Portrait of a Collector
by Julia M. Klein
NOVEMBER 29, 2011 TAGS:
The man was, without a doubt, irascible and complex. Once he had money – growing up in the mean streets of Philadelphia, he had none – he did things his way, with a vengeance. The victim of bullies as a child, he learned both to box and to use words as weapons, sometimes choosing targets bigger and more powerful than himself.
But Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes (1872-1951) – the creator of the Barnes Foundation and its irreplaceable trove of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Early Modern masterpieces -- was also intermittently generous, intellectually curious, racially progressive and, in matters of art, both discerning and ahead of his time.
This is the portrait – professionally told, but mostly familiar -- that emerges from director Jeff Folmsbee’s The Collector. The film, which aired this past spring on HBO, had its first theatrical showing in October at the Philadelphia Film Festival. The Barnes Foundation’s new museum, opening May 19 on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, will use an edited version to orient visitors or for other educational purposes, foundation spokesman Andrew Stewart said in a recent interview.
The Barnes allowed the filmmaker unprecedented access to its magnificent galleries in Merion, Pa., stacked floor to ceiling with ensembles of paintings, sculpture, furniture, decorative arts and metalwork. Folmsbee’s camera moves rhapsodically, with exuberant musical accompaniment, around the galleries. It lingers lovingly, alluringly, on some of the collection’s iconic works, including Cezanne’s The Card Players (1890-92), Picasso’s Young Woman Holding a Cigarette (1901) and Matisse’s The Joy of Life (1905-06).
Folmsbee possessed only a few photographs – no vintage film -- to evoke the image of the collector himself. So he fills in aspects of the biography with inventive animation. He also relies heavily on (a few too many) talking heads, sometimes rapidly intercutting their remarks to emphasize contradictory views or underline points of agreement.
The Barnes not only opened its archives to Folmsbee; it also offered up archivists, a curator and education director, the foundation’s executive director and president Derek Gillman, and a parade of trustees to elucidate the man and his collection. Other experts in the film include Mary Ann Meyers, author of Art, Education, and African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy (2004); John Elderfield, an emeritus curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Richard J. Wattenmaker, who prepared a catalogue of the foundation’s American works.
After a hardscrabble childhood, Barnes trained as a doctor and chemist and made a fortune by manufacturing Argyrol, an antiseptic to prevent and treat gonorrheal blindness. He began buying French art with the aid of an old Central High School classmate, the artist William J. Glackens, who had once laughed at Barnes’ own artistic efforts. Barnes set up his foundation in 1922, and commissioned a building in suburban Merion by the noted architect Paul Philippe Cret.
In 1923, while the gallery was under construction, Barnes decided to mount an introductory exhibition of his new acquisitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This, in Folmsbee’s telling, was a seminal event for Barnes that shaped his combative relationship with the local art establishment. The city and its conservative elites were not receptive to what was then avant-garde art, and the critical reaction to the exhibition was devastating. As has often been reported, Barnes never forgave the snub.
He began a tradition of firing off intemperate letters at his critics, bizarre missives often rife with sexual insults and innuendo. Occasionally, in an undeniably humorous touch, he signed them with the name of his beloved dog, Fidèle-de-Port-Manech. The pathology is obvious, but the film doesn’t assay a diagnosis.
Other omissions are more glaring. The Collector, which clocks in at 55 minutes, makes clear that Barnes’s death – in a traffic accident, at a familiar intersection where he always refused to observe the stop sign – was entirely preventable. But the film makes no attempt to discuss the aftermath: the foundation’s convoluted and controversial history in the years since, including the financial crisis and legal maneuvering that precipitated the pending move to Philadelphia. Folmsbee said that he did, indeed, film some of that debate – the subject of a critical 2009 documentary, The Art of the Steal – but thought it veered too far afield.
Even as biography, The Collector is far from comprehensive. There is relatively little said about Barnes’s relationship with the philosopher John Dewey, who became the foundation’s first education director, or with Violette de Mazia, Barnes’s longtime collaborator, who ran the foundation after his death. Barnes was married to the former Laura Leggett, who supervised the foundation’s arboretum, but the collector and de Mazia are widely believed to have been lovers. There is no hint of that here. Nor is the film particularly good on the details of Barnes’s highly formalistic approach to art, still taught in foundation classes.
