Books: The House of Barnes

Albert C. Barnes is perhaps the most contentious of the great American collectors of the late 19th/early 20th centuries – not because of the quality or nature of his collection, but because of the way in which Barnes himself attracted controversy like filings to a magnet.
Never an easy character, Barnes came from an under-privileged background, growing up in the slums of the Neck in south Philadelphia.

Hauling himself up by his own bootstraps, he graduated as a doctor of medicine at the age of 20 and by his early 30s was well on his way to becoming a pharmaceutical millionaire.

Impressionist haul

In 1905, aged 32, he bought a plot of land in Merion, Pennsylvania. Here, he and his wife, Laura, built a home and a gallery where Barnes gathered a collection of some 800 works focusing on the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, together with some fine examples of African art.

By the time he died in a car crash in 1951, he had bought 181 Renoirs; 69 Cézannes; and 59 works by Matisse – not bad for a boy born on the wrong side of town.

Barnes was not alone in America in collecting Impressionist art but what sets this collection apart, besides the irascibility of its quixotic owner, was that it was a collection with a purpose.

“My principal interest,” he wrote to his early guide and mentor, John Dewey, the educational philosopher, “has always been in education first for myself, and then for those less fortunate ones around me, then in the education of the public in general.”

To this end Barnes established an educational foundation based on his own theories of the study of colour, line, space and mass.

On the days it was open, and they were not plentiful, the Barnes collection would be used to educate the “plain people” of the working class and those “who toil” in settings such as “shops, factories and schools”.

All this, and far more detail on the daily operation of the Barnes Foundation, was captured in its indenture, a document so specific that it was to paint the organisation into a corner, bringing it close to bankruptcy while at the same time denying it the freedom to resolve its own financial and managerial problems.

In litigation for “nearly thirty of its eighty-six years of existence”, the foundation was in and out of dispute and court like a weaver’s shuttle.

This is a story with almost everything – a generous but lonely benefactor, capable of being unpleasant and rude; a rich man who believed in the transforming power of art for the many, yet often seemed to want his collection to be the exclusive domain of the owner; a passionate collector driven by his belief that his approach to art and education through art was the only true way; a man who was committed to equal rights for African-Americans; a hero “inclined to battle the world without compromise on behalf of the art and ideas in which he believed”; a boxer, “an intellectual pugilist” who found it difficult to face criticism; a sensitive aesthete who found solace in the paintings in his collections.

And that was just Barnes himself.

Lettered dog

Add in intolerant neighbours, scorned philosophers, even a letter-writing dog, and almost miraculously there is a happy ending – a new Barnes Gallery, more accessible, both physically and intellectually, capable of taking action to manage and finance itself and fulfill its charitable aims.

With the passing of time, the struggles of the Barnes Foundation will hopefully fade into insignificance when compared with the importance of the collection that is its founder’s true legacy.

For now, however, the legal battles fought over the indenture, with the University of Pennsylvania and even with Barnes’s neighbours in Merion, have cast such shadows over the foundation that almost inevitably they tend to dominate Neil L. Rudenstine’s history.

The author is a trustee of the foundation and at times he seems almost too aware of his need to maintain a dutiful balance between casting blame (often easy) and being fair (sometimes difficult).

The result is a careful, sometimes cautious, but often engaging assessment of more than 80 years of turbulence from which we can all learn lessons.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant