Barnes Collection, Loathed by Neighbors, Faces Uncertain Future

August 22nd, 2007
By James S. Russell
Bloomberg

The Barnes Foundation, which owns an idiosyncratic art collection awash in works by Renoir and Matisse, faces a quandary.

As it proceeds with a long-planned move to Philadelphia, there's a new campaign to keep the museum in suburban Merion, its home since 1925. Yet the irascible collector Albert C. Barnes made preserving his legacy intact almost impossible.

The idea of staying in Marion is appealing. In contrast to the impersonal and antiseptic experience of so many museums, visiting the original Barnes is like being invited into a connoisseur's home. You sense the strong personality and individual eye of the collector, who died in 1951.

After making a fortune in patent medicines, Barnes acquired rapidly in the first two decades of the 20th century, purchasing late French Impressionists and early Modernists: 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes and almost four dozen early Picassos, to name a few.

He hired the great Beaux Arts architect Paul Philippe Cret, who designed a formidably austere French limestone gallery building set amid lush gardens on Barnes's Montgomery County estate.

Barnes hung his paintings densely and symmetrically according to his own esthetic theories. He dotted gallery walls with decorative metal hardware and juxtaposed masterworks with simple farm furniture, cabinets of African art and chests covered in cheerful folk-art decorations.

Then, in his will, he stipulated that nothing may change.

Only One Way

His jumble of the voluptuous (Renoir's scantily clad female bathers) and the plain (a splayed-back farmer's chair) is a delight on a first visit. But it strangles any interpretations except Barnes's own. Curators cannot juxtapose his works with those from other collections or rearrange them to reveal new significance.

The Barnes languished under the straitjacket of the will and restrictions on visitors imposed by posh Merion (the museum is open only three days a week). Financial woes mounted. In 2003, the Barnes persuaded the local Orphans' Court to rule that the collection could move to Philadelphia, where it would attract more visitors and greater support.

Neighbors in Merion objected to the traffic and tour buses. (It's one reason for the three-day-a-week schedule.) But now, four years after a court gave locals their wish, many have decided the Barnes shouldn't move after all, and Montgomery County has offered a $50-million bond to help sustain the Barnes where it is.

Move Still Planned

Barnes President Derek Gilman, having spent years raising money and planning for a move, understandably rejects this belated overture.

"We charted this course for financial and fiduciary reasons," he explained on a recent visit. "The philanthropic community is persuaded the Barnes will work in Philadelphia, not here. The collection moves, but the buildings and gardens will stay and remain open to the public."

Moving poses its own perils. Judge Stanley Ott requires the new structure to reproduce exactly the galleries from the Cret building and Barnes's arrangement of the works. The collection can neither grow nor shrink. It's got to be the most peculiar major architectural commission in years.

Cret's galleries are intimate and beautifully proportioned, but the experience of so many works in such small spaces will suffer if large crowds are permitted in the new location. (The Barnes says it will limit the numbers to what they are today.) If the new architect, scheduled to be selected soon, is permitted insufficient leeway, the result could feel embalmed.

Philadelphia Site

To make things messier, the Barnes can't be sure when it can move. The city of Philadelphia has offered a perfect 4.5- acre site along the Parisian-style Benjamin Franklin Boulevard that leads to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The city is supposed to move an overcrowded juvenile jail now occupying the site to a new facility by next May, yet it has failed to take the necessary steps. Assume the replacement will take a minimum of four years.

The Barnes will need that long itself, even though it still promises occupancy in 2009. Continued foot-dragging by Philadelphia, though, will imperil the move.

There's more. The Barnes says it can build its 120,000- square-foot building for $100 million. (That sum has been raised, led by the local Annenberg Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Lenfest Foundation and the state of Pennsylvania, along with $50 million pledged for education and an endowment.)

Yet world-class architecture isn't cheap. The more modest Perelman building at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, opening Sept. 15, came in at $90 million. Rampant construction-price inflation will worsen the picture.

If the foundation can clear these hurdles, Barnes's legacy may be enriched by a move, sad as it is to think of the Merion gallery emptied. Were the Barnes now in Philadelphia, its holdings would enhance Museum of Art's current Renoir show.

There's a lesson in the ugly Barnes saga for all the private collections being turned into museums by the hedge-fund Barneses of our day: Donors don't readily cut million-dollar checks to sanctify Barnes's or anyone else's quaint art theories. They want their Cezannes to hang next to his Cezannes. They want to attach their names to institutions that learn, grow and change.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)