| Albert C. Barnes | |
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Albert C. Barnes in 1940 |
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| Born | January 2, 1872 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | July 24, 1951 (aged 79) Phoenixville, Pennsylvania |
| Cause of death | Traffic collision |
| Residence | Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania |
| Known for | inventor and art collector |
Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 – July 24, 1951) was an American chemist and art collector. With the fortune made from the development of the antiseptic, gonorrhea drug Argyrol, he founded the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution based on his private collection of art. It is strongly represented by paintings by Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modernist masters, as well as furniture and crafted objects. It is located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Barnes was known as an eccentric figure who had a passion for educating the underprivileged. He created a special relationship with Lincoln University, a historically black college in the area, and gave the university a strong role in administration of his foundation. It selected candidates for four of the five original trustee seats.
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Barnes was born in Philadelphia to working-class parents. His father had been a butcher before the Civil War (American) where he lost his right arm in at the Battle of Cold Harbor and became a letter carrier.[1] His mother was a devout Methodist who took Barnes to African-American camp meetings and revivals.[1]
He earned a spot at the public academic Central High School in Philadelphia. Barnes helped put himself through the University of Pennsylvania by tutoring, boxing, and playing semi-professional baseball. At age 20, he was a medical doctor.[1]
In 1899 with a German chemist named Hermann Hille, Barnes developed a mild silver nitrate antiseptic solution, marketed as Argyrol. Used in the treatment of gonorrhea and as a preventative of gonorrheal blindness in newborn infants, Argyrol was an immediate financial success.[2] Barnes proved adept at running the business: he convinced Hille not to patent Argyrol to prevent it from being stolen by competitors, he marketed directly to physicians, and took his product abroad.[1] Within five years of starting the business in 1902, the firm cleared $250,000 in profits (roughly $5.8 million today).[1]
Barnes bought out Hille and became a millionaire in the 1900s by the age of 35. In July 1929, Barnes sold his business for a reported sum of $6 million. The move was well timed, he sold before the 1929 stock market crash and the antibiotic age that started during World War II.[1][2]
From about 1910, when he was in his late 30s, Barnes began to dedicate himself to the study and pursuit of art. He commissioned one of his former high school classmates, the painter William Glackens, to buy several 'modern' French paintings for him. In 1911, Barnes gave Glackens $20,000 to buy paintings for him in Paris.[1] Glackens returned from Paris with the 20 paintings that formed the core of Barnes' collection.[3]
In 1912, during a stay in Paris, Barnes was invited to the home of Gertrude and Leo Stein, where he met artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. In the 1920s, the art dealer Paul Guillaume introduced him to the work of Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, and Chaim Soutine among others. With money, an excellent eye, and the poor economic conditions during the Great Depression, Barnes was able to acquire much important art at bargain prices. "Particularly during the Depression," Barnes said, "my specialty was robbing the suckers who had invested all their money in flimsy securities and then had to sell their priceless paintings to keep a roof over their heads."
For example, in 1913, Barnes acquired Picasso's Peasants and Oxen for $300—about $6500 in 2010—and he picked up dozens more canvasses for a dollar apiece. He paid a mere $4000 for The Joy of Life. According to biographer, John Anderson, the most Barnes ever paid for a painting was $100,000.[1]
Barnes's collection grew to house 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris—as well as 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, and an astonishing 181 Renoirs. The 2,500 items in the collection include major works by (among others) Rousseau, Modiggliani, Soutine, Seurat, Degas, and van Gogh. The entire collection is estimated today to be worth between $20 and $30 billion.[1] Although John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were vastly wealthier than Albert Barnes, the Barnes Foundation has assets 10 to 20 times greater than either the Carnegie Corporation or the Rockefeller Corporation.[1]
Barnes was known for his antagonism to the discipline of art history, which he said "stifles both self-expression and appreciation of art." He was an outspoken and controversial critic of public education and the museum. He set up his foundation to allow visitors to have a direct, even "hands-on", approach to the collection. He created it, he said, not for the benefit of art historians, but for that of the students.[4]
In 1925, the Barnes Foundation opened its doors as an educational institution, not a museum. It was housed in an estate in Lower Merion. The Barnes Collection was arranged in a new building designed by Paul-Philippe Cret, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts.[1]
In 1923 a public showing of Barnes' collection proved that it was too avant-garde for most people's taste at the time. The critics ridiculed the show, prompting Barnes' long-lasting and well-publicized antagonism toward those he considered part of the art establishment. For example, he informed Edith Powell of the Philadelphia Public Ledger that she would never be a real art critic until she had relations with the ice man.[1]
Barnes had his collection hung according to his own ideas about showing relationships between paintings and objects; for instance, paintings were placed near furniture and finely crafted medieval, Renaissance and Early American hinges and metalwork. The pieces were identified in a minimal manner, without traditional curatorial comment, so that viewers could approach them without mediation.
