The Devil and Albert Barnes

DAN ROTTENBERG

Imagine yourself in my shoes. It's the fall of 1993, and I'm the token journalist accompanying a goodwill delegation of 60 Philadelphia movers and shakers for the opening of the Barnes Collection's exhibit in Paris (a dirty job, but somebody has to do it). Forty-two years after his death, the will of the eccentric Philadelphia art collector Dr. Albert Barnes has finally been cracked sufficiently to permit 72 of his thousand-plus paintings— what the New Yorker magazine once called "the finest collection of modern paintings in the world"— to be shown somewhere outside his secluded and damn near inaccessible Merion mansion.

Thanks to the passion that the French attach even to the temporary homecoming of these French Impressionist masterpieces, all of Paris lies at our feet. More than 1.5 million European art lovers stream into the fabled Musée d'Orsay. At the French Senate, the Academie Francaise, the Ministry of Finance, the U.S. Embassy— everywhere we turn we are festooned and feted as if we'd just conquered Hitler. Day and night we sit down to elegant banquets at private chateaus. Even such a worldly sophisticate as Robert Montgomery Scottt— son of the model for the Katharine Hepburn character in The Philadelphia Story, former aide to Ambassador Walter Annenberg in London, president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art — is moved to exclaim spontaneously, "In my entire life I've never spent four such amazing days."

Now, suppose you learned that you too could soon experience such a euphoric high right here in Philadelphia, without the benefit of drugs or the Second Coming or even an Eagles victory in the Super Bowl. Would you trample your grandmother for such ecstasy? Would you shake hands with the devil? A number of drooling Philadelphia civic boosters are wrestling with these issues even as we speak.

The Barnes Foundation's board— on the brink of bankruptcy despite the collection's $25 billion estimated value— recently sought court permission to break Dr. Barnes's will one more time in order to move his collection to Philadelphia's "Museum Row," the Ben Franklin Parkway. Three of Philadelphia's very largest foundations— Pew, Annenberg and Lenfest— have promised to raise $150 million to help make it happen. If a Montgomery County judge approves, admission to the Barnes collection will no longer be limited (for the sake of the Foundation's sensitive Merion neighbors) to just 400 visitors a day, three days a week. The three-fifths of Dr. Barnes's paintings that have never been displayed (because he insisted that all works remain in the exact bizarre juxtapositions in which he had installed them) will at last be seen by someone other than the Barnes Foundation's janitors.

Once this world-class collection of 69 Cézannes, 181 Renoirs, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos and seven Van Goghs (not to mention vast quantities of African and native American art plus boxes of Rembrandt etchings) becomes convenient to mass transit, parking and ample functioning toilets, you won't need to visit Paris any more. The Parisians will come here.

This new museum will radically enhance your quality of life and mine in ways we can't yet conceive. It will delight art connoisseurs, jump-start Philadelphia's tourist business and boost Philadelphia's tax base, not to mention the value of my Center City townhouse. Who could possibly object?

There's just one small problem. I don't own the Barnes collection. Neither do you. Neither do the well-intentioned civic stalwarts who covet its paintings. All these works belong to a foundation that was specifically chartered as a school rather than a museum. Its creator was a brilliant curmudgeon who assembled his collection not to benefit the Greater Philadelphia establishment (which he detested) but to promote his own idiosyncratic art theories in an environment sympathetic to his ideas. Back in the '20s Barnes's avant-garde artistic tastes and ideas were ridiculed by prominent Philadelphians. The foundation he created was designed to punish them and their successors in perpetuity for rejecting him.

According to the Barnes Foundation's 1922 by-laws, access was to be limited to students of Barnes's theories of light and color, as well as "men and women who gain their livelihood by daily toil in factories, shops and schools." He also stipulated that once his five appointed trustees had died, four of the five board seats were to be nominated by Lincoln University, the historically black college in Chester County.

Of course, these requirements proved tough to enforce. For one thing, resourceful rich people (some of whom actually possess brains as well as money) managed to sneak into the Barnes Foundation by disguising themselves as poor people. For another thing, in 1961 the Barnes was forced to broaden its admissions policy following a lawsuit that challenged its tax-exempt status.

For a third thing, the Barnes Foundation, like virtually all single-donor institutions (the Frick Collection in New York, say, or the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Pulitzer in St. Louis, or the Gardner in Boston), was inadequately funded by its founder. A $10 million endowment seemed huge when Dr. Barnes died in 1951, but that's been virtually depleted since then by legal fees spent wrangling over his cockamamie instructions, not to mention rising operating costs and the need for modern environmental controls.

Dr. Barnes thought he was empowering black people by putting them in charge of his foundation, when in fact he buried them under mountains of bills and responsibilities. The five Barnes trustees became the Philadelphia equivalent of Sam Peliczowski, the put-upon reservations clerk in Becky Mode's comedy Fully Committed, who finds himself saddled with all the scutwork at a fancy New York restaurant while the pompous chef and maitre d' enjoy all the acclaim. And Dr. Barnes's rigid restrictions all but guaranteed that no other sane philanthropist would help rescue the trustees from their quagmire.

In 1987, contrary to the founder's indenture, the Barnes trustees won court approval for a world tour of a small portion of the Barnes collection in order to raise the funds they desperately needed. And today it is not power-hungry white outsiders but the Barnes trustees themselves who have petitioned to expand the board from five trustees to 15— white, black, whatever. In effect they are saying: Power, schmower— we need help.

If I seem conflicted about the Barnes Foundation's likely move to the Parkway, that's because I am. The arrival of the Barnes after 80 years in Merion, in tandem with the opening of Verizon Hall more than 90 years after it was first proposed, will be Philadelphia's biggest cultural coup of the century. That both of these miracles have come to pass in my lifetime and yours is a matter of infinite wonder and excitement.

On the other hand, the thought that Barnes's peculiar legacy will be commandeered by the establishment he despised is profoundly dismaying. Whatever Albert Barnes's shortcomings, at least he put his own money where his mouth was, which is more than you can say for the bland and earnest bureaucrats who now run the Pew Charitable Trusts.

If we must move the Barnes Collection to the Parkway, let's at least do it in a manner that preserves Barnes's irascible character. For starters, instead of building a new museum to house the collection, let's transport the existing 23-room foundation building from Merion to the Parkway and re-install all the paintings there, just as Dr. Barnes left them. Then let's build new wings nearby to house the additional works, the gift shop, the cafeteria, the auditorium and whatever other amenities 21st-Century audiences demand.

Architects assure me that moving the Barnes building is eminently do-able. But Barnes officials indicate that they'd rather re-create the feel of the old Barnes galleries in a new museum built from scratch. Reproducing the old Barnes building, they say, is easier and cheaper than moving it.

No doubt they're right. But if Albert Barnes bequeathed us any useful message, it is this: Great art— the painting of it as well as the collecting— is neither easy nor cheap. It requires money, yes, but it also requires talent and taste. And it requires the courage of one's convictions.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world," George Bernard Shaw once observed. "The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Albert Barnes was an unreasonable man. Throughout his 79 years on earth plus the 52 since he left us, he constantly tested Philadelphians, forcing us to sift through his craziness in order to extract the genius hidden beneath it. As a community we are all stronger for the experience. I think we owe him something, don't you?

For another viewpoint on the Barnes Foundation, see