Great Art Framed by Turmoil

Inside the Barnes Foundation, a French Renaissance chateau set in a fenced arboretum on Philadelphia’s western shoulder, hangs one of the world’s most spectacular art collections.

Masterpieces are displayed literally from floor to ceiling: Cezanne’s “Bathers” and “The Card Players,” Seurat’s “Models,” Van Gogh’s signed “Postman.” The gallery is so crammed with priceless works that Matisse’s “Joy of Life” is confined to a stairwell.

The Musee d’Orsay in Paris owns 94 works by Renoir. The Barnes has 181. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has 39 by Cezanne. The Barnes owns 69.

“A-plus, superb, glorious, as good as exists in the world,” Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, says of the collection’s masterpieces.

For all its artistic treasures, however, the Barnes remains a troubled and dysfunctional institution on its 80th anniversary, weighted down by years of confrontations over art, education and race. “Our mission has been overshadowed by turmoil,” a Barnes publication acknowledges, with some understatement.

The foundation is suffocating under a crush of lawsuits and is desperate for money. It has a poisonous relationship with its neighbors, who videotape visitors and count people arriving inside buses.

The Barnes is hemmed in by court decisions and zoning rules that dictate its admission (a mere $5), hours, parking, attendance and art arrangement. It cannot move its paintings from the wall positions they have held since 1951. It cannot lend or sell them.

Much of the Barnes’ glory, and some of its misery, can be traced to the iconoclastic beliefs of its founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes. A self-made millionaire with a shrewd eye for art, Barnes is considered a brilliant visionary and champion of social justice by many and a paranoid and vindictive pedagogue by a few. (Thomas Hart Benton called him “friendly, kindly, hospitable, and, at the same time, a ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch.”)

The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings Barnes bought in France in the 1910s and 1920s were shipped directly to Merion but not to be hung in a museum. Barnes used them as instructional tools in gallery classes that taught his theories about art, aesthetics, light, line, color and space.

The paintings were hung next to African sculpture, Navajo jewelry and Pennsylvania German blanket chests so that students could appreciate the similarities among different works of art. Because he focused on the art and not the artist, Barnes did not attach the names of paintings or other identifying information. Even now, the Barnes says it is not a museum; it’s a school for art. Its trustees are named not by curators or art experts but by a small university in rural Pennsylvania.

The son of a Philadelphia letter carrier, Barnes made a fortune patenting an eye antiseptic. An amateur painter, he attended high school with painter William Glackens, who later educated Barnes about art--and how to buy it. To some, Barnes was said to be astute but overbearing. He offended Gertrude Stein by asking how much she had paid for Picasso’s portrait of her. Barnes “did literally wave his checkbook in the air,” Stein once said.

Barnes died in a car crash in 1951 at age 78. His will and indenture, along with the foundation’s bylaws, are still being interpreted, debated and dissected 80 years after he chartered the Barnes “to promote the advancement of education and appreciation of the fine arts.”

The foundation was paralyzed for half a century after his death, with admission severely restricted and the gallery in disrepair. The collection has never been fully inventoried. Until the 1990s, there were no color photos of the paintings and no illustrated catalog.

Kimberly Camp, who announced “We are broke!” shortly after taking over as executive director in 1998, is struggling to raise money to keep the foundation alive and still true to Barnes’ vision of art as a vehicle for racial and social justice. She calls it the “first purposely multicultural collection” in the nation. “Barnes believed in the power of aesthetics and art to enhance the perceptions of everyday people and build critical problem-solving skills,” Camp said. And those perceptions “would help build a better democracy and help eliminate segregation and discrimination,” she said. Race is never far from the surface at the foundation.

Barnes, who was white, railed against the overt racism of his time; he attended black churches and held gospel concerts at the foundation. He battled white-run cultural institutions and left control of the Barnes to Lincoln University, a historically African American school.

In his foundation’s bylaws, Barnes stipulated that “the plain people, that is, men and women who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories, schools, stores and similar places, shall have free access to the art gallery.” He wrote of “the rare artistic and mental endowments of the Negro.”

