The Art of The Art of the Steal

The Barnes debacle hits the big screen.

by Sam Adams

Evan M. Lopez

The Toronto International Film Festival is not, as a rule, where movies go to get discovered. It's a place where world-renowned auteurs debut their latest works and studio prestige projects start their Oscar runs. But last fall, amid the discussion of Cannes prize-winners and movie-star vehicles, the chatter turned to The Art of the Steal. In theater seats and waiting lines, and in the knots of critics and journalists that form just outside press screenings, people were talking about the hitherto unknown documentary about the Barnes Foundation, and its planned move from Lower Merion to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

It's doubtful any Philadelphian with a passing interest in art needs a refresher on the controversy, but to many at Toronto, the very existence of the Barnes' peerless collection of Impressionist masterworks was a revelation. The astonishment that this trove of masterpieces by Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir, Picasso and many others lay only a few miles outside one of the nation's largest cities and yet remained relatively unknown was matched by a sense of urgency that time to see it in its original location was running out fast.

Over the course of Toronto's 10 days, you could hear the conversations about The Art of the Steal growing more frequent and more intense, as if someone were steadily turning up the volume. Like the Barnes itself, the movie felt like a secret that thousands of people had discovered on their own. Thom Powers, Toronto's documentary programmer, recalls the "electricity" of early screenings. "You immediately saw it rippling through the industry," he says. "The whole marketplace was so depressed, and to see an old-fashioned buying frenzy start to pop up around this film was significant." (The film was eventually acquired by IFC, which is releasing the film in theaters and on demand this week.) The advance buzz was strong enough to convince the Barnes Foundation's president and executive director, Derek Gillman, to fly up and see the film himself.

Devotees of Albert C. Barnes, the self-made millionaire who organized the collection according to his own unusual theories, say that removing it from its current home would destroy the experience Barnes devoted his life to creating. Proponents of the relocation, which is scheduled to be completed by 2012, say that the Foundation's location in a suburban residential neighborhood poses insurmountable challenges to its economic viability, and that moving it to a stone's throw from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is the only way to ensure its continued existence. There is little question that moving the collection expressly violates the terms of Barnes' will, as well as his lifelong antipathy to what he saw as the hopelessly snobbish and aesthetically backward Philadelphia establishment. The question is whether moving the collection is a rescue mission or the desecration of a prescient collector's life's work.

The two sides are hardly evenly matched. The anti-move contingent is composed of a small but fervent group of activists, many of them organized under the banner Friends of the Barnes, while those in favor include the Foundation's current board, heavy-hitting foundations like Pew and Lenfest, and both the mayor's and governor's offices, which tout the Parkway Barnes as a sizeable tourist draw. With court rulings against them and ground broken at the new site, those who want to preserve the Barnes in situ seem to be fighting a lost cause. But the debate, particularly as focused in The Art of the Steal, stirs up a host of pressing questions, on matters ranging from the durability of charitable bequests to the place of intimate and idiosyncratic museums in a culture dominated by traveling mega-exhibits and the underlying assumption that more is always better.

Lenny Feinberg, the former student of the Barnes' art education programs who financed The Art of the Steal, paints it as a conflict between those who feel that art is something you have to work to understand and those who tout accessibility, which he equates with disposability, as their highest goal.

"You've got some of the greatest minds of the last 100 years on those walls," Feinberg says. "Picasso, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, Soutine: They're names that used to mean something. When they were on those walls, you could get the depth of what they were telling you, if you made the effort, if you put the time in. Now all they're going to be is names that divorced parents can tell their little kids to look at on the weekends they have them."

Neal Santos "The first call that we made was to the Barnes Foundation," says director Don Argott. "The decision not to take part is on them."

There is no shortage of Philadelphia residents with strong opinions about where the Barnes Collection belongs, but Don Argott and Sheena Joyce were not among them. As the director and producer of the 2005 documentary Rock School — and two-thirds of 9.14 Pictures, which also includes their editor, Demian Fenton — the couple thought of themselves as documentary storytellers, which didn't lend itself to wading into the thicket of arguments and counterarguments, lawsuits and political intrigue that make up the Barnes saga.

