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Indian Express
10-05-2025
- General
- Indian Express
I went beyond the popular image of Kabir to create mine: Gulammohammed Sheikh
You joined the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda in 1955, within five years of its opening. Coming from a provincial town, Surendranagar, what was your experience like? It was amazing to be part of a like-minded community of artists and aspirants; to have the doors of our studios in the art school open, day and night. I had never imagined there could be a whole library full of books, only on art! The atmosphere in the college was liberal, which made newcomers like me feel at ease. Our teachers worked in the studios after class hours. We saw the seminal paintings of our teacher NS Bendre being painted. He gave demonstrations of oil painting and watercolour with such mastery, leaving us spellbound. Art History classes were conducted by artists themselves, except for Dean Markand Bhatt, who had studied it at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. He taught us Western art and aesthetics, while Bendre taught us Chinese art, and sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, Egyptian and Mesopotamian art. You started your teaching career in Art History before you shifted to Painting. When I was a post-graduate student, there was an opening in the department to teach art history. The then Dean, Bendre, asked me if I would like to teach. It was a godsend offer as I was living on a paltry scholarship. I taught for three years before going to London in 1963. Upon my return, I taught again for 15 years till I moved on to head the Painting department. London played a role in igniting your interest in early painting traditions. The Painting Department at the Royal College of Art was adjacent to the Victoria & Albert Museum and students had free access. I used to eat lunch in the museum restaurant to avoid the bland fare in the college canteen, and on my way, I would see paintings in the Indian section. I was aware of the various schools of Indian painting, but a magical-looking Kota painting of a nocturnal jungle scene in the moonlight fascinated me. Robert Skelton, the Assistant Keeper of the Indian section, became a mentor. Writing my dissertation on Kota enabled me to have a closer look at the regional school of Rajasthan. During the summer vacation, I hitch-hiked in Italy to see the masters of the Renaissance. I was especially touched by the Sienese artists such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Simone Martini and Sassetta. For them, painting was an act of love offered with humility and passionate conviction. I found them close to Indian painting in sensibility. After finishing my studies in London, I returned to India, mostly travelling overland. The three-month-long journey evoked greater love for the wanderings than I was already prone to. The year 1981 seems to be seminal, as you completed several important works. Yes, in that year I showed with artists such as Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, Jogen Chowdhury and Sudhir Patwardhan in the exhibition we called, 'Place for People'. Each of us was involved in exploring and focusing on the world we lived in. In that sense, several works were autobiographical. In my case, Speaking Street recalled memories of my childhood in a provincial town. Following it, a large painting, titled City for Sale, dealt with the irony of communal riots raging at one end, and on the other portrayed a cinema hall audience, totally oblivious of it. The Tree of Life (1996), which you painted for the Vidhan Bhavan in Bhopal, was the first time you took up painting on such a massive scale for a public building. Yes, I had long desired to make a mural in a public space, after I saw the cityscape, Effects of Good Government, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Sienna. The mural in the Legislative Assembly was 31-feet high and 21-feet wide. The idea was to cover a cultural tapestry of India with its multiplicity and diversity. The central motif of The Tree of Life represents the lives of people, both past and present, including glorious as well as turbulent periods. Then, Kabir appeared in your work. The beginning of the 1990s was a period of great turbulence, which needed a healing touch. Kabir was the answer. Instead of using just the popular rendition of Kabir as a Vaishnavite saint, I also searched other images of Kabir as prototypes to create mine. The man who said 'tera Saai(n) tujh me', indicated looking inwards, instead of seeking an answer in the outer world. You started with a small town. Then, you entered the belly of a city, and then you moved to the world. In a chance encounter I found a medieval map of the world — the Ebstorf mappa mundi — which I used as a basis for re-enacting the world. In the 20-odd years, many such maps were made to reframe the world. The use of a portable shrine or Kaavad served as an alternative to the easel painting. Its format allows multiple stories like a picture book unfolding gradually. The recent work, Kaarawaan, at its core, holds the idea of a journey, wherein I packed my favourite characters from history, mythology and the world of dreams. I painted within it all the artists, poets and thinkers whom I admire. The intention was to paint a civilisational ark carrying a world of humanity in the midst of highly turbulent waters.