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Could the Barnes Foundation be improved?

Thinking the unthinkable:
Could the Barnes benefit by moving?
VICTORIA SKELLY
In a recent New York Times article on the Barnes Foundation’s teacher and painter Harry Sefarbi (July 22), Barnes president Derek Gilman offers that the institution, some 50 years after the founder's death, needs to grow. He is right, but the appropriate question is: How?
As a student at the Barnes in the mid ’90s, I sometimes felt I was entering a vault. It was a place, battle-worn and under siege, full of stories about past personalities and injustices, endless lawsuits and neighbor disputes, and of "spies" from Lincoln University, neighbors, the Art Museum, and wherever suspected of sitting in classes. But the "wall" that has surrounded the Barnes Foundation, the heaviness of the place, stems from the ostracism it has suffered from the outset.
Albert Barnes had offered trusteeship of his "eccentric" collection to a number of institutions prior to settling on Lincoln. The Art Museum was among them. What he had wanted from them was some assurance that his program (he wouldn't have seen it as dogma!)— his educational portion— would be kept intact alongside the collection. No one institution aside from Lincoln was interested.
Johnson, Annenberg and Barnes: One big difference
While I’m no proponent of flagrantly ignoring the wills of art donors, I appreciate that John Johnson’s collection was removed and reorganized to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the benefit of viewers like me. Johnson's collection, and Walter Annenberg's for that matter, are assemblages of exceptional stand-alone works of art. Both collections are admirably installed in their respective museum homes.
But the Barnes collection differs in that its home in Merion Station was specifically designed to house a specific collection of works— some chosen for their strong aesthetic value, some for their value in developing visual skills in students, and some as levelers or "balancers" for other works. (Matisse's Joy of Life was banished to the staircase for excellence and its inability to get along with all of those Renoirs!) One gets a better sense of what the avant garde of Albert Barnes's age was all about by studying at the Barnes Foundation (ideally over time and with the assistance of a good teacher) than one does by browsing through the overconserved and overcleaned works at the Musée D'Orsay in Paris (or even before that when they were at the rather grimy Jeu de Paume).
The Barnes Foundation’s art always had a greater life to it. Its works, if broken up and exhibited on a stand-alone basis (as with the Johnson and the Annenberg collections) would be stripped of their import and robbed of their roles in a marvelously fashioned whole.
Applying Barnes’s approach to today’s artists
So where is the life left in this institution that Derek Gillman rightly contends needs to grow?
My experience of the teaching at the Barnes Foundation was superb. It was vital and offered a perspective that is timeless and worthwhile for all to consider. In reality, Barnes's so-called "dogma" amounts to nothing more than teaching people to see as an artist sees, as an artist observes life all around him or her.
When I was a student at the Foundation, we explored the perspectives of post-Barnes-era artists. It was, as it happens, easier to fully grasp some of these perspectives, certainly in a richer way, through the lens of the Barnes paradigm. From this vantage point one can approach thinking intelligently about contemporary art rather than to just impotently accept that everything offered to us by anyone who calls him or herself an artist, or a marketer of art or even a historian of art is really art.
Can there be a dividing of the collection or a moving of the complete collection that elevates it from its practically perfect present state? I have ventured from outright abhorrence of the idea to a position of, well, cool skepticism that it is humanly possible to pull it off. Dozens of aesthetic decisions would need to be made. Maybe some of the early modern pieces or rooms could successfully be moved in a light-and-glass sort of space that Derek Gilman seems to have in mind. What about the Renoirs? And the Cézannes? Oh, why do we have to do this?
The Perelman building’s example
As I was sitting in the café at the Art Museum’s new Perelman building the other day, I pondered what a new Barnes Foundation would look like. As it would only be a short distance from the Perelman at the Youth Study Center site, it would share some of the same environmental characteristics. The café has an outdoor section that overlooks a string of Philadelphia row homes— interesting colors and angles, blue/gray city light, almost uncomfortably juxtaposed to the massive pale brick walls of the Perelman.
For the Barnes Foundation, however, how would one build a structure that replicates the sense of the sun, the colors of those dappled landscapes, the lush green and golden tones that reflect in from the garden in Merion, all that informs the placement of things in the Barnes Foundation? In the end, the Barnes Foundation is all about color— rich, vibrant color. Where else on earth is there or could be such a place as this?
As a native Philadelphian who has visited the Barnes Foundation since adolescence as well as a former student who has been "dogmatized," perhaps I need some help seeing how new life can be brought to the Barnes Foundation in moving it. I have yet to see a reasonable justification as to why it must move, and feel rather uneasy that the deciders of this done deal will do the work to preserve its soul.
The easy thing would be to just build something, move the collection and be done with it. The last of the complainers and the rememberers will be gone in about a quarter of a century.
Victoria Skelly lives in Wayne, Pa.
