Was Dr. Barnes infernal or inspired? Before Christmas, I wrote about the Barnes Foundation's enriching Modigliani Up Close exhibition, but, in my nearly daylong visit, I saw the permanent collection as well. The Barnes is unique in its abundance, and that means art of exceptional quality, and in its eccentricity, and that means its founder and his vision. Dr. Albert Barnes collected the Fauves in depth, especially Matisse, and fauve means wild beast in French. Barnes (1872–1951) was the wild beast of the Philadelphia art world.
First of all, he was a maniacal, focused collector. He bought 69 works by Cézanne, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, and 181 — mostly late-career — Renoirs. He acquired African sculpture, folk furniture and ceramics, Navajo blankets, old metalwork, medieval manuscripts, and, when he fancied them, paintings by Seurat, Degas, El Greco, Van Gogh, and Rubens. These and so much more are displayed at the Barnes Foundation in center-city Philadelphia, using Barnes's own — and odd — gallery design.
The Barnes is the essential place for art lovers of all stripes to visit. There's no place like it, and that's putting aside its fraught history.
Barnes grew up in the same working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia as Rocky Balboa. His father, once a butcher, lost an arm in the Battle of Cold Harbor, in the Civil War, after which he became a mailman. Barnes put himself through the University of Pennsylvania through work as a tutor but also as a boxer and semi-professional baseball player.
A savant at school, he was a doctor by age 20. He didn't believe in the practice of medicine, but the medicine business suited him. He made millions developing and selling Argyrol, a silver nitrate antiseptic used especially for babies to prevent childhood blindness. He sold the company in 1929 and plunked the money in U.S. government bonds, thus escaping the Wall Street crash.
Barnes was a bruiser by birth and, later, a bruiser who loved Matisse, Picasso, and Cézanne. He suffered neither fools nor snobs nor stand-patters gladly. His taste in art made him a cultural renegade. When some of Barnes's pictures were displayed at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1923, local critics stewed them in scorn.
The museum seems infested with some infectious scourge, one scold wrote. Trash, another concluded, with economy. Barnes was furious and responded in kind. He called Philadelphia a depressing intellectual slum. Edith Powell, the critic for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, wrote that Barnes's art depicted the dregs of society, not the worst thing a critic could say. Barnes — a weird guy — wrote her a letter proposing that she was frigid and might want to elope with an ice man.
Later, Barnes built a home with galleries, anchored by his collection, and established an art school in Lower Merion on the Main Line. Over time, he poisoned every well and burned every bridge leading to Philadelphia's elite. His galleries weren't open to the public, but sometimes people wrote to him asking to see the collection. If he didn't like the person, he'd send a rejection letter signed with the paw print of Fidele, his dog. Barnes rejected T. S. Eliot's request to see the collection with a one-word letter: Nuts, he wrote, meaning no, or perhaps referring to Eliot, or, inadvertently, to himself, or to the world. Surely Barnes, brilliant as he was, was also a hothead and a crank.
Barnes never lent his art. He never allowed it to be photographed in color. He thought photography of art distorted the color. After the 1923 debacle, he wrote books about art education, traveled with John Dewey, his best friend, bought more art, and commissioned Matisse to paint murals for his Lower Merion house. His collection was less a secret than a beguilement or an anecdote.
Barnes lived among his art, in a twelve-acre gated estate and arboretum, until he died in a car crash in 1951. He'd run a red light.
Barnes's antics — and vitriol — are well documented, as is the opus leading to the Barnes Foundation's move from Lower Merion to center-city Philadelphia. On the one hand, it's the most daring and flagrant abuse of donor intent in the history of American philanthropy. Philadelphia courts, politicians, and foundations — busting a vast terrain of Barnes's trust governing the collection's future — moved the place, upended its governance and financial plan, and turned what was an art school into a museum.
On the other hand, this is Barnes's fault. His plan wasn't just bad. It was untenable, and a bad, untenable plan governing $50 billion in art isn't, alas, a merely private concern. The fact is, the Barnes is where the art is, its building is ten years old, the foundation is 100 years old, and at least three books and dozens of essays on the move are there to be devoured. I'll stick to the art and where the museum is now, mostly.
