Exhibit of the week: The Barnes Foundation

Albert Barnes must be spinning in his grave, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Among the strict rules that the eccentric late art collector left for his “inestimably valuable” Matisses, Picassos, Cézannes, and sundry other masterworks was that the entire collection must never be moved from the suburban Philadelphia gallery he built for it in 1922. But Barnes’s presumed irritation aside, it was a happy day last week when, following several years of construction and a long court battle, the collection’s new home opened in downtown Philadelphia. Freed at last from a cramped, dark nest, the collection is now “safely installed in well-lighted galleries,” in “an appealing new building” with attractive surrounding gardens. A stone’s throw from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum, the new Barnes completes what is now clearly “one of the great art destinations of the world.” What’s to protest?

How about the “gross betrayal” of Barnes’s wishes? said Nicholas M. Tinari Jr. in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Barnes intentionally chose to set up in Merion, Pa., so that his public-focused mission wouldn’t be corrupted by art-world elites. This “pure takeover of the collection” by the very people Barnes distrusted marks the end “not only of an art collection in the perfect setting” but of an original idea. Not all of Barnes’s wishes were trampled, said Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times. Kept by court order is Barnes’s eccentric arrangement of the artworks, determined by formal and aesthetic relationships rather than by school or artist. A well-intentioned judicial decree also places the works in galleries that are near-exact replicas of the ones in Merion. Unfortunately, that attempt at verisimilitude fails miserably. The artificial feeling of each gallery is impossible to ignore, and “it throws a harsh, thin glare on the art.”

“Short of a return to the way things were,” nothing, apparently, will please the “Barnes fundamentalists,” said Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair. The new building is “absolutely wonderful.” Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien have skillfully navigated the requirements, creating a “soulful, handsome, self-assured building that has not a whiff of the sentimental.” The inclusion of sparkling new educational facilities, including a library, an auditorium, and classrooms, will fulfill Barnes’s educational mission, while an abundance of natural light makes the paintings look decades younger. “You may or may not believe that visitors fare better in the new Barnes. But you cannot dispute the fact that the Cézannes and Renoirs and Matisses do.”

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