Hidden Treasure of Philadelphia : Art: Dr. Albert C. Barnes amassed an unparalleled collection of fine art. Only now is the public getting a chance to see it.

E. Roger Mandle was a graduate art student when the memorable letter came more than 25 years ago. The reclusive Barnes Foundation here in suburban Philadelphia had granted his request for a rare look at the magnificent paintings assembled by one of the most enigmatic, obsessive and powerful figures in the history of American art. “It was sort of like getting access to the Kremlin,” Mandle recalled.

The young student beheld one of the grandest private collections in America, assembled by Dr. Albert C. Barnes with the wealth from his discovery of Argyrol, the best-known childhood cold remedy in the United States during the first half of the 20th Century. The collection, infused with breathtaking beauty, included 171 sumptuous Renoirs, 57 Cezannes, 54 Matisses, 19 early Picassos and 8 Van Goghs among hundreds of other works. Yet, for most Americans, unlike Mandle, it was a hidden treasure.

Now, Mandle, deputy director of National Gallery of Art in Washington, is one of several leading specialists advising the Barnes Foundation on how to function like a modern museum, open to all. The astounding yet unfamiliar collection of Dr. Barnes--which may be worth more than $3 billion at present art auction prices--is slowly entering the mainstream of American cultural life.

Barnes, who died in 1951, and the coterie of disciples who ran the foundation for four decades after his death, had special educational ideas about the collection that largely kept it from the public. But control of the collection has now passed to trustees appointed by Lincoln University, a small, mainly black college whose illustrious graduates include Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and poet Langston Hughes.

No revolutionary change is in sight. “Any kind of change in any institution has to be gradual,” said Richard H. Glanton, the 43-year-old lawyer recently elected president of the foundation. “. . . We have no agenda. We do not intend to revise history to meet current fashions.”

But there will be change, for Glanton clearly does not intend a rigid interpretation of Barnes’ ideas. “We’re not talking about Moses coming down with his tablets,” he went on in his law office in Philadelphia. “No one is going to be a God-like arbitrator of what is the Barnes approach. . . . As you know, everything changes. The only thing that is constant is change.”

One possible change, in fact, could make the Barnes paintings well-known. Glanton may lift the foundation’s strange, frustrating ban on color reproductions. He is meeting with publishers to discuss the possibility of producing a full color catalogue.

Barnes stubbornly refused to allow color pictures. He insisted that they distorted the true nature of a painting and then deluded people into thinking they had seen something as good as the original. As a result, only those who have visited the foundation are familiar with Barnes’ paintings.

The lifting of the ban on color reproductions and a probable expansion of the present limited visiting hours--as welcome as they will be in the art world--will also evoke some bittersweet, nostalgic regret. The Barnes paintings will become familiar to many Americans, and this familiarity will destroy one of the truly wondrous and rare art experiences in the world.

In the main rotunda, for example, crowded with 57 paintings and a mural by Henri Matisse, it takes only a few swift moments to feel that the Georges Seurat painting of three models in his studio, a large Cezanne painting of card players and a Cezanne portrait of a young girl have the right to an honored place in any distinguished museum in the world. Other rooms have what may be the finest portrait ever painted by Chaim Soutine and a delightful, unparalleled nude by Gustave Courbet. And it is hard not to feel a special, self-congratulatory glow for discovering all this greatness without anyone showing the way.

It is inevitable, however, that this must change. But it is not clear what else will change. Under the legal arrangements set down by Barnes before he died, Lincoln University must not sell any of the paintings or loan them to other museums or buy new paintings. Lincoln also must run the foundation as an educational institution following the theories of Barnes and of the philosopher John Dewey that, in large part, account for the strange, jumbled, crowded way that the paintings hang on the walls of the gallery.

The new foundation president, who once served as an aide to Dick Thornburgh when the latter was governor of Pennsylvania, quickly made it clear, however, that he intends no rigid or blind interpretation of old rules. “The indenture (the legal document of Barnes creating the foundation) mandates that the foundation’s teaching of art follow the philosophy of John Dewey,” he said. “But how one artistic director interprets the teachings of John Dewey or of Dr. Barnes is another matter. It’s like going from one Pope to another.”