Barnes' interests included what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance, and he followed its artists and writers. In March 1925 Barnes wrote an essay "Negro Art and America", published in the Survey Graphic of Harlem, which was edited by Alain Locke.[5] He explained his admiration of what could be called 'black soul'. In the late 1940s Barnes met Horace Mann Bond, the first black president of Lincoln University, a historically black college in central Chester County, Pennsylvania. They established a friendship that led to Barnes' inviting Lincoln students to the collection. He also ensured by his will that officials of the university had a prominent role after his death in running his collection.
Barnes limited access to the collection, and required people to make appointments by letter. Applicants sometimes received rejection letters "signed" by Barnes's dog, Fidèle-de-Port-Manech. In a famous case, Barnes refused admission to writer James A. Michener, who gained access to the collection only by posing as an illiterate steelworker.[6] In another, Barnes turned down T.S. Eliot's request with a one-word answer: "Nuts."[1]
It was not until 1961 that the collection was open to the public regularly two days a week. That schedule expanded slightly in 1967.[7] Up through the early 1990s, long after Barnes's death, access to the collection was extremely limited, and the foundation restricted the reproduction in color of many works, so they could only be seen in person. The collection had difficulties raising enough money from attendees to provide for needed renovations to its building, as well as regular operating expenses. The Foundation decided to send 80 works to be exhibited on a three-year tour to raise money for needed renovations.[7] The paintings and other works attracted huge crowds in numerous cities.
Because of these restrictions, many people never saw works that were part of the "conversation" of artists and history. For example, the critic Hilton Kramer wrote of Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre: "owing to its long sequestration in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, which never permitted its reproduction in color, it is the least familiar of modern masterpieces. Yet this painting was Matisse's own response to the hostility his work had met with in the Salon d'Automne of 1905."[8]
The Foundation became embroiled in controversy due to a financial crisis in the 1990s, partially related to longstanding restrictions on public access resulting from its location in a residential neighborhood. After a court challenge and resolution of legal issues, the gallery holdings are to be relocated from Lower Merion to a new building sited in Philadelphia on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, for enhanced public access; the opening is scheduled for 2012.[9]
Barnes and his wife Laura purchased an 18th-century estate in West Pikeland Township, Pennsylvania, and named it "Ker-Feal" (Breton for “House of Fidèle”) after their favorite dog. Barnes had brought the dog home from Brittany during an art-buying trip to France.[10] Barnes died on 24 July 1951, in an automobile crash.[11] Driving from Ker-Feal to Merion, he failed to stop at a stop sign and was hit broadside by a truck near Phoenixville. He was killed instantly.[12][13]
Barnes wrote several books that explained his theory of art aesthetics: The Art in Painting, The French Primitives and Their Forms, The Art of Renoir, The Art of Henri-Matisse, The Art of Cézanne. The last four books were co-authored with Violette de Mazia. Barnes co-authored Art and Education with Dewey, Buermeyer, Mullen, and deMazia.
Having watched the Philadelphia Museum of Art take control of the collection of his late lawyer, John Johnson, Barnes tried to prevent the same from happening to his collection. The Foundation's Indenture of Trust and other documents provide that the Barnes Foundation was to remain an educational institution, open to the public only two to three days a week. His art collection, furthermore, could never be loaned or sold; it was to stay on the walls of the foundation in exactly the places they were at the time of his death.[11] After court cases, as of 2010, the Barnes collection was being relocated from Lower Merion to a new public museum in Philadelphia, near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an establishment Barnes detested.[14]
The 2009 documentary film The Art of the Steal tells the story of Barnes' collection and the legal challenges to its staying in Lower Merion.
Barnes was responsible for financially rescuing the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell in the 1940s. Russell was living in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer of 1940, short of money and unable to earn an income from journalism or teaching. Barnes, who had himself been rebuffed by the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, had been impressed by Russell's battles with the Establishment, and invited Russell to teach philosophy at his Foundation. Russell invited Barnes to his cabin in Lake Tahoe, and managed to secure a contract to teach for five years on a salary of $6,000, subsequently raised to $8,000 in order that Russell could give up his other teaching duties.[15] Russell was contracted to give one lecture a week on the history of Western philosophy, which later became the basis of his best-selling book History of Western Philosophy.
The two men later fell out after Barnes was offended by the apparently snobbish behaviour of Russell's wife Patricia, who insisted on calling herself 'Lady Russell'.[16] Barnes wrote to Russell, saying 'when we engaged you to teach we did not obligate ourselves to endure forever the trouble-making propensities of your wife',[17] and looked for excuses to dismiss Russell. In 1942, when Russell agreed to give weekly lectures at the Rand School of Social Science, Barnes dismissed him for breach of contract, claiming that the offer of the extra $2,000 was conditional upon his exclusively teaching at the Foundation.[18] Russell sued for loss of $24,000 (the amount owed for the remaining three years of the contract), and in August 1943 was awarded $20,000 – the amount owed less $4,000, which the court expected Russell to be able to earn from public lectures for the remaining three years.