Iris Barry

Iris Barry (1895 – 22 December 1969) was a British-American 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 Museum of Modern Art, New York City in 1935.

Life 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 and attended “Ezuversity,” that is, Ezra Pound’s programme through which he educated young male and female poets on the art of reading and writing. In the letters Pound wrote to her, among many other things, he encouraged her to emancipate herself, to avoid marriage and to do something no other living person had done before. She had two children with Wyndham Lewis, a boy in 1919, and daughter in 1920. As Barry spent the war years going to the cinema, when she wrote her book Let's go to the pictures (1926), she explicitly stated: "Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of" (p. viii).

In 1923 she met the American poet Alan Porter (1899–1942), assistant literary editor of The Spectator, and published a poem in the magazine in July 1923. During their engagement The Spectator also favorably reviewed her first novel, Splashing into Society. She and Porter were married on October 8, 1923, the name Felix Porter appearing in the marriage record.

She began publishing film criticism in The Spectator in 1923, and was film correspondent for the Daily Mail between 1925 and 1930, when she was fired for writing a negative review of a film by Elinor Glyn, a friend of the proprietor. In those five years she wrote hundreds if not thousands of articles for the paper. Subsequently she emigrated to the United States; her marriage to Alan Porter did not long survive the move.

On October 10, 2014, MoMA presented an illustrated talk by Robert Sitton, author of Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film.

Works Splashing into society. London: Constable, 1923 Let's Go to the Movies (pdf via Internet Archive)

The Ezra Pound Period. The Bookman. October 1931. Portrait of Lady Mary Montagu, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928 (First American Edition)