The foundation, under its new Lincoln University management, is also trying to shake off its traditional suspicion of the press or, in fact, of any public attention. Esther Van Sant, a longtime foundation official who is now director of art education, explained recently why she has always been irritated by press coverage. “Every article you read,” she said, “talks about the cantankerous Dr. Barnes and how he excluded people from the collection.”

But he also had authentic genius. He purchased paintings that could fill gaps in the current collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He uncovered at least one painter who might have remained in obscurity otherwise. With his fortune, Barnes revived an old, dormant interest in art and began taking trips to Europe to buy paintings. A novice in the bewildering art world, Barnes allowed others in Paris to mold his tastes. His mentors included American writer Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo Stein, who collected the works of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro and other contemporaries, and dealer Paul Guillaume, who sold the works of contemporary artists.

Barnes gradually become more confident in his own judgment and, by the early 1920s, could make the decision on his own to buy a host of works by the unknown painter Chaim Soutine, a young friend of the hapless, alcoholic Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. As a result of this universally acclaimed discovery, the Barnes Foundation now boasts the largest collection of Soutines in the United States.

In 1917, Barnes enrolled in a course of American philosopher John Dewey at Columbia University, and the two struck up a friendship and intellectual partnership that lasted throughout their lives. Dewey’s ideas--which inspired American “progressive education”--reinforced Barnes’s feelings about art, and the collector soon evolved a theory of art that has guided the management and display of his paintings until this day.

Barnes, bolstered by Dewey, believed that a painting should be treated as a singular experience on its own. An art lover, according to this theory, could appreciate a painting by Vincent van Gogh without needing to know that the painter was a madman who cut off his ear. A thorough knowledge of the history of the times, moreover, added nothing to the experience of viewing a painting. Even the title added nothing.

The paintings were--and still are--grouped not according to artist or era but according to the qualities that make up a painting like color or light or line or space. In one room, for example, a Renoir painting of his family is shown alongside paintings by Tintoretto and Giorgione to demonstrate Renoir’s adaptation of 16th-Century Venetian use of color. Although each painting in the collection identifies the artist with a minuscule metallic label on the lower frame, there are no dates or titles or explanations to guide an onlooker. On top of this, paintings are crowded together on a wall in symmetry or other patterns as if joined into a larger work of art.

This might seem like a hopeless jumble to the uninitiated, but Barnes did not intend to cater to the uninitiated. During his lifetime, he allowed entry only to those who enrolled in the foundation’s art courses expounding his theories and to a few others whose written requests for invitations displayed a sincerity that impressed Barnes or his staff. Over the years, the foundation turned down such celebrities as auto magnate and art collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr., Nobel Prize poet T.S. Eliot, drama critic Alexander Woollcott and, even though his pieces grace the collection, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

After lawsuits filed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and the state of Pennsylvania, a state court ruled in 1960 that, as a tax-exempt foundation, the foundation had to open the doors of the collection to the public. The foundation finally agreed to open its doors to 200 people for 2 1/2 days a week 10 months of the year. Otherwise, the foundation operated as before, teaching the art philosophy of Barnes to students throughout the year.

As vacancies occurred, however, Lincoln appointed new trustees, and, by 1988, Lincoln trustees controlled the five-person board and the future of the Barnes collection. The illness of foundation president Franklin Williams, a former ambassador to Ghana who died earlier this year, delayed change for a while. But, with the election of Glanton as president in August, the Barnes Foundation made it clear that it was now ready for changes that will lift it out of a self-imposed obscurity into the limelight of the modern art world.

BACKGROUND Dr. Albert C. Barnes was the son of a Philadelphia butcher and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania medical school. He made his fortune by joining a German chemist in 1902 in discovering a silver nitrate antiseptic that mothers would use for five decades to swab the throats of rheumy children. Barnes, who marketed the compound as Argyrol, later bought out his partner and took full credit as sole discoverer. His wealth and accumulation of art did not ease his way into Philadelphia society. Most of the rich and powerful looked down on him as a butcher’s son, and his abrasive manner did him no good in trying to overcome their prejudice. Biographer Howard Greenfeld has described Barnes as “stubborn, strong-willed, doggedly opinionated, and totally unwilling to compromise.”