The case for moving the Barnes

GRESHAM RILEY

Reading Robert Zaller’s recent two-part, sensationalist treatment of “Barnescam” in Broad Street Review was not unlike reading an unauthorized biography by Kitty Kelley or a novel by Jackie Collins.

Zaller’s story opens with a “coup against the Barnes Foundation” by Philadelphia’s art elites that results in “the greatest art theft since the end of World War II,” all made possible by “prevarication” and “legal trumpery.” This pilfering of a priceless collection is aided and abetted by the “greed” of highly-placed political figures who are “ever on the lookout for revenues.” The “heist” is motivated by the “trust-busting power grab” of a powerful charitable organization presided over by “a self-appointed culture czarina” whose goal in life is to “play queen of the ball” and who is driven to turn the Avenue of the Arts into “one-stop shopping for tourists.”

Since a script of this kind is frequently made more exciting by a dose of the supernatural, we are offered an eminence grise (in the person of a deceased publisher, diplomat and philanthropist) “whose influence, even today, seems scarcely diminished by the grave.” The final scenes of the drama are played out, appropriately enough, in a courtroom presided over by a clueless, obliging, yet bemusedly skeptical judge.

There are, of course, other actors (an irascible and eccentric art collector who triggered the drama in the first place), institutions (a historic black university), and numerous perfidious deeds (including the “ploy of a fire sale” by a “politically connected Center City attorney”/president of said university’s board of trustees/de facto director of the Barnes Foundation)— but, by now, you get the picture.

This overheated treatment of a serious development in the worlds of art, jurisprudence and urban affairs makes for exciting reading and stirs emotions. But it glosses over, perhaps even trivializes, issues of substance that have received little or no attention in the media. Paramount among these issues is the fact that the most recent ruling by Judge Stanley R. Ott of the Montgomery County Orphans Court (and upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court) opens the way for securing, rather than violating, what is essential to Albert Barnes’s trust indenture.

Location is a minor issue

Sadly, for most of the 55 years since Albert Barnes’s death, the Barnes Foundation, vocal supporters of the status quo, and the courts have directed disproportionate attention to the form rather than the substance of Barnes’s will and away from what is most important among his foundation’s various objectives. By form I mean such issues as restrictions on lending and/or traveling the collection, the foundation’s governance, the location of its world-class body of artwork, and the management of the Foundation’s endowment. By substance I mean, in addition to the precise manner in which the collection is displayed, Barnes’s distinctive philosophy of arts education and the specific publics who were intended as the beneficiaries of his unusual form of pedagogy.

Next to these primary concerns, it matters little where the collection is located, who manages the foundation, or how its financial resources are invested. This is not to say that location, for example, is of no importance. It would be unacceptable (indeed unnecessary), for instance, to move the Barnes collection to Pittsburgh rather than keep it in the Philadelphia area. But to place highest priority on retaining the Lower Merion home for the collection (as opposed to a location a few miles away), at the expense of implementing more fully Albert Barnes’s educational vision for the public he intended, would be to allow the secondary concern to trump the primary.

Barnes’s will isn’t the final word

The starting points for reaching this conclusion are two principles frequently overlooked in the controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation’s initial petition, which sought the Court’s permission to move from Lower Marion to a site on or near the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and to restructure its board of trustees.

The first principle is that Albert Barnes’s will is not the sole determining factor, the final word, regarding the Foundation’s continuing management of the estate.

The courts have long recognized the legal principle of deviation, which properly states that a court may direct or permit trustees of a charitable trust to deviate from a term (or terms) of the trust if it appears to the court that compliance is impossible or illegal, or that owing to circumstances not known to the trust’s creator and not anticipated by him/her, compliance would defeat or substantially compromise the trust’s purposes. In embracing this principle, a court is not interpreting (or reinterpreting) the terms of the trust but is permitting a deviation from those terms in order to carry out the purposes of the trust.

The principle of deviation focuses attention on the purposes of a trust and (in complex situations) on which of a trust’s several purposes are the most important. This principle does not result in violating a trust; rather, it assures that the trust’s purposes can be realized over time as circumstances change.

Museums have changed their mission

One circumstance that has changed since Albert Barnes’s death is society’s understanding of the mission of art museums. Although most museums were founded with “arts education” prominent in their mission statements, education functioned for much of the 20th Century as a limping afterthought in museum culture. The collection, preservation and exhibition of works of art were these institutions’ sole raisons d’être. This approach changed toward the end of the 20th Century as museums realized that such a focus defined an all too narrow, elitist mission. Museums have come to realize that their mission, simply stated, is education— the complex array of activities comprised in the instruction of visual literacy. Consequently, it’s no longer sufficient to proclaim that the Barnes Foundation is “an educational institution, not a museum,” as though this ended all discussion. What’s more, it’s disingenuous at best to treat a world-class collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art as a mere “lab” for a small group of self-appointed art cognoscenti.

The second noteworthy principle is that the Barnes Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization— and as such it must pursue and fulfill important public interests. It is for this reason that you, I and the public at large have a vested interest in the Barnes Foundation, and the Montgomery County Orphans Court exists in part to protect that interest. This second principle raises two important questions: What exactly are the public interests served by the Barnes Foundation? And how are these interests related to the foundation’s primary purposes?

