Of all of the methods that right this moment’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an artwork museum is without doubt one of the extra benign, someplace behind eradicating malaria however forward of eradicating democracy. The artwork in these museums is sort of at all times up to date, reflecting the dearth of obtainable previous masters together with a world chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde artwork is socially, intellectually, and culturally essential. Few of those tycoons, although, are prone to discover the stakes as agonizingly excessive as Albert C. Barnes did.
From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of many world’s best personal collections of recent European paintings—extra Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than another museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Pleasure of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Fashions ; the record goes on and on. The Barnes Basis was formally an academic establishment, however was successfully America’s first museum of recent artwork. (The New York group that put capital letters on these phrases is 4 years youthful.) But when Barnes’s assortment is a mannequin to emulate, the saga of his group is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils.
Coinciding with the centennial of the Barnes’s opening, we’ve Blake Gopnik’s breezy new biography of the person, The Maverick’s Museum, and Neil L. Rudenstine’s reissued historical past of the establishment, The Home of Barnes, first printed in 2012, when its authorized struggles had been above-the-fold information. The 2 need to be learn collectively, as a result of the slippage of id between the person, the artwork, and the establishment gives each the melodrama and the farce of the story.
Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was sensible sufficient to realize admission to Philadelphia’s selective Central Excessive Faculty and the College of Pennsylvania’s medical faculty. Realizing, maybe, that he lacked one thing within the bedside-manner division, he went into chemical analysis, and in 1902 he and his companion commercially launched the antiseptic Argyrol, which grew to become commonplace in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit surprise, however Argyrol made him a fortune.
At first he used his new cash in predictable methods. He constructed a mansion on the Foremost Line and named it “Lauraston” for his spouse. He purchased quick vehicles (a ardour that will be the dying of him) and joined the native fox hunt. He additionally did much less clichéd issues, corresponding to learning philosophy, studying Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed {that a} principle’s value was measured not by its magnificence however by its penalties on the earth, and he handled his Argyrol manufacturing facility as a laboratory for social experimentation. He employed Black and white staff, women and men. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated office “effectivity,” Barnes boasted that in his manufacturing facility, “every participant had developed his or her personal technique of doing a selected job.” The “her” in that sentence alone is noteworthy.
By Blake Gopnik
On the similar time, Barnes was a crank of operatic grandiosity—thin-skinned, bellicose, distrustful, fickle, and vindictive. Ezra Pound described him as dwelling in “a state of high-tension hysteria, at battle with mankind.” His bile may very well be witty, however extra usually traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Artwork was “a home of creative and academic prostitution”; when a newspaper critic took offense at “the fevered ardour for unclean issues!” (bare individuals) in Barnes’s assortment, he despatched a letter impugning her “well-recognized sexual vagaries.”
Interested in artwork, he enlisted the recommendation of a high-school good friend, the Ashcan Faculty painter William Glackens, and in 1912 despatched Glackens to Paris with a want record and $20,000 (about $650,000 right this moment). Discovering that the Impressionists Barnes sought had been costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed trendy. In the middle of two weeks, he purchased 33 works, together with a Picasso, a Cézanne, and the primary Van Gogh to enter an American assortment, his spellbinding The Postman. When Barnes made his personal journey to Paris a number of months later, he spent 3 times the cash in half the time and lived as much as each stereotype the French had about American millionaires. “He did actually wave his chequebook within the air,” Gertrude Stein wrote to a good friend.
By Neil L. Rudenstine
Modernism held attraction for somebody who thought of himself a pugnaciously authentic thinker. Accumulating previous artwork was posh and respectable, however in an America nonetheless scandalized by the sight of breasts, gathering trendy artwork was outrageous. Inside 10 years, Barnes had acquired some 700 work. However artwork to him was greater than a proxy for cultural sophistication and a fats checking account. It made him really feel issues—intense and essential issues—and he would spend the remainder of his life attempting to map exactly the way it did so.
If his obsession with Renoir’s late, big-bottomed, pinheaded nudes appears “idiosyncratic within the excessive,” as Rudenstine writes, it was shared by Picasso and Matisse, who prized radical departures in kind. Barnes was a turbulent individual and Renoir was his pleased place, filled with fairly colours and keen flesh. Cézanne appealed for various causes. Barnes discovered heroism within the artist’s “social strangeness,” and noticed it mirrored within the artwork: “His deformations of naturalistic appearances are akin to the brusque remarks … which, when sociability is the rule, mission new interpretations upon conventionally accepted concepts.”
