How he saw the world

Albert C. Barnes always had very specific ideas about his art collection. He amassed an astonishing cache of paintings, including 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus and 14 Modiglianis, and had a bridge constructed to connect his house to the building that contained them. According to Barnes lore, when he couldn’t sleep he padded across it in his robe and slippers and tweaked the arrangement of his treasures.

Today the artworks and other objects in the gallery are positioned exactly as he left them the day he died in an automobile accident in 1951. The question is whether they will remain that way much longer.

The fate of the Barnes Foundation, the bankrupt organization that oversees the art collection and affiliated educational programs, is in the hands of Judge Stanley Ott. He is weighing a proposal from the foundation to overturn Barnes’ will and move the multibillion-dollar collection from this wealthy residential community to downtown Philadelphia, about 10 miles away. Hearings began Monday at the Montgomery County Orphans’ Court in Norristown. A decision is expected soon.

Meanwhile in Merion, at the idyllic enclave that has housed the 9,000 artworks since 1925, it’s business as usual -- with all its storied eccentricities.

Three days a week the foundation opens its doors to 400 visitors who have made reservations weeks or months in advance. Access to the collection has always been limited, first by Barnes, who welcomed students but turned away arts professionals, and later by zoning restrictions imposed in response to neighbors’ traffic concerns. Last weekend, as an early winter storm blanketed the 12-acre estate in snow, a trickle of people made their way to the gatehouse to pick up their prepaid $5 tickets from a blond woman in a bright red coat.

Down a paved walkway, visitors enter the stately gallery through double doors flanked by white columns and follow orders to check their coats and deposit other belongings in lockers. Stripped down for the Barnes experience and equipped with $7 audio tours, they plunge into the world of an extraordinary contrarian.

The French Impressionist and Postimpressionist works are only the most spectacular part of a global melange of fine art and decorative objects, displayed in a precise -- but extremely idiosyncratic -- order. Taken as a whole, it embodies the vision of a collector who detested mainstream art museums but passionately believed in art as an educational tool that could cure social injustice.

A self-made man who lived from 1872 to 1951 and amassed a fortune from pharmaceuticals, Barnes began collecting when he was about 40 and established his foundation 10 years later to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine art.” Early on, his high school classmate, painter William Glackens, helped him purchase artworks in Europe. Barnes also learned a lot from philosopher John Dewey, the foundation’s first director of education. They met in 1917, when Barnes took a seminar with Dewey at Columbia University, and developed a lifelong friendship. But the art collection, as well as the philosophy behind its presentation, are distinctly Barnes’ creation.

He and his wife, Laura, purchased the site for the gallery in the early 1920s and commissioned architect Paul-Philippe Cret, a French-educated architect and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to design a large building to accommodate the collection and a smaller dwelling, connected by a bridge on the second floor.

Visitors find an elegant gallery with high, white ceilings, arched windows and wood moldings. The walls are covered with burlap-like fabric; the floors are marble or oak parquet. Each floor of the gallery has a long, rectangular showcase in the center, flanked on each end by six smaller rooms.

If the Barnes Foundation’s collection consisted of only the central room on the first floor, it would still attract art pilgrims. In 1931 Matisse created a buoyant mural of dancing figures for the spaces above the windows. On the walls below are large, signature canvases by Seurat, Cezanne and Renoir, and smaller paintings by a dozen other artists. They fill walls in symmetrical clusters and hang above doorways. Between and above the paintings are examples of Barnes’ huge collection of European metalwork, including hinges, locks, forks and tongs.

The mix of styles, periods, media and cultures becomes much more eclectic in the other galleries. Furniture joins the fray. Early 17th century paintings by El Greco sidle up to avant-garde 20th century pieces. Whimsically decorated Pennsylvania Dutch chests of drawers team up with juicy French Impressionist canvases and simple pewter vessels.

Matisse’s trademark painting, “Joy of Life,” perhaps the most celebrated work in the collection, is in a stairwell leading to a balcony full of Navajo blankets and African sculpture. In some of the most cluttered rooms, visitors find cases of small objects from Greece, Rome, Syria, Africa and Egypt and walls teeming with everything from Chinese ink paintings and medieval French illuminated manuscripts to Paul Klee’s watercolors.

Barnes wanted people to look at these objects with fresh eyes, so there are no labels or text panels. The only way to determine titles, dates or artists’ names is to consult handout diagrams of each gallery wall -- which aren’t always accurate -- or listen to the Barnes gospel on the audio guide.

The recorded information makes it clear that Barnes viewed each piece in his collection as part of an aesthetic scheme. To him, the placement of each item and its relationship to its neighbors was almost as important as the work itself. Barnes was acutely conscious of how the shapes of metal implements complement nearby paintings. He was also intensely aware of color relationships. His wasn’t a case of choosing paintings to match the furniture, but he used individual pieces to build a vast composition.

And he wasn’t above improving upon the art when he found it lacking. Barnes “corrected defects,” as the audio guide puts it, by strategically placing weak pieces next to stronger ones. In one such case, he thought the red skirt worn by a woman in a small canvas by Renoir helped to fill a void in a larger painting of a washerwoman and child by Manet. The arrangement isn’t easy for those accustomed to viewing art displayed chronologically or thematically. But after awhile, many visitors pick up on the rationale, peculiar as it may be. Before long, it doesn’t seem crazy to notice that the sweep of a Windsor chair’s arms echo the voluptuous bodies of Renoir’s nudes, or that the curved forms of a pair of metal candlesticks recur in a Miro abstraction. Whatever one makes of this, it’s clear that Barnes was an artist of sorts, as well as a collector.

And that is part of what’s at stake in the current court proceedings. If the judge decides the foundation may move the collection to a new yet-to-be-built locale in central Philadelphia, many more people will have an opportunity to see the artworks. But the next question looms: How will the collection be presented?

At this point, everyone in the art world has an opinion. Some believe Barnes’ arrangement is untenable. Many others fear that, in the process of saving the financially strapped foundation, an eccentric institution may disappear.

“I think there’s a value to understanding that tastes in collecting change,” says Selma Holo, an art historian and museum specialist who teaches at USC. “Going to the Barnes allows us to see through the eyes of another sensibility -- one that has gone out of fashion, but that still encourages us to see newly, which is what the experience of art is about for me.”