year-old Barr saw this tour as an opportunity to study contemporary
European culture and, on a more practical level, to collect bibliographic and visual
material for his courses on modern art.2 A major destination was the Bauhaus in
Dessau, where Barr met with the school’s director and architect Walter Gropius, as
well as its faculty, including the painter Paul Klee, and the photographer,
typographer, and painter László Moholy-Nagy.

Barr was accompanied by Jere Abbott, a friend and fellow art history graduate
from Harvard, who would become MoMA’s first associate director. While still in
Germany, near the end of 1927, the two travelers decided to make an unplanned
detour to Russia to witness firsthand its post-revolutionary avant-garde. Initially
planning to spend two or three weeks in Moscow, they ended up staying and
traveling across Russia for a month and a half.3 Anxious to preserve the
information they gathered, both Barr and Abbott kept lively diaries of the plays they
watched, the people they met, and the things they learned.4
Right to left: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Jere Abbott, and Petr Likhachev, their Russian interpreter, in Moscow, February
13, 1928. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Having recently visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, Barr was especially keen to see
VKhUTEMAS (also spelled Vkhutemas), an acronym for the Vysshie
khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie (Higher state artistic and technical
studios), in Moscow. In recent press and bibliography, the school is often
reductively referred to as the “Soviet Bauhaus.”5 However, Vkhutemas faculty
comprised some of the most pioneering Soviet artists of the time, including
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Gustav
Klutsis, to name but a handful.6 Barr visited the Vkhutemas three times in January
1928. He actively sought to meet with faculty there to learn about their artistic
practice and pedagogical activities, and to inform his own teaching of modern art
back in the United States. Yet, his attempts were decisively hindered by language,
as he did not know Russian.

Moreover, the most important obstacle for Barr in decoding the school and its
pedagogy was its lack of printed matter: “The whole institution seemed painfully
lacking in organization and equipment but the fine spirit of enthusiasm will conquer
these technical difficulties with time and money. It was annoying, though, not to
find any printed matter about the school, not even a list of professors or courses.”7
Unlike the Bauhaus—whose posters, brochures, postcards, and books were
crossing borders around the world—Vkhutemas and its workings remained largely
unknown in European circles, let alone North American ones.8

Faced with an impregnable fortress, Barr found a new mission in obsessively

amassing as much printed material directly or indirectly related to Vkhutemas, its
faculty, and its students as he could get his hands on. The disproportionate
number of personal papers accumulated during his stay in Moscow betray an
impassioned collector of Russian printed matter, characterized by what Walter
Benjamin calls “the thrill of acquisition.”9 For Benjamin, who in 1926 had also felt
frustrated spending a winter in Moscow, the most memorable items are acquired
“on trips, as a transient.”10 Similarly for Barr, each piece of paper he gathered had
its own story, promising to offer another small piece to the frustrating puzzle of the
development of modern Russian art he felt unable to trace.

Barr’s and Abbott’s diaries from their Russian trip reveal their constant urge to
compare and measure Vkhutemas against the Bauhaus. As Barr wrote about the
Russian faculty of the former: “They were much interested in the Bauhaus and have
evidently learned much from it. I asked [painter, critic, and administrator David]
Sterenberg what were the chief differences between the two. He replied that the
Bauhaus aimed to develop the individual whereas the Moscow workshops worked
for the development of the masses. This seemed superficial and doctrinaire since
the real work at the Bauhaus seems as social, the spirit as communistic as in the
Moscow school.”11 The Bauhaus is the only lens through which they seemed able
to interpret the Vkhutemas, a riddling entity often understood as simply derivative.

