Albert C. Barnes

In 1911, Barnes reconnected with his high school classmate William Glackens and in January 1912, just after turning 40 years old, Barnes sent him to Paris with $20,000 to buy paintings for him. Glackens returned with 33 works of art.^[3]: 19

Following the success of Glackens' buying campaign, Barnes traveled to Paris twice himself, the same year. In December, he met Gertrude and Leo Stein and purchased his first two Matisse paintings from them.^[20] Barnes purchased his collection of African Art from art dealer Paul Guillaume (1891–1934), who served briefly as the Barnes Foundation's "foreign secretary."^[20]

The collection changed throughout Barnes' lifetime as he acquired pieces, moved them from room to room, gifted pieces, and sold them. The art works in the Barnes Foundation reflect how they were hung and placed at the time of his death in 1951. There are over 4,000 objects in the collection including over 900 paintings and nearly 900 pieces of wrought iron. Some major holdings include: 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 69 works by Paul Cézanne, 59 works by Henri Matisse, 46 works by Pablo Picasso, and 7 paintings by Vincent Van Gogh. In 1923, Barnes Purchased Le Bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), a painting once owned by Gertrude and Leo Stein, bought from Christian Tetzen-Lund through Paul Guillaume for 45,000 francs.^[21]: 153 In 1927, he purchased Renoir's The Artist’s Family from Claude Renoir through Galerie Barbazanges for $50,000.^[22] The collection also includes many other paintings and works by leading European and American artists, as well as African art, art from China, Greece, and Native American peoples.

Barnes Foundation

Barnes had a longtime interest in education; he held two hour long employee seminars at the end of the day in his factory.^[23] At the seminars, his primarily African American workforce would discuss philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics reading James, Dewey, and Santayana.^[24] With friend and mentor John Dewey he decided to expand his educational venture. In December 1922, the Barnes Foundation received its charter from the state of Pennsylvania as an educational institution. He hired Franco-American architect Paul Philippe Cret to build a gallery building, residence (administration building), and service building. The gallery served as a teaching tool for students to study art using a method based on the scientific method. Barnes consulted with attorney Owen Roberts (1875–1955) when setting up the by-laws and the indenture.^{[3] : 29} In 1925, the buildings were completed and the Barnes Foundation opened. The collection is not hung traditionally, instead they are arranged in "ensembles" which are organized following the formal principles of light, color, line, and space. The focus of Barnes's teachings were on the art itself rather than its historic context, chronology, style, or genre. Barnes did not provide documentation on the meaning of each arrangement.

Operations

Since the Barnes Foundation was an educational institution, Barnes limited access to the collection, and often required people to make appointments by letter. He often declined visitors who wrote and asked to visit. He especially did not appreciate the wealthy and entitled requesting visits and would often rudely answer them. In 1939, Barnes sent a letter, posing as a secretary, informing Walter Chrysler he could not visit because he (Barnes) "is not to be disturbed during his strenuous efforts to break the world's record for gold-fish swallowing."^[10]: 13

Influenced by the

Litigation to open the Barnes Foundation to the public began seven months after Barnes' death. In March 1961 it was opened to the public on Fridays and Saturdays, then expanded to three days a week in 1967, after Mrs. Barnes' death in '66, and remained that way until the 1990s.[27] Barnes also had strong feelings against color photographs of the collection as the quality was not up to par with the then current technology. In regards to a request for color photographs Mrs. Barnes wrote to Henri Matisse: “Despite the improvement of the photographic process, it does not faithfully reproduce the exact colors of the artist. And there is further difficulty in making color plates for a book.”^[21]: 282 The stance is often criticized. The critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre: "owing to its long sequestration in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, which never permitted its reproduction in color, it is the least familiar of modern masterpieces. Yet this painting was Matisse's own response to the hostility his work had met with in the Salon d'Automne of 1905."^[28]

Relationship with art world

In 1923, a public showing of Barnes' collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts proved that it was too

