At the Barnes, Donor Intent Is Central but Not Sacred

Dr. Barnes’s will made the place impossible to run.

L ast week, I wrote about the Barnes Foundation, focusing on its permanent collection, so good and so idiosyncratic that it slackens even the most fixed of jaws. After ten years in center-city Philadelphia, the Barnes is a national treasure, a stunner, and a unique, essential experience for art lovers. Getting it to Philadelphia from its leafy perch in Lower Merion took drama, conniving, $150 million, and the decimation of donor intent. Was it worth it?

I tend to be a purist on donor intent. A rich man or woman is free to make a will disposing of his or her wealth, and unless insanity rears its ugly head and tosses its curls, those wishes are to be honored. As I age, though, I’m less patient with crazy hotheads. The uncertifiable among them can wreak havoc. Mostly, cultural havoc’s good, but here’s a case of bad havoc.

Dr. Albert Barnes, cultural renegade and art collector extraordinaire, died in a car crash, having run a red light, in 1951. He provided a decent endowment for his art school — and the Barnes was a school, not a museum — and a few conditions weren’t fatal. Nothing could be lent, and nothing could be added or moved. Fine. No tea parties or soirées allowed. Good. Barnes hated high society. He didn’t want his collection used as a Main Line social prop.

But he also prescribed an investment policy for the endowment, a very bad idea indeed. The money could be invested only in low-interest government securities. Inflation made a banquet of it over time. By the ’60s, the trustees were dipping into capital. Location was inviolate. Barnes required the art to stay in the galleries that he’d designed in Lower Merion, one of the toniest Main Line suburbs.

The wing of the museum displaying Barnes’s collection is a replica of his house and galleries in Lower Merion, designed by Paul Cret in 1922. The moldings and other finishes are not quite as fussy as Cret’s, but it looks the same, down to the orientation to the sun. It’s a proper museum, though, with advanced climate systems behind the walls and modern security. Surely the art’s happier. It’s got museum-quality lighting, a big advance from the old Barnes, where the art was hard to see. The new Barnes is neat as a pin. The old Barnes wasn’t ragged, but deferred maintenance was clearly an issue.

Attached to the replica is the infrastructure of a big-city museum: a courtyard, café, auditorium, shop, elevators, and toilets galore. The admissions building, which is separate, looks like an outhouse. The entrance and hallway to the museum are cramped. I’m a minimalist when it comes to visitor amenities such as reception areas, which are altogether too grand in most new museum buildings. The place is about the art, not the entrance. The Barnes’s is too tight. An enclosed courtyard serves as a space for parties.

The galleries for rotating exhibitions aren’t big, but that’s fine. There was no space for loan shows at the old Barnes, and Barnes emphatically didn’t want art he hadn’t selected shown near his collection. The lower level is lovely. The shop’s a bookish one. There’s a spacious room for rest, reading, and reflection with comfortable chairs.

A donor wall in the Barnes courtyard lists the big foundations that gave millions to extract the Barnes from Lower Merion. Top of the list are Annenberg, Pew, Lenfest — names with power and dough — as well as the City of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth. Barnes pelted Walter Annenberg, owner of the local newspaper, with lots of garbage over the years, and Annenberg neither forgave nor forgot. His lawsuit after Barnes’s death forced the place to accept visitors. The big culture foundations in Philadelphia and the art-donor class have been agitating since the ’50s to put the Barnes collection downtown. The Barnes isn’t a school anymore, though it offers some classes. The classes sound good, too.  All in all, though, it’s a museum, which Barnes didn’t want.

Barnes was profoundly moved by America’s racial dilemma, properly and, for his time, unusually so. When he died, his estate planning for his collection and art school vested ownership and control, eventually, in Lincoln University, a historically black college about 50 miles from Philadelphia. As Barnes-appointed trustees died or retired, Lincoln would appoint replacements. In the late ’80s, Lincoln appointees finally controlled the board.

Though the university had years to plan, it was hopelessly out of its depth. Barnes might have believed that he’d promoted social justice but, let’s face it, he gloried in snubbing Philadelphia’s culture czars. I don’t think he dwelled too deeply on whether or not Lincoln could run the place in perpetuity. After all, he and a handful of cronies ran it just fine.

Lincoln’s 20 years in charge were disastrous, at least financially. Their failure was the delight of Philadelphia’s big foundations and Ed Rendell, mayor of the city and then governor of Pennsylvania. Lincoln slogged for so long not for love of art but as a point of pride. It wouldn’t admit that a school for African Americans, run by African Americans, was incompetent. Lincoln’s foolish trustees finally agreed to surrender control to a new board, which voted to move. They got a few dollars in return for a collection worth billions.

Not to dwell on the past, which I never do, but the point is, with good thinking and a bit of hardball, Barnes’s original plan might have been — mostly — salvaged. A prudent, ruthless sale of a few Matisses, Cézannes, and Picassos would have given it the endowment it needed. No one would have died. The quaintly named Orphans Court — the probate court — could also have scrapped Barnes’s investment mandate.

Would these tweaks have salvaged the old Barnes? Probably not. Lincoln University did its best but still performed ineptly as a steward. I don’t think more money would have changed this. And as an art school, the Barnes was a flop by the ’60s. Its students weren’t working-class prodigies as Barnes wanted but affluent Main Line housewives. Art schools unaffiliated with colleges or universities tend to fail.

And then there’s Lower Merion. “NIMBY” is the town motto. The old Barnes attracted few visitors, and only under duress. When I first visited — in 1978 — the Barnes took no more than 200 souls a day, and we needed to be invited. I called and was interviewed by Violette de Mazia, Barnes’s acolyte in running the school, a trustee, and the keeper of the flame until her own death in 1989.

She was very nice, and then I was a chatty, precocious Wesleyan senior. When the call ended, I didn’t know whether I’d passed the test. A few days later, I got a letter telling me when I could visit. Lower Merion’s good people hated even this modest arrangement. Two hundred strangers a day. Two hundred potential Exxon Valdezes. Horror of horrors, I could have been black!

In the ’80s and ’90s, under Lincoln’s rule, visitorship increased. Looming over the Barnes were threats of court action to strip its tax-exempt status if it didn’t accommodate the public. The Orphan’s Court, addressing the Barnes’s insolvency, allowed the biggest hits in the collection to travel on an income-producing national tour. This kindled touristical interest in what had been a hidden, mythic place.

With visitors came traffic, and with traffic came local ire. About 25 years ago, in the days before GPS, I tried to visit the Barnes. I got lost in Lower Merion. I have no problem asking strangers for directions. People walking their dogs, and that means they lived there, all told me they had no idea where the Barnes was. Local lawsuits proclaimed the Barnes a hazard and a nuisance. The place spent a bundle on legal fees. Irony of ironies, the townies claimed to be crestfallen when the Barnes decided to leave!

This history, hardly ancient, invites a dollop of atonement on the part of the new Barnes. It claims in its very good, new handbook, which I read, to follow Barnes’s “intertwined commitment to art and racial equity.” Yet its makers — mostly Philadelphia’s big foundations — shoved a historically black college out of the picture, not exactly unceremoniously, but shoved it was. Barnes conceived of his art and his school as “a radical experiment in democratic education and social justice.” This seems to have been lost.

“Social justice” is such an abstract, freighted term. The chase for it always becomes a racket. Democratic education is more tangible. The biggest problem lingering from the Covid mass hysteria is the horrible toll that endless — and useless — lockdowns, masking, and inferior online learning took on poor and working-class children.

Philadelphia’s rich foundations and the Barnes — together — have a golden opportunity to fix a massive injustice. Some radical experimentation is in order, developed with the same fervor that movers and shakers summoned to move the Barnes. Big foundations have too much money. One day, a desperate, greedy government will empty their coffers as Henry VIII, Napoleon, and the Bolsheviks did to the churches. Before that happens, though, the Barnes and its enabling foundations can right what the government, science community, and teachers’ unions have done to so many during the Covid mass hypnosis.

As unique as the collection, history, and display are, the Barnes is now a traditional museum. The cost of admission is a whopping $30 per person, though college students and kids under 18 pay $5. ACCESS/EBT cardholders, which are food-stamp recipients, are admitted free, through an Institute of Museum and Library Services program. As “a radical experiment in democratic education and social justice,” I’d suggest that the foundations that busted Barnes’s trust pay for free admission for all.

Was it worth it? I think Lower Merion’s intransigence, Lincoln’s incompetence, and Barnes’s crazy investment policy doomed the place. Each was foreseeable, had Barnes foresight. I revere donor intent. Donors need to have common sense, though.