Delving into Barr’s Russian trip library reveals an impressive variety and volume of
material, amounting to more than sixty archival folders. In connecting the dots
between Barr’s and Abbott’s diary entries and the dozens of items they brought
back from their reconnaissance trip east, the seeming “disorder” of the archive
begins to make sense. Every newspaper clipping, postcard, pamphlet, bulletin,
travel guide, journal, exhibition catalogue and book reveals a brief moment of
contact, a personal story, a rare glimpse into not only the faculty of Vkhutemas, but
also the school’s “intersecting parallels” with the Bauhaus.12

NOTE

On January 3, 1928, Barr met with the architect, artist, designer, and typographer
El Lissitzky, who taught architecture, interiors, and furniture design at Vkhutemas.
Barr carried printed matter from the Bauhaus to Vkhutemas, and he delivered a
handwritten personal note from Gropius to Lissitzky, entrusted to him a few weeks
earlier in Dessau. Judging from the positive way in which the gesture was received,
Barr assumed that Lissitzky “is evidently very friendly with the Bauhaus.”13 He
reflected on Lissitzky’s “quite ingenious” book designs and photos, which he noted
in his diary were, nonetheless, suggestive of Moholy-Nagy’s work at the Bauhaus.14
In 1927, the Vkhutemas had published one of its most important book-length
publications, which, showcasing the work of the architecture faculty, features a
cover designed by Lissitzky.15 Strangely enough, there is no evidence that a copy
of it was shown or made available to Barr.

SKETCH

Lissitkzy must have also shown Barr and Abbott his audacious design for
Wolkenbügel (Cloud Iron), a network of “horizontal skyscrapers” positioned at
major intersections across Moscow. Barr was quick to consider the proposition as
“the most frankly paper architecture I have ever seen.”16 Abbott, on the other hand,
rehearsed Lissitkzy’s paper architecture by sketching a perspective view of the
daring cantilevered design under his diary entry for that day, and he noted that
Lissitzky’s “work shows some influence of Bauhaus—but the feeling behind it is
quite different . . . It is very interesting to see how careful these former painters are
to repudiate painting.”17 A few days later, Abbott concluded that “Lissitzky gets
many ideas from [the] Bauhaus but he is not a copyist.”18

El Lissitzky, “A series of skyscrapers for Moscow, 1923–25,” aerial view, Izvestiia ASNOVA (Moscow:
Tipografiia VKhUTEMAS, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jan Tschichold Collection. Gift of
Philip Johnson

“JUNK”

The afternoon of the same day, Barr and Abbott met with Aleksandr Rodchenko,
who taught furniture design at Vkhutemas, and Varvara Stepanova, his “talented
wife,” at their apartment.19 Language was an obstacle once again, as these
“brilliant, versatile artists” only spoke Russian.20 As early as 1921, both Stepanova
and Rodchenko had abandoned painting in order to fully devote themselves to
photography, advertising, and textile design. A seemingly unsatisfied Barr insisted
on looking at their older abstract paintings, which he was surprised to find
“preceding the earliest geometrical things I’ve seen.”21 While impressed with their
masterful photographs, Barr was determined to “find some painters if possible.”22
Recalling the incident from a different angle, Stepanova wrote: “Those Americans
came to call: one of them dull, dry, and bespectacled—Professor Alfred Barr. . . . is
interested only in art—painting, drawing. He turned our whole apartment upside
down. They made us show them all kinds of old junk. Toward the end Barr got all
hot and bothered.”23

For Stepanova, Barr’s uptight character and inquiries were indicative of an

academic who seemed stuck in a bygone idea of fine art and nonmechanical
media: “I am absolutely not interested in this anymore . . . the soul is already filled
with photography.”24

TEXTBOOK

On January 19, 1928, Barr reconvened with Rodchenko, this time at the latter’s
Vkhutemas workshop. Barr arrived loaded with questions, many of them regarding
Rodchenko’s formative years as a painter, which the artist answered “in a rather
disgruntled manner, insisting that the past bored him utterly and that he couldn't
remember at all when he had painted this way or that.”25 Stepanova apparently
answered on behalf of her husband, for she later chronicled in her diary: “Barr
showed us a book on Russian art, in English, by [Louis] Lozowick. Everything was
accurate—even the parts on the Constructivists—and there was a list of all their
names. There’s an entire chapter on Rodchenko. Barr made us check it for
accuracy . . . There turned out to be only one error: that Rodchenko had been a
student of Malevich. This was pointed out to Barr, and the passage was
underlined.”26