Probably the Barnes's most distinctive and unnerving feature, even for people who've seen the place, is its gallery design. This is Barnes's doing since he hung the art, and the building today is a nearly exact replica of Barnes's house and galleries in Lower Merion. Gallery walls are packed, often in Salon Style, with tiers of objects. That's not in itself unusual. What's unusual is the mix of, say, paintings by Renoir and Cézanne with Pennsylvania German furniture, folk ceramics, African sculpture, and antique metal brackets, hinges, and locks.
Barnes called them ensembles. Each wall is arranged with a fastidious, even persnickety balance, usually making a triangle design. After a few galleries, Barnes's symmetry seems obsessive, and then formulaic. Mixing painting and objects from everyday life — the work of artists and artisans — was radical then but less so now. Barnes, above all, saw symmetry as egalitarian.
The galleries, as arranged by Barnes, bust hierarchies between high art and craft. Color, line, light, and space were, he believed, universal. Craftsmen unknown to us today used the same basic visual vocabulary that El Greco, Matisse, and the ancient Egyptians did. In mixing media, chronology, and origins, Barnes pushed viewers of art to look beyond schools of artists and art history and see what unites us. Using a triangular wall design, Barnes created the look of an altarpiece. He preached a new religion based on art.
The first gallery overwhelms, in a good way. Barnes the teenage boxer is never far, and it seems we need to be pummeled by Renoir, Cézanne, and Degas to disrupt our shabby, trite preconceptions. The Large Bathers, by Cézanne, his biggest Card Players, Seurat's giant Models, from around 1887, which incorporates A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and a 1906 Picasso life-size peasant scene are there along with a life-size Matisse. Barnes's favorite painting, a Renoir Bathers from 1916, is there, too. It all makes for a spectacle as well as a color riot.
A grander space is hard to find, but, aside from effulgence, what impresses the most is Barnes's nod to tradition, especially to classicism. Degas, Renoir, and Cézanne, of all the avant-garde superstars of the late 19th century, are deeply rooted in the Old Masters. Rule breaker that he was, Barnes didn't like abstraction, which he felt was irrational. Almost all his art is representational and figurative.
Barnes displayed art with students in mind, and his conception of who is a student is an inclusive one. As a principle, he hoped that working-class Philadelphians would learn the most, not about art history but about visual culture. His juxtapositions didn't draw from academics. In one gallery, an American yarn winder from around 1800, shaped like a little windmill, is displayed near a Rubens oil sketch for a tapestry, a folksy Horace Pippin picture of Lincoln and his father building a log cabin, a dark Hals burgher portrait, and a painting of a skinned rabbit by Soutine. Each is a study in basic shapes and lines. The Barnes is far from ponderous, and the last thing I'd call it is didactic.
Barnes wasn't a snob. He wasn't blinded by fashion, provenance, or hierarchy. He found beauty and design perfection in andirons, Windsor chairs, yarn winders, and even the grate of a confessional. He loved strong color. Whether in a painting or a door hinge, he looked for the best craftsmanship. Today, I'd call him old-fashioned.
There are no labels. Almost every painting has the name of the artist in a tiny plaque on the frame. It's the visitor and the art. I'd call Barnes's art and arrangement refreshing, even buoyant. Matisse's long, sinuous Dance mural, which Barnes commissioned in 1932, his Joy of Life from 1905, and lots of late, juicy Renoir nudes help to create a happy, contented ambiance. Barnes knew that looking at art mustn't be painful. So many museums were burdensome and claustrophobic, Barnes felt, as well as elitist, and he said so, with ridicule and contempt.
The Barnes is a place for multiple visits. Designed as one giant classroom, it's meant for students to reflect on life and love, as many of us do when we visit a museum, but, as students do, also to puzzle specific aesthetic issues. Packing the entire experience in one visit is impossible. Barnes bought some clunkers. Matisse's large Three Sisters paintings point to the artist's inconsistency, but I'm not a Matisse fan. Barnes adored Native American textiles and ceramics. I do, too, but I felt I needed another visit to absorb them. After so much luscious Renoir, their geometry jarred.
What a place, though. It looks great, and Barnes's story and the art make it a national treasure. I'll write more on the Barnes move and donor intent next week. Given the history of the place, very mixed feelings are in order.
Brian T. Allen is National Review's art critic.