Barnes “hated snobs--those affected English-accent people who were born with money and who thought therefore that that gave them the right to things other people shouldn’t have,” Camp said. He despised the upper crust art establishment, calling the Philadelphia Museum of Art “a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution.”

He routinely refused the rich and famous permission to view his masterpieces. When T. S. Eliot asked to drop by, Barnes responded, “Nuts,” according to a biography, “The Devil and Dr. Barnes,” by Howard Greenfeld. James Michener, turned away three times, finally got in by claiming to be a steel mill worker. Walter P. Chrysler Jr., a millionaire art collector, was rejected via a scathing letter from Barnes’ “secretary” that was actually written by Barnes himself.

On the other hand, Albert Einstein was allowed to see the paintings. So were writer Thomas Mann, actor Edward G. Robinson, African American operatic singer Marian Anderson and actor Charles Laughton.

Today, the foundation is in an exclusive, predominantly white, Main Line neighborhood with stately mansions. When the Barnes emerged from relative obscurity in the mid-1990s, the crush of new visitors irked the residents, one of whom has posted a sign on her manicured lawn that reads: “Warning--Dog bites first, asks questions later.”

Both Camp and her predecessor, Richard Glanton, are African American. In 1996, Glanton filed a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the foundation’s neighbors and the township zoning board of racism after neighbors protested his expansion plans. The courts dismissed the suit, calling it “cynically brought” and “frivolous” and ordered Glanton to pay the defendants’ legal fees.

But that wasn’t the end of it. In March, the neighbors sued Glanton and his lawyers for abuse of process, and they accuse Camp of trying to evade strict zoning rules that restrict visitors and traffic.

Robert Marmon, an intense, fast-talking management consultant who lives directly across Latch’s Lane from the Barnes, has videotaped and photographed visitors. He claims Camp is violating rules that limit tour buses to 26 passengers. He says he has 70 photos of buses with more than 60 passengers.

Marmon and his neighbors lost a bitter mid-1990s battle to stop Glanton from expanding visitation. They complained of traffic, trespassers and the fumes of idling tour buses. Marmon compared Glanton and other Barnes officials to “carpetbaggers,” triggering the civil rights suit.

Glanton had failed to convince the courts to break the foundation’s bylaws and sell off some of the paintings. But he did persuade a judge to allow a onetime world tour, “Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation,” from 1993 to 1995 that raised $17 million to renovate the gallery.

The Barnes, though still relatively unknown outside art circles, was suddenly overrun with art lovers. Visitation was increased from 2 1/2 to three days and from 500 to 1,200 visitors per week.

“They won the battle; they can run their museum on our quiet residential street,” Marmon said, predicting that the Barnes will face persistent lawsuits. “But they also guaranteed they’ll bleed to death financially. This is going to be ugly.”

Marmon said he doesn’t object to “those gorgeous paintings” at the Barnes; he says he tours the gallery occasionally under an assumed name. “It’s the people who control them who have perpetuated this evil in our community,” he said.

Camp, asked about Marmon and other neighbors, paused and said: “There are several residents who have behaved in a--my attorneys say I have to say it this way--in my opinion they exhibit unhealthy social attitudes and sociopathic behavior. Daily. We are harassed daily.”

Marmon recently gave his neighbors and township zoning officials copies of a British newspaper article in which Camp is quoted as saying of the neighborhood: “It is so insular that it has kept out African Americans. After WASPs, Catholics and Jews, blacks are bottom of the pile.”

“Tell that to my black neighbor, the accountant!” Marmon said, describing himself and many of his neighbors as “liberal Jews.”

Nicholas Tinari, an engineer who took classes at the Barnes, heads a watchdog group called “Barnes Watch.” Tinari claims a fund-raising reception held by Camp at the foundation violates Barnes’ bylaws, which forbid “any society functions, commonly designated receptions, tea parties, dinners, banquets, dances, musicales or similar affairs.” (A judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Marmon seeking to ban future fund-raisers.)

Camp said fund-raiser traffic moved through a rear gate and did not affect neighbors on Latch’s Lane. When asked to describe the event, Camp laughed and said: “It was Marmon and Nick Tinari across the street, making faces and shifting from leg to leg, taking pictures of people’s cars and license plates.”