The book, the accuracy of which Rodchenko and Stepanova were interrogated
about, was Modern Russian Art.27 Written by the Russian-born émigré artist Louis
Lozowick and published by the Société anonyme in New York in 1925, it was one
of the very few English sources on modern Russian art of the twenties in circulation
in the United States.28 Barr was apparently so attached to it that he had taken his
copy all the way across the Atlantic and then carried it through Europe all the way
to Moscow, where he wrote down within it the dates on which he met with Russian
artists and architects, all of whom appeared to be faculty members at Vkhutemas.
For the far-flung art historian, these close encounters presented a rare opportunity
not only to witness a foreign artistic scene but also, in the absence of an
established bibliography, to fact-check the few existing accounts of its hitherto
genealogy.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s personal copy of Louis Lozowick’s Modern Russian Art (New York: Société anonyme,
1925). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s notes about his visits in Moscow, handwritten in his personal copy of Louis Lozowick’s
Modern Russian Art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Page 24 of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s personal copy of Louis Lozowick’s Modern Russian Art on which he underlined
an erroneous passage regarding Rodchenko’s education. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern
Art Archives, New York

PHOTO

During another visit to Vkhutemas, on January 19, 1928, Rodchenko again

welcomed Barr to his workshop. It is possible that it was on this very day that the
artist gave Barr a gelatin silver print of one of his photographs that captures the
snowy courtyard of Vkhutemas as seen from above on a sunny winter day. It is
likely that Rodchenko had taken this picture from a balcony situated off his
workshop at the Vkhutemas building on 21 Myasnitskaya Street, a site that served
as a laboratory for his architectural photography. Rodchenko’s gift, later added to
the MoMA collection as Barr’s gift, is part of his iconic series of sharp-angle shots
depicting the school building’s balconies and service access ladders. One of these
photographs also appears on the cover the first issue of Novyi lef (New left), a
journal also designed by Rodchenko, a copy of which Barr made sure to bring
back to North America.29

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Dvor VKhUTEMASa (The Courtyard of VKhUTEMAS), 1926–28. Inscribed on verso in
pencil: “Rodchenko to Alfred Barr, Moscow, 1928.” The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Alfred H.
Barr, Jr.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Novyi lef. Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv, no. 1 (1927). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Envelope with the address of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s studio in the VKhUTEMAS building in Moscow noted in
Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s handwriting. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
PAMPHLET

Rodchenko’s photographic gift may have (briefly) transcended the language barrier
with Barr, who attempted to scribble the former’s address at Vkhutemas in Cyrillic,
along with other notes about Russian artists and publications in Latin script, on a
yellow envelope.30 The same could not be said about Tatlin, who was introduced to
Barr at Vkhutemas on the same day. Tatlin had recently been appointed head of the
school’s metal workshop and spoke with Barr in broken German. Barr was
intrigued by the “very beautiful metal constructions” produced by Tatlin’s students,
but he left empty-handed. Three days later, Barr was delighted to meet Russian
modern art critic Nikolai Punin, who provided him with “a copy of his excellent
monograph on Tatlin,” and possibly also his famous 1920 pamphlet on Tatlin’s
Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International), which would
resurface a couple more times in Barr’s personal papers.31

Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International) (Petersburg: Izdanie otdela
izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv NKP, 1920). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New Yor
Page from Nikolai Punin’s Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third International) (Petersburg:
Izdanie otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv NKP, 1920). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York

JOURNAL

A few days before departing, on January 26, 1928, Barr also met with Moisei
Ginzburg, a “brilliant, young architect” who taught at Vkhutemas.32 Ginzburg was a
founding member of the Organization of Contemporary Architects (OSA) and a
coeditor of the widely circulated architectural journal SA. Sovremennaia
arkhitektura (CA. Contemporary Architecture). An illustrated article by Ginzburg on
“constructivism as [a] method of laboratory and pedagogical work,” published a
few months earlier in SA, is included, along with Walter Gropius’s design for the
new Bauhaus building in Dessau and photographs by Lucia Moholy, among others.
The appearance of the Bauhaus and its faculty on the pages of SA are testament
not only to OSA’s admiration of the Bauhaus’s mission but also to the aspiration of
many Vkhutemas architecture faculty members to engage in a critical dialogue with
the German school’s faculty and ideas through publications, exhibitions, and even
mutual exchanges of students.33
Moisei Ginzburg, “Konstruktivizm kak metod laboratornoi i pedagogicheskoi raboty” (“Constructivism as
method of laboratory and pedagogical work”), SA. Sovremennaia arkhitektura (CA. Contemporary
Architecture), no. 6 (1927). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation
 Aleksei Gan, Ivan Leonidov (designers), SA. Sovremennaia arkhitektura (CA. Contemporary Architecture), no. 6
(1927). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation