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Philadelphia, Art Shows by Women Teem With Eros and Audacity
Is there such a thing as being too tall to be an artist? Christina Ramberg, the subject of a long-overdue retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stood 6-foot-1 and considered her height a liability. She grew up in the Eisenhower era, when the average American woman was 5-foot-4 and aspired to have an hourglass figure, and she sewed her own clothes, since standard sizes didn't fit. As if wanting to somehow shrink herself, she painted images of the female body constrained by fabric — corseted, cinched, girdled and even bound. By a nice coincidence, Cecily Brown, a generation younger than Ramberg and the subject of a retrospective at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is also a devotee of the human figure — but unbound. If Ramberg's imagery evokes a period when women were tethered to traditional roles and constricting fashions, Brown's world is just the opposite: untethered and uninhibited. Brown is known for exuberant semi-abstractions, in which gleaming nudes in shifting gradations of salmon pink turn up in French forests and other far-flung places. The two artists could not be more different, but their work teems with eros, emotion and painterly audacity, and it has turned Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the site of both museums, into a temporary capital of the much-heralded female gaze. Ramberg, who died in 1995 and remains underknown, was officially a Chicago Imagist, one of a dozen or so figurative artists who defined their work in opposition to New York, the country's No. 1 painting town. Spurning abstraction, the Chicago Imagists worked on the margins of cartooning and surrealism. They pursued the rough, often raunchy edges of American culture with a zealousness that made the art of both coasts seem relatively polite. Ramberg's work is easy to recognize, even from the next room. She painted cropped, centered, fastidiously crafted images that isolated a female hand or a vintage hairdo against a blank ground, as if turning them into heraldic emblems. And she can fairly be called a connoisseur of undergarments. With nearly devotional detail, she captured the texture of different fabrics, contrasting the smooth, blue-black sheen of satin bands with the intricate patterns embedded in lace. Her colors, compared to the screaming hues of other Imagists, tend to be soft and muted, with an emphasis on peachy beiges and grayed lavenders reminiscent of women's slips. Her work can put you in mind of Roy Lichtenstein, with his nostalgic subjects and thick cartoon outlines. He and Ramberg both made memorable paintings of a female hand raised to display its slender white fingers and red-painted nails. A mesmerizing series by Ramberg of three small paintings from 1971, '(Untitled) Hand,' show a sinuous, near-boneless hand binding itself in a length of cloth that mutates into a glove. In the place of Lichtenstein's Pop jokiness, her work feels psychological and interior. Ramberg was adept at turning the visual clichés of cartooning into an entirely personal language, and her influence can be felt in the work of painters as different as Elizabeth Murray, Amy Sillman and Julie Curtiss, all of whom spent some time in Chicago. Born in 1946 in Ft. Campbell, Ky., Ramberg moved frequently. Her father was a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, and her mother was a piano teacher. She believed that her father (her first critic) viewed her as 'awkward and unattractive,' as she later wrote, and she attributed her negative self-image to him. After her family settled in the Chicago area, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later joined the faculty and served as head of the painting department. She married a fellow artist and Chicago Imagist, Phil Hanson. They separated in 1980, but Hanson returned to care for her in 1989, when she was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. She died six years later, at age 49. One of the fascinations of her short career is her devotion to the same limited repertory of subjects. 