Minute for Leila Barber
Leila Cook Barber, who died on December 4, l984, at the
of 8l, was a member of the Vassar faculty for 37 years.
She taught in the Art Department, which she joined in l93l,
until her retirement in I968.
Of that generation that in its youth placed more value
on the personally creative than on conformity to professional orthodoxy, Leila Barber could and did say of herself: "I am a period piece. I've never published anything. I have no Ph.D. I don’t know why they kept me.“ Generations of stu-
dents, however, and department members, colleagues and col-
lege administrators knew exactly why she was invaluable to
the College, why it can be said that she has not left her
peer. Simply because formalized professional ambition was alien to Leila Barber, this minute, to record her contri-
bution to Vassar College must go beyond the framework of
academic vita.
A phrase often used by Leila to characterize others was
“mover and shaker.”
Leila was not a shaker, but she was a
mover and shaper. And it is the shape of things that she
herself cared to fashion and foster, or encourage and sup-
port, that became incorporated into the mainstream of learning, enhancing its quality and affirming at the same time the
values of larger social enterprise. What she gave shape
to may, perhaps, be traced to her study of philosophy and
psychology as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, from
which she received her B.A. in 1925, and to her study of
art history, begun under the famed Giorgianna Goddard King.
She earned her M.A. in art history in 1928 at Radcliffe,
where she did further graduate work until 1931.
Related to these fields of study, and what might be
said to lie at the heart of Leila Barber's accomplishments
was a fundamentally domestic ideal. "Domestic" is not meant
in the narrow sense here -- not at all implying a channeling
of energies to private ends -- but signifying that personal
space where what is within can be ordered and arranged, ex-
panded and controlled, -- to visible effect. It was the
platform from which an inner dynamic of energy radiated out-
ward in many directions: a base from which a response to
immediate surroundings was extended to a critical concern
with a larger environment -- with working spaces, archi-
tecture and landscape. It was the launching point for a
trajectory of thought that carried personal compassion into
social action -- in her later years to serving meals on
wheels, to recording for the blind. The domestic core was
a touchstone not only for personal social life, but for
social responsibility, including her vigilant concern for
the quality of campus life And it was the source of the
tremendous reach of her truly liberal point of view which
in so forward looking and positive a way embraced every
innovative idea that could potentially bring about greater
understanding, more perceptive knowledge or pleasure, or
improved social condition. The operative pattern of her
gifts and dedication emerges clearly in her contributions
to Vassar College.
Part of each summer she worked on student rooming
with the College warden, Mrs. Drouilhet; by 1940 she was
head resident of Josselyn House; and from 1955 on, house-
fellow at Josselyn. During the Second World War she
helped plan and inaugurate a college system of cooperative
living in which household tasks formerly done by maids
and white angels were rotated among the students in each
dormitory. In addition to getting the work done, this,
she thought, brought students of different backgrounds
together, and induced a sense of communal responsibility
and an active participation in the care for one's environ-
ment. She was also chairman of the wartime faculty com-
mittee called the Key Center of Information at Vassar,
which, by appointment of the Office of Education, served
as a distribution center for information about the war
and postwar problems to six neighboring counties. She
represented the Key Center on the Vassar Coordinating
Council for War Activities, and served on the council's
advisory panel of faculty members who helped students to.
choose individual programs of preparation for war service.
She also chaired the Emergency Committee, which formu-
lated the College defense program.
Her committee service for the College, however, en-
compassed the entire range of academic process, from
visiting schools and talking with prospective students,
to the Committee on Student Records, to the Curriculum
Committee, to the Board of Residents which advised stu-
dents in each house -- 140 in Joss -- to the advising of
majors in Art History. She was chairman of the Art De-
partment from 1965 to 1968; and following her retirement,
she was briefly Acting Dean of Studies. Her advising,
house-fellowing and teaching brought her into touch with
an exceptionally wide range of students, with countless
of whom she formed enduring friendships. She was master-
ful at bringing along the C student; she was a bulwark
to those having a difficult time in college, and she was
a fearless defender to parents of individual freedom as
F. Scott Fitzgerald realized when Leila Barber took him
to task for his views concerning the social life of his
daughter.
In another vein, she was both awe-inspiring and for-
midable: formidable in the authority, strength of voice
and definitive manner in which she expressed her views;
awe-inspiring in her presence, which was stately, ex-
ceptional in grandeur and beauty and impeccable in every
detail from coif to couture. Today she would be called
a "role model;” indeed she inspired a student who saw her
at a lecture last winter to write of her "perfectly seated
figure,“ finding her "marvelous," and evoking more genera-
tions of students than she realized when she wrote, "Perhaps it was the child in me that caused the memory of Leila Bar-
ber to become forever crystallized within me."