CLIPPING

Ginzburg offered back issues of SA to Barr, who wrote in his diary of Ginzburg’s
“excellent maquette for a workers’ apartment house and club.”34 A few months
after returning to the United States, Barr contributed an article titled “Notes on
Russian Architecture” to the journal The Arts.35 There, his initial appraisal of
Ginzburg’s design is revised to question the project as “perhaps . . . influenced by
Gropius’ building for the Deutsches Bauhaus at Dessau.”36 Barr’s papers include a
clipping from SA with plans for the project, which he kept in a white envelope
annotated with explanations about the OSA and SA acronyms, most possibly to
illustrate his article. His original reaction is self-censored, and the clipping
remained unused. As former MoMA curator and Barr’s collaborator Elizabeth Jones
later noted, “Architecture as practiced by the pioneers of modernism in the West
provided a standard against which to judge the recent buildings in Moscow.”37

Clipping showing two versions of the plans for a duplex apartment designed by OSA for “Communal House A
1,” published in SA. Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 4–5 (1927): 130. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s handwritten note on
the envelope reads: “Strictly speaking OCA / To be precise OCA - Society of Modern Architecture should be
word / in speaking of the group, CA in / speaking of the periodical.” Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York

CATALOGUE

Perhaps the rarest item included in Barr’s Russian trip papers is one of the five
thousand copies printed of the catalogue for the First Exhibition of Contemporary
Architecture, which he obtained “from Moisei Ginzburg.”38 Typeset in both Russian
and German, this publication was designed by the artist and designer Aleksei Gan,
one of the main theoreticians of Constructivism. Held inside the Vkhutemas
building in the summer of 1927, the exhibition was organized by members of OSA
and brought together works by Vkhutemas and Bauhaus students and faculty
under one roof.39 Even though the exhibition had closed a few months before his
arrival, Barr made use of his copy of the catalogue to take notes on Moscow’s
architects and buildings, many of which he later referenced in his “Notes on
Russian Architecture.”

Aleksei Gan (designer), SA. Katalog pervoi vystavki sovremennoi arkhitektury (CA. First Exhibition of
Contemporary Architecture) (Moscow: Glavnauka, 1927). Gifted to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by Moisei Ginzburg,
January 1928. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Aleksei Gan (designer), SA. Katalog pervoi vystavki sovremennoi arkhitektury (CA. First Exhibition of
Contemporary Architecture) (Moscow: Glavnauka, 1927). Gifted to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by Moisei Ginzburg,
January 1928. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York

Aleksei Gan (designer), SA. Katalog pervoi vystavki sovremennoi arkhitektury (CA. First Exhibition of
Contemporary Architecture) (Moscow: Glavnauka, 1927). Gifted to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by Moisei Ginzburg,
January 1928. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
POSTCARD

