I've lived near Philadelphia for four years now. The first two years I barely went anywhere due to the pandemic. The last two years or so I've been investigating the sights. I've been to the obvious candidates like the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, Benjamin Franklin's gravesite, and the Pennsylvania Museum of Art. I've hit some of the lesser but still cool sights like the Eastern State Penitentiary (the world's first penitentiary!) and the very weird Mütter Museum (a medical museum, not for the squeamish).
Always on my list was the Barnes Foundation. It is known for its collection of impressionist paintings. I understand that impressionism is very popular and hugely lucrative. It's just that I've seen a lot of such paintings. I've been to the Louvre, the British National Gallery, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I've even been to the Musée d'Orsay, which has the largest collection of impressionist paintings in the world.
The Barnes was just never at the top of my list. Also, it keeps slightly strange hours. It's open Thursday through Monday, 11 AM to 4 PM.
I had a free day and I decided that I might as well visit it, if for no reason other than to check it off my list.
In short, mind blown.
Let's start with the presentation. Despite the lavish size of the building, the art itself is hung in a relatively modest number of small rooms. Art museums typically have many galleries spread over many floors. Each gallery itself is composed of many rooms. At the Barnes, the paintings are stored in perhaps two dozen rooms.
In a typical gallery, each room might hold something close to two dozen paintings. They are spaced appropriately from each other. Each object is labelled, often with a brief description of the significance of it.
At the Barnes, there is none of that. The image that I included above is very typical. The paintings are stacked on top of each other. In each small room are dozens of paintings. None of them are labelled. You better bring your phone. The only practical way to get the title / artist is to use an app on the Barnes web site. You share your camera with the Barnes app and it will automatically try to match the image on your camera with their database. If successful (tip: it's not always successful), your phone will pop up with the title, the artist, and usually some interesting information about it.
The final weird thing about it is that, in other galleries, the objects are organized, usually by artist or genre or era. Here there is none of that. There will be an El Greco painting (16th century Greek) right next to a Renoir painting (19th century French). A Picasso will be right next to an African statue. I'm sure that there is an order and / or an aesthetic to it, but it's not obvious to an admittedly art neophyte like myself. Not only that, but metal brackets are screwed into the wall at various places and the floor has chairs, desks and other furniture scattered about.
All of that is interesting, but what blew my mind is the sheer quantity and quality of the art. In this relatively modest collection of rooms is an astounding array of impressionists, post-impressionists, and modernists. Even at say the British National Gallery, there might be fifty or so impressionist canvases on display. At the Barnes, there are about 180 Renoirs, 70 Cézannes, 60 Matisses, 50 Picassos, 20 Modiglianis, and around 10 each of Degas and Van Goghs. I'm not even counting the few Monets and Toulouse-Lautrecs seemingly randomly placed among the rest. Renoir is famous for his bathers. A museum will be lucky to have two or three examples. Barnes must have had around ten.
All told, the Barnes has around 4,000 objects, including 900 paintings. It is currently valued at between twenty-five to thirty billion dollars. Yes, you read that right. A painting by Cézanne called The Card Players has an estimated value of around 500 million dollars. I stood less than two feet away from it, separated from it by only a thin string strung along at knee height. This access to priceless artifacts is one of the fascinating aspects about art galleries.
The question that I kept asking myself was how? How was this magnificent art collected?
The short answer is one man. And yes, that man's name was Barnes. As in, Albert C Barnes. Barnes created a medical treatment that made him a fortune. He became a serious collector in 1912. Although he was first helped by a friend, from what I can tell he was the driving force behind all of the purchases that are in the museum today. It's amazing because you can see pictures of him on the internet. He looks like a typical cranky old man.
Here's where the story gets really interesting because, actually, he was a cranky old man. When he came back to Philadelphia in the 1920s, he proudly held an exhibition of his collection. For those not up on art history, impressionism was deeply controversial and unpopular. The high and mighty local art critics basically called his collection trash.
