Out of Solitary : Masterworks by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso Go On First-Ever Tour After Getting a Temporary Reprieve From the Iron-Clad Terms of the Barnes Foundation

The masterpieces on this page should be familiar, but they aren’t.

Although each is a major work by a pillar of Modernism, they can be seen only two days a week in Merion Station, a frustrating-to-find suburb of Philadelphia. Until very recently, the only reproductions permitted--for scholarly publications alone--were bad, black and white, and thumbnail-sized.

The Barnes Foundation, where the paintings reside, has been recognized as having one of the world’s stellar accumulations of late 19th-Century and early 20th-Century masterworks since Dr. Albert C. Barnes consolidated his art holdings into the foundation in 1922. Today, the foundation’s extraordinary, unlabeled hodgepodge includes 2,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, metalwork, antique furniture, ceramics, textile and jewelry, with 180 paintings by Renoir, 69 by Cezanne, 60 by Matisse, 44 by Picasso, 18 by Rousseau, seven by Van Gogh and major works by Seurat, Gauguin, Modigliani and the American modernists. No other American museum can boast such depth in these artists.

On the other hand, no other American museum has policies that prohibit works from being reproduced in color or sent out on loan, that make it difficult to visit, and then even more difficult to understand once you get there.

From its very inception, the Barnes Foundation has been a place of suspicion, acrimony, backbiting and scandal. Until his death in 1951, the irascible doctor would go to any lengths to keep from his museum anyone who knew too much or disagreed with him about art, or who represented the art Establishment from which he had suffered a plethora of real and imagined snubs. That included having the polio-stricken former director of the National Gallery of Art, John Walker, forcibly ejected after he had gained entrance to Barnes’ limestone chateau incognito.

Even now, with the National Gallery organizing an international traveling exhibition that will permit 80 of the foundation’s masterworks to be seen outside its grounds for the first time, the controversy continues.

Once the paintings chosen for the international tour leave the museum in April, it will never again be possible to experience these paintings exactly as Barnes intended. Until then, an excursion is an “‘I-just-can’t-believe-this” event, even for the most jaded critics.

This has something to do with the virgin status of the pictures; unless you’ve trekked to Merion Station, you probably haven’t seen them before, no matter how many other paintings--on canvas or in reproduction--are known by these artists. That will change after the international tour to Washington, Paris, Tokyo and Philadelphia and the accompanying books about to be published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc.--in an agreement that is also attended by controversy.

We may know studies for Seurat’s 1888 “Models,” in which three muses-as-working-girls undress in front of a corner of his masterpiece “Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte.” But the mellow surface of pointillist dots approximates indoor light with an incandescent calm impossible to reproduce. Matisse’s 1906 “The Joy of Life” is his great, unseen breakthrough painting, in which he began to translate the world of the senses into his own version of paradise. In it, he peopled a garden of unbridled color growing out of white canvas with primal undulating figures, including his earliest version of “The Dance.” And his later, three-part architectural frieze on the dance theme, which Matisse came to Merion to design in the 1930s, rejuvenated the painter and led to his late, great cutouts.

Multiply all that by the Cezannes--so many one can’t imagine how anyone ever brought off a Cezanne show without them. And so many blowzy Renoir blondes you could gag on them, not to mention the energetic, unexpected Glackenses tucked away in corners. And all of it is hung on burlap walls surrounded by Pennsylvania Dutch latches and hinges, Navajo blankets, Old Master paintings of questionable authenticity, ceramic vases made by Jean Renoir before he became a filmmaker, Colonial candle clippers and a host of other hilarious oddities to mislead and distract.

There are few places in the world anymore where one can make the throat-catching discovery of an amazing Gauguin one knew nothing about, next to an unknown Cezanne, on the same wall with something by someone called Gritchenko, and perhaps next to an African sculpture, or Japanese enamel, or Russian icon, and over a Pennsylvania Dutch chest with pewter candlesticks. The strength of the Barnes is how all this mad excess actually manages to surprise and enthrall us in a way a more proper, up-to-date, white-on-white museum no longer can.

That’s how Barnes meant it to be. The purpose of the foundation, he specified, was educational, and the method of teaching came from his “lifelong study of the science of psychology as applied to education and aesthetics.”

Violette de Mazia, his fellow teacher and reported mistress, explained in a 1942 House and Garden magazine that the idea was “to excite the student’s curiosity as to why these apparently disparate objects are placed in the same room, even, at times, on the same wall.” And the hope was that said student “soon begins to discern similarities in line, shape, color or rhythm between these apparently dissimilar objects.”

