The Barnes isn't a museum
Confusion about the basic nature of the foundation lies at the heart of the continuing dispute over its move from suburb to city.
By Seymour I. "Spence" Toll
If the New York Times doesn't understand what the Barnes Foundation is, it's no wonder countless others don't. In a recent article, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff called the Barnes "one of the country's most beloved and quirky museums," comparing it to two other actual museums, the Getty Villa in Los Angeles and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
But the fact is that since its creation in 1922, the Barnes has always been a school, not a museum.
After years of litigation that led to the Barnes collection's pending move from Merion to Philadelphia, a new round in the dispute is under way with court-ordered briefings. That raises fresh hope for those of us who believe transferring the incomparable collection to Philadelphia's heavily trafficked "museum mile," on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, will destroy an American cultural treasure.
Proponents of the move promise the new facility will evoke the arrangement of pictures and objects in the Barnes' current suburban setting. That's like saying the experience of the Statue of Liberty wouldn't be altered by a move from New York Harbor to Tampa Bay.
I have been gratefully aware of the singular cultural contribution of Albert C. Barnes through occasional visits to the beautiful Merion campus for more than a half-century. And despite its deservedly acclaimed collection of art, I have always thought of that contribution the way Barnes perceived it.
Closely collaborating with the American philosopher John Dewey, Barnes wanted the foundation to be a school in which Dewey's thought would be used to teach students to understand and appreciate art. Dewey saw the foundation as "one of the most important educational acts, one of the most profound educational deeds, of the age in which we are living."
Thus, for nearly 90 years, those fabled paintings and objects have not been on passive display in a museum. They have been used as priceless teaching materials in a remarkable school for generations of Barnes Foundation art students.
One of those students was my dear late wife, Jean, who was ever grateful to have studied at the Barnes in the 1960s. A history major with a graduate degree in literature, Jean was a longtime volunteer parent leader in the Lower Merion school and library systems as the mother of our four daughters. I cite that background to suggest her respect for excellence in education. It's fair to call it a passion.
The art education she acquired at the Barnes was a major academic experience for her. She was so moved by it that I would have appreciated it if she had told me only once, but this is an example of the preservative power of repetition: If you hear something frequently enough, you won't forget it. Thanks to Jean, I learned and can never forget that the Barnes is indeed a school and not a museum.
On any day that she went to her Barnes art class, I would come home to find her raving about what had happened there. Not only was she receiving a brilliant new kind of education, but she was also teaching me to see and judge art in ways she had never known.
One recurring detail was proof that this was in fact a school. In class after class, the teacher's working materials were paintings that had been taken off the walls and carefully propped against supports on the floor. The teacher was using them for intricately instructive analyses, and students were seated and standing close enough to the paintings to get a detailed view and understanding.
What had been propped up on the floor were paintings by such masters as Renoir, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Monet. Doing this in a school is an ideal use of extraordinary teaching materials; doing it in a museum would have been unthinkable.
The Barnes' restricted visiting hours also prove that it is no museum. To honor and protect its mission as a school, the foundation could not allow the kind of visitor traffic that is the lifeblood of any museum. So it was essential that public access to it be restricted. That's why Barnes insisted on that arrangement, and that's how I learned to respect the fact that I couldn't see the pictures whenever I wanted to.
Even though the Barnes collection is currently headed there, that's why it doesn't belong on Philadelphia's museum mile. May the litigation end with the Barnes collection staying where it belongs - in its school in Merion.