ART REVIEW : An ‘80s Kind of Show : ‘Great French Paintings’ Is an Indulgent Wallow, Created to Generate Cash for the Barnes Foundation’s Buildings

If you thought the 1980s were over, make your way to the National Gallery of Art to see “Great French Paintings From the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern,” opening Sunday. It’s an ‘80s kind of show stumbling headlong into the ‘90s.

Which is to say, it’s a glossy treasure-house show, without an idea in its head. An indulgent wallow in often wonderful modern paintings from the legendary Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, the show can claim scant reason for being, save generating publicity and cash.

The publicity has been revving up since 1991. That was the year Barnes trustees considered selling parts of the collection, which totals some 2,500 paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, including French, American, Old Master, ancient Greek and African works of art. The furor generated by the liquidation scheme was deafening.

The trustees wanted to raise millions of dollars to repair the unkempt 1923 buildings in fashionable Merion, Pa., which house the extraordinary collection assembled by the very rich, very irascible Dr. Albert C. Barnes, between 1912 and his death in a 1951 car crash. Antiquated security systems, inadequate climate control, rotting floors, outdated electrical wiring--the problems appear to be pronounced.

The astronomical rise in art prices in the 1980s seemed to offer a solution. So, through de-accessioning, the trustees oddly planned to “save” the collection by damaging it. When that bizarre idea got squelched, the notion of a traveling show was born.

The exhibition, which will also be seen in Paris, Tokyo and nearby Philadelphia while renovations proceed in Merion, approximates in a very general way Barnes’ initial enthusiasm for French painting. His personal pantheon of Cezanne, Matisse and especially Renoir is the show’s focus, while excursions into the art of Van Gogh, Rousseau, Modigliani and others are dutifully acknowledged.

Barnes wasn’t exactly adventurous as a collector--except, perhaps, for a provincial American living among Main Line bluebloods. In Europe, Impressionism had been acclaimed for decades when he began to acquire it. Cezanne was dead, his pivotal position well established.

Renoir was 72 when Barnes acquired the first of nearly 200 pictures by the artist. The collector preferred the sentimentalities of Picasso’s so-called Blue and Rose periods, stopping at the brink of the radical developments of Cubism. And, he bought no abstract art.

If Barnes was not adventurous, he was committed and tenacious. A control-freak of Brobdingnagian proportions, he went all out when he decided an artist was major.

The first great moment in the exhibition comes after two seemingly endless rooms, filled with 17 mostly frothy Renoirs. The selection shows how desperate Renoir was to be seen as the modern equivalent of a historical master--and how captivated Barnes was by such a vision.

The standard motifs of Western painting--scenes from classical mythology, aristocratic portraiture, religious subjects--are all there. By 1880 Renoir was simply updating them, applying “modern” Impressionist style to images of the bourgeoisie, especially women, who were cast as actors playing secularized Madonnas, strong caryatids or luscious Venuses.

The great moment comes from stepping out of this exercise in fawning formula and into the first of two astonishing galleries, which together contain 20 Cezannes.

In extraordinary paintings such as the large, frieze-like picture of bathers, “Nudes in a Landscape” (1900-05), Cezanne also recalls classical motifs. The shocking, nearly headless nude striding at the left trails a flowing raiment, as if a Hellenistic Nike had victoriously arrived at a casual picnic.

But Cezanne does not rehash a comfortably established style. His almost violent packing together of form and hacking away of space constructs a new visual universe, with which the broken shards of history are reassembled.

Interestingly, three of the show’s four greatest paintings evoke the theme of bathers, as do dozens of lesser ones. Conjured is the classical Golden Age--a lost era of ideal happiness, prosperity and innocence, which is recoverable only through the imaginative constructions of art.

Seurat’s monumental “Models” (1886-88) shows three nudes--or, perhaps one nude, seen cinematically in three poses--arrayed in the artist’s studio before his earlier Golden Age masterpiece “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” And Matisse’s “The Joy of Life” (1905-06) is a coloristically wild bacchanal containing the seeds of much that the artist was subsequently to accomplish, including the 1932 lunette mural “The Dance,” commissioned by Barnes and also in the show.

Barnes’ commitment to Cezanne, Matisse and the rest should not be minimized; yet, his faith in the supreme genius of the mediocre Renoir seems emblematic.

Barnes, a manufacturer of patent medicines who had ruthlessly and rapidly climbed from working-class status to immense wealth, sought to re-create himself as an independent man of culture. Renoir’s appeal seems apt: Bourgeois citizens are transformed into modern figures of historical consequence through the distinctive inventions of art.

The American established his foundation in 1922. Pointedly, it was not meant to be a museum. Instead, founded with the aid of the great educational philosopher John Dewey, it was meant to be a school. The foundation would be a place to teach others of the working class “the Barnes method” for self-transformation.

The “proper” understanding of art--meaning Barnes’ often crackpot pronouncements of universal visual truths, manifest in eccentric, permanent arrangements of paintings, iron keys, door-hinges, African sculpture, furniture and such--had a definite goal. It would help bring about a democratic Golden Age, which had been America’s founding myth.

That’s why it’s hard to look at the sleek National Gallery exhibition without feeling a sense of loss. Yes, extraordinary art hangs on the museum’s walls. But you can’t help feeling it has been trapped in enemy territory, put to uses the collector would have deplored.

Like any treasure-house show of “Golden Whatzits From Wherever,” their first order of business is simply to amuse by appealing to our vanity, the better to get the cash-register ringing. Nevermind that this was precisely what the collector being celebrated had struggled to avoid.

In establishing his foundation, Barnes refused to lend to museums, disdained reproductions as awful distortions, even tried to keep the Establishment art world from visiting the galleries. His efforts were excessive, often even mean. Always, however, they were at the service of an art-idea.

The exhibition is at the service of fund-raising, nothing more. Foundation trustees expect to realize a minimum of $15 million from the tour. Color posters, calendars, postcards and $600 Polaroid reproductions, never before allowed, are on the way. The Barnes Foundation is in a financial fix, so its collection has been dispatched to sing for its supper.

From this day forward, the image of Matisse’s “The Joy of Life” will never again be fresh and unobstructed. Instead, it will be preceded by the experience of a bad color-reproduction that, like all those in the show’s hastily assembled, mediocre catalogue, is far too red, destabilizing the picture’s daring palette.

Save for pondering a sale, no other effort to raise funds was considered. A dire option of last resort instead leaped to the head of the list. The show manages, in a less dramatic but still harmful way, what the initial attempt to sell off part of the collection threatened: It damages the uniqueness of the Barnes legacy, ostensibly to save it.

The Barnes Foundation, despite annoyances ranging from limited public hours to an often loony installation, was a last refuge from the money-mad machinery of our modern museum world. That refuge is gone now--and there’s no getting it back.

National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street at Constitution Avenue, Washington, (202) 842-6713, daily through Aug. 15. Free-admission passes required.