After Rock School, which followed a group of local kids through the Paul Green School of Rock, and Two Days in April, a little-seen documentary about the NFL draft for Netflix's Red Envelope Productions, they were looking for their next subject when they got a call from Feinberg, a Main Line real estate investor who was looking to move into film financing. After a few connections he had tapped out, Feinberg took the direct approach, which led him to 9.14.

"I went to Borders, picked up a book about documentary filmmaking, and saw they had a local phone number," Feinberg recalls. "So I gave them a call."

A straight-talking type who plainly loves a good argument, Feinberg was looking for filmmakers to make a documentary about the Barnes. But his investment came with strings attached, conditions that caused at least one director to decline. He wanted to be involved in every aspect of the film, from preproduction through editing.

"I made it clear with the filmmakers in interviews that I would be hands-on in every aspect, which is just the way I felt about this story," Feinberg says. "I wasn't just the guy who was writing a check. I know that's not the way it's normally done, but I didn't give a damn. Don said, 'Hey, man, it's your money. You can do whatever you want.' Other people just wanted me to fund them and go away."

Rather than balk at Feinberg's contributions, Argott and Joyce say they welcomed an additional point of view, no matter how firm. "From our first film to this one, we've had some amazing arguments in the editing room," Joyce says. "It makes for a better film."

Neal Santos

Although he checked in only periodically during the invariably tedious editing process, Feinberg says he was involved with production on a day-to-day basis, poring over the list of questions for interview subjects and even asking his own once Joyce had finished with the primary interview.

Feinberg's intimate involvement, and his forthright opposition to the Barnes move, furnishes ammunition to those who paint The Art of the Steal as a work of advocacy. Derek Gillman, who like all of the Barnes staff turned down repeated requests to be interviewed for the film, says he was convinced early on that the film was going to be biased, and there was nothing to be gained by representing the Foundation's current point of view on camera. He cites in particular a "distasteful" e-mail regarding a former member of the Barnes' staff, declining to provide further details. "I think certainly from my point of view, my decision not to participate and to make clear to others who were asked why I wouldn't came about from seeing that particular communication."

After checking her records, Joyce says the e-mail in question surfaced two weeks after the filmmakers had been told the Barnes would not participate in the film, and that was after months of being "strung along."

"The first call that we made was to the Barnes Foundation," Argott says. "The decision not to take part is on them. I think they really didn't think much of us, and I think over the years they've been able to pretty much get away with whatever they wanted to do. The bottom line is I think they grossly underestimated us and this film."

It's doubtful anyone could have anticipated the reaction The Art of the Steal met with last fall, vaulting ahead of much higher-profile titles in Toronto coverage, prompting a five-part write-up on Time magazine's Web site, selling out the capacious Alice Tully Hall at the New York Film Festival and prompting an additional screening, the first in the NYFF's history.

Argott and Joyce don't necessarily dispute the claim that the film is one-sided, in part because they could find only a handful of people to endorse the move on camera. As "character-driven" filmmakers, they structured the film in such a way as to make Albert Barnes the main character, and it's not hard to guess how he would have felt about it. "There might be two sides to the story, but more often than not there's right and wrong involved," Argott says. "If there are things that have gone on that are wrong, it's not one-sided because we're trying to make it one-sided."

Feinberg admits that the Barnes' current location poses a mild set of challenges, but he doesn't see that as a drawback. "Is it more of an effort to go there than to go to the Parkway? Probably. But people seem to make the effort and find it. It's not a secret. If I were a superficial museum-goer, I don't know if I would have found it. And I don't know if that's bad."

Regardless of how objective The Art of the Steal is or isn't, its one unequivocal effect has been to spread word of the Barnes' existence to untold numbers of people who come away with a feverish desire to experience it — something both sides can endorse. "The end result of this film is that tens of thousands of people are going to become curious about the Barnes Collection for the first time," says Powers, the Toronto programmer. "The people who are in for some criticisms in the film ultimately are going to be the beneficiaries of it."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Art of the Steal opens Fri., Feb. 26 at Ritz Five. See Shaun Brady's review.