Whither the Barnes? - controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation's touring exhibition of French paintings - Cover Story

Art in America, March, 1994 by Anne Higonnet

Ostensibly, only paintings collected by Alfred C. Barnes were on display at the National Gallery of Art last summer [and now at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo through April 3]. But between the paintings--between the lines, as it were--one could glimpse the signs of egomania, esthetic fanaticism, a lot of money and a clash between two museological philosophies. On display in "Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern," along with the 80 masterpieces by Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and other modernists, were the rules of art's ownership--not just the current rules but also those that preceded them. The exhibition signals the troubles, if not the demise, of the type of museum that the Barnes once represented.

Without ever openly criticizing the Barnes Foundation or Barnes himself, the National Gallery structured all its publicity for this exhibition around a single idea: that it was revealing masterpieces that had for some reason been hidden from the public. "A secret to all but a few," blared one announcement. The paintings were "rarely seen"; the show was "unprecedented"; the tour was "the first time ever." With such phrases the National Gallery posed itself as an altruistic institution representing the public good, while the Barnes Foundation was, by implication, an outmoded institution governed by selfish and often capricious private interests.

On one level, the National Gallerrs tactics were transparently mercenary. The hype of "secret masterpieces" helped procure for the National Gallery a paying audience of about haft a million people (at $10 per head), and promises to do the same at future venues. But more broadly and importantly, the National Gallery's strategy inadvertently demonstrated the troubled status of its own museum type. Even though at every turn the show argued that the big national museum represents a more modern, more viable, more democratic kind of institution than museums of the Barnes type, it demonstrated why large museums have become virtually dependent on blockbuster exhibitions. And if the temporary, blockbuster-type exhibition dominates the museum, then what function does the permanent collection serve? If corporations support blockbuster exhibitions like "Great French Paintings," why should taxpayers have to support the museum's permanent collection, including the National Gallery% own collection of French masterpieces?

At a time when more than half of America's largest museums run at a deficit, the revenues generated directly and indirectly by temporary exhibitions assume a new importance. More fundamentally, blockbusters help to maintain an extremely fragile equation in which attendance equals popularity equals "cultural democracy" equals ideological justification equals funding. This implicit formula garners both corporate and governmental support for the ordinary operating expenses of big museums, as well as for the actual costs of mounting the huge temporary exhibitions. This equation also underlies the justification provided by the chairman of GTE (General Telephone and Electronics) for his companys support of "Great French Paintings": the "visual arts," he said, are like corporate telecommunications products, because "each enhances human understanding, offers an example of mankind's imagination, and expands creative horizons."(1)

Whether or not blockbusters should be supporting big museums both financially and ideologically, it is rapidly becoming uncertain that they can. Dwindling sponsorship, rising insurance costs and the reluctance of many museums to loan works (for conservation reasons) are all making blockbusters harder and harder to accomplish. The Musee d'Orsay is reportedly paying $2.5 million to the Barnes Foundation for "Great French Paintings," while the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (where the show traveled after Paris) is supposedly paying $4.5 million, and that is only the loan fee; it doesn't include any other costs the museums will incur.(2) In comparison, the National Gallery, which is paying the Barnes Foundation nothing (though it assumed the internal costs of organizing the exhibition and preparing the catalogue), appears to have gotten the bargain of the decade. But the more closely the story of the exhibition is examined, the less attractive the bargain becomes.

On a puroly formal level, the National Gallery had an exhibition to be proud of. Virtually no museum in the world, and certainly no other privately formed collection, can boast as many really great modern masterpieces as the Barnes Collection. If the exhibition had included nothing but the nine paintings so well chosen to illustrate its free introductory brochure (including Seurat's Poseuses, 1886-88; van Gogh's Joseph Etienne Roulin, 1889; Cezanne's The Card Players, 1890-92; Matisse's Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905-06; Modigliani's Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne Seated in Profile, 1918; and Picasso's Acrobat and Young Harlequin, 1905), it would have been worth traveling to see.