A DECADE AGO, you still could travel to the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, buy your ticket, and enter a rambling mansion filled with 900 paintings or artworks, mostly Impressionist. It was the famed Barnes art collection.
Now, you can see that very same collection of the late Dr. Albert Barnes in a modern building, which inside has replicated all the nooks and crannies of the old Barnes mansion, where he had hung his work just so, in nine rooms on two floors, if in very eccentric ways.
The modern museum, The Barnes Foundation Museum, is now on the mall of downtown Philadelphia, opened in 2012 after a few heated years of legal wrangling.
Before his death in 1951, Barnes had endowed his collection—worth several billion—to Lincoln University, a local black school. However, as the university faced financial difficulty, and the collection was coveted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a legal battle ensued on who would control the artistic treasure.
On one side was the Philadelphia Museum, the famed Philadelphia philanthropies (Pew and Annenberg), and finally the state governor and attorney general. In the end, they navigated the sale of the collection and move to the new property. They wanted to make the art collection a jewel of downtown Philadelphia.
Opposing was the old neighborhood of the Barnes mansion collection, which put Lower Merion Township and its Montgomery County on the map, even worldwide. Other opponents simply rejected the power moves of the Philadelphia establishment, which even Dr. Barnes, a self-made outsider, had always disliked.
True, maintaining the museum in the old neighborhood had become difficult. At first, in fact, the residents complained of the traffic, parking problems, etc. So narrow was the access to the museum that it had to limit visitors to 450 a day and be open only four days a week. This cut into its revenue, putting the old Barnes Foundation in the red.
The underbelly of the whole transition was highlighted in the 2009 documentary, The Art of the Steal. The story was fraught with allusions to racism, overturning of a legal will, and the rapaciousness of powerful museums and foundations. The consolation, perhaps, is that in the end Lincoln University gained a large cash endowment for its future, and a wider public is now allowed to see the Barnes Museum, internally, just as it was set up by its owner.
A native of Philadelphia, Dr. Barnes had become a millionaire by inventing an antiseptic. Then he spent the rest of his life buying art. For better or worse, he was always at odds with the Philadelphia establishment, especially its wealthy philanthropic families.
Thus, at its founding in the 1920s, Dr. Barnes’ foundation rejected the idea of being a high-tone museum. Instead, he presented the collection as a look-and-see “educational” experience for ordinary people.
At the museum, they could see one of the world’s strongest collections of French Impressionists, post-Impressionists, and modern paintings (not to mention pre-modern works, African sculpture, furniture, and ironware). It is resplendent with art by El Greco, Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and more.
Like the art, no one doubts that the new downtown museum is a beautiful work of architecture. Its original promise was to attract two-to-three times more than the old museum’s latter-day peak of 93,600 a year. Still, as with many such projects, the new museum costs went above the first estimates, and taxpayers foot some of the bill.
As some pointed out at the 2012 opening of the new museum, there was no guarantee that the new museum would draw enough visitors to pay the bills. Most museums, in fact, face such perennial problems. By 2017, for example, the new museum had recorded some peak attendance years of more than 250,000, but then had settled back to 230,000, showing a decrease in public interest. The result in 2017 was for the Barnes Foundation to kick off a $100 million capital campaign to underwrite its expenses.
It is often the case that in such ethical debates, two different “goods” are in conflict. One good was to retain the homey mansion art museum, a rarity, and honor Dr. Barnes’ will to the letter. The other was to make the art more accessible to the public.
Art is such a valuable commodity now that power plays, and the weight of big money, often determine the outcomes. The Barnes Foundation story is not only colorful—thanks to the eccentric Barnes himself—but emblematic of how matters will usually turn out in the high stakes art museum world.