Barnes Museum Moves Downtown
Philadelphia City Council Approves Lease to Famous Art Collection
The saga of the Barnes Foundation and their new museum to be built on Museum Row in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, moves forward as the Philly City Council approves a lease.
On June 5, 2007, the Philadelphia City Council voted to move the famous Barnes art collection to a space on Museum Row in Philly. The land will be leased at $10 a year, and the Barnes will build a new museum to house its priceless collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings and quirky artifacts.
The powerful and stubborn art collector, Albert Barnes placed some unusual restrictions on the art collection that bears his name. Barnes did not want his paintings reproduced in full color. Even black and white reproductions were allowed very stingily because Barnes maintained the belief that to sell his religion as art, people needed to come to the church, or, art museum. And his museum was in his beautiful estate with wide and elegant gardens, all meant to be a lush and invigorating environment in which to experience art and the funky taste of Albert Barnes.
The saga of the Barnes Foundation and the collection has been played out in the media for years, with several factions all tugging the collection in several directions. What has made the Barnes collection the object of much controversy may be its size, breadth, and vision of its Art – and I do mean Art with a capital A. The Barnes collection is a large, quality art collection, and undoubtedly one of the best in the world: It is worth fighting over.
Barnes was one of the first American collectors of the most exquisite and painterly Chaim Soutine. He also collected Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Rousseau, De Chirico, Dégas, Seurat, Manet and Monet. Barnes also collected unusual bits of Americana from Indian rugs to Pennsylvania German ceramics, to antique iron hardware. There is also work from Charles Demuth, William Glackens, Maurice and Charles Prendergrast, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens and Titian. He was also one of the first Americans to collect and pay attention to African art.
Barnes’ eclectic taste sprang from his idea that art shared similar qualities and an aesthetic across time and culture. In the old Barnes Museum, Barnes himself spent countless hours planning, arranging, and rearranging his amazing collection into “wall ensembles” that combined works of art that he deemed to have similar aesthetic qualities or themes. So paintings might be displayed next to ancient iron hinges, and Pennsylvania Dutch ceramics could hang with a Navajo rug. The juxtapositions of objects and cultures created a wonderul sensory experience, though the quantity of items could be visually quite exhausting to try to digest.
Let’s hope the new museum will combine some of the charm of Barnes’ original vision of wall ensembles that create visual diversity, and visual similarities simultaneously. Museum Row in Philadelphia includes the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum. The addition of the Barnes Museum adds to the city's already enormous cache of cultural wealth, and will enable this extraordinary collection to be seen by more people than ever.
