Debating the Barnes move (sort of)

After a two-week exclusive run at Center City's Ritz Five, The Art of the Steal, the documentary about the Barnes Foundation, arrived on March 12 at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. The Institute's proprietor, Juliet Goodfriend, properly recognizing the film's particular significance to Montgomery County, set up a series of five panels to accompany afternoon and evening showings. I attended the first three of these.

The first one featured the filmmakers themselves: director and cinematographer Don Argott, producer Sheena Joyce and executive producer Lenny Feinberg. The second, on the following night, consisted of two prominent participants in the film: author John Anderson and former Smithsonian official Tom Freudenheim, as well as Philadelphia architect Denise Scott Brown and preservation architect Hy Myers. Last Sunday, Paul R. Levy, CEO of Philadelphia's Center City District, and City Representative Melanie Johnson came to discuss the film from the downtown perspective.

These events were separate presentations rather than debates. There has in fact never been a public debate over moving the Barnes in any venue, except for the one between my fellow BSR contributor Gresham Riley and myself sponsored three years ago by Drexel University and reprised soon after on WHYY.

As Willy Loman might say, isn't that remarkable? Whatever your position on the move, it is a major event in this region's history, and a profoundly controversial one. You'd think the sponsors of the move would be eager to tout its benefits and rebut critics. You'd imagine that local architects, preservationists and city planners would want to weigh in about the site and design of the new Barnes.

A civic service

Except for carefully scripted events, however, there has been no discussion of the move at all by the actual parties to it. Press conferences, yes (no questions, please). Groundbreaking ceremonies, yes. Private breakfasts, sure. But not a peep of public discourse in the cradle of American democracy.

So Juliet Goodfriend has performed a civic service in juxtaposing the two sides of the Barnes debate, if not in actually bringing them together. I suspect it would take a Congressional subpoena to get Rebecca Rimel or Gerry Lenfest to discuss the matter in public.

That doesn't mean the movers have been indifferent to the way they've been depicted. Rimel has said the film is shot through with distortions and inaccuracies, albeit without citing concrete examples. (I'll return to that point.)

Beyond control

The movers' standard explanation for their silence is that it was clear to them that the film would be biased against them. How they knew this, they don't say. My suspicion is that they chose simply to ignore a small indie film they couldn't control and to which they would only be lending a credibility it would otherwise lack in deigning to notice it. They were, no doubt, very disagreeably surprised to discover that The Art of the Steal copped a spot at the Toronto Film Festival, where it quickly generated buzz.

As Argott told the story at the panel, he was immediately approached by HBO, which expressed great interest in distributing the film. As it turns out, HBO is making a film of its own about the Barnes, in close collaboration with it. HBO's business ties to Comcast are well known, and Comcast is, of course, a major supporter of the move. When HBO's representative began dunning Argott for access to the film in advance of the festival showing, Argott says he put two and two together. He told HBO there would be no advance or private screenings.

I had a microphone in hand, waiting to press Argott further on the point, when Juliet Goodfriend decided that no further questions would be taken. I approached him privately afterwards. "Do you think HBO was trying to get access to the film on behalf of other parties, and distribution rights for the purpose of killing it?" I asked.

"Yes," Argott replied. "And we weren't going to give it to them."

Plants in the audience

I am convinced there were plants in the audience at Bryn Mawr the first two nights, though not necessarily by invitation. The first "questioner" on each night made a long, tendentious speech in support of the move. It was hardly the response of the rest of the audience, which jammed the theater to the rafters and was plainly outraged by what it had seen.

The second night was equally interesting. John Anderson, the author of Art Held Hostage, the definitive book on the takeover of the Barnes, focused attention on the famous "immaculate appropriation" of $100 million in state funds to move the Barnes. Arguably, this represented a criminally culpable conspiracy to violate a trust, since the appropriation was inserted into the budget before the Barnes board itself had petitioned for the right to move, and while it still adhered publicly to its commitment to remain in Merion. It is, therefore, not surprising that no legislator has ever taken responsibility for the funding. But no prosecutor seemed interested in digging into this particular can of worms.

The Art Museum connection

Richard Glanton, in his film interview, remarks that he was approached "at least twice" by the Philadelphia Museum of Art about custody of the Barnes collection during his tenure as head of the Barnes in the 1990s. He doesn't say by whom, but now that the Art Museum's board chairman Gerry Lenfest has emerged as one of the chief financial backers of the Barnes move, the museum's not very covert attempt to stage-manage if not appropriate the Barnes' excellent adventure downtown seems evident.

Not a single museum director or curator in the country has risen to protest the Barnes move. Commenting on this, Tom Freudenheim said that he was "deeply, deeply ashamed" of his erstwhile colleagues. He did not say he was surprised.

The architect Hy Myers spoke of the Barnes's uniqueness and irreplaceability, both as an artistic and cultural artifact, and Denise Scott Brown contributed the useful thought that Philadelphia would be diminished rather than enhanced by the simulacrum of cultural encounter better experienced in its proper setting (inseparable from it, I might add). Indeed, one has to wonder what the city would do with a "McBarnes" (David D'Arcy's felicitous phrase) after it went bust financially, as seems a likely possibility. Perhaps the Parkway site could then host a permanent "Body Worlds" exhibit?

Levy and those 'distortions'

Paul Levy's mission was to discredit The Art of the Steal. It was, not a genuine documentary, he said, but a work of "advocacy" that distorted the record. Levy cited two distortions: First, he said, Lincoln University, upon whom active management of the Barnes was ultimately to devolve, was unprepared for its task; and, second, the Barnes's financial condition in the 1990s was far more perilous than the film disclosed.

In fact, The Art of the Steal makes clear that the Barnes was run, as stipulated in its original 1922 indenture, first by Albert Barnes's widow Laura Barnes and then by his acolyte Violette de Mazia. Lincoln had plenty of time to prepare for its responsibilities, and, under the leadership of Franklin Williams, was appropriately discharging them until Williams's untimely death and the unfortunate ascent of Richard Glanton.

As for the money question, Levy offered no specifics. It's well known that the Barnes operated comfortably in the black for 40 years after Albert Barnes's death in 1951, and that only with Glanton did "problems" arise. Nor is it disputable that under Glanton and his successor, the Barnes's endowment was spent into the ground by a specious lawsuit charging the Foundation's neighbors with racism. Levy didn't respond to this point.

"Advocacy" is, of course, the gentleman's word for propaganda, and the move's sponsors have sought to dismiss The Art of the Steal as such. But this argument is a distraction from the relevant question: Are the facts presented in The Art of the Steal correct? I have yet to hear a single cogent factual objection to it.♦


To read responses, click here.
To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.