To read responses, click here and here.
Could the Barnes benefit by moving?
VICTORIA SKELLY
In a recent New York Times article on the Barnes Foundation’s teacher and painter Harry Sefarbi (July 22), Barnes president Derek Gilman offers that the institution, some 50 years after the founder's death, needs to grow. He is right, but the appropriate question is: How?
As a student at the Barnes in the mid ’90s, I sometimes felt I was entering a vault. It was a place, battle-worn and under siege, full of stories about past personalities and injustices, endless lawsuits and neighbor disputes, and of "spies" from Lincoln University, neighbors, the Art Museum, and wherever suspected of sitting in classes. But the "wall" that has surrounded the Barnes Foundation, the heaviness of the place, stems from the ostracism it has suffered from the outset.
Albert Barnes had offered trusteeship of his "eccentric" collection to a number of institutions prior to settling on Lincoln. The Art Museum was among them. What he had wanted from them was some assurance that his program (he wouldn't have seen it as dogma!)— his educational portion— would be kept intact alongside the collection. No one institution aside from Lincoln was interested.
Johnson, Annenberg and Barnes: One big difference
While I’m no proponent of flagrantly ignoring the wills of art donors, I appreciate that John Johnson’s collection was removed and reorganized to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the benefit of viewers like me. Johnson's collection, and Walter Annenberg's for that matter, are assemblages of exceptional stand-alone works of art. Both collections are admirably installed in their respective museum homes.
But the Barnes collection differs in that its home in Merion Station was specifically designed to house a specific collection of works— some chosen for their strong aesthetic value, some for their value in developing visual skills in students, and some as levelers or "balancers" for other works. (Matisse's Joy of Life was banished to the staircase for excellence and its inability to get along with all of those Renoirs!) One gets a better sense of what the avant garde of Albert Barnes's age was all about by studying at the Barnes Foundation (ideally over time and with the assistance of a good teacher) than one does by browsing through the overconserved and overcleaned works at the Musée D'Orsay in Paris (or even before that when they were at the rather grimy Jeu de Paume).
The Barnes Foundation’s art always had a greater life to it. Its works, if broken up and exhibited on a stand-alone basis (as with the Johnson and the Annenberg collections) would be stripped of their import and robbed of their roles in a marvelously fashioned whole.
Applying Barnes’s approach to today’s artists
So where is the life left in this institution that Derek Gillman rightly contends needs to grow?
My experience of the teaching at the Barnes Foundation was superb. It was vital and offered a perspective that is timeless and worthwhile for all to consider. In reality, Barnes's so-called "dogma" amounts to nothing more than teaching people to see as an artist sees, as an artist observes life all around him or her.
When I was a student at the Foundation, we explored the perspectives of post-Barnes-era artists. It was, as it happens, easier to fully grasp some of these perspectives, certainly in a richer way, through the lens of the Barnes paradigm. From this vantage point one can approach thinking intelligently about contemporary art rather than to just impotently accept that everything offered to us by anyone who calls him or herself an artist, or a marketer of art or even a historian of art is really art.
Can there be a dividing of the collection or a moving of the complete collection that elevates it from its practically perfect present state? I have ventured from outright abhorrence of the idea to a position of, well, cool skepticism that it is humanly possible to pull it off. Dozens of aesthetic decisions would need to be made. Maybe some of the early modern pieces or rooms could successfully be moved in a light-and-glass sort of space that Derek Gilman seems to have in mind. What about the Renoirs? And the Cézannes? Oh, why do we have to do this?
The Perelman building’s example
As I was sitting in the café at the Art Museum’s new Perelman building the other day, I pondered what a new Barnes Foundation would look like. As it would only be a short distance from the Perelman at the Youth Study Center site, it would share some of the same environmental characteristics. The café has an outdoor section that overlooks a string of Philadelphia row homes— interesting colors and angles, blue/gray city light, almost uncomfortably juxtaposed to the massive pale brick walls of the Perelman.
For the Barnes Foundation, however, how would one build a structure that replicates the sense of the sun, the colors of those dappled landscapes, the lush green and golden tones that reflect in from the garden in Merion, all that informs the placement of things in the Barnes Foundation? In the end, the Barnes Foundation is all about color— rich, vibrant color. Where else on earth is there or could be such a place as this?
As a native Philadelphian who has visited the Barnes Foundation since adolescence as well as a former student who has been "dogmatized," perhaps I need some help seeing how new life can be brought to the Barnes Foundation in moving it. I have yet to see a reasonable justification as to why it must move, and feel rather uneasy that the deciders of this done deal will do the work to preserve its soul.
The easy thing would be to just build something, move the collection and be done with it. The last of the complainers and the rememberers will be gone in about a quarter of a century.
Victoria Skelly lives in Wayne, Pa.
To read responses, click here and here.
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