'Hair' (1968), her undergraduate thesis show, consists of a series of 16 small, square, olive-green panels that each depict the back of a stylish woman's head, with hairdos that are variously bobbed, plaited, or curled, and patted by a manicured hand. Whose head is this? Impossible to know, but I had a shivery vision of the young Ramberg watching the back of her mother's head as she played the piano, pressed into silence in that era when children were seen and not heard. In the 1970s, Ramberg's paintings shed their retro flavor and began courting figurative grotesqueries. The exhibition culminates in a room ringed with large-scale torso paintings, each about four feet tall and dominated by an action figure with broad shoulders, a small waist, and signs of brokenness. 'Troubled Sleeve' feels like a bad dream, with its four pickle-shaped organs sprouting from beneath a woman's tightly wound belts and tourniquets, defeating her efforts to control her body.¶ Philadelphia is the only East Coast stop for Ramberg's show, which was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has never been properly assessed by a New York museum, perhaps as a result of the geographic bias that has often afflicted American artists working outside of New York. The good news is that the situation is likely to improve in September when the Whitney Museum will feature Ramberg and other Chicago Imagists in 'Sixties Surreal,' a rethinking of more than 100 artists whose work was initially eclipsed by the shiny surfaces of Pop art. The subject of a handsome and high-spirited show at the Barnes Foundation, Cecily Brown is in no danger of being forgotten. Now 56, the British-born painter is one of the signal figures on the New York scene, having survived the contretemps of early fame and established herself as an artist of irrefutable seriousness. In 2023, she was accorded an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Death and the Maid,' a thematically focused show of works lamenting the brevity of life; it was shoehorned into a too-small space. The Barnes retrospective, by contrast, which was organized with the Dallas Museum of Art, is not large — it comprises just 30 paintings and related drawings — but spans her career and feels expansive. It's interesting to see her once-maligned early paintings, such as 'Untitled' (1996), whose circle of humping rabbits, in hues of gold and blue, today could pass for a relatively wholesome campfire scene. It makes sense that museums appreciate Brown, because she appreciates museums and centuries-old European masterpieces. She is hardly the only artist to raid art history as well as pop culture for inspiration — one of the defining activities of postmodernism — but she does so with an intelligence and ardor that are entirely her own. She isn't interested in recycling the past to bemoan the exhausted present. Instead, she is a kind of artist-explorer, feeling her way, as if eyes could walk, into long-ago scenes by Degas or Goya, into Fragonard's garden scenes or shipwrecks by Delacroix or robust hunting scenes by the lesser-known Flemish painter Frans Snyders. In the process, she recycles figuration as abstraction, collapsing the timeline of art history into a one-of-a-kind expressionistic lexicon of whippy lines and whorls of curling brushstrokes. One of her gifts, as we see in works ranging from the riotous, red-smeared surface of her 25-foot-long hunting epic 'The Splendid Table,' to a riveting, small-scale bedroom scene, titled 'Body (After Sickert),' is the way Brown dramatizes the act of looking at art, the process by which we — the viewer, standing before an unfamiliar painting — take it apart with our eyes and then reassemble it. Her best paintings and drawings take time to see, and the Barnes show would have benefited from benches. 'Selfie' (2020), one of the standouts, deepens the longer you look. The painting takes us into a cluttered, high-ceilinged room where a nude figure rendered as a wave of pink flesh reclines on an iron bedstead. Or are there two nudes — a woman on her back and a bearded man face down beside her, lost in his own thoughts? Around them, paintings are hung salon style, covering every inch of wall space. The furniture, which includes a tall grandfather clock, suggests that the room is a 19th-century European studio, or a picture gallery that looks a little chaotic. The dozens of picture frames hanging on the wall form a jumble of rectangles that emit a quivering energy, as if shaken by an earthquake. Looking at 'Selfie' you may feel it echoes your own situation amid the Barnes, its walls crowded from floor to ceiling with masterpieces by Cézanne, Matisse and Renoir. There are so many paintings in the world, more than we can ever see, but as Brown's work exhorts us, take it one picture at a time, and look as searchingly as you can.
