Spring Break
Stealing the Barnes: Heist of the century
By: Robert Zaller
Issue date: 6/1/07 Section: Ed-Op
Originally published: 6/1/07 at 3:44 AM EST
Last update: 6/1/07 at 3:44 AM EST
Originally published: 6/1/07 at 3:44 AM EST
Last update: 6/1/07 at 3:44 AM EST
As some of you may know, last week I participated in an on-campus debate with Gresham Riley, a former president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, on the future of the Barnes Foundation.
Public debates are, I think, a fine thing, but they seem rare nowadays - a relic of horse and buggy days. True, Drexel hosted a mayoral "debate" recently, but a gaggle of politicians trying to get face time and crowd out each others' sound bites is not a specimen of the art. Gresham and I may not be Lincoln and Douglas, but we were trying to address a civic issue that has received no serious public discussion except online. And neither of us was running for office.
What is the Barnes Foundation, and why talk about it?
Dr. Albert C. Barnes collected and installed the greatest collection of Post-Impressionist and early modern art in the world in a chateau-style building right off City Avenue. The Louvre has nothing like it nor does the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It contains over 350 works by Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso and a great many other masterworks. Barnes wanted the general public to enjoy and profit by his collection, and to that end he devised a course of study to utilize the collection in collaboration with the great philosopher John Dewey. Barnes hung the collection to illustrate the aesthetic principles being taught and stipulated that no item in the galleries ever be rehung, loaned or sold. He provided for a day of open public admission, free of charge, but he never intended the Foundation to function as a museum. It was and is a teaching institution not unlike Drexel itself.
Dr. Barnes amassed his collection at a time when the Philadelphia art establishment ridiculed modern art. The establishment dissed Barnes, and he dissed them back. His will provided that no one connected with Philadelphia art institutions serve in any capacity with the Foundation.
That was before the art market exploded, and a nineteenth-century painting of a local medical clinic in the realist style, estimable but hardly in the league of a Cezanne or Matisse, could fetch $68 million in our own fair city. The Barnes collection, today, is worth over $30 billion--except, of course, that it is not and cannot be put on the market.
Public debates are, I think, a fine thing, but they seem rare nowadays - a relic of horse and buggy days. True, Drexel hosted a mayoral "debate" recently, but a gaggle of politicians trying to get face time and crowd out each others' sound bites is not a specimen of the art. Gresham and I may not be Lincoln and Douglas, but we were trying to address a civic issue that has received no serious public discussion except online. And neither of us was running for office.
What is the Barnes Foundation, and why talk about it?
Dr. Albert C. Barnes collected and installed the greatest collection of Post-Impressionist and early modern art in the world in a chateau-style building right off City Avenue. The Louvre has nothing like it nor does the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It contains over 350 works by Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso and a great many other masterworks. Barnes wanted the general public to enjoy and profit by his collection, and to that end he devised a course of study to utilize the collection in collaboration with the great philosopher John Dewey. Barnes hung the collection to illustrate the aesthetic principles being taught and stipulated that no item in the galleries ever be rehung, loaned or sold. He provided for a day of open public admission, free of charge, but he never intended the Foundation to function as a museum. It was and is a teaching institution not unlike Drexel itself.
Dr. Barnes amassed his collection at a time when the Philadelphia art establishment ridiculed modern art. The establishment dissed Barnes, and he dissed them back. His will provided that no one connected with Philadelphia art institutions serve in any capacity with the Foundation.
That was before the art market exploded, and a nineteenth-century painting of a local medical clinic in the realist style, estimable but hardly in the league of a Cezanne or Matisse, could fetch $68 million in our own fair city. The Barnes collection, today, is worth over $30 billion--except, of course, that it is not and cannot be put on the market.
