January 13-19, 2005

slant

What Would Alfred Do?

The Barnes belongs in Philadelphia.

by Steve Conn

It's payback time. After a half-century of watching the suburbs steal money, jobs and population from the city, Philadelphia, thanks to the recent ruling by a Montgomery County Orphans Court judge, is going to swipe Alfred Barnes' multibillion-dollar collection of art from Lower Merion and bring it to The Parkway, the cultural heart of the region.

In the weeks since Judge Ott issued his ruling, there has been quite a bit of public lamenting by those who don't want the Barnes to change. At all. Ever. The gist of these lamentations seems to be that Alfred Barnes' "legacy" will now be lost, that the Barnes will never be the same, and by implication the new Barnes will be something less than it is now.

But what exactly is this "legacy" that the vandals at the Pew, Lenfest and Annenberg Foundations have trashed? What, exactly, will now be irretrievably lost when the paintings move from Latches Lane to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway?

Alfred Barnes had an extraordinary eye for painting. That much is irrefutable. What is equally irrefutable is that as an institution-builder, he was inept. Indeed, the Barnes Foundation found itself in court in part because of the bizarre restrictions he placed on its endowment investments. One only has to compare the financial fate of the Barnes with that of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston to see what a difference good financial strategy can make. Is this part of his "legacy" that we ought to preserve, too?

Those who insist that the intimacy and charm of viewing the paintings on Latches Lane will vanish ought to remember that Barnes never wanted you to see them at all. It took a court case back in the '50s to get the foundation to open up to the public at all, and then only for limited hours and for limited numbers. In the old days, Barnes himself allegedly kept a "blacklist" of art historians, collectors and assorted others who were forbidden from ever crossing the threshold. Were we to respect Barnes' wishes, only students in art appreciation classes would ever see those paintings.

Furthermore, back in the good ol' days, those who taught the classes apparently took paintings off the walls and put them on the floor so that students could get a better look. Does anyone really think that was a good idea?

Most bizarre is the argument that this art can only be appreciated if it remains exactly as Barnes left it. I fully acknowledge that the unusual way Barnes hung his paintings created wonderful and unexpected juxtapositions. At the same time, however, this line of reasoning suggests that the paintings themselves would be diminished if they were displayed in any other way, that different arrangements or contexts wouldn't make us see new things that we haven't seen before.

It is an argument, frankly, that cheapens the art Barnes collected to insist that only his vision of how the pieces should be displayed makes them come alive.

These lamentations about moving the Barnes strike me as a misplaced kind of nostalgia masquerading as high principle. Museums do and must change all the time. They alter their missions, they rearrange their collections, they put some things in the basement, only to rediscover those same objects again in some other generation.

In 1888, George Brown Goode, then running the Smithsonian, told an audience that museums had to become "nurseries of living thoughts" and warned that, without change, museums risked becoming "cemeteries of bric-a-brac."

The Barnes has been strangled by the dead hand of its founder reaching from beyond the grave, and it risked becoming a mausoleum for him. In the end, moving the Barnes isn't only about money or tourists but about turning a dying institution into, in Goode's phrase, a house of living ideas. In a new location it won't be the same Barnes. And that is exactly the point.

Steve Conn is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. If you would like to respond to this Slant or submit one of your own (800 words), contact Duane Swierczynski, City Paper editor in chief, 123 Chestnut St., Third Floor, Phila., Pa., 19106 or e-mail Duane Swierczynski.