"The Art of the Steal': The Barnes on film

The Art of the Steal, Don Argott's documentary feature about the theft of the Barnes Foundation, wowed audiences at the Toronto Film Festival, and again at the New York Film Festival. In both venues, the screenings were packed, and extra ones were tacked on. The film will go into general release next year, and perhaps even Philadelphians will see it. When it comes, the lines should rightly stretch around the block, as they did several years ago when the Frick Museum's chef curator, Colin Bailey, lectured about the Barnes at the Frick in New York.

Full disclosure: I am a participant in this film, albeit a modest one. I have no stake in the film, and I met its makers only when I sat for a single interview. The Friends of the Barnes Foundation, of which I am a member, likewise has no stake in it, and other Friends members who gave interviews did so only as private individuals, as did I. Nor were we able to see the finished product until it was publicly shown.

That said, I shall comment on what I saw, leaving to others the task of more formally reviewing the film as such.

The Art of the Steal is an ambitious attempt to relate the saga of the Barnes Foundation from its founding in 1922 to the groundbreaking ceremony for the Barnes museum on the Ben Franklin Parkway that was held last year. The story is a complicated one, and Argott has chosen— wisely I think— to tell it in terms of its principal personalities.

A familiar American success story

The story begins, of course, with Albert Barnes himself, a self-made son of Philadelphia's mean streets who worked his way through a degree at Penn, set up a partnership to produce and market a drug to combat infant blindness called Argyrol, and greatly prospered. This tale doesn't differ greatly from other Horatio Alger stories at the turn of the 20th Century. Nor is it unusual that Barnes, once wealthy, took to collecting art; so did others similarly situated, including J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon and, on a more modest scale, Anthony Drexel.

What distinguished Barnes was that he saw his collection not as a personal ornament or an eventual public benefaction, but as a living instrument for the creation of a genuinely democratic culture. Certainly the Morgans, Fricks and Mellons had no such vision.

In addition, Barnes was the first American collector to recognize the pictorial revolution launched by Cézanne and Renoir and reinforced by Matisse and Picasso. Barnes also collected specimens of the African art that had inspired the latter two, and he personally supported the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Many decades before the civil rights movement, Barnes perceived that the future of American democracy was bound up with its treatment of African-Americans and its appreciation of their contribution to the country's culture.

Rare personal film footage

For all this, Barnes was vilified and ridiculed by the establishment of his day. Argott lays out this story meticulously, utilizing unique archival footage of Barnes in the possession of a former Barnes teacher, Richard Segal. The humanization of this great American is one of the film's strengths, for the theft of the Barnes collection depends, ideologically, on the continuing vilification of Barnes himself.

This is a subtler affair today, of course, since it would hardly make sense to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring "decadent" or "degenerate" art— the appellations bestowed on Barnes's collection when it was first publicly exhibited— to greater public display, and no one would deny the cash value of Cézanne or Matisse now. Rather, Albert Barnes is given a certain left-handed credit for amassing his collection but still derided as a social primitive who dissed his betters and tried to hide his stash in the wilds of Merion.

Argott doesn't gloss over Barnes's rough edges, but he puts them properly in context as a response to the philistine abuse Barnes endured for decades. And he makes the point, emphatically, that Barnes's collection, rather than being withheld from the public, was expressly designed for it.

Annenberg as villain

If Albert Barnes is clearly the hero of the film, the late Walter Annenberg is its villain. Annenberg's fortune, like many another in the Prohibition era, was dubiously obtained, and its founder, Moses Annenberg, went to prison for evading $5.5 million in taxes— a staggering sum by the standards of the time. Walter himself avoided jail time only by a plea bargain. Subsequently he passed cash around in the right places and wound up as Nixon's ambassador to Great Britain.

All the while, Annenberg maintained a running feud, pre- and post-mortem, with Albert Barnes, whose art collection was one of the few that outshone Annenberg's own. After dangling his holdings in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for years, Annenberg gave his entire collection to the Met in New York under the ironclad provision that it never be moved, loaned or sold. These, of course, were the same trust provisions Barnes had placed on his own collection, which Annenberg and his lawyers spent decades trying to break.

Glanton's delusions

With the death of Violette de Mazia, who ran the Barnes Foundation after Barnes died in a 1951 car crash, Annenberg was able at long last to insinuate himself into its management with the help of Richard Glanton, who was newly installed as head of the Barnes board in 1990. Glanton tells the story his own way, and the film gives him enough rope to hang himself. Suffice it to say that, having trashed Albert Barnes's indenture of trust and spent down the Foundation's endowment on acrimonious lawsuits against the Barnes's neighbors and Lower Merion Township, Glanton now represents himself as the visionary who would have "saved" the Barnes if everyone had just gotten out of his way.

