A battle of wills

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 17, 2003 by Kendra Hamilton

PHILADELPHIA

Along Philadelphia's City Avenue, between the St. Joseph's University campus and the Bala Station metro stop, an ominous black billboard has risen. "A man's will should not be broken," reads the legend.

But though that phrasing might seem cryptic, be assured its meaning is clear as glass to any Philadelphian who cares about art--or who just reads the newspapers. The billboard's sponsor is <www.BarnesWatch.org>, making this another salvo in the decades-long war for control of the Barnes Foundation.

It's a war that has brought together a treasure trove of modern art, a historically Black university with a glorious past and an uncertain future, and hosts of players from Philadelphia's elite in an uneasy mix of power politics, legal maneuverings, human frailty and just plain greed. It's a war that may end with a decree by the Montgomery County Orphans Court Division later this summer--or that may drag on many seasons more.

Kimberly Camp, executive director and CEO of the Barnes Foundation and perhaps the world's only African American female head of a major art collection, is hoping for a win in the foundation's bid to amend its charter and bylaws.

What's at stake, she says, is no more nor less than the foundation's survival as an independent institution. With the endowment drained by decades of legal wrangling and possibilities for fund raising poisoned by those same battles, Camp asks, "Are we able to realize our mission of education, to continue the work of our founder and to protect our collection under present conditions? The answer is clearly no," she says.

Lincoln University--one of the nation's first historically Black colleges and home of such famed "Lincoln men" as Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall and Kwame Nkrumah--is hoping for a win, too. Specifically, in the school's counter-petition to stop the Barnes Foundation from changing, among other things, a governance structure that allows Lincoln to appoint four of the foundation's five trustees.

"We want to see the governance issue resolved in Lincoln's favor," says Frank Gihan, director of community relations for the Chicago Tribune and president of Lincoln's board of trustees. "Just as, from an educational standpoint, we want to develop an education program involving Lincoln with the Barnes, and if there's some monetary value for Lincoln University that can come from that relationship, we want that" as well, he says.

In short, Lincoln's position is that "we want to remain as close to maintaining (Albert) Barnes' goals and visions for the school" as possible, Gihan adds.

The problem with that goal is that, over the years, many people have claimed to understand what Barnes' "goals and visions" were. And far too many of them have been willing to sue each other to get the last word.

THE ROOTS OF A CONTROVERSY

If you're not an art aficionado, or a subscriber to the Philadelphia Inquirer, you may be wondering exactly what all the fuss is about. Who was this Albert Barnes? Why does his collection matter so much?

The second question is by far the easier of the two to answer. The collection matters because it is, quite literally, the largest and most important collection of impressionist, post-impressionist and modernist masterpieces in the world. There are 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses; there are works by Picasso, Seurat, Modigliani, Monet and Manet.

But this is just a fraction of what Barnes amassed in a lifetime devoted to the avid acquisition of art. There are nearly 9,000 objects in the collection, just 4,000 of which are on display in the Barnes Foundation's school in Lower Merion Township, southwest of Philadelphia. Barnes and his wife, Laura, also loved ancient African sculpture, Pennsylvania German decorative arts, American Indian and Latin American pottery.

The value of the whole collection is estimated at over $6 billion.

Depending upon whom one asks, Dr. Albert C. Barnes may have been an eccentric philanthropist and collector with an interest in social change in the tradition of a Nancy Cunard or a Mabel Dodge Sterne; a litigious gadfly to the Philadelphia establishment, feuding famously with his neighbors, nearly every Philadelphia institution of note, not to mention other wealthy collectors in his bid to create the most important modern art collection in the world; an educational visionary whose theories were as remarkable and whose stature as lofty as that of his friend and collaborator John Dewey; or a little bit of all of these.

Camp, who has read the founder's copious correspondence, including the nearly 1,800 letters in the Dewey-Barnes correspondence, contends that nearly everything that's written about Barnes is ill-informed or intentionally distorted. Barnes was indeed a wealthy man. Born in the slums of Philadelphia, he created a product that prevented vision loss in newborns without damaging their tender eyes and marketed that creation into a vast personal fortune.

But Camp notes that Barnes was no philanthropist. Certainly, he could be quite generous about matters such as sending aspiring African American artists or doctors abroad to continue their studies, but, "The Barnes Foundation began as an educational experiment on the floor of Dr. Barnes' factory," Camp explains.