Ellsworth Kelly: Shame on the Parkway

It's now as certain as midnight that the so-called Barnes Museum on the Ben Franklin Parkway will open, presumably on its announced date. If the financial analysis that Tom Freudenheim and I have conducted is correct, it will fail. (See my previous BSR piece here.)

This isn't a prospect I welcome, since it would almost certainly place the gallery collection in jeopardy. The destruction of the Barnes has been a tragedy long in the making, and its final chapters, I fear, have yet to be written.

That tragedy, as many commentators have pointed out, was entirely avoidable, since the Barnes in Merion was easily sustainable for a fraction of the cost of moving the collection and building a new facility. Not a single valid argument was ever raised on behalf of doing so.

Too many have remained silent in the cause of the Barnes, and too few have spoken.

That silence has been particularly striking in the art world itself. I honor, among others, the rare exceptions like Dana Gioia, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts; David McKee of the McKee Gallery in New York; and Louis Newman of David Findlay Jr. Fine Arts, as well as such artists as Jake Berthot and Naoto Nakagawa, all of whom have spoken out in support of the Barnes.

Silent artists

Where, however, have such American artists as Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine or Richard Serra been? Where were Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler or John Chamberlain, when there was still time to hear them?

Museum directors and curators, cowed by the Pew and the Annenberg, elected to sit this one out. But artists like Johns et al— wealthy, unassailable and internationally renowned— were in a perfect position to speak up. None did.

Their mere dereliction, however, pales before the crime of Ellsworth Kelly.

Kelly has had a significant and much-acclaimed career over more than six decades. Now he has chosen to besmirch it by agreeing to design a so-called "Barnes Totem" for the exterior plaza of the Parkway museum. This, it is said, will be the symbol of the new Barnes and of the "directions" it plans to take: in short, an instant corporate logo, 40 feet high.

There's nothing like getting double bang for your buck, going from art to advertising in a single instant with the same product. Who knows? Perhaps the bent lightning-bolt design won't remind others, as it does me, of the insignia on Waffen-SS uniforms.

Matisse desecrated

Kelly is aware, I presume, that Albert Barnes was the first serious collector of Matisse in America, and that the great lunettes of La Danse, torn from the Merion site for which they were designed, are now to be displayed in a manner completely divorced from their aesthetic and historical context. Kelly's own career is unthinkable without the influence of Matisse, and yet he has given his imprimatur to the desecration of one of the great art works of the 20th Century. It's like spitting in your progenitor's face.

I have enjoyed Kelly's works in the past. I hope to avoid ever looking at them again.

As the Parkway Barnes prepares to open, so too does the new casino at Valley Forge. These events are not unconnected (through the mega-philanthropist Gerry Lenfest, specifically). They are only among the more egregious examples of the plundering of this country's treasures and resources by moneyed interests in a way we haven't seen since the Gilded Age. But even Jay Gould kept his hands off George Washington.♦


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