Argott's film narrows its focus here to concentrate on these events. The plot to move the Barnes Foundation rests on a tripod of falsities. The first is that Albert Barnes himself wanted to deny the public access to his collection; in fact, the reverse is true. The second is that "hostile" neighbors drove the Barnes away by demanding impossible restrictions on the public's access; in fact, those neighbors are responsible for more than doubling the attendance ceiling. The third lie, which I will discuss in due course, is that the Barnes now has no option but to move.

Meet the neighbors

Argott conducts pivotal interviews with Walter and Nancy Herman and with Robert and Toby Marmon, both immediate neighbors of the Barnes. The Hermans, who seem the generally intended target when the "neighbors" are discussed, speak with composure and dignity about the legal and other insults they have endured, and Toby Marmon's videotape of the belching tour buses with which Glanton invaded Latch's Lane makes clear that his intention was to pick a fight.

The second critical event of that period was the coalescence of the conspiracy to move the Barnes. By this time, Annenberg's hand was in the background, and his fellow billionaire, the Art Museum's chairman Raymond Perelman, had taken the lead. During a party at the Barnes Foundation in November 1995, Perelman reportedly urged Philadelphia Mayor (now Pennsylvania Governor) Edward G. Rendell to orchestrate the Barnes' move to Philadelphia.

Candor from Rendell

Aside from Glanton, Rendell and his later attorney general, Mike Fisher, were the only parties to the move willing to discuss these maneuverings on camera. Rendell's position is simply that of the politician who wants everyone to be happy: More people will see the Barnes in Philadelphia; more is obviously better; and the "neighbors" never wanted it in Merion anyway. (The bigger the lie, the oftener you want to repeat it.)

Fisher is equally candid about his role in strong-arming the existing Barnes trustees to accept an expansion of their board that would give majority control to a slate selected by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which had come forward as the chief financial supporter of the move. The film errs, by the way, in the sum offered the trustees by Fisher on behalf of Lincoln University, in whose ultimate charge Barnes had left his Foundation: it was not $40 but $80 million.

Regrets from Perelman and Rimel

Raymond Perelman declined to be interviewed for The Art of the Steal, as did Rebecca Rimel, president of the Pew. This may have been a mistake. Perelman is shown in tight focus against a large work of abstract art, beaming roundly, while he is described in voice-over by the critic David D'Arcy as a man who knows nothing, but absolutely nothing, about art. As Feigen (who has a delicious scene earlier at a Sotheby auction, dissecting the inflated art market) sneers on, Perelman grows smaller and smaller against the huge painting he has posed against, until he and his money alike are reduced to insect size.

Similarly, Rebecca Rimel, shown at first elegantly coiffed, is more and more unflatteringly presented as the self-interested machinations of the Pew are detailed, until she is pinned to the screen in a Nixonian grin, all teeth and popping eyes. My first impulse was to rise to the lady's defense, until I recollected the harm she had done.

A story the Inquirer missed

On the other side, the film provides narration by John Anderson (whose book, Art Held Hostage, is the primer on the struggle over the Barnes), a delicious takedown of the inflated art market by the noted New York dealer Richard Feigen, and commentary by Christopher Knight, the Los Angeles Times art critic who broke the story of the "immaculate appropriation" of $100 million in state money to move the Barnes at a time when the Barnes Foundation had made no petition for permission to do so. (The formerly Annenberg-owned Philadelphia Inquirer, offered this story, declined to print it.)

Two other principals are cannily cast: Nick Tinari, whose BarnesWatch website has followed the unfolding saga of the Barnes heist for nearly 20 years; and Jay Raymond, who single-handedly organized the resistance to the petition for the move in court in 2004. Tinari is feisty, outraged and on occasion profane; his is the one voice really raised in anger. Raymond is quietly eloquent, and it is from his perspective that the film's final chapter— the petition to reopen the move rejected by Orphans Court Judge Stanley R. Ott in 2008— is told.

One final falsehood

The film ends with the gloomy observation that the new Barnes will open in 2011 (a date since adjusted to 2012 by the Foundation's director, Derek Gillman), and with Jay Raymond noting that noble causes are never truly lost, whatever their practical result. Which brings me to the third big lie on which the move is built: The notion that it is both necessary and inevitable. The Barnes could have been "saved" in Merion three years ago had it accepted Montgomery County's offer of a bond-leaseback arrangement on the Latch's Lane property, as the county's chief deputy solicitor, Carolyn Carluccio, remarks in the film; and it can be saved any day for a tenth the cost of the move by any agency, public or private, that wishes to do so. In the current economic climate, the one truly infeasible proposal may be the move itself.

The Art of the Steal is an unapologetic example of American muckraking, and the muck, in this case, is deep indeed. The film is not without flaws; it scants the important role of Barnes's wife, Laura, and it fails to explore the 2004 hearings that gave the Barnes permission to move. Nor does it investigate the chief enabler of the scam, Judge Ott, whose mischievous rulings I have commented on earlier in this space. But it gets the basic story right, and pulls no punches telling it. Like Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame— and not many films since— it belongs on a short list of documentaries that have spoken truth to power, and truth about it.♦


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