Nobody to blame but Albert C. Barnes for the Barnes Foundation’s moving

Renoir's "The Promenade"

(March 2010) No one feels worse than Emsworth that the Barnes Foundation’s fabulous collection of post-impressionist and modern art is leaving its home in Merion, Pennsylvania and moving to downtown Philadelphia.

What an extraordinary place the Barnes is! We discovered it about 15 years ago: the world’s richest stash of Cezannes, Renoirs, Modiglianis, Matisses, van Goghs, and Picassos, all hidden away in a marvelous mansion surrounded by exotic gardens on a hard-to-find residential street in suburban Philly.   [Update: we went back to Merion one last time.  See this post.]

Seeing these masterpieces has been all the sweeter for the sense of enjoying stolen fruit. The Barnes management has always done its best to make visitors feel unwelcome, starting with its arbitrary and complicated rules for making “reservations.” If you do manage to find your way to North Latches Lane, the security people look over your paperwork at more checkpoints than East Berlin during the Cold War. The gallery personnel inside are hostile and irascible. No photography’s allowed, never mind the ostensibly educational purposes of the Foundation. Emsworth was once chastised by parking lot personnel for eating his breakfast muffin inside his car.

Albert Barnes didn't care much for impressionists other than Renoir, but he did collect this superb 1875 Monet (The Woman at Work)

But the aggravation would be worth it if it were only for Seurat’s stunning “Models” and Van Gogh’s “Postman.” For years we were torn between wanting to tell every art lover we knew about the Barnes and the fear of what might happen if it got to be too well known. But now it’s all moot, because the Barnes Foundation is hopelessly and irretrievably broke, and its directors have arranged to move the entire dazzling collection a few miles south into a real museum that’s already being built on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just a few blocks below the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 2010 is the last year we’ll be able to see the Barnes pictures in their natural habitat.

Words cannot convey the richness and wonder of the Barnes collection . The Cezannes alone! Dozens of first-quality Cezannes, many more than in any museum in the world. The Card Players — the finest and largest in Cezanne’s celebrated series. One of the three Large Bathers pictures (the other two are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in London). Breathtakingly perfect still lifes. And glorious Cezanne landscapes, including Emsworth’s favorite of all the Mt. Saint Victoire vistas.

And more Renoirs than anywhere else in the world. And one of the most important canvases in the history of modern art, Matisse’s 1909 The Joy of Life.

At the Barnes, Matisse's The Joy of Life hangs in the landing of a stairwell

They’re are all being moved, and some people are extremely upset. A couple weeks ago we paid Time-Warner Cable $7.95 to see an overwrought documentary movie entitled The Art of the Steal, whose makers want the world to believe that a cabal of rich Philadelphians have successfully conspired to acquire control of Barnes’s incredibly valuable art collection for their own greedy purposes. (The movie isn’t scheduled to play at Rochester’s Little Theater until April; how was it already on cable?)

The flaws and fallacies in this documentary were so transparent that Michael Moore himself might have produced it. To begin with, nobody has actually stolen anything; the Barnes Foundation still owns the paintings and will continue to own them. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and other downtown Philadelphia venues will simply benefit from having the Barnes pictures in a nearby museum that’ll be easy for tourists to drop in on. The people in the film kept yammering hysterically about a $100,000,000 state budget item that supposedly showed that money to save the Barnes was available and that the move was unnecessary, but one can tell just from the movie itself that no funds had actually been appropriated, and our research has confirmed that this was the case. It was even clearer that any such money would have been earmarked for a new home for the Barnes collection — not to keep the Foundation operating in Merion!

Among Emsworth's favorite Modigliani paintings at the Barnes is this urban landscape, a rare Modigliani that does not portray a human figure

The only part in The Art of the Steal that we don’t really doubt is its drumbeat that Dr. Albert C. Barnes never wanted his art collection to go anywhere else, especially not to downtown Philadelphia. He despised the art establishment types who ran the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he wanted his works of art to hang on the walls just as he left them for the benefit of art students who would be taught his own idiosyncratic theories of art.