Barnes’s eye wasn’t excellent—he handed on Van Gogh’s Starry Night time—however his instincts had been remarkably good. He started shopping for African sculpture in 1922 and amassed an essential assortment. He purchased previous masters whose agitation or distortions recalled the moderns he liked. He purchased Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He purchased Native American serapes and jewellery. He purchased American people artwork and—repudiating the excellence between “artwork” and “craft”—acquired portions of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door tits, which he hung alongside the work. To Kenneth Clark, then the pinnacle of the Nationwide Gallery in London, he wrote that he noticed “no important esthetic distinction between the types of the nice painters or sculptors, and people of the iron-workers.”
None of this was fairly as extraordinary as Barnes appreciated to faux. The connection amongst people artwork, handcrafts, and modernism was made by quite a lot of curators and collectors on the time. Regarding the avant-garde, John Quinn, the visionary behind the 1913 Armory Present, was extra adventurous, leaning into Cubism and Duchamp’s radical experiments the place Barnes balked. (Their rivalry was such that Barnes, tiring of his common name-calling, employed personal detectives to dig up dust on Quinn.) Others weren’t far behind. MoMA’s 2024 ebook Inventing the Trendy celebrates the museum’s feminine founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—and the energetic idealism required to get these efforts off the bottom in an usually hostile tradition.
Barnes exaggerated his temerity within the face of philistines partly as a result of he longed to be acknowledged as greater than only a world-class shopper. Making use of his chemist’s mind to finding the “scientific” ideas behind his aesthetic expertise, he concluded that what mattered in artwork was kind—line, coloration, house, motion. Contextual information corresponding to biographies and material simply distracted from the actual act of wanting. These formalist concepts had been articulated by numerous critics and artwork historians earlier than Barnes, although, as common, he took them to extremes. His 530-page “assertion of ideas,” The Artwork in Portray (1925), contains no titles for works reproduced within the ebook, lest readers be led astray by material.
Far more authentic was his software of this formalism to John Dewey’s theories of experimental schooling and social reform. He might cite Dewey’s 1916 ebook Democracy and Schooling “nearly chapter and verse,” Gopnik tells us. Barnes was satisfied that “plain individuals of common intelligence” may very well be delivered to the sort of artwork apotheosis he had skilled, simply by understanding find out how to look. He derided artwork historical past as a self-discipline and artwork students individually, however he couldn’t abandon the concept that he himself had experience different individuals wanted.
Like many individuals who get so much out of wanting, Barnes was irritated on the informal attitudes of museum guests. When the Barnes Basis opened its doorways in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical constructing inside a 12-acre arboretum adjoining to Barnes’s dwelling—its indenture permitted no posh events and no unvetted guests. The artwork wouldn’t journey or be reproduced in coloration. To see it, you utilized to take lessons within the Barnes technique. It was not a museum; it was a faculty.
Inside, he organized (and recurrently rearranged) the gathering in “ensembles” that combined objects of various ages, origins, and features. Most individuals do that at dwelling, however Barnes’s stridently symmetrical preparations—massive artworks within the center, smaller ones to both aspect, formal echoes bouncing across the room—had been emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for instance, Matisse’s Purple Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (amongst different issues) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of followers, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of images, every exhibiting a lady and a canine (one in all them from the hand of William Glackens’s daughter, age 9). The impact is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson.
Admission was doled out on the premise of whim and choler. Having prior experience or spectacular connections was often a black mark: T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier, Barnett Newman, and the heads of each MoMA and the Whitney had been among the many rejected. Scholar habits was monitored. Questioning the tactic or viewing within the unsuitable approach might get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened by means of microphones for heretical dialog. Such ritualistic protocols can really improve the expertise of viewing: Perceiving the specialness of the chance, individuals will give heightened consideration. So whereas some Barnes college students rebelled, others grew to become acolytes.
Dewey, one in all Barnes’s only a few lasting associates, wrote in his ebook Artwork as Expertise that the academic work of the gathering was of “a pioneer high quality akin to the very best that has been carried out in any subject throughout the current technology, that of science not excepted.” Contemplating that the science of that technology had produced antibiotics and the idea of relativity, that’s fairly a declare.
Fifty-three and childless when the muse opened its doorways, Barnes was not oblivious to the necessity to prepare its future past his lifetime. However his imaginative and prescient for it was rigid. He unsuccessfully floated potential partnerships to the College of Pennsylvania, Haverford School, and Sarah Lawrence School, whose exasperated president lastly wrote: “You may stuff your cash, your footage, your iron work, your antiques, and the entire goddamn factor proper up the Schuylkill River.” Barnes then skilled an affectionate eye on close by Lincoln College—the second-oldest traditionally Black college within the nation, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.
His relationship with Black tradition and Black leaders was characteristically complicated. He thought of spirituals “America’s solely nice music,” and his admiration for African sculpture was deep. However this appreciation was usually tinged with condescension. The one Black painter in his assortment was not a type of artists who had been to Paris and absorbed the teachings of modernism, however the self-taught “primitive” Horace Pippin. (Equally, the ladies in his assortment tended towards the doe-eyed and ornamental. He returned the Georgia O’Keeffes he’d purchased, however stored his Marie Laurencins.)
