Response to Jeremy Braddock

It is for this reason that I am somewhat perplexed at her response, as I had believed we were largely in agreement about the need to make visible Barnes's progressivism and his truly unique modes of using art as a means of social engagement. Just as Camp asserts that Barnes sought to establish an "education program ... to serve as a model for alternatives to educational methodology" (page 62), I write of Barnes's wish to use the pieces of his collection "as instruments of a more generalized reform of educational and psychological practices, addressed to and expressive of the conditions of modernity" (page 60). My article aims to elucidate an important example of that commitment prior to the establishment of the Barnes Foundation in 1922.

Barnes's interactions with established institutions and individuals have often been represented as examples of a kind of overreaching eccentricity. But what they actually speak to are a set of social, aesthetic, and intellectual concerns that, crucially, for Barnes were inseparable from one another. Camp rightly censures those who have said that Barnes never wanted reproductions from his collection and those who believe that Barnes's association with African Americans began in the 1920s. These are not claims made in my article. It concerns me that my citation of Barnes's wish to establish relationships with Charles S. Johnson (editor of the Urban League's journal Opportunity) and Alain Locke (editor of the pivotal New Negro anthology, to which Barnes contributed) would be construed as mere posturing on Barnes's part. I use the word "alliance" (a word Barnes favored in his own correspondence) in order to signal the progressive affinities Barnes believed existed between his own interests and those of these Harlem Renaissance figures. Camp writes that Barnes eschewed "those whose theories included racist assumptions of intellectual or emotional hierarchies between blacks and whites" (page 64). This was precisely what I meant to convey by juxtaposing Barnes's work against the disgraceful comment of Charles Burr, who saw Freud as a "return to darkest Africa" (page 55). Such a corrective is a central theme of my other writings on Barnes (see note 8 on page 50).

Barnes's careful readings in philosophy, American pragmatism in particular, were motivated by this same interest in progressive social engagement. That is why I have found Megan Granda Bahr's work to be singularly instructive. Though I accept that my description of her dissertation as being the "best, and only, explication of the philosophical basis of Barnes's aesthetics" (page 56, note 31) might have been worded more carefully, Bahr remains to my knowledge the, only commentator of the last fifty years to have studied the influence of George Santayana on Barnes's signature concept of "plastic form," which Barnes described in The Art in Painting (1925). Though Barnes's aesthetic philosophy was not a major theme of my essay, it is worth noting that Bahr has demonstrated that it was through a careful reading of Santayana that Barnes was able to elaborate a more socially engaged formalism, over and against the formalism of his contemporaries Roger Fry and Clive Bell. It is this insight that allows her to show how the development of Barnes's own aesthetic philosophy actually predated (and therefore strongly influenced) the better-known, later aesthetic writings of John Dewey. Bahr's arguments seem both plausible and carefully considered to me; I am therefore eager to know of specific objections to her work, be they factual or interpretive, as I would have much to learn from them.