A Move for Art’s Sake Stirs Debate on Bequests

In a case watched for its possible effect on philanthropy, a Pennsylvania judge Monday ruled that art intended to stay put -- the treasured, highly idiosyncratic but deficit-ridden Barnes Foundation collection -- can be uprooted despite the terms of the donor’s bequest.

The decision opens the way for the cloistered collection amassed by pharmaceutical tycoon Albert C. Barnes to be moved from suburban Merion, Pa., and housed in a more conventional, $100-million showplace in downtown Philadelphia. There, attendance and revenue are expected to soar.

Students who take courses at the Barnes Foundation had tried to stop the move, saying it would dishonor Barnes’ wish to create an intimate educational institution -- not a conventional museum -- built around his whopping collection of Renoirs, Cezannes, Matisses, Picassos, Rousseaus and Modiglianis, among others. The Barnes trove, considered by many art experts to be the best private collection in the country, is said to be worth from $6.5 billion to more than $30 billion.

The ruling poses questions for those with large sums to bequeath: If Barnes’ trust can be substantially changed, can their wishes, too, prove to have a life span of less than “in perpetuity”?

“I think that any time there is a decision to break the original donor’s intentions, it has a negative effect on philanthropy,” said Gene Tempel, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

But the Barnes situation seems unique, said Southwestern University law professor Robert Lind, author of “Art and Museum Law”: “I don’t see it as a harbinger of similar situations arising down the road.”

Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, said that although the case gained enormous attention, especially from people in a position to make big bequests of cash and art, he doubted that it would have a damping effect. In 2000, the Getty gave the Barnes Foundation $500,000 to help it plan a solution to its fiscal jam.

For art aesthetes, the worry is that moving the Barnes collection for the sake of making it more accessible -- and revenue-enhancing -- will destroy the visual and intellectual effect its creator, who died in 1951, had in mind. He specified that the paintings, sculptures and furnishings should remain exactly where he placed them, in unorthodox configurations that, for some expert beholders, reveal an ingenious and visionary understanding of the relationships among works of art.

“The Barnes was an anti-museum, because he hated museums,” said Christine Steiner, a former Getty Trust general counsel who specializes in art law. “There are no museums quite as quirky and strange. The era of quirky collectors is over.”

“It’s very sad,” said Bruce J. Altshuler, director of New York University’s museum studies program. “Museums, as a whole, are becoming less and less ‘different.’ ” And museum leaders, Altshuler added, are becoming more insistent that gifts not come with lots of donor restrictions on how art can be displayed.

The Barnes Foundation’s trustees had argued in a September hearing that they were going broke in an affluent suburban residential district, where municipal rules aimed at preserving neighborhood tranquillity limited gallery operations. Without transplantation, they said, the Barnes Foundation -- which has a $1.2-million annual deficit, according to testimony -- would eventually collapse.

Lawyers for the students, who had won friend-of-the-court status, countered that Barnes had less drastic ways of curing its financial woes: It could amass more than $40 million by selling real estate holdings elsewhere, as well as thousands of lesser artworks and a highly valued Courbet painting that’s not part of Barnes’ carefully choreographed gallery displays. That, and boosting admission prices, would erase the deficit and bring financial stability, argued the students’ attorneys, Terrance A. Kline and Paul M. Quinones.

It’s uncertain whether the students, as friends of the court, have legal standing to appeal, their attorneys said, but they will consider ways to keep the case alive.

In his 31-page opinion, Montgomery County Orphans’ Court Judge Stanley Ott ruled that selling off Barnes Foundation art and property would net $20 million -- not enough to keep the operation solvent. Transplanting the collection to an established museum district in downtown Philadelphia would be “the least drastic modification” to Barnes’ initial wishes that would ensure that his foundation could survive and serve the educational purpose that was Barnes’ overall aim, Ott decided.

Three Philadelphia-based philanthropies, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Annenberg Foundation and the Lenfest Foundation, have promised to help the Barnes Foundation raise $100 million to build a new home near the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum, and an additional $50 million for an endowment to safeguard the foundation’s long-term solvency.

At the core of the design, said Kimberly Camp, the Barnes Foundation’s executive director, will be an exact replica of the existing layout, so that all of the art can be hung exactly as it is in Merion. Additional classroom and exhibition space will be built around that core. Barnes attorney Ralph Wellington said that no more than about 100 people would be allowed to enter per hour, about the same as peak hourly attendance at the current location.

For John Anderson, an Ossining, N.Y., writer who last year published “Art Held Hostage,” a history of the Barnes Foundation, the foundation’s court victory clears the way for “a straightforward corporate takeover, which has been cloaked in a kind of faux populism.” Philadelphia’s government and business leadership will get a salable new tourist attraction, and the big foundations raising the money will gain art-world clout, Anderson said, but a unique destination on the art map will have been lost.

“No one would think of closing down the Frick in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Gardner in Boston, and moving the paintings,” he said, referring to other venerable private collections open for viewing. “They have a very special historic niche. Ten years from now, people will understand that a terrible mistake was made.”