In the end, The Collector serves mainly as a smooth, if spotty, introduction to the foundation and its creator – a well-made commercial product rather than a provocative and original work of art.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently for Obit. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein
(Giorgia di Chirico, Portrait of Alfred C. Barnes, 1926)
RELATED: ELEGY FOR THE BARNES
But Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes (1872-1951) – the creator of the Barnes Foundation and its irreplaceable trove of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Early Modern masterpieces -- was also intermittently generous, intellectually curious, racially progressive and, in matters of art, both discerning and ahead of his time.This is the portrait – professionally told, but mostly familiar -- that emerges from director Jeff Folmsbee’s The Collector. The film, which aired this past spring on HBO, had its first theatrical showing in October at the Philadelphia Film Festival. The Barnes Foundation’s new museum, opening May 19 on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, will use an edited version to orient visitors or for other educational purposes, foundation spokesman Andrew Stewart said in a recent interview.
The Barnes allowed the filmmaker unprecedented access to its magnificent galleries in Merion, Pa., stacked floor to ceiling with ensembles of paintings, sculpture, furniture, decorative arts and metalwork. Folmsbee’s camera moves rhapsodically, with exuberant musical accompaniment, around the galleries. It lingers lovingly, alluringly, on some of the collection’s iconic works, including Cezanne’s The Card Players (1890-92), Picasso’s Young Woman Holding a Cigarette (1901) and Matisse’s The Joy of Life (1905-06).
Folmsbee possessed only a few photographs – no vintage film -- to evoke the image of the collector himself. So he fills in aspects of the biography with inventive animation. He also relies heavily on (a few too many) talking heads, sometimes rapidly intercutting their remarks to emphasize contradictory views or underline points of agreement.
The Barnes not only opened its archives to Folmsbee; it also offered up archivists, a curator and education director, the foundation’s executive director and president Derek Gillman, and a parade of trustees to elucidate the man and his collection. Other experts in the film include Mary Ann Meyers, author of Art, Education, and African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy (2004); John Elderfield, an emeritus curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Richard J. Wattenmaker, who prepared a catalogue of the foundation’s American works.
After a hardscrabble childhood, Barnes trained as a doctor and chemist and made a fortune by manufacturing Argyrol, an antiseptic to prevent and treat gonorrheal blindness. He began buying French art with the aid of an old Central High School classmate, the artist William J. Glackens, who had once laughed at Barnes’ own artistic efforts. Barnes set up his foundation in 1922, and commissioned a building in suburban Merion by the noted architect Paul Philippe Cret. In 1923, while the gallery was under construction, Barnes decided to mount an introductory exhibition of his new acquisitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This, in Folmsbee’s telling, was a seminal event for Barnes that shaped his combative relationship with the local art establishment. The city and its conservative elites were not receptive to what was then avant-garde art, and the critical reaction to the exhibition was devastating. As has often been reported, Barnes never forgave the snub.
He began a tradition of firing off intemperate letters at his critics, bizarre missives often rife with sexual insults and innuendo. Occasionally, in an undeniably humorous touch, he signed them with the name of his beloved dog, Fidèle-de-Port-Manech. The pathology is obvious, but the film doesn’t assay a diagnosis.
Other omissions are more glaring. The Collector, which clocks in at 55 minutes, makes clear that Barnes’s death – in a traffic accident, at a familiar intersection where he always refused to observe the stop sign – was entirely preventable. But the film makes no attempt to discuss the aftermath: the foundation’s convoluted and controversial history in the years since, including the financial crisis and legal maneuvering that precipitated the pending move to Philadelphia. Folmsbee said that he did, indeed, film some of that debate – the subject of a critical 2009 documentary, The Art of the Steal – but thought it veered too far afield.
Even as biography, The Collector is far from comprehensive. There is relatively little said about Barnes’s relationship with the philosopher John Dewey, who became the foundation’s first education director, or with Violette de Mazia, Barnes’s longtime collaborator, who ran the foundation after his death. Barnes was married to the former Laura Leggett, who supervised the foundation’s arboretum, but the collector and de Mazia are widely believed to have been lovers. There is no hint of that here. Nor is the film particularly good on the details of Barnes’s highly formalistic approach to art, still taught in foundation classes. In the end, The Collector serves mainly as a smooth, if spotty, introduction to the foundation and its creator – a well-made commercial product rather than a provocative and original work of art.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review, writes frequently for Obit. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein
(Giorgia di Chirico, Portrait of Alfred C. Barnes, 1926)
RELATED: ELEGY FOR THE BARNES
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