It's fair to say that Barnes did not take kindly to that. He swore that he would never show his art in public again. In 1922, he set up a trust that created the Barnes Foundation. It was set up exclusively to be an educational institution. Essentially there was to be no public access to any of the art. The art would be used purely to educate artists. By the terms of the trust, the objects could never be lent or sold. If some fancy critic from the New York Times wrote to Barnes asking to view the collection, he would send them back a refusal letter. Instead of his signature, he would include a paw print from his dog. He particularly despised the society Philadelphians that owned / controlled the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He had a specific contempt for the Annenberg family. This incredible collection of art was going to be locked away forever.
However, Barnes proved not to be immortal. He died in 1951. He did not have any children, so there were no Barnes family members to carry on with his wishes. He was succeeded by an acolyte named Violette de Mazia. She loyally followed the terms of the trust, although, much to her distress, she was forced, in 1961, to open up the collection to the public. By open up, I mean that it was open for two and a half days a week with a maximum of five hundred visitors in a week. Reservations could only be made by phone two weeks in advance.
She died in 1988. By this time, the value and quality of the Barnes collection was widely recognized. Organizations like the Philadelphia Museum of Art were salivating at the opportunity to take it over.
Barnes had one last trick up his sleeve. By the terms of the trust, the trustees could only be selected by Lincoln University. Never heard of Lincoln University? Located near Philadelphia, it's the second oldest HBCU in the country (apparently the first one to award degrees). Interestingly enough, the oldest HBCU is Cheney University, located just a mile or two from where I'm typing this right now. It must have been infuriating to the Philadelphia elite to know that this priceless art collection was in the hands of a small HBCU.
However, Lincoln University turned out to be a vulnerable part of Barnes plan to forever exclude the Philadelphia elite. By the time of the early 2000s, Lincoln University was facing a financial crisis. The Pennsylvania governor at the time promised to give Lincoln University a significant influx of money if they agreed to expand the number of Barnes trustees (there seemed to be a certain "it'd be sad if something were to happen to your little university" coercive element to these discussions).
Lincoln University agreed and the number of trustees was expanded from five to fifteen. It would surprise no one that the ten new openings were filled by, yes, members of the Philadelphia elite (including the Barnes hated Annenberg Foundation) with connections to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Within short order, the trustees voted to move the Foundation, currently housed in a residential neighborhood of a small township, to a downtown Philadelphia location that is a mere stone's throw away from the Museum of Art. A fancy new building was constructed, opening hours were expanded, an entrance fee was charged, and it is now much more a museum than it is an education institution. The Barnes trust is now a tattered fragment and the Philadelphia elite have gotten their way.
How do I know about all of this? There was a documentary made about it called The Art of the Steal. It's a fascinating film to watch. There were all of these former instructors from the old Barnes that were decrying the state of the new Barnes. They wrung their hands at the fact that the art is now open to Philistines that won't have the proper appreciation of it. They bemoaned the fact that the trust has been so flagrantly violated.
I found the film amusing. As with most people, when I hear a David vs Goliath story, especially when the story is so blatantly biased towards David, my inclination is to sympathize with David.
I just couldn't here. The new building is beautiful. The rooms are replicated exactly as they were in the old Barnes Foundation. It's much easier to access now than from some quiet residential street. It's literally only five miles away from the old site.
It's ironic that the participants in the film were so negative about the Philadelphia elite when they are precisely the artistic elite that people also hate. How dare they say that this magnificent collection of art should only be available to view to only those that they deem somehow worthy? Maybe I took it a bit personally because I'm sure that I would never gotten past these gatekeepers. Did my unwashed, uneducated eyes somehow besmirch the grandeur of the art?
How long was the trust supposed to last? The trust is now one hundred years old. Barnes has been dead for seventy. How much past the grave does a person's property rights extend? Barnes managed to thwart his enemies for some seventy years. Take the W and move on.
Regarding the title of my blog post, I have to give credit. Requiem for a Jumble of Artworks was the title of the film review written up in the New York Times. It was such a great title that I had to yoink it.
The bottom line is that I found the film interesting and amusing. Even more importantly, if you have any interest in art and find yourself in Philadelphia between Thursday to Monday, 11 AM to 4 PM, definitely think about going to the Barnes. I can almost guarantee that you won't regret it.
Even better, by doing so, you might be making a dead, cranky misanthrope spin in his grave.
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