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

Art in America, March, 1994 by Anne Higonnet

But "Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation" included many more than those nine stellar examples. In fact, the depth of the Barnes Collection is so extraordinary that it defies imagination. It is impressive to think of a private collector owning 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 69 Cezannes, 21 Soutines and 14 Modiglianis. Surrounded in a gallery by nothing but first-rate Cezannes, one has to render homage to Barnes's taste and commitment. And even after the overdose of last year's Matisse retrespective at MOMA, the Barnes Matisses still surprise and delight. In this respect, the exhibition does well by Barnes. Seeing all 180 Renoirs owned by Barnes, for instance, might have deadened viewers to the delights of the extraordinary Renoir included here: the 1877 masterwork Leaving the Conservatoire. In the case of the Barnes Collection, sometimes less is more.

But if "Great French Paintings" tended to measure the Barnes Collection in terms of big names and their best works, both the collection itself and Barnes's biography partially justify such an evaluation. Barnes styled himself a pioneering collector, crusading against philistine academicism and collecting avant-garde modernist painting before most other Americans could recognize its merit. True, he began his collection with the help of William Glackens in 1912, was counseled at a critical moment in 1913 by Leo Stein and relied to some extent on dealers like Paul Guillaume, who helped him appreciate African sculpture early on. But other collectors have had at least as much aid and never developed the eye or bought with the daring that Barnes did.

Barnes, who was born in 1872 and died in a car crash in 1951, created himself in life as well as in art. The son of a butcher, he grew up poor and pugnacious, defending himself with his fists as a child, playing semi-professional sports to put himself through school and later making a fortune by marketing an antiseptic called Argyrol. As his business and his art collection grow, Barnes decided to enhance his employees' lives by using the paintings as the basis for art-appreciation classes. To conduct these classes Barnes devised an esthetic and pedagogic ideology loosely based on the theories of his lifelong friend John Dewey and the philosopher William James. In 1922 he turned his still-expanding collection into the Barnes Foundation, an institution dedicated to teaching his ideas on the basis of works he owned.

In order to give the collection a permanent home, Barnes made overtures-in some cases even direct offers of the collection--to various local institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. These institutions scoffed at the Barnes Collection, refusing to admit that the modernist works were art, and of course turned down Barnes's offer flat. On the other hand, since Bames's advances to these institutions so closely resembled harassment, perhaps the result is not surprising. In any event, the Barnes Collection remained at the Barnes Foundation. Until the death of his appointed successor, Violette de Mazia, in 1988, no modification of Bames's eccentric school was tolerated, either by teachers or students. Nor were errors of omission forgiven; one student was dismissed from the school for skipping two classes because her husband died.