Nothing like front page news to start your day that affect us in Lower Merion. We are hoping it will be front page news here because what we are about to relay is hugely important!

SAC has told y'all time and time again to pay attention to important meetings that occur close to major holidays....such a meeting occured last night in Philthadelphia, City of Brotherly Murders and Art Collection Poaching. Here is an excerpt of the newspaper article, followed by an open letter to a Fairmount Park Commissioner we received this morning, and ending with Cheryl Allison's article on the Barnes we were going to promote this morning. Lower Merion if you want to keep our art collection in Merion where it belongs, what are you waiting for? Time's a wastin'.

Fairmount Park Commission OKs lease for Barnes museum
By Rita Giordano
Inquirer Staff Writer

The Fairmount Park Commission in a special meeting last night approved a proposed lease that would allow the Barnes Foundation's museum and school to move to Philadelphia.

Now it will be up to the City Council to approve the lease....before the Council ends its session next month.

For a payment of $10, the foundation, now based in Merion, would get a 99-year lease on the site of Youth Study Center on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

.....The lease agreement would set a target date of May 30, 2008, for the city to vacate the site.

Derek Gillman, president of the Barnes Foundation, told the commissioners he hoped to open in Philadelphia by the end of 2009.

On hand for last night's vote were members of the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, Lower Merion officials, and others who staunchly oppose the move.

"Shame on you!" shouted Drexel University history professor Robert Zaller after last night's vote.

During the meeting he testified that moving the late Albert Barnes' priceless collection of masterpieces was "the largest theft of art since World War II."

Jay Raymond of Jenkintown also argued against the move on aesthetic and financial grounds.

"If you vote in favor of this lease, you are giving away an irreplaceable asset of the park for a pittance, the modern equivalent of selling Manhattan for $24," he said.

Barbara Rosen, a landscape painter from Philadelphia, also spoke against the move.

"This diminishes us," she said. "How can Philadelphia claim to be a world class city and do something like this?"

Next is the letter e-mailed this morning (we also received a copy here) - we would also say follow this link to flood Philadelphia City Council with calls as well: http://www.phila.gov/citycouncil/about.html

I read with some dismay in this morning's Inquirer about the Fairmount Park Commission's special meeting last night which approved a proposed lease that would allow the Barnes Foundation's museum and school to move to Philadelphia.

The Barnes Museum is a piece of local history, Lower Merion’s history. I mean no disrespect, but how would you feel if I started a campaign to say, move the Rodin Museum to Bryn Mawr?

You would be appalled. Why? Because the history of the Rodin Museum is in Philadelphia, a landmark on the Parkway.

That is how all of us in Lower Merion feel about the Barnes. The Barnes was created by Dr. Barnes with a specific mission, purpose, and location. To move the collection quite simply flies in the face of what he intended, as well as what was originally stipulated in his will.

As a native Philadelphian, I have adored Philadelphia my entire life. I have admired and cherished the museums, historic homes and architectural heritage and the parks. But the Philadelphia I have come to know as an adult in recent years leaves me full of shame at corrupt politics, back room deals, poor development choices, and a pay to play system that grows worse with each passing year.

I submit to you most respectfully that Philadelphia has too many unresolved issues to be the caretaker of the Barnes museum and world renowned art collection. Philadelphia must once again become good and honest stewards of what is already within the city limits, not poach another community’s treasure because a bunch of misguided well heeled philanthropists and politicians need a project that gives them immortal legacy.

The Main Line and Philadelphia share a special relationship that will be irrevocably broken if the proposed moving of the Barnes comes to full fruition. $10.00 for a 99 year lease is a deal most wouldn’t pass up, except the Barnes Museum where it sits now, owns its own property. So to me, it makes no sense to rent when you already own one of the most gorgeous sites for a museum and art collection ever imagined.

Maybe you can’t help reverse the ill advised decision reached by The Fairmount Park Commission, but I kindly ask you to try.

I am urging every person I know to write , The Pew Charitable Trusts at , The Lenfest Foundation( ) , The Annenberg Foundation ( ), Michael Nutter Candidate for Mayor ( ), contact John Street, The Mayor of Philadelphia( ), and to the Inquirer reporter who broke today’s story, to protest this decision, and the whole ill advised concept of stealing this art collection from Lower Merion Township.

I urge people like yourself to meet with the friends of the Barnes, and a person you can start with is a woman who makes an inordinate amount of sense, Nancy Herman. She and her group can be reached at or via:

Friends of the Barnes Foundation
P.O. Box 35
Merion Station, PA 19066
Tel. (610) 667-0281

Finally, Cheryl Allison's coverage of recent Barnes Friends events:

Barnes move is debated
By:Cheryl Allison 05/24/2007

Give Gresham Riley credit for courage.

The former president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, taking the "pro" position in a debate Monday night on the controversial proposed move of the Barnes Foundation from Merion, faced an audience made up mostly of firmly convinced "cons."

In a nearly two-hour exchange with Robert Zaller, a Drexel history professor and critic of the move, he held firmly to his core point.

That is, that only a relocation to Center City will create "a realistic chance" of implementing Dr. Albert C. Barnes's educational mission in founding the institution. In Riley's view, that mission is making the collection accessible to the "plain people" he mentions in his much-examined will: people "who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories and schools, stores and similar places."

In its bastion in a "posh neighborhood that is not easily accessible," Riley said, "The walls around the collection have grown higher and higher, making it a collection of jewels for a small elite." And that's something about which Barnes, who notoriously held in contempt Philadelphia's elite, would be outraged.

Zaller, on the other hand, said the educational mission and accessibility are in fact a matter of will for the foundation's leadership, not the victims of an "artificial financial crisis" or remote location. "People make it sound as if the Barnes is located somewhere in the Poconos," he said. It could be a short bus ride from Center City art institutions. And Lower Merion officials have already endorsed measures to increase attendance and revenues, to solve any financial shortfalls in place.

On the other hand, Zaller said, the move - even if galleries and installations are recreated in a new, much larger museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway - will irrevocably alter the experience of viewing and studying Barnes's collection in what the painter Henri Matisse famously called "the only sane place to see art in America."

The two men have been staking out their positions for more than a year in the online arts and culture journal, The Broad Street Review. In fact, a fiery essay from Zaller was one of the first submissions, said journalist Dan Rottenberg, when he launched it last year. Riley speedily replied.

But this is the first time, proponents of keeping the Barnes in place pointed out, that a representative of Philadelphia's art establishment has been willing to argue the points of the move in a public forum.