The John Batchelor Show

Sunday 30 March 2014

Air Date: 
March 30, 2014

Photo, above: THE THEFT OF THE BARNES COLLECTION BY PHILADELPHIA SWELLS AND POSEURS, NABOBS, STRING-PULLERS AND PLAIN OLD GRINNING THIEVES.  See Hour 3, Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection by John Anderson

 

. . .  From about 1910, when he was in his late 30s, Barnes began to dedicate himself to the study and collecting of art. He commissioned one of his former high school classmates, the painter William Glackens, who had been living in Paris, to buy several "modern" French paintings for him. In 1911, Barnes gave Glackens $20,000 to buy paintings for him in Paris. Glackens returned with the 20 paintings that formed the core of Barnes' collection.

In 1912, during a stay in Paris, Barnes was invited to the home of Gertrude and Leo Stein, where he met artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. In the 1920s, the art dealer Paul Guillaume introduced him to the work of Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, and Chaim Soutine among others. With money, an excellent eye, and the poor economic conditions during the Great Depression, Barnes was able to acquire much important art at bargain prices.  . . .

In 1922, Barnes created a foundation to display his collection according to his aesthetic theories, strongly influenced by the American philosopher, John Dewey. He had a mansion built to display the collection, designed by the Franco-American architect Paul Philippe Cret, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1925, the Barnes Foundation opened as an educational institution, not a museum. It was an educational institution based on his private collection of art, which was hung according to his theories of aesthetics and without curatorial commentary. The collection has numerous paintings by Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist masters, as well as furniture, ancient artifacts, and highly crafted objects from different time periods. He created numerous restrictions to limit the number of visitors and intended to attract students.

Barnes had his collection hung according to his own ideas about showing relationships between paintings and objects; for instance, paintings were placed near furniture and finely crafted medieval, Renaissance and Early American hinges and metalwork. The pieces were identified in a minimal manner, without traditional curatorial comment, so that viewers could approach them without mediation.[citation needed] Requiring people to write for appointments, he gave preference to students over members of Philadelphia society.

 

. . . Having watched the Philadelphia Museum of Art take control of the collection of his late lawyer, John Johnson, Barnes tried to prevent the same from happening to his collection. The Foundation's Indenture of Trust and other documents provide that the Barnes Foundation was to remain an educational institution, open to the public only two to three days a week. His art collection could never be loaned or sold; it was to stay on the walls of the foundation in exactly the places the works were at the time of his death.

. . . Decades after his death, the Barnes Foundation gradually expanded its hours and visitation, but was still limited in visitors, and struggled financially to maintain the museum and preserve the collection.[26] After a lengthy court battle in 1992, the Barnes Foundation received court approval to send 80 works on tour to generate funds. The paintings and other works attracted huge crowds in numerous cities.

It also decided to accept offers from the City of Philadelphia and regional foundations to move into the city [Note this disingenuous balderdash.   and allow greater public access. Its new building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway opened in 2012, after the Foundation survived court challenges to its decision.

Today, the collection is estimated to be worth between $20 and $30 billion. Although John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were vastly wealthier than Albert Barnes, the current value of the assets of the Barnes Foundation are 10 to 20 times greater than the Carnegie Corporation or the Rockefeller Corporation.

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But the deed is done [the entire Barnes was dragged screaming and in pain to a soulless space in downtown Philadelphia where the victors can gloat over the spoils].  The Barnes is moved, and there's no use crying over spilled milk any longer. The greatest American cultural monument of the 20th century's first half is no more.

That doesn't mean, of course, that it isn't useful — and important — to know as many details as possible about how the travesty happened. John Anderson's "Art Held Hostage: The Battle Over the Barnes Collection" is the go-to book for that. Published a decade ago, while the traumatic events were still unfolding and about a year before the 2004 court rulings that set the relocation in motion, it still makes for painfully informative reading..

. .  . Unless you live in Pennsylvania — or are an avid student of national crime news — you might not know of Vincent J. Fumo. He's the once-powerful, longtime Pennsylvania state senator, a leader of the local Democratic machine, who was convicted in 2009 on 137 counts of political corruption and later sentenced to five years in federal prison.

In "Art Held Hostage," Anderson described him as "A porkbarreler in the great Philadelphia tradition ... who took care of friends and enemies with considerable zeal." Fumo turned up here and there in the book's narrative as a person of influence in the long Barnes saga, if typically in a minor role.

In "The Wrecker's Ball," Anderson's aptly titled new epilogue, Fumo steps to the foreground. His wide-reaching criminal conviction on all manner of elaborate fiscal schemes — many involving complex manipulations of a nonprofit charity and a local history museum — seems to have prompted another look.

