Alfred Barr was just 27 years old when he became the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1929. One of his first acts was to appoint as his director of design and architecture a Harvard philosophy undergrad who had no formal training in architecture or design.

That undergrad was Philip Johnson, who would eventually become a renowned designer of buildings and other things. A key attraction for Barr at that point was that the energetic Johnson shared his passion for the new design philosophy emanating from the Bauhaus school in Germany.

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In 1929, museums were still relatively passive institutions, gathering and presenting work without any conspicuous partisan agenda. Barr and Johnson were activists, who gave MoMA’s adventures in design and architecture – still novel fields for a fine-art museum – a sharp polemical edge. They promoted the sparse aesthetic and all-encompassing approach of the Bauhaus, and denigrated nearly everything else. Their goal was to convince everyone in America to take the same view.

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The show gives special and unusual attention to the apartments the two lived in, on neighbouring floors of a building on Manhattan’s East Side. Barr and Johnson, we are repeatedly told, “experimented” with modern design in their own austere digs. The wealthy Johnson’s experiment consisted of hiring Mies van der Rohe to design his flat, then closely following the master’s instructions for use. A lived-in look was not permitted. When a visitor dared to leave a handbag on one of Johnson’s chairs, Barr’s wife Marga informed her that “one does not leave extraneous objects lying around … The interior is a still life.”

The Barrs, who lived on Alfred’s salary, had to scrounge for domestic knock-offs of German furniture priced beyond their reach. Amusingly, Hanks’s research discovered that a Marcel Breuer-inspired table and chair set the Barrs used for decades was actually the work of Donald Deskey, the man behind the “horribly deformed” deco interiors at Radio City Music Hall.

These and other pieces from the Barr home were donated by their daughter in 1988 to the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, which became part of the MMFA in 2000. Some of Johnson’s furnishings are on view also, along with a 3-D-simulating video tour of his apartment. Johnson justified the expense of hiring Mies to his mother by saying it was “the cheapest possible publicity for my style.”

But few tastemakers actually saw the place, and one of the only publications to write about it at the time was the newsletter of Johnson’s old prep school.

No matter: MoMA’s “‘missionary’ responsibility,” as Barr called it, was better served by a series of shows that travelled widely and set the modern standard for touring exhibitions in the United States. The museum’s Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932) toured for several years, as did Machine Art (1934), Barr’s and Johnson’s most far-out statement of how wide a contemporary-art museum’s reach should be. Exhibits included kitchen utensils, a cash register and a ball bearing, which also appeared on the poster.

Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson spotlights a crucial, though little-known, aspect of the development of American modern design: the collaboration between Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902‐1981), the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and Philip Johnson (1906‐2005), MoMA’s first curator of architecture. The exhibition focusses on the contribution of these two visionaries and friends who spread the ideas of the Bauhaus and acquainted North America with modern design and architecture by means of pioneering exhibitions that they organized at MoMA, such as Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932) and Machine Art (1934).

The exhibition traces the development of modern design from Bauhaus up to the influential MoMA exhibitions of the 1930s. It brings together archival documents and over seventy design objects – furniture, textiles, and industrial design products – including twenty-one from the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, held today by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and some Bauhaus and New Bauhaus pieces on loan from MoMA.

Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson is organized around five major themes: Bauhaus in America; Johnson’s Apartment; Barr’s Apartment; The Exhibition Machine Art at MoMA; and The Spreading of a Modern Aesthetic in America. The exhibition combines the presentation of design objects with an original experience paying tribute to the bold spirit of the two men. It uses multi‐platform digital technology, including autostereoscopic display, which makes it possible to see images in 3D without the use of glasses. The audiovisual presentations were designed by the filmmaker and director Philippe Baylaucq, in partnership with the Montreal content producer Toast Studio and 3D consultant Alain Baril.