The Barnes Belongs In Merion: Update July 24,2007

Submitted by SaveArdmoreCoalition on Tue, 2007-07-24 12:10.

Ok, so the Barnes belongs in Merion. What have you done out there on this issue? Do you sit at home and comment how the thieves of Philthadelphia, Fast Eddie, Vince Fumo, and their checkbooks (Pew Charitable Trusts, Annenberg Foundation, and Lenfest Foundation just to name the largest checkbooks) shouldn't be able to steal Lower Merion's art collection and move it to the City of Murderly Love? If you answered "yes" to any other above, come on now, chop-chop....time's a wastin'

NY Times: After 50 Years, the Barnes Way, Still By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: July 22, 2007

HARRY SEFARBI turned 90 last month, but he appears not to have paid much attention.

“Listen, before you faint, I want you to come over here and take a look at one more Modigliani,” he said recently to a reporter whose art-appreciation muscles were beginning to weaken well into the third hour of a guided tour of the Barnes Foundation here, where Mr. Sefarbi, a painter, has taught for 54 years.

He often wears a patch over his left eye now, to remedy a double-vision problem. But you get the sense that Mr. Sefarbi has spent so many hours of his life looking at and thinking about the paintings that climb the walls of the Barnes — 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 59 Matisses — that he could describe each of them while blindfolded, like a Zen archer.

He leads the way to a Renoir landscape, whose luminescence he compares to peacock feathers. He describes how Cézanne’s oft-painted wife seems to be “screwed up into her hat” in one dark, torqued portrait. He admits that he is still deep into arguments, now more than half a century old, with many of the works, like a small Cézanne still life of a bottle, undulating cloth and fruit. “I stare at it every time I’m here,” he says, “and it stares back.”

Mr. Sefarbi is one of the last living links to the eccentric origins of the Barnes. In the late 1940s he attended classes presided over by the foundation’s charismatic founder, Albert C. Barnes....The doctrine Barnes expounded, one that has inspired cultish devotion, held that paintings tell you nearly everything you need to know in themselves, in their colors, shapes and lines, and that with “fierce attentiveness,” as one art critic said, you can begin to understand artists’ visual language in a new way, a kind of aesthetic high rationalism shading into the mystical.

Now, as the foundation, in financial trouble, moves ever closer to leaving its odd home and transplanting its collection to a new building planned for downtown Philadelphia — a decision viewed as essential by some and apostasy by others — Mr. Sefarbi is often seen as more than just a veteran teacher of Barnes’s method. He has become a voluble, cane-carrying symbol of all the ethereal qualities that critics of the move fear may be lost in the foundation’s translation to a sleeker, more contemporary space.

His classes, taught every year in the vaulted main hall, are as much about a worldview as they are about paintings. And this view — exalting the virtues of concentration, dedication and deep insight into art accruing only over time — is largely antithetical to much of today’s quick-moving museum world, in which institutions are under pressure to expand, increase attendance, compete with popular entertainment and serve as anchors for urban development.

But it takes little more than a half-hour in his company to learn how he feels: that the move will most likely mean the end of the foundation’s primary role as a teaching institution, as its founder intended, and its reincarnation as a high-profile museum, despite assurances from Barnes officials that teaching will remain central. “It will be like those courses at most museums,” Mr. Sefarbi said, with more disappointment than anger. “They’re just entertainment, more or less.”...Complementing Barnes’s philosophy of art appreciation growing out of artists’ intentions, Mr. Sefarbi’s teaching has grown out of his own work as a painter, which he attends to daily in a cluttered, splattered studio that takes up the third floor of the house he shares with his wife of 52 years, Ruth.

Art collection on display as founder Barnes intended
By Mark Houser
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, July 22, 2007

Tucked on a tree-lined and gated estate, almost lost in the glare of Philadelphia, is a controversial little museum that combines a fascinating history with the world's best private collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.
If you have never heard of the Barnes Foundation, its irascible founder may well be smiling in his grave.

Dr. Albert Barnes was picky about whom he allowed to see his 180 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos and dozens of other works by well-known masters of the era.

Some things have changed since Barnes died in a 1951 car wreck. With an advance reservation and $10 admission, anyone today can tour the collection.

One thing hasn't changed. Every painting is still hung exactly the way Barnes liked it.
Which is to say, blanketing the walls like a multibillion-dollar quilt, stacked three and four canvases high and bracketed with decorative wrought iron hinges and Amish furniture that the owner felt perfectly complemented the pieces.

That too is almost certain to change. Some day soon -- a succession of lawsuits keeps the date uncertain -- the paintings in this limestone gallery-cum-mansion are to be carted off to a new home yet to be erected along the grand Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The powers-that-be want it there, next to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum, to magnify the city's tourism draw.....Born in 1872, Albert Barnes grew up in a rat-infested Philadelphia tenement, the son of a one-armed mailman and a mother who strived to push her kids out of the slums.

Lydia Barnes scrimped enough to get her son art lessons, and finagled him a spot in the city's best public school. Barnes eventually graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a medical degree and a love for painting, though not much of a knack for it.

At 30, Barnes founded a company that made an ointment to prevent newborns from going blind. He soon made a mint.

Then Barnes caught up with a former school friend, William Glackens, now a minor star in the Post-Impressionist cosmos. He gave Glackens $20,000 in 1912 to go on a Paris shopping spree and pick up whatever paintings looked good. Glackens came back with one each by Paul Cezanne, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.

Barnes was hooked. He had a dozen Renoirs within a year.....All the while, Barnes was dreaming of becoming a legendary benefactor and willing his collection to the city museum or to his alma mater, Penn.

But when he unveiled his collection in 1923, it was too avant-garde for Philadelphia. Critics ridiculed it.

So Barnes built his own museum and thumbed his nose at high society for the rest of his life.....One of my favorites is a brilliantly colored piece by William Glackens, showing a busy dive platform marked with splashes of rainbow hues that capture the mood of a summer frolic.

Barnes hung it above a doorway in the main hall. I think of it as a nod to the old school chum who gave Barnes his start collecting masterpieces.

Mark Houser can be reached at or (412) 320-7995.