Opening The Barnes Door

By ROBERT HUGHES

Where, until last month, was the world's finest semi-unknown collection of early modern art?

At the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania.

Where is the pick of it now?

At the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

How much of it has gone there?

Eighty-two paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Soutine and Matisse, among others.

And why are they all there?

Because either a) a new administration at the foundation has decided to bring the Barnes into an era of public accessibility, thus promoting knowledge and beauty, or b) the same administration has condemned these valuable and fragile paintings, against the explicit will of their dead owner, to a vulgar road show that will expose them to intolerable risk.

What should one do?

Go and see them, at least. Whatever one thinks of their impending travels over the next 15 months -- to the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, to Tokyo, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art -- let opportunism prevail. With all the hoopla and reproduction, this will be the last chance to experience these paintings freshly before they join the huge canon of overreproduced masterpieces of early modern art. Then by all means reflect on Albert Barnes, and why nobody like him and nothing like his collection could exist today.

Barnes was the classic American self-made man. The son of a black-Irish Philadelphia butcher, he went through medical school and made his fortune in the early 1900s on an antiseptic, which he developed in partnership with a German chemist and registered under the trade name Argyrol. Even before World War I, Barnes was a millionaire -- a word with meaning then. And he was developing a curiosity about modern art.

In 1912 he began to buy in earnest, first through his friend the American painter William Glackens, and then during his own trips to Paris. His main aesthetic guide in collecting was art critic Leo Stein, Gertrude's brother. His intellectual mentor was the educator John Dewey, whose book Democracy and Education formed his ideas about education for "the masses" through art. After 1918, Barnes' acquisitions became obsessive. His biggest spree was in the early '20s, when he went charging through Paris waving his checkbook (earning the disapproval of Gertrude Stein, who thought him vulgar) and haggling like a mule trader. The postwar market for modern art was low, and Barnes got nearly everything he wanted, including, as he later boasted, the entire contents of the "drunk, sick and broken" Chaim Soutine's studio "for a pittance" -- about $3,000.

He also purchased 900 tons of French limestone, with which he would build his foundation in Merion, outside Philadelphia, a sort of Trianon with Art Deco overtones by the French architect Paul Cret, who had designed the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. The Barnes Foundation was chartered in 1922, with a core of 713 paintings and a $6 million endowment. Its purpose was education. Barnes was fascinated by formal analysis, which, like a true chemist, he thought could be put on a "scientific" basis. He was indifferent, even hostile, to discussing iconography (the subject and images of the work), or the artist's life, or the social or historical contexts of his work. No modern art historian would go with his theories, but then he didn't like art historians much either. He was an autodidact. He had a whole system, and those who disagreed could go jump in the Schuylkill. Few people could like Barnes, but there was something admirable about his independence, even at its most flintily messianic.

Through the '20s and '30s he amassed a gigantic collection. Its focus lay on modern French art. Barnes disliked Impressionism as superficial, but he adored Renoir and bought 180 of his works -- certainly the largest group of Renoirs, good, bad and indifferent, owned by anyone in the world. He ended up with 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus, and so on down the list of modernist greats (and mediocrities, like Jules Pascin, whose oo-la-la nudes stirred Barnes' libido to the point that the doctor bought 57 works). His collection contains many duds, but it also boasts some of the greatest masterpieces of French art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and most of these are on view in the National Gallery show.

There is Seurat's huge Models, for instance, which ranks with La Grande Jatte (a corner of which appears in this view of Seurat's studio, behind the slender nudes and their enchanting litter of clothes and parasols) as one of the artist's key paintings. From Barnes' many first-rate Cezannes come Nudes in a Landscape and The Card Players, two paintings in which the inherent monumentality of his late style is brought to a pitch of astonishing grandeur. There are some good Picassos, though they're sentimental and juvenile after the stern intensities of Cezanne. There is a great Van Gogh portrait of the Arles postman, from whose beard all of Expressionism might have subsequently unrolled.

Then there is the painting that parallels Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as one of the charters of modern art, Matisse's The Joy of Life, with its peculiar sluglike nudes disporting themselves in a brilliantly colored arcadian landscape based on the coast of St. Tropez. In the middle distance is a ring of naked dancers, the prototype of the figures in the big Dance murals Matisse would do for the Moscow palace of the great Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, and the ancestors of yet another Dance, the three- panel, 45-ft.-long mural that Barnes was to commission for his foundation's main gallery in 1931.

Today the possession of a mere half a dozen of Barnes' better paintings would make their owner a social lion, courted by hopeful museums, wooed by trustees and hostesses. Not in Philadelphia 70 years ago. There, modern art was generally regarded as the effusion of five-thumbed lunatics, and when some of Barnes' Soutines and Modiglianis were shown, along with Matisse's Joy of Life, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1923, they were mocked by Good Society and press alike. Barnes never forgave Philadelphia. To say he lacked the Main Line social graces, notably that of kissing the superior posterior, would be like rebuking a rhino for awkwardness with the tea set. In particular, Barnes loathed Fiske Kimball, the director of the Philadelphia Museum; his snobbery got Barnes' working-class Irish goat, and their enmity lasted a quarter of a century, during which Barnes refused to lend anything to Kimball's or any other museum.

One doesn't have to sympathize with Kimball to recognize that Barnes was the most difficult patron in the history of American collecting -- a living disproof of the naive idea that great art refines its owner. He was coarse, vindictive, paranoid and given to scatological insult. He ran his foundation like a cult. Its students, admitted on the basis of an interview conducted by the formidable Barnes, were meant to be working-class, "plain" people, but few real Philadelphia workers could get time off to meet the mandatory requirement of attending class in Merion one afternoon a week for two years -- and those who missed class could be expelled. No degrees were given. The teachers were for the most part uninspired, and no divergence from the doctor's art theories was tolerated.

