Raising the Barnes. A serene new home for a contested collection

摘要

At The New Home Of The Barnes Foundation, which houses the dazzling art collection of Albert C. Barnes, visitors enter via a pathway that crosses a reflecting pond. Given the history of the place, it feels like a bridge over troubled water. For much of his life, the spectacularly cranky Barnes-a chemist who made his fortune with a drug to treat gonorrhea-was at war with the social elites of Philadelphia. Many of them at first had no taste for the Cezannes, Matisses, van Goghs and Picas-sos at his private museum, a limestone villa located in the suburb of Merion, Pa. Barnes also established an art school there in 1922, intending his collection to be primarily for the benefit of students. Anyone not connected with the school could visit by appointment only. By the time of Barnes' death in 1951, powerful segments of Philadelphia society had dreams of adding his astonishing cache of Impressionist, post-Impressionist and modern art to the city's cultural attractions.