But the phrase "role model," which now verges on empty
jargon, is one that Beila Barber would not have used except
facetiously. Abstraction was not something that experience
fitted into, but something drawn from it. For this reason,
among others, she excelled in the art of teaching. Many
teachers reach their students; but singular was Leila's
style, projection of voice and logically sustained develop-
ment of analysis and idea. What she said made an indelible
impression, and not least because of her invention of
striking, witty and vivid turns of phrase often drawn from
the commonly shared worlds of food and fashion. Dazzlingly
articulate, and lucidly clear, she was able, just in the
telling, to raise every work of art that she projected on
the screen to a higher power, or to consign it to a limbo
of inferiority where the works of those who misunderstood
the styles of others seemed rightly to belong. She made
art history itself a profoundly aesthetic and human--as
well as historical-- discipline.
When Leila Barber joined the Art Department, she became
its third member, teaching twelve l05 conference sections
and a course in ancient art. It was she who shaped the intro-
ductory survey course, writing and revising its extensive
syllabus. Printed annually, it was a booklet eagerly
sought after and cherished by graduate students at other in-
stitutions long after it ceased to be produced. There was,
hardly a historical period in the survey course that she
had not at some time taught herself. She taught American
painting as well, and on the advanced level, medieval art
and Italian Renaissance art from Giotto to Tintoretto
and beyond, though Tuscan painting of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Centuries was her special field. With growing
specialization in the discipline, no one else in the de-
partment could do all that Leila Barber could do, or with
the intelligence and knowledge that she did it. No one
had before, and certainly no one has since. Covering the
field, shaping the developing discipline through the curri-
culum at Vassar, she was absolutely integral to that
excellence of teaching and training for which the Vassar
Art Department was so widely renowned in mid-century. A
member of the Renaissance Society of America and the Col-
lege Art Association of America, she was well known in
the art historical world, and it was well known by her.
Her shaping of programs extended, moreover, beyond the
art department. In the Forties, she was a staunch advocate
of the three-year plan, participating in it. This was an
innovative arrangement of semesters and of curricular
offerings that enabled students in the war years to gradu-
ate in three rather than four years. Part of the raison
d'etre of the plan was its potential for encouraging stu-
dents to go on to graduate work, to have already launched
themselves on a course of advanced study within the canonicm
four years.
Study in the form of seeing, knowing first hand and
re-viewing the works of art that she taught early establishw
a regular pattern of summer travel. It was not altogether
uneventful. In l936, in Spain with J. B. Ross from the
History Department, she was trapped in the bombing of Gran-
ada at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The New York
Times photographed them and headlined their ‘Escape by Plane
from Rebel Stronghold in Spain.“ They were rescued in a
H-seater piloted by the Comte de Sibour, for whom Leila
characteristically, held the map that guided them to Tangien
In her teaching years she traveled mostly to the Continen
including Russia, but especially to Italy; and in the years
of her retirement she spent long intervals in Greece and
made repeated trips to England.i Although she traveled ex-
tensively with undiminished interest in all visible mani-
festations of life and civilization, she had a great spirit
socially for those enterprises on the local scene, including
the League of Women Voters, to whom she gave her enthusiastic
support.
An alumna who had enjoyed Leila's l05 lectures some
years earlier returned to work at Vassar. Still regarding
Leila with the awe inspired by their earlier teacher-student
relationship, it was some time before she could stop ad-
dressing her as ‘Miss Barber.“ However, in the years follow-
ing Leila's retirement, they shared many happy times to-
gether. These ranged from the concerts and opera workshops
in Skinner, and the Drama Department productions, to Honi
Cole and his tap-dancing troupe in concert at the Bardavon.
Leila's great capacity for enjoying a variety of experi-
ences, and her witty comments on the proceedings, made these
evenings and many another outing to museums in Williamstown
and New Haven a delight.
A strong and loyal supporter of the arts in Pough-
keepsie, Leila Barber could be seen at virtually every im-
portant cultural event. After her retirement she regularly
attended concerts, plays and lectures at Vassar and at the
Bardavon. She was a major supporter of the Bardavon and a
patron of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. A great film
buff, she became the first member of the Bardavon Film So-
ciety. She also supported Vassar's Friends of the Art Ga
lery and Barrett House.
With her unfailing enthusiasm for budding talent, she
never missed an audition for the Young Artists Competition,
and she played a vital part in guiding a local student play-
wright, Bill C. Davis, in creating his successful Broad-
way production, "Mass Appeal.” Her personal involvement
with the arts was boundless. No wonder she was heard to
say, ”It makes me weary to think of all I shall have done
weeks from now."
For all that she did do for the College and Art De-
partment, art history and the community, we are deeply
grateful.
Respectfully submitted,
Pamela Askew
Eugene Carroll
Elizabeth Drouilhet
Mary Alice Hunter
Joan Murphy