Closing the Barnes Door

Giorgio de Chirico: Dr. Albert C. Barnes

When the Barnes flap heated up, I had more important things to do: like learning enough German so I could research a book on the Bauhaus. In the back of my mind, though, this back door putsch to reject Dr. Albert C. Barnes(1872-) pissed me off. It was the MainLine’s last sucker punch at a man whose blue collar ideals still shame their greedy selfishness.

But Inga Saffron’s appeal for a Calder Patch on the Parkway in her lively “Skyline Online” blog started me deeper thinking. I argued that those Barnes Boo(s)ters cowering proudly on their Parthenon Hill at the rich end of the Parkway should be forced to swallow Argyrol (the ultimate winter punishment the Dominican nuns used to force down my ten year old throat in Bay City) and blow their stuffy old noses. (I was never good at civilized discourse!) But, alas, it had been almost seventy years since Sister Mary Giles had grabbed me by my aching ear and forced Dr.Barnes’ noxious toxic draft down my beleaguered throat. But in the winterim I had forgotten how to spoil the noisome stuff, so I Googled Dr. Albert C.

My God, had I been underinformed about the VC of this Mauler of the MainLine Snooties. For a start he graduated from Central High with a BS degree and at the precocious age of twenty walked away with an M.D.from Penn. This working class lad went on to study chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Berlin and later at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universitaet in Heidelberg, where he befriended a German scientist named Herman Hille.

Hille and Barnes formed the firm of Barnes and Hille in 1902 to peddle their snake oil. Later Barnes bought out Hille and the attendant fortune supported his increasingly crusading efforts to bring Great Art to the Masses. His wide reading in John Dewey, George Santayana, and William James (America’s premiere philosophers at the time) shaped his own theories about art education.

A combination of these theories and his compassion for the working man led him to start seminars for them at work. He hung Ashcan painters like William Glackens and Ernest Lawson in the Argyrol factory to be studied and discussed by his workers. His first formal classes in art appreciation were held at the factory for his employees.

In 1918 Barnes went up to Columbia University to study under John Dewey. Soon they were pals, and Barnes made Dewey the first director of education for the newly formed Barnes Foundation. He and his wife Laura bought a twelve acre aboretum in Merion from horticulturalist Joseph Lapsley Wilson, a lawyer and Civil War Veteran. He hired Penn Professor of Architecture Paul Philippe Cret to design the new Gallery and adjoining residence, now the Administration Building completed in 1925. He commissioned Jacques Lipschitz to make bas reliefs and tiles using African designs and themes by the the Enfield Pottery and Tile Works.

In 1929 he sold his company to devote himself fulltime to art education and collecting. His fondness for African Art was not as was common then among the gliteratti as the work of Primitives. He considered it from the start high art. He first got interested in the field when he accompanied his Methodist mother to African Methodist Episcopal church revivals. So it was no surprise when he entrusted his Foundation to the black Lincoln University where Horace Mann Bond was president.

(His son Julian now heads the NAACP.)In short, Barnes was a spectacularly successful alternative to MainLine Culture for the Rich and Complacent. That these reactionary forces are about to steal his great collection, skim off the “best”, and sell the rest to fund their own purposes is to me sacrilegious.

Let our bumpers proclaim, before it is too late, BUST THE BARNES BUSTERS: Let Dr. Barnes’s unique vision continue to show that Philly has its civilized side, that it wants all Philadelphians to participate in Culture. And begin by ensuring that Calder’s Patch comes first. CLOSE THE BARNES DOORS.