Collectors, artists and Albert Barnes

It's beginning to dawn on me that the founder of the Barnes Foundation shares a few characteristics with the founder of Broad Street Review.

Like me, Albert Barnes was a contrarian by nature who flourished by rejecting conventional wisdom. Like me, he was a control freak who zealously guarded admission to his domain. Like me, he was an observer and critic of talented performers, not a performer himself. And like me, Dr. Barnes utilized the federal tax code to pursue his personal vision.

In Barnes's case, the vision involved commandeering great works of art to serve his iconoclastic theories about painting— specifically, his notion that the academic discipline of art history "stifles both self-expression and appreciation of art." In my case, the vision involved creating the Internet equivalent of a living-room salon where I could educate myself by welcoming arts lovers who burned with something to say and no place else to say it.

Barnes's vision survived more than 80 years and outlasted its creator himself by more than half a century, but now his game is pretty much up: Barnes's world-famous Impressionist collection will soon be carted downtown from its Merion retreat by the very art historians, civic boosters and social climbers he detested; his school will be converted into a museum open to all comers; and his unique theories, whatever their value, will be largely shunted aside.

As for me, the upshot of my experiment is that today, barely four years after launching Broad Street Review, I find my "living room" often monopolized by Barnes diehards arguing endlessly about whether those respomsible for moving the Barnes should be burned at the stake or merely waterboarded. I gave them my ear and they gave me an earful.

Whether they're right or wrong, this isn't how I planned to spend my golden years. The debate over moving the Barnes Foundation raises deeper and (to me) much more interesting philosophical issues than the mundane question of where the collection ought to be located. It's time to elevate this conversation, and in my control-freak mode I propose to do so, starting now.

Philadelphia-style solutions

As I suggested in this column last week, other things being equal, I would prefer to see a Barnes Foundation that expanded while keeping the original Merion mansion and its contents intact. That strikes me as a Philadelphia solution in the best sense of the term.

New Yorkers, throughout their history, have routinely razed and replaced their Academy of Music, their Metropolitan Opera House and their Yankee Stadium, not to mention several Madison Square Gardens. Philadelphians, by contrast, have restored and preserved our Walnut Street Theatre, our Academy of Music, our Franklin Field and our Palestra. The result is the priceless intangible benefit of communing not only with live performers but also with the ghosts of Edwin Forrest, Adelina Patti, Red Grange and Wilt Chamberlain.

But I overreached in describing the Barnes move as an "artistic tragedy." Albert Barnes was a collector of art, not an artist himself. The distinction is important. And the more fascinating question raised by the Barnes debate is this: In any given artistic situation, whose vision should ultimately prevail— the artist's, or the collector's?

In the best of all worlds, such decisions are made in the marketplace— not the commercial marketplace, but the marketplace of ideas. This is the test that Albert Barnes's vision has failed.

Lip service to his theories

Barnes's superb eye for art, and his willingness to spend money on Impressionists when no one else would, helped transform the world's notions of beauty. Yet his theories about art appreciation never gained traction beyond the walls of his own school. The world clamored to see his paintings and consequently paid lip service to his theories. Without those paintings, I submit, Barnes's theories would have been discarded long ago.

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come," Victor Hugo observed. Jesus and his 12 disciples came along at the height of the mighty Roman Empire with a seemingly outlandish idea— the power of love— that spread nonviolently with such force over the next three centuries that ultimately Christianity was embraced by the Roman Emperor Constantine himself. The "Chicago School" of economics similarly began in an ivory tower with a half-dozen free-market professors at the height of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and ultimately persuaded most Americans (for better or worse) that government isn't the solution to every problem.

If Albert Barnes's theories were truly valuable, they would have gained acceptance by now at some art school beyond his Merion estate. For all practical purposes, that hasn't happened.

This is why the much-debated legal issues concerning Barnes's testamentary trust strike me as a sideshow. Ultimately, laws can't force people to believe or respect ideas if they don't find the ideas persuasive. The legal restrictions that Albert Barnes placed on his foundation from beyond the grave suggest that deep down he understood his dilemma all too well: Once the collection goes, so will his theories.

To be sure, we haven't reached the end of history, or art. It's possible that, years from now, art scholars will re-examine Albert Barnes's theories and conclude that he was on to something. That's why I'd prefer to see the Barnes in Merion preserved in its existing state.

"'Theft' of the Johnson collection

On the other hand, the closest parallel to Albert Barnes is the great Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson, who left his 1,300 paintings to the city of Philadelphia upon his death in 1917, with one key stipulation: The collection must remain forever in his mansion on South Broad Street.

Barely a decade later, on the (valid) pretext that the Johnson mansion was a crumbling firetrap, Johnson's will was broken and his entire magnificent collection was moved to Fairmount to form the nucleus of the new Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it remains to this day.

At first the Art Museum honored the spirit of Johnson's will by keeping his collection together. But in 1989 the Art Museum convinced the court to allow the Johnson collection to be broken up so that his paintings could be more effectively integrated into the museum's overall collection.

The Johnson case is often cited by opponents of the Barnes move as further proof of the rapacity of Philadelphia's movers and shakers. Yet no one today suggests that Johnson's art works would have been better served by keeping them in his Broad Street mansion, or by segregating them within the Art Museum. It's nice to know who owned those paintings once upon a time, but the paintings themselves are what really matter.

At the end of the day, collectors, patrons, curators and critics are to art what Wall Street investment bankers are to the global economy: important but ultimately peripheral players— servants rather than masters— in the creation of beauty and wealth, respectively. Economies crash whenever bankers start thinking it's all about them.

The rights of art collectors are surely important. But in the fullness of time, Michelangelo and Picasso are the story; John G. Johnson and Albert Barnes are the footnotes. The ultimate question, to the extent it can be answered, must be: What is best for the art?♦


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