Axios
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Philly weekender: Bok Bar reopens and Otaku Fest
You know it's spring when Parks on Tap returns. The traveling beer garden sets up shop in the Azalea Garden near the Philly Art Museum. Today-Friday, 4-10pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-10pm 🎉 Rooftop bar season is upon us. South Philly's Bok Bar reopens Thursday. Stop by for tacos, beers or cocktails and enjoy views of the city. Hours vary. 🍽️ Last call for Dine Latino Restaurant Week. Deals or special menus at more than two dozen restaurants run through Saturday. 🦸♀️ Embrace a full weekend of cosplay at Otaku Fest at Cherry Street Pier on the waterfront. Also count on video game tourneys, dozens of vendors, panel discussions, food and drink. Friday-Sunday, hours vary. 🥳 Young professionals get their own night at the Barnes Foundation on Friday. 🎶 A pop-up exhibit on Saturday will spotlight Marian Anderson and the backstory of the singer's historic concert in 1939. Runs 10am-4pm at the South Philly museum dedicated to the singer. Admission: $5 🖌 Stock up on arts supplies at Art Star's CRAP Bazaar on Saturday from 11am-4pm inside the Independence Visitor Center. It's a rummage sale of gently used and overstock supplies. Plus: A spring pop-up market will set up shop nearby featuring a handful of local craft vendors. 🚗 Saturday is your chance to see a handful of early 20th-century cars out on the road in Southwest Philly. Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum's Demo Day will also feature a presentation about the autos. 11am-2pm 🛍️ Shop more than 50 vendors at the Ready, Set, Bloom Market under the El near 5 Sisters Ice Cream Parlor in Fishtown. Saturday, 11am-5pm Free live music, vendors, food and giveaways are on the agenda. Saturday, noon-7pm 🐕 Bring your pooch to Evil Genius brewery's Block Pawty on Saturday from noon-6pm in Fishtown. This family-friendly event includes dog-themed vendors, food trucks, beer tents and music. 🚶🏿♀️Stop by Rittenhouse on Sunday when seven blocks will go car-free again from 10am-5pm. This week's schedule includes a stringband, bubbles, entertainment and double-dutch lessons.
New York Times
19-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
A Vivid, Engrossing Biography of an Art-World Contrarian
Albert C. Barnes, among the first major American collectors of modern art, barrels onto the page in Blake Gopnik's vivid, engrossing biography in a behemoth, chauffeur-driven, seven-seater, indigo Packard. Through a carpeted passenger door steps 'an ox of a man,' in greatcoat and fedora, with 'the look of an aging vice cop — someone who hit first and asked questions later.' Voracious and vituperative, Barnes was a character of wild contradictions — a 'tyrannical egalitarian,' a 'patriarchal feminist,' a 'Gilded Age progressive.' Co-inventor of a gonorrhea antiseptic used to prevent blindness in newborns, he amassed more than 4,000 pieces of art and objects, and set up a personal foundation dedicated to using the collection to teach 'plain people' (not the intellectuals and philistine Philadelphia elites he disdained) how to learn to see. Seventy-five years after his death, hundreds of thousands of people, plain and otherwise, pilgrimage annually to the Barnes Foundation to marvel at and puzzle over his 'ensembles' — unorthodox arrangements of Impressionist and modernist masterpieces and minorpieces, African art, classical sculpture, Native American ceramics, old keyhole plates, colonial hinges and other ironmongery, all interspersed with a superabundance of Renoir nudes of the sort Mary Cassatt once called 'enormously fat red women with very small heads.' Less well known are the picaresque details of Barnes's life, of which Gopnik, a longtime art critic and a biographer of Andy Warhol, makes delectable use. There's the brainy boy's escape from an impoverished childhood on the margins of a notorious Philadelphia slum; the factory where, in the segregated, early-20th-century city, his racially mixed workers were allowed to spend two hours a day in optional seminars on the likes of William James and Bertrand Russell; his foray into conducting psychoanalysis; his bulldozing, bridge-burning and 'sheer lust for battle'; and his death in 1951 at age 79 in a collision with a 10-ton truck. He was, as Thomas Hart Benton put it, 'friendly, kindly, hospitable' and 'a ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch.' Ezra Pound described him as living in 'a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.' A rare friendship Barnes did not sabotage was with John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher whose progressive educational theories influenced Barnes's experiment in using art to improve society and human nature. If the role of a classroom teacher was to create experiences from which children would learn by doing, as Dewey believed, then perhaps art could become an instructional tool in what Gopnik calls 'the 'educational' task of changing America.' Barnes had discovered early