Getty Trust: Buy the Barnes

To: Barry Munitz, president and CEO, J. Paul Getty Trust

From: Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times art critic

Re: The Barnes Foundation

I know it’s unusual to be writing you this letter, but a bad cultural situation lately has gotten worse. Now, a disastrous crisis looms. Maybe you can help.

No doubt you are aware of the seemingly intractable woes that lately have befallen the Barnes Foundation, the unique shrine to American pragmatist philosophy in a wealthy suburb 10 miles outside Philadelphia. The school was created around arguably the finest collection of Modern art ever assembled by one individual in our nation’s history. The several hundred paintings by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Matisse and Renoir are its most famous assets, but there also are fine European Old Masters, African sculptures, Pennsylvania Dutch furniture, pre-Columbian objects and more.

Awhile back, after years of mismanagement, the prospect of bankruptcy loomed. The Getty generously pitched in $500,000 (and some management expertise) to help keep the Barnes afloat -- and to buy some time. Maybe locals would figure out a way to save the place. Pennsylvania is a rich state, and in the decades after the country’s founding, Philadelphia even was the art capital of the United States.

Well, it didn’t happen. Management was indeed professionalized, but money was not forthcoming. Instead, vultures began to circle the wounded prey.

So here’s why I’m writing. I have a rescue plan to propose. One that would ensure that an irreplaceable national treasure would remain intact. The Getty should buy the Barnes Foundation and maintain it as it is.

Without such a rescue, its days are numbered. Over the last year or so a coalition of local businessmen, politicians and wealthy charities has launched a scheme to dismantle the Barnes Foundation.

In hopes of aiding Philadelphia’s ailing economy, they want to turn the suburban school into an art museum, to be built in a downtown tourist district after a flashy international competition for an architect. (Yes, the Bilbao Effect.) They know that the general public loves the Impressionists, Picasso and Matisse and that the art is worth billions. So their plan is to remove the staggering collection from the suburban school where the late collector, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, and his trenchant educational advisor, the premier American philosopher John Dewey, carefully installed it early in the 20th century.

This so-called rescue plan actually is a business plan. A national cultural asset is dumped for an urban redevelopment project.

Here’s an analogy: You could take the amazing prehistoric paintings out of the remote caves of Altamira, Spain, move them to a shiny new museum in a depressed Barcelona neighborhood, and I’m sure the tourists would come in droves. The paintings would be more accessible to the general public. Starbucks would open up in the neighborhood. Conventioneers playing hooky from some turgid Power Point demonstration back at the hotel would have something cool to do. But the singular, unforgettable experience of seeing art where it belongs would be forever lost.

Ditto the Barnes. The operation might be a success, but the patient will have died.

Money-wise, a rescue wouldn’t cost the Getty much. Do the math. To dismantle the place, more than a quarter-billion dollars in cash, pledges and public promises have been bandied about. But just $50 million of that is targeted for an endowment to run the new museum. The annual operating cost is less than $4 million, so a $50-million endowment would easily take care of that.

Imagine: That’s actually a little less than the Getty has offered to Britain’s Duke of Northumberland to buy his lovely Raphael painting, “Madonna of the Pinks.” For the price of that one tiny jewel from the Italian Renaissance, you could secure all the masterpieces in the 2,000-work Barnes Foundation!

True, you wouldn’t be moving the Barnes collection to Brentwood. (You might not be getting the Raphael out of England, either -- though I hope you do.) And I’m not exactly sure, legalistically speaking, what it would look like for a charitable trust in one state to acquire one in another state. “Buy” might not be the right term. But the folks who want to dismantle the Barnes have threatened that, if their business plan falls through, the foundation will enter the uncharted waters of Bankruptcy Court, where almost anything seems possible. So surely there’s a way.

Maybe, because the Barnes is not an art museum but a school, it should operate as a program of the Getty Research Institute. The Barnes also owns a huge treasure-trove of documents about the cultural life of the period, when pragmatism emerged as the most influential American idea between the Civil War and the Cold War.

How to make it work

Maybe the rescue could be modeled on the $10-million endowment the Getty is giving to the University of London’s Courtauld Institute -- another debt-laden school with a great art collection. Or perhaps the Barnes should become an independent department of the Getty. The Getty Museum doesn’t collect 20th century paintings, but the umbrella Getty Trust has acquired many contemporary works for the center’s grounds and offices. Why not a satellite?

Figuring out the best fit between the two is just a matter of creative thought and ingenious lawyering -- and I know you have good lawyers.

You also have an incomparable conservation institute, which could take care of the Barnes’ amazing collection. You have long experience operating cultural institutions in residential neighborhoods. And you have a large bureaucratic infrastructure already in place, so adding a few staff as liaison to an outpost in the East should be simple.

Buying the Barnes Foundation also might appeal to Judge Stanley Ott of the Montgomery County Orphans Court. He must sign off on any plan to change the 1951 will left at Barnes’ death. (Hearings are set for December.) Jurists hate to mess with settled wills; it’s bad precedent. Potential benefactors get nervous about what might happen to their own planned bequests, 50 years on.

Those who now want to dismantle the Barnes also have to pretty much dismantle the donor’s entire will to change his bequest into a downtown redevelopment plan. But a Getty rescue would guarantee the Barnes Foundation stays almost entirely intact -- where it is and how it operates -- with only minimal changes to the indenture that established it.

Would this set bad precedent for the Getty? I’m sure others already come to you, hat in hand, asking for salvation. I can think of several precarious projects in L.A. right now that could be secured by some attention from the Getty. But the Barnes is an authentic rarity -- the exception, not the rule.

Once lost, it’s gone forever. True, no roar of opposition to the redevelopment scheme has arisen from colleagues in the institutional art world. But their relative silence is not surprising. Fear breeds silence. The phony “rescue” is funded by three very wealthy philanthropies -- Pew, Annenberg and Lenfest -- and in these cash-strapped times, who wants to alienate them?

The Getty, of course, has no such concerns.

Two years ago you told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If they [the Barnes Foundation] cannot energize the community, the question must be asked: Should they exist?” I know your background is in business and university administration and not in art, but I was shocked. You were referring to the need for local people to get behind a rescue effort, which is important. But the Barnes isn’t some neighborhood art club in need of local boosters; it’s a national treasure, among the most important cultural assets America has created.

Mr. Munitz, you are the Barnes’ community. The Getty Trust is the Barnes’ community. If Pennsylvanians can’t figure out a plan that won’t wreck the place, surely the biggest cultural powerhouse in the United States can.

Can’t you?