Battle for the Barnes; can one of America's greatest private collectons survive?

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 ...