The shame is that these paintings will probably never be seen in context with the other paintings by these artists that would make a real interpretation possible.

That is why curators like John Elderfield, who organized the Museum of Modern Art’s exhaustive Matisse exhibition, wish that when the foundation went to court to get relief from the iron terms of the Barnes trust, it had sought permission to lend works to relevant exhibitions. Instead, last summer the foundation asked for and got a ruling by Judge Louis Stefan of the Orphans’ Court of Montgomery County, Pa., amending the trust indenture in which Barnes specified that the works were never to leave Merion--thereby gaining permission for a one-time-only tour while the foundation’s building is closed for renovation.

The exhibition of top Barnes hits at the National Gallery in Washington, May 9-Sept. 6, is a little like the blockbuster exhibitions from the just-opening-up-Soviet Union in the ‘80s. Then, we got to see the cream of the Picassos, Matisses et al that had been locked up in Russia, all in one gulp. And welcome they were--as a first step. Even more welcome, however, is to see those same paintings again in more pertinent contexts, such as the Modern’s Matisse show.

That will not happen with the Barnes paintings; barring unforeseen circumstances, they will never be allowed out of Merion again. The international tour, predicts Richard H. Glanton, president of the Barnes Foundation, “will be more exciting than Tutankhamen.”

But Glanton’s reason for the exhibition is definitely of the ‘90s. It’s needed, he says, to raise the $7 million the Barnes says is necessary to bring its building up to modern museum standards. Already, according to the Barnes, “there is an agreement in hand” for the Musee d’Orsay to pay $2.5 million for the exhibition and the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo to pay $4.5 million. Glanton says there is also a $700,000 deal with Knopf for two books with an option for a third at $300,000.

Glanton had originally estimated that the cost of restoration would be $15 million to $18 million and, to the outrage of his art advisory committee, he had sought to sell some Barnes paintings to raise the money. He was supported in his quest by art collector Walter Annenberg. But after the suggestion was greeted by a furor in the press and the art community, both of them backed down.

His treatment by the press and the art world continues to rankle Glanton--in one of the many ways in which he resembles Barnes. Like Barnes, he sees himself as an outsider: Barnes was a blue-collar millionaire who made his money selling silver nitrate; Glanton rose to the top as a corporation lawyer, deputy counsel to Gov. Richard Thornburgh, and Pennsylvania co-chairman of George Bush’s 1988 campaign.

Glanton fills one of the four (out of five) trustee positions Barnes willed to Lincoln University, a small, primarily black liberal arts university in Pennsylvania. Barnes had been a big supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, collected paintings by American blacks, sculpture from Africa, and, in the last years of his life, he had taught at Lincoln.

“Barnes was poor, he played with blacks and whites, he had a profound religious experience at black revival meetings,” says Glanton. “When the foundation was dedicated, he talked about a proposal for a center to promote the Negro heritage--this is something I’ve gathered from reading his archives at the foundation.”

What Glanton would like to see at the Barnes, he says, is an endowed chair in fine arts and horticulture (the foundation is on a 12-acre arboretum where Barnes’ ashes are secretly buried), with a relationship to Lincoln University and maybe Princeton. The Barnes would give high school graduates fellowships to a four-year college.

Glanton says that for now the issue of selling paintings is dead. “We’re not going to revisit this issue right now. We’ll get the building restored. But I can’t bind the hands of a future president of the board. I don’t plan to be around forever.”

There remain doubts in the art world about Glanton’s ultimate intentions, although no one will speak on the record. J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery’s former director, articulates the official position: “They are fast learners and pretty professional now.”

But accusations and court battles continue. Glanton is suing the De Mazia Trust, set up by Violette de Mazia. De Mazia virtually ran the Barnes for years after the doctor died. Glanton’s suit charges, among other things, that De Mazia unlawfully took at least 30 works of art from the Barnes and sold them to fund her trust.

“What would happen if I had taken those pictures? I’d be lynched from here to sundown,” he says.

S. Gordon Elkins of Stradley, Ronon, Stevens & Young, the lawyers for the trust, calls the charges “scurrilous.”

The De Mazia Trust has filed a countersuit, claiming that a $2-million grant by S. I. Newhouse, owner of Knopf, to Lincoln University influenced the awarding of the book contract to Knopf.

But on one thing the trust and the foundation agree: The point of the foundation is to educate the public about art, not to make it easy to see.