what he called 'the ineffable joy of the immediate moment' from religious ecstasies witnessed at Methodist camp meetings as a child. Later, he experienced a similar rush from art. But he was a man of science, trained in pharmacology and chemistry. His lifelong challenge, Gopnik writes, 'was to reconcile the demands that reason made on his judgment and the claims aesthetics had on his feelings.' Those early camp meetings also informed Barnes's attitude toward racial issues. He'd become addicted, he would say, to the company of Black Philadelphians. He employed them and paid them well. He called spirituals 'America's only great music'; he championed African art. But Gopnik, citing the work of the scholar Alison Boyd, says Barnes's enthusiasm toward Black culture also tended to be nostalgic and simplistic. His interest in modernism did not spring fully formed from his rationalist's head. It took two years of coaching by William Glackens, a high school friend and a founder of the Ashcan School of painters, to open Barnes's mind to the avant-garde. On an early shopping expedition to Paris on Barnes's behalf, Glackens shipped back 33 paintings, including Barnes's first Picasso, his first Cézanne and one of the first van Goghs to reach the United States. Later, the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume became Barnes's principal adviser. Without him, 'the Barnes Foundation would be a very different place,' according to Gopnik, who detects in Barnes himself a certain 'blindness to the cutting edge.' Barnes, a serial exaggerator, later denied the roles played by Glackens and Guillaume. He 'even pretended to have discovered modernism before Le Corbusier, one of its founding creators.' Barnes's brilliance has occasionally been overshadowed by his interpersonal ineptitude, Gopnik suggests. Similarly, the glories of his collection have eclipsed his thinking and writing as a reformer. Gopnik covers it all, in exquisite balance, concluding that Barnes's 'gifts to posterity, as a collector and thinker, pretty clearly outweigh his own lifetime's faults.' In the 13 years since the foundation was relocated to Philadelphia from its original home on a quiet street in suburban Merion — over the ferocious objections of Barnesians who saw the move as a capitulation to Philadelphia's elites — 2.5 million people have seen Barnes's beloved collection, its ensembles rehung precisely as he left them. Which is to say, far more people than would have seen the collection in Merion. Would Barnes still object? Gopnik wonders. 'Knowing Barnes — yes.'
Atlantic
12-03-2025
- General
- Atlantic
The Cranky Visionary
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. Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was smart enough to gain admission to Philadelphia's selective Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania's medical school. Realizing, perhaps, that he lacked something in the bedside-manner department, he went into chemical research, and in 1902 he and his partner commercially released the antiseptic Argyrol, which became standard in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit wonder, but Argyrol made him a fortune. Ezra Pound described Barnes as living in 'a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.' At first he used his new money in predictable ways. He built a mansion on the Main Line and named it 'Lauraston' for his wife. He bought fast cars (a passion that would be the death of him) and joined the local fox hunt. He also did less clichéd things, such as studying philosophy, reading Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed that a theory's worth was measured not by its elegance but by its consequences in the world, and he treated his Argyrol factory as a laboratory for social experimentation. He hired Black and white workers, men and women. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated workplace 'efficiency,' Barnes boasted that in his factory, 'each participant had evolved his or her own method of doing a particular job.' The 'her' in that sentence alone is noteworthy. At the same time, Barnes was a crank of operatic grandiosity—thin-skinned, bellicose, distrustful, fickle, and vindictive. Ezra Pound described him as living in 'a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.' His bile could be witty, but more often traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was 'a house of artistic and educational prostitution'; when a newspaper critic took offense at 'the fevered passion for unclean things!' (naked people) in Barnes's collection, he sent a letter impugning her 'well-recognized sexual vagaries.' Curious about art, he enlisted the advice of a high-school friend, the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, and in 1912 sent Glackens to Paris with a wish list and $20,000 (about $650,000 today). Finding that the Impressionists Barnes sought were costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed modern. In the course of two weeks, he bought 33 works, including a Picasso, a Cézanne, and the first Van Gogh to enter an American collection, his spellbinding The Postman. When Barnes made his own trip to Paris a few months later, he spent three times the money in half the time and lived up to every stereotype the French had about American millionaires. 