Elegy for the Barnes
by Julia M. Klein
DECEMBER 23, 2010 TAGS:
Merion, Pennsylvania
It was a gorgeous October day, and some of the foliage in the Barnes Foundation’s arboretum had shaded into amber. The last roses of the season were in bloom. Chrysanthemums lined the drive. There were plenty of other flowers, too, but I didn’t know their names – no more than a typical Barnes visitor knows the titles of the unlabeled masterpieces that hang, salon-style, in the gallery here.
This was to be my last visit to the old Barnes, a place I had come to know well. The Merion institution created by Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) is being replaced, in part, by a museum slated to open on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the spring of 2012. The 12-acre arboretum in Merion will remain a laboratory for the foundation’s well-respected horticultural program. But the Barnes’s unparalleled collection, along with its art-education classes, will move to the new building downtown, with more amenities and presumably more visitors to enjoy them.
Across the street from the Barnes, on the lawn of a mansion on lush North Latch’s Lane, a small black-and-white sign expresses a lonely dissent: “The Barnes Belongs in Merion.” But that battle, joined too late, seems lost. These are the waning days of the suburban Barnes. Five upstairs rooms are already closed, the rest of the upstairs will be off limits by the end of the year, and next summer the Barnes will shutter its Merion gallery for good.
Or ill, according to many art critics and the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a coalition that opposes the move. To them, the five-mile move seems unnecessary and tragic, not to mention – at $150 million -- an enormous waste of money. But it has arguably been made inevitable by years of fiscal mismanagement, neighborhood rancor, legal wrangling, and, above all, the conditional generosity of three Philadelphia foundations which wanted the art in the city and were willing to support only a downtown Barnes.
I grew up near the gallery, in neighboring Wynnewood, and I remember having a first date there. It went well; how could it not? My late mother, a lifelong student, avidly worked her way through the art-education curriculum at the Barnes, with the legendary Violette de Mazia (1899-1988), Barnes’s rumored paramour, as one of her teachers. I still have my mother’s extensive class notes, as well as a hand-written letter from de Mazia thanking her for a homemade dessert.
Since then, the Barnes has evolved, but not radically. There are no longer walkup admissions, but online ticketing has made the reservation process easier. A sense of exclusivity still attends one’s arrival. No sign on either City Avenue or Old Lancaster Road heralds the fact that 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses and 46 Picassos await nearby. Street parking, once fairly easy, is now forbidden. At a gated entrance, a guard will slowly peruse a list to find your parking-lot reservation, while other cars stack up impatiently behind you.
The art is housed in a purpose-built, 1925 neoclassical building by Paul Philippe Cret. Cret also designed Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, which will adjoin the new Barnes. The Merion entrance is decorated with tile motifs evoking the African art Barnes collected. Above the doorway are stone bas-reliefs by the Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.
In a small vestibule, visitors show their timed tickets, and are directed downstairs, where even pocketbooks must be checked. There is a small gift shop, but no café. For the first time, I picked up an audio guide. It offered descriptions of individual paintings and, more interesting to me, insight into the ensembles of artworks that Barnes assembled for teaching purposes.
The Barnes never seems crowded, certainly not compared to a typical blockbuster exhibition. But even after several visits, the richness of the collection and the way it is displayed, in a jumble of artists, styles, media and time periods, make the work extremely challenging to absorb. The first gallery alone -- with Matisse’s mural La Danse, Seurat’s Models and Cezanne’s Cardplayers, among other stunners - contains more masterpieces than many museums.
Barnes famously used ironwork, decorative-arts objects and furniture, including Pennsylvania German painted chests, to complement his wall ensembles. His art analysis stressed formal elements: color, line, light, and space. Sometimes, the likenesses he observed -- between African masks and the modeling of faces in works by Modigliani and Picasso – are easily divined. Elsewhere, the audio tour is indispensable. It illuminates how, for example, a particular ensemble demonstrates different ways of using white paint, and it links the shape of a piece of ironwork to a curvilinear chair back and a tree trunk in a French landscape.
In addition to the audio tour and docent-led visits, the Barnes supplies placards that identify the paintings. There are no wall labels. But the ensembles themselves are no longer pristine: They are marred by the addition of numbers corresponding with the audio tour, and the subtraction of several works for conservation. The experience is diminished, too, as it always has been, by the awfulness of the lighting. Most of the gallery windows are curtained to protect the artwork, and artificial light suffuses the canvases with an unappealing mixture of shadow and glare.
But these minor annoyances – problems that the new building, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, will mostly solve – are easily cast aside when you leave the gallery.
What remains is a different way of looking at nature, as well as art. I exited the building with an eye attuned to color and form. After being immersed in the radiance of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes, it was a deep pleasure, on this unseasonably mild day, to wander the grounds – a setting that the urban Barnes will evoke, but not replicate.
I strolled past the gallery and the attached residence where Barnes lived with his horticulturist-wife, Laura. Crossing the lawn, I watched the shimmering play of late-afternoon sunlight on a pond and tried to capture its evanescent beauty in photographs. Conscious of time passing, I meandered through the formal gardens, with their anonymous colored blooms.
I stopped to examine the specimens of rare trees that Barnes (as well as his predecessor and colleague, Joseph L. Wilson) had planted. Stepping back, I admired the vistas they created. Then I walked around the gallery again, lingering in the approaching autumn twilight, not yet ready to say goodbye.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. She has covered the Barnes Foundation for various publications since the early 1990s.