Nonetheless, he cast a relationship with Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the phrases of succession in order that Lincoln would ultimately assume management of the muse’s board. This relationship, too, may properly have gone south, however in July 1951 Barnes sped by means of a cease register his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer.
For the subsequent 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission grew to become tougher, the dogma stricter, the scholars fewer however extra ardent. When the state pressured the tax-exempt basis to open to the general public two days every week, Barnes college students picketed. In 1987, the thinker and artwork critic Arthur C. Danto described the sorry state of affairs—the “beautiful works” imprisoned in “the sullen museum, with its musty smells and emotionless custodians.”
De Mazia’s dying, in 1988, snapped the muse out of its torpor. That it had been careening towards insolvency now grew to become clear, and the one paths to revenue—admission charges, mortgage reveals, occasion leases—had been blocked by Barnes’s indenture. The brand new Lincoln-appointed board fought to interrupt the phrases; former Barnes college students fought to protect them. The state fought to extend entry; neighbors fought to limit it. Accusations of racism and corruption bounced round. Ultimately the board proposed shifting the entire assortment to a brand new location close to the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork. YouTube feedback beneath the 2009 anti-move movie The Artwork of the Steal convey the ensuing outrage: “My soul cries for this loss,” “Disgrace!!!,” “I Actually hope The Philadelphia Of Artwork [sic] Burns to the bottom … artwork and all.” If this fury appears disproportionate to the scenario—a nonprofit establishment in want of funds finds a option to protect its core belongings whereas rising public entry—it was definitely very Barnesian.
The Barnes Basis has now been on Philadelphia’s Museum Mile for greater than a decade. The artwork is all there—Cézanne’s nice The Card Gamers, the numerous pink girls searching for their garments, the Wes Anderson ensembles. From ceiling vaults to baseboards, each room has been replicated because it appeared when Barnes died. However they sit in a unique constructing, underneath a unique algorithm.
Entry is not an achievement on par with getting previous the bouncer at Berghain. All it’s important to do is cough up $30. Inside, you’ll be able to interrupt your viewing with a cup of espresso within the café or a go to to the reward store, the place you should purchase a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin’s African American household at prayer (an odd alternative for footwear, however perhaps the logical consequence of pure formalist thought—the colours and shapes look fantastic on an ankle).
In different phrases, exterior the re-created rooms, you get the usual, bustling, consumer-oriented museum expertise, not arboreal serenity, and contained in the rooms, it’s important to put up with the presence of different individuals, not all of them fashions of rectitude. However there’s nothing prefer it. The absence of wall texts is usually a welcome reduction from present museum follow. And if the ensembles rely extra on visible rhyming than on concepts, they actually do get you to look. If you would like, you’ll be able to even take lessons within the Barnes technique, with out spending some capricious check of advantage.
Arthur Danto was proper, although: Barnes remains to be remembered “for the spectacular assortment of early trendy artwork that bears his title, for the passion with which he stored individuals from viewing it and for the horrible mood he expended on behalf of those two tasks. He was a gifted however a particularly tiresome man.” Barnes’s apparent intelligence, Gopnik observes, is “overshadowed, even eclipsed, by his actual emotional and social stupidity.”
And but, there’s something gripping about his battle, 12 months after 12 months, to resolve the riddle of artwork. By all accounts, Barnes was a person with no principle of thoughts: Missing any perception into the subjective worlds of different individuals, he discovered their habits relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It should have been exhausting. In an essay quickly after he began gathering, he wrote: “Good work are extra satisfying companions than the very best of books and infinitely extra so than most very good individuals.”
In artwork, he believed he noticed the subjective expertise of others—Renoir, El Greco, a Fang craftsperson—made concrete and visual, even measurable. It sat nonetheless for examination. His arguments circle endlessly (Rudenstine rightly calls them tautological), searching for the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one individual to a different through kind. Every murals, he wrote, “information a discovery and that discovery could be verified, the artist’s expertise could be shared, [but] solely by one who has himself realized to see.”
Like mercury, nevertheless, the target mechanism he searched for this intuitive course of at all times wriggled away from his contact. Have a look at Cézanne’s The Card Gamers or Renoir’s Henriot Household and also you see shifting edges, unstable areas, fragmentation, dissolution, impermanence. However in life, Rudenstine observes, Barnes discovered “ambiguity, irresolution, incompletion, obscurity … unimaginable for him to tolerate.” His must lock issues down practically killed the muse that was his nice life’s work. The tragedy of Barnes was that the issues he might perceive least held the important thing to what he liked most.
This text seems within the April 2025 print version with the headline “The Cranky Visionary.”
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