UNTOUCHABLE.(the Barnes Foundation)

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 chateau that was finished in 1925. Among them, hundreds of School of Paris modern paintings and a smattering of Old Masters and American moderns are massed on walls covered in warm tan burlap, labelled only with the artists' names. The pictures are interspersed with items of skilled metalwork (hinges, lock plates, utensils). Antique furniture, African sculpture, Pennsylvania folk art, Egyptian and Greek antiquities, and Southwest Indian rugs and ceramics and jewelry cluster throughout. There are enough andirons to outfit an andiron museum. The over-all level of connoisseurship is sublime, though riddled with idiosyncrasies, such as a gluttonous avidity for Renoirs--a hundred and eighty-one, many of them small, perfunctory daubs. If Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro suggests brown soup, Renoiresque chroma is orange juice. Its fruity effulgence suffuses the Barnes.

Barnes was a poor boy who became a patent-medicine millionaire. He was introduced to art by a school friend, the Ashcan realist painter William Glackens. Barnes's taste was sensual, with a special tilt toward randy nudes. (There's a startling one by van Gogh, of a swarthy prostitute nestled in what looks like an explosion of swan feathers.) He thought well of himself and ill of others, notably those in Philadelphia high society whose ideas--or aversion to ideas--opposed his own. He took a paternalistic interest in "plain people," as he called them. He left control of the foundation's board to Lincoln University, a local, historically African-American institution, and the collection's fate now rests with a county judge, who will decide on the board's petition to facilitate a move. Legal approval would release a flood of money: a hundred and fifty million dollars toward costs and an endowment for the Barnes, to be raised by the Lenfest and Annenberg foundations and the Pew Charitable Trusts. It would also break Barnes's original stipulation, which forbids moving any of the foundation's pieces and asserts that the foundation is not a museum but a school, dedicated to furthering his philosophy of art appreciation. That philosophy, derived from pragmatism, emphasizes close study of artists' decisions and their intellectual and emotional import, in line with the book "Art as Experience," by Barnes's friend and supporter John Dewey. Barnes's own prose, in books on Renoir, Cezanne, and Matisse, is, like Dewey's, clearly written, firmly reasoned, and numbingly dull.

The weirdness and the glory of the Barnes come down to the same thing: a relentlessly pedagogical intention behind the placement of everything. The lessons are rarely obvious. Most have to do with contrasts and comparisons of composition, line, color, texture, and other formal qualities. Some seem trivial (the rhyming of a teapot spout with the angle of a piece of driftwood in a Gauguin), if not crudely jokey (two unusually wide wooden chairs beneath two massive Renoir nudes). The particulars of Barnes's thinking count for far less, in any case, than ...