Frank Barr: Avant-Garde Designer in Mid-Century Chicago?

Abstract A popular 1941 gallery show in Chicago entitled “The Advance Guard of Advertising Artists” included five prominent European advocates of modernist design and four Americans who did daring and innovative work. All but one of these designers is today included in the mid-century design canon. The odd man out was Frank Barr (1906–1955), a Chicago letterpress printer with a modest, entirely local reputation both before and after the exhibit. This article explores Barr’s career to explicate the meaning of avant-garde design during at the period and shed light on the larger question of canonical status. Chicago was a major industrial and printing hub that nonetheless seemed provincial in design terms into the 1930s. Many design professionals educated there (like Barr) had remained content with the opportunities the city provided. The arrival of the New Bauhaus in 1937 injected new vitality into the local design scene and gave birth to a fresh sense of Chicago’s potentially international credentials. Barr’s career spanned the two decades of this transition and provides a useful case study of provincialism, avant-garde status, and internationalism.