Iris Barry
| Iris Barry | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Iris Sylvia Crump 1895 Washwood Heath |
| Died | December 22, 1969 |
| Nationality | British; American |
| Occupation | film critic |
| Known for | curator at the Museum of Modern Art |
Iris Barry (1895 – 1969) was a film critic and curator. In the 1920s she helped establish the original London Film Society, and was the first curator of the film department of the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1935.
Barry was born Iris Sylvia Crump, in the Washwood Heath district of Birmingham, England. She was the daughter of Alfred Charles Crump and Annie Crump. She studied at the Ursuline convent, Verviers, Belgium.
She moved to London in 1916 or 1917, where she met Ezra Pound. She had two children with Wyndham Lewis, a boy in 1919, and daughter in 1920.
She began publishing film criticism in The Spectator in 1923, and was film correspondent for the Daily Mail between 1925 and 1930, when she emigrated to the United States. Her marriage to Alan Porter did not long survive the move.
The Film Society, the first of its kind, was launched in October 1925; she was one of its founders along with cinema owner Sidney Bernstein, film director Adrian Brunel, well-connected enthusiast Ivor Montagu, and fellow film critic Walter Mycroft.
She is probably best remembered as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, which had opened in 1929. After coming to the United States in 1930, she founded the film study department in 1932, with an archival collection of rare films, library of film-related books, and a film circulation program. She also collected films. She became an American citizen in 1941, and married John E. Abbott.
Barry wrote a popular book on moviegoing Let's Go to the Pictures (1926) and the scholarly classic D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940), and became a regular book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune.
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