THE DREAM OF TEACHING: take students to a museum, put them in front of a great work of art, have them describe what they see, and in so doing, discover that greatness for themselves. Rarely, many a museum educator will share, is this what happens. We arrive before the work of art riddled with biases, assumptions, presumed knowledge, and conditioned patterns of viewing, all of which make it tremendously difficult to see what is right in front of us.
This is the problem Albert Barnes was contending with when he founded his museum and educational institute in Marion, Pennsylvania, in 1922. The baggage visitors brought to the art in his collection included a conservative resistance to the avant-garde, yes, but even more than that, they brought with them the widespread racism of early 20th-century America.
Today, the Barnes Collection is best known for its lush Renoirs and joyous Matisse mural; Barnes acquired his collection at a time when Monet still looked radical to most Americans. But he was also one of the earliest United States collectors to exhibit African objects as art. And famously, he took a formalist approach to displaying his collection, selecting and grouping works not by chronology or context but by visual elements like color and shape.
At the Barnes Collection, relocated to a new building in downtown Philadelphia in 2012 against its founder’s wishes, these “ensembles,” as the foundation calls his groupings of artworks, have been meticulously re-created. The arrangement provides one of the most singular experiences of art viewing in museums today, juxtaposing work made in distinct eras, places, and media. In theory, such an approach would de-hierarchize a historically elitist field and welcome new makers and modes of representation.
In his new biography of Barnes, Blake Gopnik foregrounds this democratic ethos, focusing specifically on the philanthropist’s contributions to building racial equality—despite Barnes’s notoriously cantankerous personality and his tendency toward invective and slur. Barnes’s support for Black culture extended beyond his collection. He made a point of hiring African American workers for his factory and paying them a fair wage, invested in the Black magazine Opportunity, and eventually partnered in his foundation with the historically Black Lincoln University.
GOPNIK OPENS HIS BOOK, The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream, at a 1924 banquet at the Civic Club in Harlem. The event is often invoked as one of the founding moments in the Harlem Renaissance, gathering together more than 100 writers, publishers, and editors, from the renowned intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to the young poet Gwendolyn Bennett. The guest list deliberately included white supporters of Black creativity; Barnes was in attendance. Gopnik describes the arrival in an indigo-blue Packard sedan of “an ox of a man in a double-breasted greatcoat and fedora.” Barnes loved to make an entrance, and he thrilled at being one of the few white attendees able to speak to the aesthetic qualities of African art.
Not just speak to, but show off, as he declared: “I have in my house ample proof in the works of these moderns that much of their inspiration came from ancient [Black] art.” This overture may come as a surprise to those readers who know Barnes for his widely beloved collection of French painting. I suspect part of Gopnik’s goal is to produce such surprise, to make us see Barnes in a new way.
But the move also speaks to the role African art played in French modernism, from Picasso’s Cubist forms to Modigliani’s masklike portraits. And it underscores how difficult it is to chart those always asymmetrical relationships between the African artists who inspired and the European artists who appropriated them.
Barnes saw himself as “elevating” what were often ritualistic objects to the status of “art,” but theorists like Walter Mignolo point out how this kind of thinking still relies on a hierarchy bound up with the explicit and implied violence of coloniality. Many of the African objects European artists were exposed to were stolen or looted, their very presence in Europe made possible by way of an imperial infrastructure of transit.
Gopnik does not try to absolve his subject from the prevailing prejudices of his time; he admits Barnes was operating, using 21st-century parlance, with a “white-savior complex,” that Barnes cast African cultures as primitive, and also manipulated support for Black communities in pursuit of his own ends. Barnes, for example, balked at a proposal for the construction of 126 small houses adjacent to his foundation in Merion that he saw as detracting from his stately property, and made threats to discourage the zoning commission.
