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Response to Jeremy Braddock

Art Journal, Winter, 2004 by Kimberly Camp

I first want to congratulate Jeremy Braddock for his tenacious attempt to get at a story that has lured many a writer. The Barnes Foundation and its founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, have eluded truth telling, in most part because of the practices of the Foundation's leadership after his death. Those practices, which created a cloistered, elitist, Eurocentric environment, were antithetical to what Barnes intended. From the eccentricities of Violette de Mazia to the intense legal harangues of the early 1990s, the story of the Barnes become even more convoluted and was seen as predictably hostile to journalists, scholars, and the art-historical community.

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When Albert Barnes died tragically in an automobile accident in 1951, the Barnes Foundation underwent massive changes. Its doors closed to the public; its work in supporting education and research about the collection ceased. Reproductions of the works in the collection stopped, as did the important documentary photography of its collections for distribution and for conservation. Children under the age of twelve were forbidden to enter the galleries. The calcification of the Barnes had begun, at the hand of yet another form of regional neurosis.

Barnes's program, which was developed as an experiment in education, changed drastically after his death. What had been a student-centered, object-based, discussion-based education program that sought to serve as a model for alternatives to educational methodology became a rote memorization lecture program for one hundred-plus students. Exploration and modification of the program in response to changes in the development of education theory and practice disappeared, only to be replaced with rigidity. Seemingly, Barnes's instructions to establish a permanent collection upon his death were misconstrued to suggest that its methodology and program, too, should be entombed. Barton Church, an artist and faculty member of the Barnes since 1952, described the environment when Barnes was alive as "an active think tank for the discussion of aesthetics and the love of painting." These are hardly words one would use in describing the Foundation postmortem. Archival research also belies this assumption as Barnes talked about the programmatic need to remain responsive to society, a key factor in relevancy and effectiveness.

Braddock's interface with the Barnes began over two years ago while he was writing his dissertation. (1) His requests came shortly after we hired our first archivist, Katy Rawdon-Faucett, to begin the work of cataloguing the two thousand linear feet of documents, photographs, drawings, and prints that survived Barnes. In those two years, archivists Barbara Beaucar and Jason Stieber have joined the Barnes and, in concert, with Rawdon-Faucett's leadership, they work simultaneously on personal correspondence and business records from 1902 to the present day. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities support the archival cataloguing effort that is still far from complete. While we make every attempt to respond to requests for information from researchers, we are not yet open for outside research. Sadly, the impatience of many has led them to attempt a bricolage of history. Braddock's essay into Barnes's collecting and Philadelphia falls into this category.

I agonized over this opportunity to respond to Braddock's essay in the same way that I did when asked to respond to Braddock's presentation at the Slought Foundation. In many ways, I will admit a tiny bit of envy that he had the time and support to actually attempt research on Barnes. To be sure, the interest of many scholars in researching the Barnes continues to grow as issues of our survival and future constantly appear in the media. Every day, I sit in my office directly above and below archival collections, knowing that no degree of osmosis will help me gain full knowledge of the Foundation, and that there is some legal, operational, or financial crisis that is, at the moment, far more important. Nonetheless, we've learned enough to state unequivocally that some key assumptions inherent in Braddock's paper may not be close enough to the actuality of Barnes's motivation and methodology.

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His reliance on Megan Bahr's dissertation is an example of how misinformation from partial access to uncatalogued information can spread from one well-intentioned scholar to the next. (2) Braddock's note 31 on page 56 states that Bahr's dissertation is the "best and only" explication of the philosophical basis of Barnes's aesthetics. This is a regrettable, incorrect assumption. For starters, Braddock could refer to The Journal of the Art Department, volumes I and II, followed by Mary Mullen's An Approach to Art (3) Barnes's own book The Art in Painting clearly articulates the Foundation's program in its first one hundred pages. Further information can be had in the study of John Dewey's Art as Experience, which is dedicated to Barnes. (4) Barnes's published articles state clearly and simply what the Foundation is all about. Three years ago, the Dewey Center in Carbondale, Illinois, released an archival collection of correspondence between Dewey and Barnes, available on CD-ROM. (5) To date, in our cataloguing efforts, we have discovered more correspondence than appears on their CD-ROM. Nonetheless, the publication contains over one thousand letters between the two men, most of which discuss in detail the intent, progress, and failures of their experiments in education.

Response to Jeremy Braddock

Art Journal, Winter, 2004 by Kimberly Camp

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