Barr’s paper trail on modern Russian art continued to grow even after his return to
the United States. One of the items sent to him from Moscow, in August 1928, was
a postcard that, for the All-Union Spartakiada Sporting Event of 1928, was
designed by Gustav Klutsis.40 Klutsis, who initially studied with Malevich and
graduated from Vkhutemas in 1921, taught color in the wood and metal workshop
of the school from 1924 until 1930.41 Barr must have already been familiar with his
work as Klutsis had codesigned the cover of a 1927 issue of the Bulletin
d’information, the weekly news bulletin of VOKS (Society for Cultural Relations with
Foreign Countries), which Barr had brought back in his suitcase from Moscow.42
However, this postcard was not sent by Klutsis or any other Vkhutemas faculty, but
rather by Petr Likhachev, a nineteen-year-old interpreter who had spent enough
time assisting Barr and Abbott in Moscow to distinguish Barr’s curiosity for any
portable piece of paper on modern Russian art and design. Likhachev’s choice to
send a postcard designed by a Vkhutemas faculty member thus can be read as
deliberate gesture to contribute to his American friend’s towering collection of
ephemera related to modern Russian art and architecture.
Gustav Klutsis, Postcard for the All-Union Spartakiada Sporting Event, 1928. Addressed from Petr Likhachev
to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and dated August 19, 1928. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York

Gustav Klutsis, Postcard for the All-Union Spartakiada Sporting Event, 1928. Addressed from Petr Likhachev
to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and dated August 19, 1928. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York
Sergei Sen’kin and Gustav Klutsis (designers), Bulletin d’information. Organe de la Société pour les Relations
Culturelles Entre l’U.R.S.S. et l’Étranger (Weekly Bulletin. Organ of the Society for Cultural Relations with
Foreign Countries) 7-XI, no. 42–44 (1927). Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York

Throughout the Russian trip of 1927–28, Barr struggled to comprehend both the
Vkhutemas faculty he met and any distinctive qualities of the school vis-à-vis its
overshadowing sibling, the Bauhaus. Vkhutemas might have been less successful
in the dissemination of its ideas and image through the circulation of printed media
(let alone commercial products), but at the same time, its distinct place in the
history of the twentieth-century avant-garde and its far-reaching impact through
the education of literally thousands of Russian and Soviet students cannot be
overestimated. Despite initially interpreting Vkhutemas as chaotic and derivative of
the Bauhaus, as missing the “organizing genius” of Gropius, Barr gradually drew a
more nuanced comparison, noting: “The important difference so far as I could
discern lay in the fact that the aim of the Moscow school was more practical, its
technique far less efficient; the aim of the Bauhaus more theoretical, its technique
much superior. But with men such as Lissitzky and Tatlin and [painter and teacher
Robert] Falk there is much in the future.”43
In the years immediately following his trip to Russia, Barr established regular
correspondence with members of the intellectual circles he had met in the fields of
art, architecture, theater, and cinema, and he wrote numerous articles, published
both in the United States and Russia, summarizing his evolving observations on
both historical and contemporary Russian culture.44

In later years, Barr claimed that the medium-specific structure of the Bauhaus
workshops played a key role in conceptualizing his strategic proposal for MoMA’s
media-specific, multi-departmental structure.45 However, as he himself was first to
point out in his Russian diary, a similar structure characterized Vkhutemas and
included “painting, sculpture, architecture, printing (color and various processed),
typography, graphic arts, furniture designing, advertising posters, and techniques
of materials.”46 During Barr’s directorship, works by Vkhutemas faculty—including
Malevich, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and Stepanova—entered MoMA’s collection for
the first time (sometimes exported as “technical drawings” through Germany, or
wrapped inside Barr’s umbrella to protect them from seizure by the Nazis).47 His
first few bumpy encounters with Rodchenko soon transformed into an exchange of
letters, photographs, and ideas—and ultimately culminated in peaks, such as
MoMA’s 1971 retrospective exhibition of Rodchenko’s work, to which Barr lent
much of his own personal collection.48
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Design for Advertisement for Lenin by G. Zionviev, 1924. Loaned by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
to MoMA’s 1971 retrospective of Rodchenko’s work. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York

Unlike the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas as a pedagogical institution of global significance

never made it into Barr’s infamous 1936 diagram interpreting the evolution of
abstract art and cubism as a series of uncomplicated, one-way vectors that
converge and diverge.49 Neither did it receive the American exposure that
Gropius’s school enjoyed through MoMA’s 1938–39 Bauhaus exhibition and
(multiple reprints of) its accompanying catalogue.50 Perhaps Barr’s contribution to
shedding a light, albeit indirectly, on Vkhutemas might lie elsewhere, as his travels,
ephemera collection, and writings did make available the ideas and artistic
achievements of the Russian avant-garde for new audiences on the other side of
the Atlantic. More than ninety years after Barr’s Russian trip, though, the continued
Othering of the Vkhutemas does not only still hinder a rightful assessment of its
original contributions in art and architecture, but also prevents us from considering
its idiosyncratic, and only seemingly disordered pedagogical culture as an
interpretation of modernity in its own right.

1. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), 66.

2. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002), 146.

3. Margaret Scolari Barr and Jere Abbott, foreword to “Russian Diary 1927–28,” October 7, Soviet Revolutionary
Culture (Winter 1978): 8.

4. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Russian Diary 1927–28,” Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers (AHB), IV.B.143, The Museum of Modern
Art Archives, New York; the original is held in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. Barr’s
diary was published in full as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Russian Diary 1927–28,” October 7, Soviet Revolutionary
Culture (Winter 1978): 10–51. Excerpts from Abbott’s diary were initially published as Jere Abbott, “Notes from a
Soviet Diary,” Hound & Horn 2, no. 3 (April–June 1929): 257–66; and Hound & Horn 2, no. 4 (July–September
 1929): 388–97. Abbott’s diary was published in full as Jere Abbott, “Russian Diary, 1927–28,” October 145
(Summer 2013): 125–223.

5. See, for example, the review of a recent VKhUTEMAS exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin: Agata
Pyzik, “The ‘Soviet Bauhaus,’” Architectural Review 237, no. 1119 (May 2015): 110–11.

6. For a general overview of the protagonists and pedagogical approach of the school with an emphasis on
architecture, see Anna Bokov, “VKhUTEMAS Training,” in Fair Enough: Pavilion of the Russian Federation at the
14th International Architecture Exhibition (Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 2014), 100¬–11.

7. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 33. AHB, IV.B.143.

8. As Daria Sorokina points out in a recent comparison on the continuing obscurity of VKhUTEMAS, “As partial
answer to the question of why the Bauhaus is known throughout the world while VKhUTEMAS is not, consider
the Bauhaus’ achievements in publishing.” Daria Sorokina, “Bauhaus VKhUTEMAS: The History of Two
Legendary Schools,” Readymag, https://stories.readymag.com/bauhaus-vkhutemas/.

9. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60.

10. Ibid., 63.

11. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 33. AHB, IV.B.143.

12. This oxymoron refers to the subtitle of the exhibition organized by Meghan Forbes and the author, on the
occasion of which this essay was written: BAUHAUS↔VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels, The Museum of
Modern Art Library, New York, September 25–October 26, 2018.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. N. Dokuchaev and P. Novitskii, eds., Arkhitektura: raboty arkhitekturnogo fakul’teta VKhUTEMASa [Architecture:
Works of the architecture faculty of VKhUTEMAS], 1920–1927 (Moscow: Izdanie VKhUTEMASa, 1927), cover.

16. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 15. AHB, IV.B.143.

17. Jere Abbott, “Russian Diary, 1927–28,” October 145 (Summer 2013): 158.

18. Ibid., 206.

19. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 16. AHB, IV.B.143.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid, 15.

22. Ibid, 16.

23. Varvara Stepanova, Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda. Pis’ma, poeticheskie opyty, zapiski khudozhnitsy [A
person cannot live without a miracle. Letters, poetry experiments, notes of the artist], ed. O. V. Mel’nikov,
compiled by V. Rodchenko and A. Lavrent’ev (Moscow: Izd. “Sfera,” 1994), 222; cited in Magdalena Dabrowski,
Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi, eds., Aleksandr Rodchenko (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998),
140.

24. Anna Savitskaya, “Alfred Barr Made Us Pull Out All the Old Junk,” Art Newspaper, November 25, 2014,
https://perma.cc/SM22-L6AR.
25. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 33. AHB IV.B.143.

26. Stepanova, Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda, 222; cited in Dabrowski, Dickerman, and Galassi, Aleksandr
Rodchenko, 140.

27. Louis Lozowick, Modern Russian Art (New York: Société anonyme, 1925). AHB, IX.B.14, The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York.

