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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Last month, I visited the Barnes Foundation for the first time. This is an embarrassing admission for a veteran art critic, but it relieves my sour conscience at having sometimes let people assume that, of course, I knew the Barnes--I just had remarkably little to say about it. The place's awkward location out on Philadelphia's Main Line, in Lower Merion Township; its admission-by-application-only policy; and, not least, its crabby, cultish aura, generated by the strange Dr. Albert Barnes and maintained since his death, in 1951--these factors enfeebled my resolution to go there. Now they give me compassionate pause in what I feel obliged to say apropos of current proposals that aim to resolve the foundation's chronic financial and administrative woes by moving the collection to a new home downtown: Altering so much as a molecule of one of the greatest art installations I have ever seen would be an aesthetic crime. It would also give hosts of my fellow art lovers access to treasures that they might otherwise never see. And it's not as if aesthetic crimes don't happen all the time. Life goes on. But something extraordinary would be lost in the event.
Thousands of wonderful objects fill a graceful...
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