In navigating Barnes’s approach to African art, Gopnik relies heavily on the scholarship of Alison Boyd, author of a dissertation on Barnes and the director of research and interpretation at the Barnes Collection. Boyd argues that though Barnes appreciated African art, he was ultimately unable to see it as modern. Boyd’s appointment is an example of the Foundation’s willingness to question its founder’s legacy, as is their recent commission of a film by Isaac Julien. To celebrate the institution’s centennial in 2022, an exhibition debuted Julien’s five-screen installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die); the work was also included in last year’s Whitney Biennial. The film stages a conversation between Barnes and the quintessential Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke, the exchange based on actual correspondence between the two men. Speaking in the museum’s galleries, both meditate on the role African culture played in the history of art, and the ways art might champion African identity.
The film also deals with the ethics of holding African objects in Western museums at all. It includes views of the Pitt Rivers Museum, a notorious repository of looted objects (some recently returned). Julien draws connections between the violence of the past and artmaking in the present. In the film, we see the 20th-century African American sculptor Richmond Barthé at work on Black sculptural bodies in an atelier filled with neoclassical plaster casts; Barthé’s sculptures were exhibited as part of Julien’s installation. A song cowritten and performed by Alice Smith layered throughout the film speaks to restitution not as a question of righting past wrongs but of restoring future possibilities. Ultimately, Julien leaves open the matter of how museums might reckon with their often fraught inheritance.
THE BARNES WHO FEATURES in Julien’s film shares much with the character Gopnik offers, not least his strident tone and seeming inability to listen. When he could have been comfortable enough to relax and enjoy his collection, he remained restless and argumentative. Barnes, a chemist, made his fortune with a new formulation for an antiseptic that became widespread in treating gonorrhea. He developed that product, Argyrol, with his business partner, chemist Herman Hille. The two later parted ways, in part because Hille (accurately) accused Barnes of bribing doctors to plug their products.
Gopnik recounts numerous spats between Barnes and his sometimes friends, entertaining episodes that leave the reader feeling a sense of tedium with a man who seems to work constantly against his own best interests. It is relevant to Gopnik’s story about a “maverick’s” pursuit of the American dream that Barnes was born poor, that he had to fight for what he wanted from the start, and that he carried throughout his life a sense of his status as an outsider despite his growing fortune.
One friend Barnes seems never to have strayed from was the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The two met when Barnes took Dewey’s graduate seminar at Columbia in 1917 and maintained a friendship for 35 years. Dewey’s progressive approach to education provided the basis for the educational program Barnes developed, bolstering Barnes’s own interest in creating a democratic environment for learning. The philosopher dedicated his 1934 book Art as Experience to Barnes, suggesting the relationship was to some degree reciprocal, though the $5,000-a-year stipend Barnes arranged for Dewey likely helped.
Barnes first tested Dewey’s pedagogical ideas on his factory workers, engaging them in weekly seminars to look at art and discuss philosophical texts. Once he established his foundation, Barnes initially hoped those workers who had become most interested in his art would be the guides to the collection: Those few burgeoning art lovers “will take the others of our workers into the Foundation a couple of times a week and each will describe his own honest reactions to what he sees.” Rather than a top-down approach to art education, the “Barnes Method” relied on individual self-determination, making the museum, in its founder’s words, “nothing but a place where people can see for themselves.”
Barnes elaborated his method in thousands of published pages and trained select appointees to teach it. And yet, Barnes seemed rarely to have appreciated what anyone else saw in his collection. Reputedly, he hovered behind visitors and ejected them from the museum if they said something he didn’t like—this, assuming they were admitted at all. Barnes required interested parties to write to request admission, and many aspiring admirers were refused. Gopnik cites a critic who described the rigorous admissions process: “There are formalities to be undergone, records to be looked into. The Pope, sitting on his throne in the Vatican, is much less careful for his most holy toe than is Dr. Albert Barnes for his hundred and twenty Renoirs and his two and forty Soutines.”
The stakes were high for Barnes. His ultimate goal was not to cultivate a world of art lovers. He had in mind something much grander: the making of a richer and fuller American life. That he saw art as the path to a better world is admirable; that he controlled the interpretation and experience of that art so rigidly, less so. Regardless, his work is testament to a belief that would seem quaint, if it didn’t also seem so desperately necessary—that art, in Gopnik’s words, can “do real work in the world.” If only those in power would let it.