But what of it? There’s a lot of tiresome talk in The Art of the Steal about how Barnes hired the best trusts and estates lawyers money could buy to make sure his egocentric vision would be carried on after he died. But stating your intentions in a will is one thing; funding those intentions and making sure they’re carried out is something else. Albert C. Barnes didn’t do either.

Good lawyers, for instance, hardly would have advised Barnes to leave the management of the Barnes Foundation and its money to amateurs. No doubt Barnes thought that giving a small Philadelphia college a perpetual right to name five trustees for his Foundation was a good joke. But what made him think that the college would name the right people? Clearly they didn’t; the results were disastrous. The first director named by the trustees, one of Barnes’s disciples who was even more hostile to the public than Barnes himself, didn’t even keep the collection open to the public for the two days a week that his will stipulated, foregoing important income. For decades the trustees failed to make timely repairs to the building, risking damage to the art. And they failed to develop sources of external financial support for the Foundation.

Whose fault is that? And if Barnes wanted to make sure his enemies in the Philadelphia art community could never get their mitts on his Foundation, why didn’t his will provide that the board of trustees could never be expanded so as to make room for them?

This Cezanne still life at the Barnes, "Compotier, Pitcher and Fruit," is as close to perfection as art can get

Rich as he was, Barnes apparently didn’t endow the Barnes Foundation adequately in the first place, or wasn’t able to. The movie libelously implies that, in recent years at least, the trustees deliberately wasted money and ran the institution into the ground so that the collection would have to be moved from Merion. That’s hard to swallow. But no matter whose fault that was, when the money was gone — and with no one volunteering to put up $150,000,000 to keep the pictures in Merion — what else could the trustees do?

It’s hard to believe that the Barnes pictures are really leaving Merion, no longer to be enjoyed merely by intrepid, difficult-to-discourage art lovers like Emsworth, but instead by unworthy, unwashed masses of tourists in downtown Philadelphia. But only blind fools would think it couldn’t have happened without perfidy and sculduggery.

[We made a final visit to Merion in September 2010.  See this post.]

Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In Philadelphia on business last week, this art museum junkie was able to spend a pleasant afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he found the usual tourists posing for souvenir photos at the top of the famous steps in triumphal “Rocky” poses. Unfortunately for the photos, most of this fine building is temporarily covered with scaffolding (even more than in this 2007 shot).

Inside, the collection is as rewarding as ever, but can’t be seen all in a day. If you have a chance to visit, Emsworth offers a modest list of ten pictures at this museum that he wouldn’t want his friends to miss.

1. Interior (Edgar Degas). Never mind the famous paintings of ballet rehearsals and nudes getting into their baths — this melodramatic 1868 painting is the Degas that appeals to me most. There’s a story here, but what is it?

The room, with its old-fashioned wallpaper, looks like a set from a play. The painting has been subtitled The Rape, as if the impassive man has just taken from the unfortunate, half-dressed woman something she can never get back. Is this a pictoral re-telling of the story of Amnon (son of King David), who tricked and raped his half-sister Tamar? “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.” 2 Samuel 13:15 (KJV). But what to make of the oddly lit jewelry box on the table in the middle of the room?

2. Rhetoricians at a Window (Jan Steen). Even without a Rembrandt or a Vermeer, the collection of Dutch and Flemish old masters at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is outstanding. It includes at least half a dozen marvelous genre paintings by the Dutchman Jan Steen, of which Rhetoricians at a Window, painted in 1661, is my favorite by an eyelash. Most of these portray working-class citizens in everyday activities, although one illustrates the Exodus scene of Moses striking the rock in anger to get water for the Israelites.

3. A Temperance Meeting (Homer). But Dutch genre paintings have nothing on American genre paintings. The Dutch peasant with the cup in Steen’s painting isn’t drinking milk, but the American farmboy in Winslow Homer’s scene, painted in 1874, is.

4. Christ Bearing the Cross (Murillo). The Gospel of John tells us that, after his trial, Jesus was forced to carry his own cross to Calvary, where he was to be executed by crucifixion. In this large picture by the great Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jesus meets his mother Mary and kneels to rest, with his cross on his shoulder. Mary holds out her hands as if to ask Jesus whether he truly must give up his life, a conversation she surely had with her son long before his arrest at Passover. Jesus confirms his mission with an expressive look.

