Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.
From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of the world’s greatest private collections of modern European artwork—more Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than any other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Joy of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Models ; the list goes on and on. The Barnes Foundation was officially an educational institution, but was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. (The New York organization that put capital letters on those words is four years younger.) But if Barnes’s collection is a model to emulate, the saga of his organization is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils.
Coinciding with the centennial of the Barnes’s opening, we have Blake Gopnik’s breezy new biography of the man, The Maverick’s Museum, and Neil L. Rudenstine’s reissued history of the institution, The House of Barnes, first published in 2012, when its legal struggles were above-the-fold news. The two deserve to be read together, because the slippage of identity between the man, the art, and the institution provides both the melodrama and the farce of the tale.
Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was smart enough to gain admission to Philadelphia’s selective Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Realizing, perhaps, that he lacked something in the bedside-manner department, he went into chemical research, and in 1902 he and his partner commercially released the antiseptic Argyrol, which became standard in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit wonder, but Argyrol made him a fortune.
At first he used his new money in predictable ways. He built a mansion on the Main Line and named it “Lauraston” for his wife. He bought fast cars (a passion that would be the death of him) and joined the local fox hunt. He also did less clichéd things, such as studying philosophy, reading Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed that a theory’s worth was measured not by its elegance but by its consequences in the world, and he treated his Argyrol factory as a laboratory for social experimentation. He hired Black and white workers, men and women. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated workplace “efficiency,” Barnes boasted that in his factory, “each participant had evolved his or her own method of doing a particular job.” The “her” in that sentence alone is noteworthy.
By Blake Gopnik
At the same time, Barnes was a crank of operatic grandiosity—thin-skinned, bellicose, distrustful, fickle, and vindictive. Ezra Pound described him as living in “a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.” His bile could be witty, but more often traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was “a house of artistic and educational prostitution”; when a newspaper critic took offense at “the fevered passion for unclean things!” (naked people) in Barnes’s collection, he sent a letter impugning her “well-recognized sexual vagaries.”
Curious about art, he enlisted the advice of a high-school friend, the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, and in 1912 sent Glackens to Paris with a wish list and $20,000 (about $650,000 today). Finding that the Impressionists Barnes sought were costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed modern. In the course of two weeks, he bought 33 works, including a Picasso, a Cézanne, and the first Van Gogh to enter an American collection, his spellbinding The Postman. When Barnes made his own trip to Paris a few months later, he spent three times the money in half the time and lived up to every stereotype the French had about American millionaires. “He did literally wave his chequebook in the air,” Gertrude Stein wrote to a friend.
By Neil L. Rudenstine
Modernism held attraction for someone who considered himself a pugnaciously original thinker. Collecting old art was posh and respectable, but in an America still scandalized by the sight of breasts, collecting modern art was outrageous. Within 10 years, Barnes had acquired some 700 paintings. But art to him was more than a proxy for cultural sophistication and a fat bank account. It made him feel things—intense and important things—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to map precisely how it did so.
If his obsession with Renoir’s late, big-bottomed, pinheaded nudes seems “idiosyncratic in the extreme,” as Rudenstine writes, it was shared by Picasso and Matisse, who prized radical departures in form. Barnes was a turbulent person and Renoir was his happy place, full of pretty colors and willing flesh. Cézanne appealed for different reasons. Barnes found heroism in the artist’s “social strangeness,” and saw it mirrored in the art: “His deformations of naturalistic appearances are akin to the brusque remarks … which, when sociability is the rule, project new interpretations upon conventionally accepted ideas.”
Barnes’s eye wasn’t perfect—he passed on Van Gogh’s Starry Night—but his instincts were remarkably good. He began buying African sculpture in 1922 and amassed an important collection. He bought old masters whose agitation or distortions recalled the moderns he loved. He bought Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He bought Native American serapes and jewelry. He bought American folk art and—repudiating the distinction between “art” and “craft”—acquired quantities of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door knockers, which he hung alongside the paintings. To Kenneth Clark, then the head of the National Gallery in London, he wrote that he saw “no essential esthetic difference between the forms of the great painters or sculptors, and those of the iron-workers.”