'He did literally wave his chequebook in the air,' Gertrude Stein wrote to a friend. Modernism held attraction for someone who considered himself a pugnaciously original thinker. Collecting old art was posh and respectable, but in an America still scandalized by the sight of breasts, collecting modern art was outrageous. Within 10 years, Barnes had acquired some 700 paintings. But art to him was more than a proxy for cultural sophistication and a fat bank account. It made him feel things—intense and important things—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to map precisely how it did so. If his obsession with Renoir's late, big-bottomed, pinheaded nudes seems 'idiosyncratic in the extreme,' as Rudenstine writes, it was shared by Picasso and Matisse, who prized radical departures in form. Barnes was a turbulent person and Renoir was his happy place, full of pretty colors and willing flesh. Cézanne appealed for different reasons. Barnes found heroism in the artist's 'social strangeness,' and saw it mirrored in the art: 'His deformations of naturalistic appearances are akin to the brusque remarks … which, when sociability is the rule, project new interpretations upon conventionally accepted ideas.' Barnes's eye wasn't perfect—he passed on Van Gogh's Starry Night —but his instincts were remarkably good. He began buying African sculpture in 1922 and amassed an important collection. He bought old masters whose agitation or distortions recalled the moderns he loved. He bought Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He bought Native American serapes and jewelry. He bought American folk art and—repudiating the distinction between 'art' and 'craft'—acquired quantities of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door knockers, which he hung alongside the paintings. To Kenneth Clark, then the head of the National Gallery in London, he wrote that he saw 'no essential esthetic difference between the forms of the great painters or sculptors, and those of the iron-workers.' None of this was quite as extraordinary as Barnes liked to pretend. The connection among folk art, handcrafts, and modernism was made by a number of curators and collectors at the time. Concerning the avant-garde, John Quinn, the visionary behind the 1913 Armory Show, was more adventurous, leaning into Cubism and Duchamp's radical experiments where Barnes balked. (Their rivalry was such that Barnes, tiring of his usual name-calling, hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Quinn.) Others were not far behind. MoMA's 2024 book Inventing the Modern celebrates the museum's female founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—and the energetic idealism required to get these efforts off the ground in an often hostile culture. Barnes exaggerated his temerity in the face of philistines partly because he longed to be recognized as more than just a world-class shopper. Applying his chemist's brain to locating the 'scientific' principles behind his aesthetic experience, he concluded that what mattered in art was form—line, color, space, movement. Contextual data such as biographies and subject matter just distracted from the real act of looking. These formalist ideas had been articulated by various critics and art historians before Barnes, though, as usual, he took them to extremes. His 530-page 'statement of principles,' The Art in Painting (1925), includes no titles for works reproduced in the book, lest readers be led astray by subject matter. Much more original was his application of this formalism to John Dewey's theories of experimental education and social reform. He could cite Dewey's 1916 book Democracy and Education 'almost chapter and verse,' Gopnik tells us. Barnes was convinced that 'plain people of average intelligence' could be brought to the kind of art apotheosis he had experienced, just by knowing how to look. He derided art history as a discipline and art scholars individually, but he couldn't abandon the idea that he himself had expertise other people needed. Like many people who get a lot out of looking, Barnes was annoyed at the casual attitudes of museum visitors. When the Barnes Foundation opened its doors in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical building within a 12-acre arboretum adjacent to Barnes's home—its indenture permitted no posh parties and no unvetted visitors. The art would not travel or be reproduced in color. To see it, you applied to take classes in the Barnes method. It was not a museum; it was a school. Inside, he arranged (and regularly rearranged) the collection in 'ensembles' that mixed objects of different ages, origins, and functions. Most people do this at home, but Barnes's stridently symmetrical arrangements—big artworks