She described the neighbors’ strategy as “keeping the foundation tied up in court with ridiculous legal battles until we run out of money and the state will take over and you people will be gone.”

The Barnes spent nearly $6 million on legal fees in the 1990s; Camp has reduced the foundation’s law firms from four to two. The Barnes endowment, $10 million in 1951, was so poorly invested that it was still $10 million almost four decades later. Camp spent the last of it in 1999.

A recent audit estimated that the Barnes needs $85 million to ensure its long-term survival, including $15 million over the next five years for a “stabilization fund.”

Several banks and foundations have donated $100,000 to $500,000 each, but the Barnes is still in a deep financial hole. And the corporate funding has drawn the ire of Barnes Watch: “Dr. Barnes would be appalled with the idea of using the artwork as a vehicle for a corporate logo,” Tinari said.

Camp says it costs the Barnes $60 to admit each visitor for $5. She said a more reasonable fee would be $10 or $12. She’d also like to see annual visitation raised from 62,400 to as high as 150,000.

The neighbors say Camp has turned the Barnes into a museum--not the educational institution stipulated by Barnes. The foundation is zoned as an educational institution with limited accessory use as a gallery.

The gallery has many accouterments of a museum--a gift shop, headphone rentals, a $10-per-car parking lot. But visits are by appointment only, and tour buses must park at a remote lot.

With its idiosyncratic “ensembles,” the Barnes is certainly no typical art gallery. Impressionist paintings are hung over doorways and beside metal works, Navajo blankets, ceramics and antique chairs--all precisely the way they stood the day Barnes died. Overlooking the main gallery is a magnificent mural, “Le Dance,” painted by Matisse at Barnes’ request in 1931. “It’s an exploration, not just a viewing,” said Courtney Waring, Barnes’ assistant education director.

A visit to the Barnes is both disorienting and breathtaking. “You could go to museums around Europe and find two or three pieces you’d give your life for. You’d do that for dozens of pieces at the Barnes,” Munitz said.

Camp said the Barnes remains primarily an educational institution. She emphasizes the art classes (tuition: $650 per academic year) and the schoolchildren who visit.

The Barnes earns half of its $4-million annual budget through admission and parking, tuition, the gift shop and reproduction rights, Camp said.

Munitz, of the Getty Trust, which has given the Barnes $500,000 and technical expertise, said the foundation must raise “a prodigious amount of money” to survive. The question, he said, is “whether it can hold steady to its core beliefs but is still able to be programmatically and financially alive.”

Munitz added: “They’ve bounced off the bottom. They are headed in the right direction, but they have a long way to go.”

With a collection valued at roughly $25 billion, in Camp’s estimation, the Barnes is fabulously wealthy on paper. A single Van Gogh from another collection sold for $82.5 million 10 years ago; the Barnes has seven Van Goghs--and 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus and 11 Degases.

Camp said the foundation has no plans to seek court permission to sell any of its art. But the courts have granted permission to lend paintings now in storage, many of which hang in the foundation’s private offices and have not been seen by the public in 50 years.

Camp said she will continue to raise money while fighting off lawsuits and improving what a Barnes publication calls “strained relationships with members of our community.” “We are trying to repair that relationship, but there is still such animosity that we have not been able to get to a place of reason,” Camp said.

Walter Herman, a retired physician who lives across from the Barnes, said Camp has “acted like a good neighbor, for the most part.” He added: “But we can’t be too buddy-buddy until the litigation is settled.”

Marmon said he would not object to 1 million Barnes visitors a year, as long as the foundation agrees to his terms, which include building a new driveway to the Barnes entrance that doesn’t feed into his street. He calls it the “Getty solution,” a reference to the way the Getty museum handled residents’ complaints about traffic and crowds.

Unless the Barnes meets his demands, Marmon said, “we’re trapped in this cycle of confrontation, and sooner or later the Barnes goes bankrupt.”

Camp said people are passionate about the Barnes because it is so magnificent and so unique.

“Nobody in the past 50 years has done anything out of malice,” to the Barnes, Camp said. “They’ve just wrapped their arms around it so tightly, they almost choked it to death.”