None of this was quite as extraordinary as Barnes liked to pretend. The connection among folk art, handcrafts, and modernism was made by a number of curators and collectors at the time. Concerning the avant-garde, John Quinn, the visionary behind the 1913 Armory Show, was more adventurous, leaning into Cubism and Duchamp’s radical experiments where Barnes balked. (Their rivalry was such that Barnes, tiring of his usual name-calling, hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Quinn.) Others were not far behind. MoMA’s 2024 book Inventing the Modern celebrates the museum’s female founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—and the energetic idealism required to get these efforts off the ground in an often hostile culture.
Barnes exaggerated his temerity in the face of philistines partly because he longed to be recognized as more than just a world-class shopper. Applying his chemist’s brain to locating the “scientific” principles behind his aesthetic experience, he concluded that what mattered in art was form—line, color, space, movement. Contextual data such as biographies and subject matter just distracted from the real act of looking. These formalist ideas had been articulated by various critics and art historians before Barnes, though, as usual, he took them to extremes. His 530-page “statement of principles,” The Art in Painting (1925), includes no titles for works reproduced in the book, lest readers be led astray by subject matter.
Much more original was his application of this formalism to John Dewey’s theories of experimental education and social reform. He could cite Dewey’s 1916 book Democracy and Education “almost chapter and verse,” Gopnik tells us. Barnes was convinced that “plain people of average intelligence” could be brought to the kind of art apotheosis he had experienced, just by knowing how to look. He derided art history as a discipline and art scholars individually, but he couldn’t abandon the idea that he himself had expertise other people needed.
Like many people who get a lot out of looking, Barnes was annoyed at the casual attitudes of museum visitors. When the Barnes Foundation opened its doors in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical building within a 12-acre arboretum adjacent to Barnes’s home—its indenture permitted no posh parties and no unvetted visitors. The art would not travel or be reproduced in color. To see it, you applied to take classes in the Barnes method. It was not a museum; it was a school.
Inside, he arranged (and regularly rearranged) the collection in “ensembles” that mixed objects of different ages, origins, and functions. Most people do this at home, but Barnes’s stridently symmetrical arrangements—big artworks in the middle, smaller ones to either side, formal echoes bouncing around the room—were emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for example, Matisse’s Red Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (among other things) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of fans, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of pictures, each showing a woman and a dog (one of them from the hand of William Glackens’s daughter, age 9). The effect is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson.
Admission was doled out on the basis of whim and choler. Having prior expertise or impressive connections was usually a black mark: T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier, Barnett Newman, and the heads of both MoMA and the Whitney were among the rejected. Student behavior was monitored. Questioning the method or viewing in the wrong way could get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened through microphones for heretical conversation. Such ritualistic protocols can actually enhance the experience of viewing: Perceiving the specialness of the opportunity, people will give heightened attention. So while some Barnes students rebelled, others became acolytes.
Dewey, one of Barnes’s very few lasting friends, wrote in his book Art as Experience that the educational work of the collection was of “a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not excepted.” Considering that the science of that generation had produced antibiotics and the theory of relativity, that’s quite a claim.
Fifty-three and childless when the foundation opened its doors, Barnes was not oblivious to the need to arrange its future beyond his lifetime. But his vision for it was inflexible. He unsuccessfully floated prospective partnerships to the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Sarah Lawrence College, whose exasperated president finally wrote: “You can stuff your money, your pictures, your iron work, your antiques, and the whole goddamn thing right up the Schuylkill River.” Barnes then trained an affectionate eye on nearby Lincoln University—the second-oldest historically Black university in the nation, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.
His relationship with Black culture and Black leaders was characteristically complex. He considered spirituals “America’s only great music,” and his admiration for African sculpture was deep. But this appreciation was often tinged with condescension. The only Black painter in his collection was not one of those artists who had been to Paris and absorbed the lessons of modernism, but the self-taught “primitive” Horace Pippin. (Similarly, the women in his collection tended toward the doe-eyed and decorative. He returned the Georgia O’Keeffes he’d bought, but kept his Marie Laurencins.)