28. Elizabeth Jones, “A Note on Barr’s Contribution to the Scholarship of Soviet Art,” October 7, Soviet
Revolutionary Culture (Winter 1978): 54.

29. Aleksandr Rodchenko, Novyi lef. Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv, no. 1 (1927). AHB, IX, B.103. Novyi lef [New left]
was the second Journal of the Left Front of the Arts. Its first issues were edited by poet Vladimir Mayakovsky,
and the entire run was designed by Rodchenko.

30. Envelope annotated in Barr’s handwriting. AHB, IX.B.100.

31. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 52. AHB IV.B.143; Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik III Internatsionala Monument to the
Third International. AHB IX.B.106.

32. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 43. AHB, IV.B.143.

33. Christina Lodder, “The VKhUTEMAS and the Bauhaus,” in The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West,
1910–1930, eds. Gail Harrison Roman and Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 1992), 196–234, esp. 213–214, 218, 234n128.

34. M. Ia. Ginzburg, “Kommunal’nyi dom A 1” [Communal house A 1], SA. Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 4–5
(1927): 130–31.

35. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Notes on Russian Architecture,” The Arts 15 (February 1929), 103–106. AHB, V.B.44, Folder
5.

36. Ibid., 105.

37. Jones, “A Note on Barr's Contribution to the Scholarship of Soviet Art,” 53¬¬–54.

38. SA: Katalog pervoi vystavki sovremennoi arkhitektury = SA: Erste Ausstellung von gegenwärtigen architektur CA:
First Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture, AHB, IX.B.4. Barr’s handwriting on the opening spread of the
catalogue reads: “A. H. Barr Moscow Jan. ’28 from Moisei Ginzburg.”

39. Lodder, “The VKhUTEMAS and the Bauhaus,” 213. The exhibition was divided into six sections, one of which
was exclusively devoted to the Bauhaus and featured the work of Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Erich
Consemüller, Ruth Hollos, Max Krajewski, Wolfgang Tümpel, Hannes Meyer, and Walter Gropius, among others.
For a comprehensive overview of the exhibition and a full English translation of its catalogue, see: K. Paul
Zygas, “OSA’s 1927 Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture: Russia and the West Meet in Moscow” in The
Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910–1930, 102–42.

40. Petr Likhachev to Alfred Barr, Moscow, August 30, 1928. AHB, IX.B.154, The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York.

41. Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 246.

42. Bulletin d’information. Organe de la Société pour les Relations Culturelles Entre l’U.R.S.S. et l’Étranger 7–XI, no.
42–44 (1927). AHB, IX.B.35.
43. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 33. AHB, IV.B.143.

44. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Za grantsei: Ruki” [Abroad: Hands], Sovetskoe kino 1 (1928): 26–27; “The ‘LEF’ and Soviet
Art,” Transition, no. 14 (Fall 1928): 267–70; “The Researches of Eisenstein,” Drawing and Design 4 (June 1928):
155–56; “Sergei Michailovich Eisenstein,” The Arts 14 (December 1928), 316–21; “Russian Icons,” The Arts 17
(February 1931).

45. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to George Rowley, May 20, 1949; cited in Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins
of the Museum of Modern Art, 155.

46. Barr, “Russian Diary 1927–28,” 31. AHB, IV.B.143.

47. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, 183.

48. AHB, IX.B.97–105; David Vance to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Loan Receipt,” February 1, 1971. AHB, IX.B.103; Jennifer
Licht to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Loans to Rodchenko Exhibition,” February 9, 1971. AHB, IX.B.101.

49. Juliet Koss, “The Pale Red Bauhaus and the USSR,” (symposium, Before and After 1933: The International
Legacy of the Bauhaus, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, January 22, 2010); Anna Bokov, “Institutionalizing the
Avant-Garde: VKhUTEMAS, 1920–1930” (lecture, Collins/Kaufmann Forum for Modern Architectural History,
Columbia University, New York, NY, April 10, 2018).

50. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Ise Gropius (eds.), Bauhaus 1919–1928 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1938; reprinted in 1955, 1972, 1975.