Hidden art of eccentric millionaire
Richard Dorment
THE DEVIL AND DR BARNES: PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN COLLECTOR by Howard Greenfeld
Marian Boyers, £19.95, pp. 306
You may think you know the work of Douanier Rousseau, Renoir, Seurat, Cezanne, Matisse, Soutine and early Picas- so but until you have made your way to the dull Philadelphia suburb of Merion you haven't even begun. The Barnes Founda- tion is one of the most splendid art galleries in the world. Dr Barnes bought pictures on such a scale and with so much discrimina- tion that any attempt to write the history of modern painting without reference to his collection would be to serve the meal without the main course. And he did not confine himself to modern European art: American painting from the first half of this century is superbly represented, and among the old masters there is a wonderful Goya, two Claudes, a great Frans Hals, and a fine Rubens sketch.
Albert Barnes was a figure out of Amer- ican folklore, the last of the patent medi- cine men. He made a fortune before the Great War by wresting the patent for a cure-all called Argyrol away from its inven- tor, then shrewdly marketing it himself. With his first couple of million he began to collect, and did not let up until a 10-ton lorry ploughed into the car he was driving in 1951 — an appropriate end, his enemies noted, for a man who had spent a lifetime figuratively ignoring stop signs.
The Havermeyers, John Quinn, or the Cohen sisters all bought Impressionists and Post-Impressionists but at a relatively stately pace and in fairly digestible por- tions. Barnes was different. He would scour Parisian dealers to snap up a dozen masterpieces in a single afternoon, waving his chequebook in artists' faces, bargaining hard for rock-bottom prices, the very caricature of the crass American mil- lionaire.
But Barnes knew what he was doing and, unlike many others of his kind, he was not after social prestige or position. A true populist, he had a passionate love for painting and a principled belief that art critics and art historians prevent ordinary people from understanding and enjoying art. He also had a mania for imposing his own views on others. As the collection grew in size and importance, he used it as an instrument of aggression to punish anyone whom he himself had not trained to look at pictures by the famous 'Barnes Method'.
This was nothing more exciting than an extreme version of the kind of formalist picture analysis Roger Fry practised. Bar- nes's students were allowed to describe a painting by Cezanne as a yellow oval with areas of green and blue around it, but not as a portrait of Mme Cezanne, which was `unscientific' and 'sentimental'. To this day there is no catalogue of the collection and no labels on the paintings, which drives non-believers like myself stark, staring mad.
During the doctor's lifetime and for many years thereafter the Foundation admitted only those who applied in writing and whom Barnes and his henchmen consi- dered, on the evidence of grubby station- ery or errors of spelling and grammar, to be innocent of the crime of having read about art in books. In practice this meant working-class or black Americans. Art historians did sometimes manage to sneak past — Erwin Panofky in a chauffeur's uniform, A. Hyatt Mayor in kit borrowed from an enlisted man. But only Kenneth Clark was invited to enter by a front door not so much closed to the rest of the art world as noisily slammed in its face.
Though Barnes was crazy, there was a core of wild, pure truth about much of what he preached. One of his doctrines was that colour slides and reproductions distort our experience of seeing real works of art. Well, they do. But it is still ridiculous that so very few paintings from the collection have ever been reproduced in colour. Then, too, the blood freezes to think that these pictures have never received proper conservation. And yet I have to admit that it is thrilling in the late 1980s to view a collection of paintings in the state in which they left Cezanne's or Renoir's studio, or at least as close as we will ever come to see- ing that state — never relined, never lent, and without glass, just where Barnes orig- inally hung them.
Barnes had a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore. His quarrels with Philadelphia's dim establishment were ex- tensively reported in the newspapers be- cause he made a habit of sending reporters copies of his childish and often scatolog!- cally offensive attacks on local personali- ties. He loathed what he called the 'de- butante' world of Philadelphia society, which is perhaps a point in his favour, yet there can be no excuse for his behaviour towards a flock of matrons whom he scat- tered as they sat taking tea with his wife by bursting in on them in the nude.
Howard Greenfeld has found a wonder- ful subject and told his story as well as could be expected without access to the archives (if they exist) of the Barnes Foundation. His life of Barnes is pure journalism, adding a number of anecdotes to what has already been written in pre- vious biographies, but failing to give any sort of context to Barnes's life. Greenfeld has almost nothing substantial to say about American collecting in the 1920s and 30s, and hardly tries to come to grips with the doctor's one real adversary among so many imagined ones: the complex, maddening, snobbish, ungrateful city of Philadelphia itself.
I can add a postscript to Greenfeld's book. In his will Barnes appointed five trustees to run the Foundation as a teaching institution. When any of the original trustees died, the right to name their successor was bequeathed to a local institution called Lincoln University in Brandywine Pennsylvania, the oldest black college in the United States. Last year after this book had already been published in America, the last direct link back to Barnes himself died, well into her nineties. This was his former mistress Violet de Mazia, dominant trustee and head of his foundation. All eyes are now turned to Lincoln University in the hope that a trustee will be named who will encourage greater access to the collections through longer opening hours, better publications, and a limited lending policy.
But that is not all. Recently I was amused and alarmed to learn that sitting right there on the board of the trustees of Lincoln University is one of the most successful and powerful art dealers in New York, Richard Feigen, a man whose disin- terested concern for black higher educa- tion has come as a complete surprise to those who know him only as a foxy businessman. While Barnes's will firmly prohibits the sale of pictures from the collection, it is impossible not to wonder whether Feigen's proximity to the ultimate chicken-coop will not turn out be a case of foresight unparalleled in the history of art dealing.
Richard Dorment is the author of British Painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Weidenfeld, 1986).
Previous page