Still, he forged a relationship with Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the terms of succession so that Lincoln would eventually assume control of the foundation’s board. This relationship, too, might well have gone south, but in July 1951 Barnes sped through a stop sign in his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer.
For the next 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission became harder, the dogma stricter, the students fewer but more ardent. When the state forced the tax-exempt foundation to open to the public two days a week, Barnes students picketed. In 1987, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto described the sorry state of affairs—the “stunning works” imprisoned in “the sullen museum, with its musty smells and impassive custodians.”
De Mazia’s death, in 1988, snapped the foundation out of its torpor. That it had been careening toward insolvency now became clear, and the only paths to income—admission fees, loan shows, event rentals—were blocked by Barnes’s indenture. The new Lincoln-appointed board fought to break the terms; former Barnes students fought to preserve them. The state fought to increase access; neighbors fought to restrict it. Accusations of racism and corruption bounced around. Eventually the board proposed moving the whole collection to a new location near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. YouTube comments below the 2009 anti-move film The Art of the Steal convey the ensuing outrage: “My soul cries for this loss,” “Shame!!!,” “I Truly hope The Philadelphia Of Art [sic] Burns to the ground … art and all.” If this fury seems disproportionate to the situation—a nonprofit institution in need of funds finds a way to preserve its core assets while increasing public access—it was certainly very Barnesian.
The Barnes Foundation has now been on Philadelphia’s Museum Mile for more than a decade. The art is all there—Cézanne’s great The Card Players, the many pink ladies in search of their clothes, the Wes Anderson ensembles. From ceiling vaults to baseboards, every room has been replicated as it appeared when Barnes died. But they sit in a different building, under a different set of rules.
Entry is no longer an achievement on par with getting past the bouncer at Berghain. All you have to do is cough up $30. Inside, you can interrupt your viewing with a cup of coffee in the café or a visit to the gift shop, where you can buy a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin’s African American family at prayer (a strange choice for footwear, but maybe the logical outcome of pure formalist thought—the colors and shapes look fine on an ankle).
In other words, outside the re-created rooms, you get the standard, bustling, consumer-oriented museum experience, not arboreal serenity, and inside the rooms, you have to put up with the presence of other people, not all of them models of rectitude. But there is nothing like it. The absence of wall texts can be a welcome relief from current museum practice. And if the ensembles depend more on visual rhyming than on ideas, they really do get you to look. If you want, you can even take classes in the Barnes method, without passing some capricious test of merit.
Arthur Danto was right, though: Barnes is still remembered “for the spectacular collection of early modern art that bears his name, for the enthusiasm with which he kept people from viewing it and for the terrible temper he expended on behalf of these two projects. He was a gifted but an extremely tiresome man.” Barnes’s obvious intelligence, Gopnik observes, is “overshadowed, even eclipsed, by his real emotional and social stupidity.”
And yet, there is something gripping about his struggle, year after year, to solve the riddle of art. By all accounts, Barnes was a man with no theory of mind: Lacking any insight into the subjective worlds of other people, he found their behavior relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It must have been exhausting. In an essay soon after he started collecting, he wrote: “Good paintings are more satisfying companions than the best of books and infinitely more so than most very nice people.”
In art, he believed he saw the subjective experience of others—Renoir, El Greco, a Fang craftsperson—made concrete and visible, even measurable. It sat still for examination. His arguments circle endlessly (Rudenstine rightly calls them tautological), seeking the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one person to another via form. Each work of art, he wrote, “records a discovery and that discovery can be verified, the artist’s experience can be shared, [but] only by one who has himself learned to see.”
Like mercury, however, the objective mechanism he sought for this intuitive process always wriggled away from his touch. Look at Cézanne’s The Card Players or Renoir’s Henriot Family and you see shifting edges, unstable spaces, fragmentation, dissolution, impermanence. But in life, Rudenstine observes, Barnes found “ambiguity, irresolution, incompletion, obscurity … impossible for him to tolerate.” His need to lock things down nearly killed the foundation that was his great life’s work. The tragedy of Barnes was that the things he could understand least held the key to what he loved most.
This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Cranky Visionary.”
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