Above all, he hated "experts," wrote them rude letters (sometimes signed with the name of his dog, Fidele), and made it next to impossible for them to visit the collection. Even Kenneth Clark was excluded, presumably for being insufficiently working-class. Nothing could be lent or even moved, since Barnes' hanging of the collection was sacrosanct.

After the irascible doctor's death in 1951, his will left control in his wife's hands until her death, after which it passed to Lincoln University, a small black institution in Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. Its board of trustees was to nominate the trustees of the Barnes Foundation. Effectively, however, the place was run by a dim, snappish woman named Violette deMazia, Barnes' longtime Girl Friday and educational hatchetperson, who reigned there with ever mounting eccentricity until her death in 1988.

By then the collection had next to no public or professional base at all. It had been forced, by court order and the threat of revocation of its tax-exempt status, to open its galleries for the first time to the public (though in a limited way) in 1961. But it was essentially a tomb. It had no loyal audience, no generous trustees, no circle of scholars and museum professionals to give it support. Its wiring, services and security system were antiquated (a boiler-room explosion in 1985 drenched some of its walls and nearly ruined nine paintings).

As the foundation came into the '90s, inflation had eaten away at its endowment, and not one of its Lincoln-appointed board members had any background in the visual arts. Never had a collection of such quality been controlled by such a quintet of aesthetic ignoramuses. To help in its deliberations, the board appointed an advisory committee. Its honorary chairman was the publishing mogul and collector Walter Annenberg. It included several museum professionals and one art dealer, Richard Feigen.

The first plan to raise money came from the foundation's new president, a lawyer named Richard Glanton. Early in 1991, Glanton proposed selling "redundant" works to pay for the repairs he considered necessary, the cost of which was estimated at $15 million. He proposed selling a minimum of 15 paintings, and he discussed sales of up to $100 million (some sources say $200 million) with Sotheby's.

When Glanton and the board petitioned the court for permission to sell, there was an explosion of protest from museum professionals and critics -- among them, Thomas Freudenheim, the Smithsonian Institution's under secretary for museums, who condemned the plan as "in direct conflict with the museum's archival and research function." The consensus outside the foundation was that the Barnes collection was a national treasure, which ought to be preserved in every detail. Besides, the sale would have flagrantly contradicted Barnes' stated wishes -- "No picture belonging to the collection," runs the foundation's charter, "shall ever be loaned, sold or otherwise disposed of."

One of the advisory committee's strongest critics of the sales plan was Feigen. He was summarily dismissed for his protests. Still, after further outcry from art authorities, critics and the Barnes' own students, the sales idea was dropped, only to be replaced with another that Barnes would also have loathed but that at least wasn't as radical. Encouraged by J. Carter Brown, the soon-to-retire director of the National Gallery in Washington, Glanton proposed a worldwide tour of paintings from the collection, accompanied by all the usual backup -- reproductions, books, posters, souvenirs. In July 1992 the Barnes board won court permission to mount such a tour, just once, after which the paintings were never to leave Merion again. This, says Brown, was "a very closely reasoned argument by a judge who felt it was necessary in order to make possible the other provisions of the will. This tour is going to go a long way to make it fiscally possible for Barnes' collection to be preserved in perpetuity."

The Barnes Foundation closed a $700,000 book-and-catalog publishing deal with Knopf; it was signed soon after the foundation controlled by Knopf's owner, Samuel Newhouse Jr., gave a $2 million donation to Lincoln University -- sheer coincidence, no doubt, but nevertheless the timing prompted a lawsuit brought by the DeMazia Trust. Meanwhile, several objectors within the Barnes Foundation -- both teachers and students -- have been expelled or dismissed, allegedly on Glanton's orders.

Glanton's critics object to the fact that the Barnes board never tried other ways of raising money -- through charitable foundations or private donors. Selling out (as they see it) to the big museums is an admission of impotence, of the Barnes Foundation's lack of a constituency, which should be fixed first. The other side's answer is that the Barnes will never get a constituency until the public can get into it; this can't happen until the place is fixed up.

The wrangle is bitter and shows no sign of resolution. The antis say the whole project has been needlessly rushed, leaving insufficient time for proper inspection of the condition of the works, for restoration and for prepping them to endure the stress of travel. "I believe that the whole schedule was worked around the National Gallery having an open date," says James Beck, an art-history professor at Columbia University who runs a group called ArtWatch International, formed in 1992 to monitor unwise treatment and abusive restoration of works of art of world significance. "It was really a kind of tragic rush. Eighty works treated in a period of nine months is outrageously fast." Nathan Stolow, a conservation consultant, also worries about the short lead time: "It is a Henry Ford-style mass-production technique. It is just unbelievable."

The National Gallery's director, Earl ("Rusty") Powell III, who took over from Carter Brown in 1992, categorically denies that the show was rushed: "The pictures that have been chosen were very carefully reviewed by a conservation committee. Some were rejected because their condition was fragile. There has been no major conservation." In an interview published in last month's issue of Art & Auction, Glanton (who is black) tried to nuke his critics with the claim that they were impelled by racism. Walter Annenberg entered the fray with the ponderous declamation that the hundred or so students who, headed by an engineer named Nick Tinari, are now seeking a court injunction to prevent the paintings leaving the U.S. are "just a bunch of complainers who act as if they're important figures in the art world. They're nothing."

Perhaps so, but they were something to Barnes, even though he wasn't at all the gentleman that Annenberg is. In the meantime, the voice you hear muttering as you revel in your first sight of the Barnes paintings may not be an acoustiguide. It could be the livid shade of the antiseptic millionaire, undeterred by the artgoing public's exclamations of delight.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York