Albert Barnes was a working class kid from Philadelphia who worked his way through medical school by boxing. After making millions of dollars in pharmaceuticals, he began collecting modern European paintings when many American critics still condemned the new art as degenerate or degraded. In 1922 he established the Barnes Foundation to house the collection. It was not a sterile, white walled museum, but an elegant mansion with wall-to-wall Renoirs, Matisses, Picassos and van Goghs.
Always a fighter, Barnes was a New Dealer who despised the right-wing oligarchy governing his hometown and was determined that his collection would never fall into the hands of the Philadelphia Art Museum, the cultural sandbox of the local elite. His will stipulated that the Barnes Collection could never be moved, loaned or sold, and was intended not for public display but for the education of art students.
Don Argotts documentary The Art of the Steal is a story of how Barnes will was busted by the descendents of the oligarchs that hated himin league with an icky collection of glad-handlers, swindlers, overpaid professional do-gooders and civic boosters. According to the film, out now on DVD, several of Americas most powerful charitable foundations conspired with state and local politicians in what amounted to a hostile takeover of the Barnes Foundation. The argument they advanced that the Barnes Foundation was insolvent appears fallacious. Their assertion that one of the worlds greatest modern art collectionsthe envy of MOMA and the Louvreshould not be hidden away in a suburban mansion but placed in a downtown museum has more weight. But as many of the moves critics point out, the Barnes Collection was a unique cultural edifice, a thumb in the eye of the McCulture Industry. Matisse, in fact, called it the only sane place to see art in America.
Alas, the big players won and the art Barnes purchased with such astuteness will be housed in a bland new buildinganother culture mallscheduled to open in 2012. Whether or not you agree that this is the greatest art theft since the Nazis pillaged Europe, or an act of cultural vandalism, think about this: the victory over Barnes shows that the dead can have no control over their legacy if powerful forces want to grab the goods. Have wills been reduced to mere scraps of paper?
