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Also this issue: Paperback Riders Industry Standard Tabloid Sensation Hanging in the Balance Telling the Truth Twists of Fate Highway to Art Weathering the Storm |
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May 29-June 4, 2003
books
As it appears more and more likely that the venerable Barnes collection will find a new home on the Parkway, a new book, Art Held Hostage: The Battle Over the Barnes Collection (W.W. Norton), makes a very timely entrance. John Anderson, a lawyer and American historian, brings us the whole sordid tale. (The author has a thing for Philly controversies: In 1990, he co-wrote Burning Down the House, an account of the MOVE bombing and subsequent investigations.) Anderson details all of Barnes Foundation president Richard Glanton’s perceived missteps during his brief but high-profile tenure: the cash-cow 1993 world tour of French impressionist paintings collected by scientist and businessman Albert C. Barnes over the course of his life (and which he specifically mandated not be moved or rearranged after his death); the lawsuit against the Foundation’s Merion neighbors over the construction of a parking lot; and the mere thought of deaccessioning a Renoir or two to balance the books. By the end, the foundation was in financial disarray. Old man Barnes, Anderson and others in the book assert, would turn in his grave.
Anderson posits his book not as a biography of the man or a definitive history of the Foundation but as an examination of the way altruistic estate planning can get derailed in a few short years. First, there's the mind-boggling collection of Matisses, Cézannes and Picassos amassed by Barnes, the son of a butcher, who went on to graduate from Penn with a degree in medicine. Then there's his sudden death and surprise bequest of the collection to Lincoln University. The climax, the bitter racial, political and legal battles of the 1990s under the leadership of Glanton, follows, and finally the denouement, the foundation's apparent rise from the ashes, with the seemingly steady hand of current Barnes director Kimberly Camp at the helm. While Anderson's prose can be muddled and the legal back-and-forth a bit dreary, Art Held Hostage is a thorough primer on the Barnes brouhaha and a juicy prelude to the dramas that would surely accompany the trek of those priceless paintings from the Main Line to Museum Way. It is, or should be, after all, about the paintings. As Camp says toward the end of the book, "The collection is too good to be punished by personalities."
John Anderson reads Thu., May 29, 6 p.m., Borders, Broad and Chestnut sts., 215-568-7400, and Mon., June 2, 7:30 p.m., Barnes & Noble, 720 Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-520-0355.
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