|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Before he died, in 1951, a Philadelphia businessman named Albert Barnes built what may be the greatest private art collection in American history. Like Henry Clay Frick, who filled his mansion on Fifth Avenue with Old Masters, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who kept her eclectic collection in a Venetian-style palace she built in Boston, Barnes arranged for his paintings and sculptures to be housed and exhibited in perpetuity. But Barnes had grander ambitions than Frick and Gardner; he had a social agenda. He wanted to use his art to redress issues of inequality, particularly racial prejudice against African-Americans. He established a foundation to insure that his collection would be not so much a museum as a classroom, where blacks and whites would study together and learn that painting and sculpture could unite the most disparate peoples and cultures. "It wasn't really about the art for Barnes," Kimberly Camp, the executive director and C.E.O. of the Barnes Foundation, says. "It was about changing the society."
Barnes's priorities become immediately clear at the foundation complex he built in the nineteen-twenties on thirteen acres just outside Philadelphia, in the Main Line suburb of Lower Merion. The gallery building itself has an austere Renaissance-inspired design, but around the front door Barnes installed a ceramic-tile decoration modelled on artifacts from the Ivory Coast. Such juxtapositions -- European art beside African art, the work of non-Caucasian people next to that of whites -- continue inside the building. "The renascence of Negro art," Barnes wrote in 1925, "is one of the events of our age which no seeker for beauty can afford to overlook." Barnes, however, bought few works by contemporary black artists. He owned hundreds of examples of tribal and folk art, but the heart of his collection is French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces, in astonishing profusion. Renoir (a hundred and eighty-one works), Cezanne (sixty-nine), and Matisse (fifty-nine) are among the artists represented, many of them by their best paintings. There are about two thousand works in all, by artists ranging from El Greco and Rubens to Miro and Modigliani. As Barry Munitz, the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, puts it, "There are some of the most spectacular paintings that the world has ever seen." The collection is currently valued at several billion dollars.
At first glance, the display, housed in twenty-three galleries, looks almost haphazard. Paintings are lined up next to and above one another, sometimes inches apart, and they are labelled with only a single word on their frames, identifying the artist: "Picasso" (there are forty-six), "Seurat" (six of his rare canvases), "Titian" (two of the handful in the United States). For viewers familiar with the way most museums group their art -- by era and nationality -- the effect of walking through the Barnes can be almost hallucinogenic. Some rooms feature a single painter, but others mix and match eras and genres. There is, however, some method to the jumble. Eighteenth-century Pennsylvania blanket chests are placed under Gauguins from the South Pacific, and the palettes and brushstrokes appear nearly identical. In 1930, Barnes commissioned Matisse to paint a mural -- it became "La Danse" -- and hung it on a wall opposite a Navajo textile and a door carving from the Ivory Coast. According to Kimberly Camp, the Barnes was "perhaps the first purposely multicultural collection in the country."
As such, the Barnes Foundation might be expected to thrive in an era more receptive to diversity in art and culture than Barnes's own time was. Instead, it is financially imperilled and perhaps mortally threatened. The story of Barnes's collection has turned out to be a lot like the story of his life -- full of rancor, misunderstanding, and unhealed wounds.
Albert Barnes was born in Philadelphia in 1872; his father was a butcher who had lost an arm in the Civil War. When he was about eight, his mother took him to a revival meeting at a black church in New Jersey, and Barnes later dated his fascination with African-American culture to this transformative event. A...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
