The Cranky Visionary

Albert Barnes believed in the liberating power of art—but you had to look at it his way.

- By Susan Tallman

Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of the world’s greatest private collections of modern European artwork—more Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than any other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Joy of Life; Seurat’s extraordinary Models; the list goes on and on. The Barnes Foundation was officially an educational institution, but was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. (The New York organization that put capital letters on those words is four years younger.) But if Barnes’s collection is a model to emulate, the saga of his organization is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils.

Coinciding with the centennial of the Barnes’s opening, we have Blake Gopnik’s breezy new biography of the man, The Maverick’s Museum, and Neil L. Rudenstine’s reissued history of the institution, The House of Barnes, first published in 2012, when its legal struggles were above-the-fold news. The two deserve to be read together, because the slippage of identity between the man, the art, and the institution provides both the melodrama and the farce of the tale.