Of all of the methods that immediately’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an artwork museum is among the extra benign, someplace behind eradicating malaria however forward of eradicating democracy. The artwork in these museums is nearly all the time modern, reflecting the dearth of obtainable outdated masters together with a world chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde artwork is socially, intellectually, and culturally necessary. Few of those tycoons, although, are prone to discover the stakes as agonizingly excessive as Albert C. Barnes did.
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From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of many world’s biggest personal collections of recent European paintings—extra Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than some other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Pleasure of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Fashions ; the checklist 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 now have 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 revealed in 2012, when its authorized struggles had been above-the-fold information. The 2 should be learn collectively, as a result of the slippage of id between the person, the artwork, and the establishment supplies each the melodrama and the farce of the story.
Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was good sufficient to realize admission to Philadelphia’s selective Central Excessive Faculty and the College of Pennsylvania’s medical college. 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 turned customary in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit marvel, however Argyrol made him a fortune.
At first he used his new cash in predictable methods. He constructed a mansion on the Primary Line and named it “Lauraston” for his spouse. He purchased quick automobiles (a ardour that might be the dying of him) and joined the native fox hunt. He additionally did much less clichéd issues, corresponding to finding out philosophy, studying Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed {that a} idea’s price was measured not by its class however by its penalties on the planet, and he handled his Argyrol manufacturing unit as a laboratory for social experimentation. He employed Black and white employees, women and men. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated office “effectivity,” Barnes boasted that in his manufacturing unit, “every participant had developed his or her personal methodology of doing a selected job.” The “her” in that sentence alone is noteworthy.
By Blake Gopnik
On the identical 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 warfare with mankind.” His bile may very well be witty, however extra typically traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Artwork was “a home of inventive 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 by artwork, he enlisted the recommendation of a high-school pal, the Ashcan Faculty painter William Glackens, and in 1912 despatched Glackens to Paris with a want checklist and $20,000 (about $650,000 immediately). Discovering that the Impressionists Barnes sought had been costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed fashionable. In the midst 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 pal.
By Neil L. Rudenstine
Modernism held attraction for somebody who thought of himself a pugnaciously authentic thinker. Accumulating outdated artwork was posh and respectable, however in an America nonetheless scandalized by the sight of breasts, accumulating fashionable 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 necessary 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 particular person and Renoir was his glad place, stuffed 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, challenge 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 necessary assortment. He purchased outdated 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 folks artwork and—repudiating the excellence between “artwork” and “craft”—acquired portions of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door titties, 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 good painters or sculptors, and people of the iron-workers.”
None of this was fairly as extraordinary as Barnes appreciated to faux. The connection amongst folks artwork, handcrafts, and modernism was made by 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 e-book 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 typically 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, shade, area, motion. Contextual information corresponding to biographies and material simply distracted from the true act of trying. These formalist concepts had been articulated by varied 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 e-book, lest readers be led astray by material.
Way more authentic was his utility of this formalism to John Dewey’s theories of experimental training and social reform. He might cite Dewey’s 1916 e-book Democracy and Training “nearly chapter and verse,” Gopnik tells us. Barnes was satisfied that “plain individuals of common intelligence” may very well be delivered to the type of artwork apotheosis he had skilled, simply by figuring out how one can look. He derided artwork historical past as a self-discipline and artwork students individually, however he couldn’t abandon the concept he himself had experience different individuals wanted.
Like many individuals who get lots out of trying, Barnes was aggravated 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 residence—its indenture permitted no posh events and no unvetted guests. The artwork wouldn’t journey or be reproduced in shade. To see it, you utilized to take courses within the Barnes methodology. It was not a museum; it was a college.
Inside, he organized (and usually rearranged) the gathering in “ensembles” that blended objects of various ages, origins, and features. Most individuals do that at residence, however Barnes’s stridently symmetrical preparations—large 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 displaying a lady and a canine (considered one of 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 strategy or viewing within the fallacious approach might get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened by way 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 turned acolytes.
Dewey, considered one of Barnes’s only a few lasting pals, wrote in his e-book Artwork as Expertise that the academic work of the gathering was of “a pioneer high quality corresponding to one of the best that has been executed in any discipline through the current era, that of science not excepted.” Contemplating that the science of that era had produced antibiotics and the idea of relativity, that’s fairly a declare.
Fifty-three and childless when the inspiration 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 Faculty, and Sarah Lawrence Faculty, whose exasperated president lastly wrote: “You’ll be able to stuff your cash, your footage, your iron work, your antiques, and the entire goddamn factor proper up the Schuylkill River.” Barnes then educated 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 typically 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 saved his Marie Laurencins.)
Nonetheless, he solid a relationship with Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the phrases of succession in order that Lincoln would finally assume management of the inspiration’s board. This relationship, too, may properly have gone south, however in July 1951 Barnes sped by way of a cease check in his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer.
For the following 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission turned more durable, the dogma stricter, the scholars fewer however extra ardent. When the state compelled 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 inspiration out of its torpor. That it had been careening towards insolvency now turned clear, and the one paths to earnings—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 transferring 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 following 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 state of affairs—a nonprofit establishment in want of funds finds a strategy to protect its core belongings whereas rising public entry—it was actually 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 women looking 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 special constructing, below a special algorithm.
Entry is not an achievement on par with getting previous the bouncer at Berghain. All you must do is cough up $30. Inside, you possibly can interrupt your viewing with a cup of espresso within the café or a go to to the reward store, the place you should buy a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin’s African American household at prayer (an odd alternative for footwear, however possibly the logical final result of pure formalist thought—the colours and shapes look advantageous 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, you must put up with the presence of different individuals, not all of them fashions of rectitude. However there may be nothing prefer it. The absence of wall texts could be a welcome aid from present museum observe. And if the ensembles rely extra on visible rhyming than on concepts, they actually do get you to look. If you’d like, you possibly can even take courses within the Barnes methodology, with out spending some capricious take a look at of advantage.
Arthur Danto was proper, although: Barnes continues to be remembered “for the spectacular assortment of early fashionable artwork that bears his title, for the passion with which he saved individuals from viewing it and for the horrible mood he expended on behalf of those two initiatives. He was a gifted however an especially 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 wrestle, 12 months after 12 months, to unravel the riddle of artwork. By all accounts, Barnes was a person with no idea of thoughts: Missing any perception into the subjective worlds of different individuals, he discovered their habits relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It will need to have been exhausting. In an essay quickly after he began accumulating, he wrote: “Good work are extra satisfying companions than one of the 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), looking for the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one particular person to a different by way of kind. Every murals, he wrote, “data a discovery and that discovery will be verified, the artist’s expertise will be shared, [but] solely by one who has himself discovered to see.”
Like mercury, nevertheless, the target mechanism he looked for this intuitive course of all the time 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 have to lock issues down almost killed the inspiration 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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