Barnes wrote several books about his theories of art aesthetics. He was assisted by his educational staff, whom he also encouraged to publish their own writings. From 1925-26, he and the staff published articles in the Journal of the Barnes Foundation.[33]

• The Art in Painting (1925).^[34]
• The French Primitives and Their Forms from Their Origin to the End of the Fifteenth Century (1931), with Violette de Mazia (1899-1988). A native of Paris, at the time she was a teacher at the Foundation; in 1950, Barnes appointed her as Director of Education.^[35]
• The Art of Renoir (1935), with De Mazia.^[36]
• The Art of Henri-Matisse (1933), with De Mazia.^[37]
• The Art of Cézanne, with De Mazia.^[38]
• Art and Education (1929-1939), with John Dewey, Lawrence Buermeyer, Thomas Mullen, and De Mazia. These were collected essays by Barnes, Dewey, and his educational staff, originally published in the Journal of the Barnes Foundation (1925-1926). (Barnes hired Buermeyer (1889-1970) and Mullen (1897-), former students of Dewey, each to serve as Assistant Director of Education for a time; Dewey was Director during this period in what was essentially an honorary position.) ^[33]

Later years

In 1940, Barnes and his wife Laura purchased an 18th-century estate in West Pikeland Township, Pennsylvania, and named it "Ker-Feal" (Breton for “House of Fidèle”) after their favorite dog.^[3]: 45 Barnes requested art dealer Georges Keller adopt and bring the dog he met while vacationing in Brittany, France to Merion.^[1]

In the late 1940s, Barnes met

Russell invited Barnes to his cabin in Lake Tahoe for discussion. He secured a contract to teach for five years at an annual salary of $6,000, subsequently raised to $8,000, so Russell could give up his other teaching duties.^{[3]: 45–46}

The two men later fell out after Barnes was offended by the behavior of Russell's wife

Barnes died on July 24, 1951, in an automobile crash.[40] Driving from Ker-Feal to Merion with his dog Fidèle, he failed to stop at a stop sign and was hit broadside by a truck at an intersection on Phoenixville Pike in Malvern. He was killed instantly. Fidèle was severely injured from the crash and was put down on the scene.^[41][1]

The Barnes Foundation in recent decades

From 1990 to 1998, Richard Glanton served as President. During his term a selection of paintings were approved by the Montgomery County Orphans' Court to tour and raise money for renovations. From 1993 to 1995, The Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern exhibited. The paintings and other works attracted huge crowds in seven international cities.^[42]

In 1998, Kimberly Camp became the first professional director in the history of the Barnes Foundation. When Camp arrived in the fall of 1998, the Foundation had a $3.3 million deficit and was embroiled in numerous court cases. Under Camp's leadership, the deficit was eliminated, excepting a $1 million structural deficit due to FASB changes. Camp led the Foundation's restoration of the arboretum in Merion and its second campus, Ker-feal, a 132-acre farm in Chester Springs. The Ker-feal restoration included a full inventory and mold remediation, funded in part by the West Pikeland Township. Camp restaffed the Foundation with professionals in their respective fields. The education program was returned to the methods used by Barnes during his lifetime. The retail division became for the first time, a profit center. A licensing program was established allowing international use of images from the collection. Programs were established for regional K-12 schools, as was intended by Barnes as documented in his papers.

Camp's work with her conservator, registrar, archivist and advisory committee created the Collection Assessment Project, a multi-year, multi-million effort to catalog the collection, conduct conservation assessments and catalog archival records. With over 1,000,000 records, the Barnes archives is now public. It was Camp's research that provided the basis for the petition to relocate the Barnes Foundation to its center city location. Documentation provided in court proved, in Barnes' own words, that the foundation could be moved to Philadelphia. Camp remained at the Foundation through 2005 to ensure its smooth transition to new leadership.

In 2002 the Foundation petitioned the Montgomery County Orphans' Court for permission to expand its Board of Trustees and move its gallery collection to Philadelphia and in December 2004 the court approved the petition.^[25] A new building designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway opened on May 19, 2012. The move to Philadelphia was featured in the documentary film The Art of the Steal (2009).

Notes