One slab of pork in the Fumo barrel may well have been $100 million to build a new Barnes building in Philadelphia, tucked into a state appropriation bill for fiscal year 2001-02. First reported in The Times, Pennsylvania surreptitiously set aside funds to move the Barnes collection downtown years before a judge's ruling allowed it.

 

The Art of the Steal, Don Argott's documentary feature about the theft of the Barnes Foundation, wowed audiences at the Toronto Film Festival, and again at the New York Film Festival. In both venues, the screenings were packed, and extra ones were tacked on. The film will go into general release next year, and perhaps even Philadelphians will see it. When it comes, the lines should rightly stretch around the block, as they did several years ago when the Frick Museum's chef curator, Colin Bailey, lectured about the Barnes at the Frick in New York.   . . . What distinguished Barnes was that he saw his collection not as a personal ornament or an eventual public benefaction, but as a living instrument for the creation of a genuinely democratic culture. Certainly the Morgans, Fricks and Mellons had no such vision. 

In addition, Barnes was the first American collector to recognize the pictorial revolution launched by Cézanne and Renoir and reinforced by Matisse and Picasso. Barnes also collected specimens of the African art that had inspired the latter two, and he personally supported the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Many decades before the civil rights movement, Barnes perceived that the future of American democracy was bound up with its treatment of African-Americans and its appreciation of their contribution to the country's culture.

. . . If Albert Barnes is clearly the hero of the film, the late Walter Annenberg is its villain. Annenberg's fortune, like many another in the Prohibition era, was dubiously obtained, and its founder, Moses Annenberg, went to prison for evading $5.5 million in taxes"” a staggering sum by the standards of the time. Walter himself avoided jail time only by a plea bargain. Subsequently he passed cash around in the right places and wound up as Nixon's ambassador to Great Britain. 

All the while, Annenberg maintained a running feud, pre- and post-mortem, with Albert Barnes, whose art collection was one of the few that outshone Annenberg's own. After dangling his holdings in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for years, Annenberg gave his entire collection to the Met in New York under the ironclad provision that it never be moved, loaned or sold. These, of course, were the same trust provisions Barnes had placed on his own collection, which Annenberg and his lawyers spent decades trying to break.



Glanton's delusions

With the death of Violette de Mazia, who ran the Barnes Foundation after Barnes died in a 1951 car crash, Annenberg was able at long last to insinuate himself into its management with the help of Richard Glanton, who was newly installed as head of the Barnes board in 1990. Glanton tells the story his own way, and the film gives him enough rope to hang himself. Suffice it to say that, having trashed Albert Barnes's indenture of trust and spent down the Foundation's endowment on acrimonious lawsuits against the Barnes's neighbors and Lower Merion Township, Glanton now represents himself as the visionary who would have "saved" the Barnes if everyone had just gotten out of his way.

Argott's film narrows its focus here to concentrate on these events. The plot to move the Barnes Foundation rests on a tripod of falsities. The first is that Albert Barnes himself wanted to deny the public access to his collection; in fact, the reverse is true. The second is that "hostile" neighbors drove the Barnes away by demanding impossible restrictions on the public's access; in fact, those neighbors are responsible for more than doubling the attendance ceiling. The third lie, which I will discuss in due course, is that the Barnes now has no option but to move.

 

Critic's notebook: John Anderson sheds new light on Barnes' bad move

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars: Updated & Revised by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (1 of 2)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars: Updated & Revised by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (2 of 2)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki (1 of 2)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki (2 of 2)

Hour Two

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block A: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (1 of 4)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block B: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2 of 4)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block C: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (3 of 4)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 2, Block D: The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (4 of 4)

Hour Three

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block A: Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection by John Anderson  (1 of 4)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block B: Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection by John Anderson  (2 of 4)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection by John Anderson  (3 of 4)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 3, Block D: Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection by John Anderson  (4 of 4)

Hour Four

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block A: Sid Perkins, Science magazine, in re: bacterial energy

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block B: Laura Huggins, PERC and Hoover, in re: Badlands. Time to move beyond ESA to save species and economic interests  It is time to move beyond the Nixon approach to the environment. The past forty years have shown how good political intentions — or, at least, political maneuvering — in the name of environmental protection can create perverse economic incentives to do the opposite.  . . .

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block C: Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars: Updated & Revised by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (1 of 2)

Sunday 30 March  2014 / Hour 4, Block D: Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars: Updated & Revised by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman (2 of 2)

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