As I’ve already indicated, the fact that the Barnes Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization inevitably leads us to straightforward answers. The Barnes Foundation’s primary purposes are: (1) Implementation of Albert Barnes’s distinctive philosophy of arts education; (2) preservation of his distinctive installation of his collection; and (3) primary focus on the working-class publics who were intended as the beneficiaries of Barnes’s unusual form of pedagogy. If circumstances (whatever they might be) have impeded (and continue to impede) the full implementation of these purposes, then the public interest demands that corrective actions must be taken, up to and including relocation of the collection and changing the profile of the governing board.

John Dewey’s critical influence

It could be argued that the most important relationship in Albert Barnes’s life was his friendship with John Dewey, the great early-20th-Century philosopher of education reform.

In 1915 Barnes joined a seminar taught by Dewey to learn more about Dewey’s ideas on education— ideas that would be published a year later in Dewey’s classic, Democracy and Education. From this seminar emerged both a close friendship and a sustained intellectual collaboration that shaped Barnes’s ideas about arts education and brought focus to Dewey’s rather scattered ideas about art. Consequently, in 1925 Barnes dedicated his The Art in Painting to Dewey, and in 1934 Dewey reciprocated by dedicating his Art as Experience to Barnes.

Dewey’s general theory of education gave shape to three central elements in Barnes’s theory of arts education— elements that proved to be central not only to how Barnes taught art to students but also to the Barnes Foundation’s mission.

First, in order to learn how to view paintings, students did not need to possess theoretical knowledge about art, nor did they need to learn theory. In fact, knowledge of aesthetics was the enemy of art appreciation.

Second, the aim of arts education (indeed, as Dewey argued, of education in general) is personal and societal growth. Viewing art properly provides a powerful, intimate and transforming experience that leads to self-renewal and self"“realization, which in turn yields important social benefits.

And finally, arts education, like all education, is intimately linked to the democratic impulse. Education properly understood, Dewey taught, can only flourish in a democratic society, and in turn a democratic society is dependent for its survival and its vitality on education. This last principle ---- the democratic impulse of education and (in Barnes's case) of arts education ---- has not been realized, nor is it likely ever to be realized, in the exclusive enclave of Lower Marion.

Because Dewey (and by extension Barnes), emphasized problem-solving rather than theory, preserving the existing installation of the collection must be numbered among the Barnes Foundation's primary objectives. The collection is its idiosyncratic grouping and hanging, and it is the precise relationships between and among these groupings that serve as the principle tool of instruction in Barnes's method. Alter these relationships and you make impossible arts education as Barnes believed it should be taught. In addition, for Barnes each wall was a "painting of paintings," and the rooms with their particular juxtapositions were (and are) collectively a single work of art. To change this arrangement might not be the same as taking a hammer to Michelangelo's "Pieta," but it comes disturbingly close.

Those upper-middle-class ladies of a certain age

Ever since Albert Barnes's death in 1951, virtually everyone (the courts included) has been in denial about the publics served by the foundation and its programs. As a result, the "walls" around the collection have grown higher and higher, making it an assembly of "private jewels" for a small elite rather than objects for the education of common folk. As has been widely noted, Dr. Barnes's target audiences were people "who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories and schools, stores and similar places." Up to the present, the educational programs in Lower Marion have attracted primarily upper-middle-class ladies of a certain age with a lot of free time, retirees, a few professionals who can afford to leave their offices, and a smattering of art students. Classes, for the most part, have been inconveniently (or conveniently?) scheduled at times when Dr. Barnes's intended audience are toiling in their shops and factories. From my observations, the profile of visitors to the Barnes collection (as opposed to those enrolled in classes) also fails to match the population in which Barnes was primarily interested, a fact that's not at all surprising, given the restricted times the collection is open to the public and its location in a posh neighborhood that is not easily accessible.

Robert Zaller is much too optimistic about the ease with which the Barnes Foundation's financial affairs can be solved. But that's a subject for a separate article. And even if Zaller were proven correct about the Barnes Foundation's finances, the problem of securing what is most important among the foundation's objectives would remain. The court believes, and I agree, that those purposes can best be achieved in the hustle and bustle, the congestion and confusion, the grit and unruliness of the city where Barnes's intended audience lives.

Finally, Zaller is quite mistaken in thinking that the Barnes "is now, in effect, a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts." The Barnes Foundation remains a ward, as it were, of the Montgomery County Orphans Court, and that court must remain more vigilant than it has been in the past about the well-being of its charge. Toward that end, the court must assure itself periodically that the Barnes Foundation's most important purposes are front-and-center. In addition, it wouldn't hurt if the Barnes Foundation's newly constituted board of trustees and all members of the staff were assigned as required reading both John Dewey's Democracy and Education and Albert Barnes's The Art in Painting.






Gresham Riley ([email protected]) is president emeritus of Colorado College (Colorado Springs, Col.), former president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a professor of philosophy who is currently engaged in an extended research project on the topic of evil. He lives in Old City in Philadelphia.