Murillo’s picture is not a literal portrayal of the scene on the road to Calvary, because Jesus was guarded and whipped along by His tormentors on his way to Calvary, and it seems unlikely that they left Him alone for a private moment with His mother. Its meaning is, I think, figurative. Jesus surely knew long before his arrest that He had been sent to yield up His life as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind, and in a real sense He was carrying the cross throughout the years of His ministry. None of the many works of art with Christian themes in the Philadelphia Museum of Art will speak more movingly to believers than this 1665 picture.

5. Pont Neuf, Afternoon Sunshine (Pissarro). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a spectacular collection of French impressionist paintings, but the sheer pleasure afforded by this heavily textured view of the most famous of the Paris bridges that cross the Seine is unmatched. Every part of this 1901 painting, from the colorful wagons and figures on the bridge to the fantastical greens and mauves of the river itself, is a sensual treat. To my great disappointment, it was not on the gallery walls during my mid-July 2008 visit.

6. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (Duchamp). This cubist painting made a stir when it was first exhibited nearly a century ago (in 1914), but it’s not at all salacious. In fact, it’s difficult to find the nude subject of this monochromatic painting at all, let alone identify any particular parts of her anatomy. Nude Descending a Staircase may be the best-known cubist painting in the world. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an excellent collection of other cubist works, especially by Picasso, Leger, and Juan Gris.

The museum has devoted an entire gallery to Marcel Duchamp. What a sad case study is his career! Some early paintings by Duchamp in the gallery, in what might be considered a post-impressionist style, show his exceptional talent. These include, for example, a fine portrait of his father. But Duchamp was caught up in the rapidly changing artistic and intellectual movements of the day. First, in a cubist phase, as represented by Nude Descending a Staircase, he abandoned representational art. Then, perhaps finding that celebrity and notoriety suited him more than artistic achievement, Duchamp abandoned his discipline altogether. He gave up painting, bought a bicycle wheel, mounted it on a pedestal, and announced that it was art.

Gratified with the attention, Duchamp repeated the trick over the years with a urinal, a comb, and other objects, a number of which are exhibited in this gallery. Remarkably, people took these stunts seriously; apparently some still do. The gallery chronicles Duchamp’s fall. The visitor will marvel at a century of public gullibility.

7. William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River (Thomas Eakins). In the shadows, the famous sculptor chips away at his masterpiece. Neither Rush nor the elderly chaperone look at the nude model, who holds a box on her shoulder to help hold her pose. The model’s clothing, laid on a chair, is by far the brightest part of the painting.

8. The Large Bathers (Cezanne). It’s the picture that’s large (83 by 93 inches), not the bathers. Cezanne painted three versions of The Large Bathers, one in the London’s National Gallery, one at the Barnes Foundation, in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, and this 1906 work, which is the finest of the three.

Paul Cezanne’s masterpiece can be seen 50 yards away down the long gallery lined with impressionist masterpieces that leads to the circular fountain court gallery.

9. The Rialto (Sargent). If Emsworth ever visits Venice, it will be because of John Singer Sargent’s evocative paintings of scenes from that city.

Visitors to the Philadelphia museum who want to see all the Sargents are led a merry chase. The curators have hung The Rialto among the works of late 19th-century European, presumably for no other reason than that it is a European scene. Portrait of Lady Eden is in the same gallery, presumably because the subject was British. But other Sargent paintings, including several fine portraits and a strikingly modern late landscape, are found among the works of his fellow Americans.

10. Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (Matisse). In 1914, while Picasso and Braque were painting the same Cubist painting over and over again, Henri Matisse was using art’s new-found freedom to paint this unique portrait. As an afficionado, Emsworth was frustrated no end to find on his recent visit to Philadelphia (July 2008) that hardly anything by Matisse was on the walls.

These are not necessarily the finest or the most famous paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I have not forgotten Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Rubens’s Prometheus Unbound, Renoir’s Large Bathers, Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, or Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and Lily Pool. But you’d see them anyway.