A rendering of the New Barnes Foundation Home
It was a gorgeous October day, and some of the foliage in the Barnes Foundation’s arboretum had shaded into amber. The last roses of the season were in bloom. Chrysanthemums lined the drive. There were plenty of other flowers, too, but I didn’t know their names – no more than a typical Barnes visitor knows the titles of the unlabeled masterpieces that hang, salon-style, in the gallery here.
This was to be my last visit to the old Barnes, a place I had come to know well. The Merion institution created by Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) is being replaced, in part, by a museum slated to open on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the spring of 2012. The 12-acre arboretum in Merion will remain a laboratory for the foundation’s well-respected horticultural program. But the Barnes’s unparalleled collection, along with its art-education classes, will move to the new building downtown, with more amenities and presumably more visitors to enjoy them. Across the street from the Barnes, on the lawn of a mansion on lush North Latch’s Lane, a small black-and-white sign expresses a lonely dissent: “The Barnes Belongs in Merion.” But that battle, joined too late, seems lost. These are the waning days of the suburban Barnes. Five upstairs rooms are already closed, the rest of the upstairs will be off limits by the end of the year, and next summer the Barnes will shutter its Merion gallery for good.
Or ill, according to many art critics and the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a coalition that opposes the move. To them, the five-mile move seems unnecessary and tragic, not to mention – at $150 million -- an enormous waste of money. But it has arguably been made inevitable by years of fiscal mismanagement, neighborhood rancor, legal wrangling, and, above all, the conditional generosity of three Philadelphia foundations which wanted the art in the city and were willing to support only a downtown Barnes.
I grew up near the gallery, in neighboring Wynnewood, and I remember having a first date there. It went well; how could it not? My late mother, a lifelong student, avidly worked her way through the art-education curriculum at the Barnes, with the legendary Violette de Mazia (1899-1988), Barnes’s rumored paramour, as one of her teachers. I still have my mother’s extensive class notes, as well as a hand-written letter from de Mazia thanking her for a homemade dessert.
Since then, the Barnes has evolved, but not radically. There are no longer walkup admissions, but online ticketing has made the reservation process easier. A sense of exclusivity still attends one’s arrival. No sign on either City Avenue or Old Lancaster Road heralds the fact that 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses and 46 Picassos await nearby. Street parking, once fairly easy, is now forbidden. At a gated entrance, a guard will slowly peruse a list to find your parking-lot reservation, while other cars stack up impatiently behind you.
The art is housed in a purpose-built, 1925 neoclassical building by Paul Philippe Cret. Cret also designed Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, which will adjoin the new Barnes. The Merion entrance is decorated with tile motifs evoking the African art Barnes collected. Above the doorway are stone bas-reliefs by the Cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.In a small vestibule, visitors show their timed tickets, and are directed downstairs, where even pocketbooks must be checked. There is a small gift shop, but no café. For the first time, I picked up an audio guide. It offered descriptions of individual paintings and, more interesting to me, insight into the ensembles of artworks that Barnes assembled for teaching purposes.
The Barnes never seems crowded, certainly not compared to a typical blockbuster exhibition. But even after several visits, the richness of the collection and the way it is displayed, in a jumble of artists, styles, media and time periods, make the work extremely challenging to absorb. The first gallery alone -- with Matisse’s mural La Danse, Seurat’s Models and Cezanne’s Cardplayers, among other stunners - contains more masterpieces than many museums.
Barnes famously used ironwork, decorative-arts objects and furniture, including Pennsylvania German painted chests, to complement his wall ensembles. His art analysis stressed formal elements: color, line, light, and space. Sometimes, the likenesses he observed -- between African masks and the modeling of faces in works by Modigliani and Picasso – are easily divined. Elsewhere, the audio tour is indispensable. It illuminates how, for example, a particular ensemble demonstrates different ways of using white paint, and it links the shape of a piece of ironwork to a curvilinear chair back and a tree trunk in a French landscape.
In addition to the audio tour and docent-led visits, the Barnes supplies placards that identify the paintings. There are no wall labels. But the ensembles themselves are no longer pristine: They are marred by the addition of numbers corresponding with the audio tour, and the subtraction of several works for conservation. The experience is diminished, too, as it always has been, by the awfulness of the lighting. Most of the gallery windows are curtained to protect the artwork, and artificial light suffuses the canvases with an unappealing mixture of shadow and glare.
But these minor annoyances – problems that the new building, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, will mostly solve – are easily cast aside when you leave the gallery.
What remains is a different way of looking at nature, as well as art. I exited the building with an eye attuned to color and form. After being immersed in the radiance of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscapes, it was a deep pleasure, on this unseasonably mild day, to wander the grounds – a setting that the urban Barnes will evoke, but not replicate.I strolled past the gallery and the attached residence where Barnes lived with his horticulturist-wife, Laura. Crossing the lawn, I watched the shimmering play of late-afternoon sunlight on a pond and tried to capture its evanescent beauty in photographs. Conscious of time passing, I meandered through the formal gardens, with their anonymous colored blooms.
I stopped to examine the specimens of rare trees that Barnes (as well as his predecessor and colleague, Joseph L. Wilson) had planted. Stepping back, I admired the vistas they created. Then I walked around the gallery again, lingering in the approaching autumn twilight, not yet ready to say goodbye.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review. She has covered the Barnes Foundation for various publications since the early 1990s.
A rendering of the New Barnes Foundation Home
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