in the middle, smaller ones to either side, formal echoes bouncing around the room—were emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for example, Matisse's Red Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (among other things) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of fans, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of pictures, each showing a woman and a dog (one of them from the hand of William Glackens's daughter, age 9). The effect is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson. Admission was doled out on the basis of whim and choler. Having prior expertise or impressive connections was usually a black mark: T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier, Barnett Newman, and the heads of both MoMA and the Whitney were among the rejected. Student behavior was monitored. Questioning the method or viewing in the wrong way could get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened through microphones for heretical conversation. Such ritualistic protocols can actually enhance the experience of viewing: Perceiving the specialness of the opportunity, people will give heightened attention. So while some Barnes students rebelled, others became acolytes. Dewey, one of Barnes's very few lasting friends, wrote in his book Art as Experience that the educational work of the collection was of 'a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not excepted.' Considering that the science of that generation had produced antibiotics and the theory of relativity, that's quite a claim. Fifty-three and childless when the foundation opened its doors, Barnes was not oblivious to the need to arrange its future beyond his lifetime. But his vision for it was inflexible. He unsuccessfully floated prospective partnerships to the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Sarah Lawrence College, whose exasperated president finally wrote: 'You can stuff your money, your pictures, your iron work, your antiques, and the whole goddamn thing right up the Schuylkill River.' Barnes then trained an affectionate eye on nearby Lincoln University—the second-oldest historically Black university in the nation, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. His relationship with Black culture and Black leaders was characteristically complex. He considered spirituals 'America's only great music,' and his admiration for African sculpture was deep. But this appreciation was often tinged with condescension. The only Black painter in his collection was not one of those artists who had been to Paris and absorbed the lessons of modernism, but the self-taught 'primitive' Horace Pippin. (Similarly, the women in his collection tended toward the doe-eyed and decorative. He returned the Georgia O'Keeffes he'd bought, but kept his Marie Laurencins.) Still, he forged a relationship with Lincoln's president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the terms of succession so that Lincoln would eventually assume control of the foundation's board. This relationship, too, might well have gone south, but in July 1951 Barnes sped through a stop sign in his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer. For the next 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission became harder, the dogma stricter, the students fewer but more ardent. When the state forced the tax-exempt foundation to open to the public two days a week, Barnes students picketed. In 1987, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto described the sorry state of affairs—the 'stunning works' imprisoned in 'the sullen museum, with its musty smells and impassive custodians.' De Mazia's death, in 1988, snapped the foundation out of its torpor. That it had been careening toward insolvency now became clear, and the only paths to income—admission fees, loan shows, event rentals—were blocked by Barnes's indenture. The new Lincoln-appointed board fought to break the terms; former Barnes students fought to preserve them. The state fought to increase access; neighbors fought to restrict it. Accusations of racism and corruption bounced around. Eventually the board proposed moving the whole collection to a new location near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. YouTube comments below the 2009 anti-move film The Art of the Steal convey the ensuing outrage: 'My soul cries for this loss,' 'Shame!!!,' 'I Truly hope The Philadelphia Of Art [ sic ] Burns to the ground … art and all.' If this fury seems disproportionate to the situation—a nonprofit institution in need of funds finds a way to preserve its core assets while increasing public access—it was certainly very Barnesian. The Barnes Foundation has now been on Philadelphia's Museum Mile for more than a decade. The art is all there—Cézanne's great The Card Players, the many pink ladies in search of their clothes, the Wes Anderson ensembles. From ceiling vaults to baseboards, every room has been replicated as it appeared when Barnes died. But they sit in a different building, under a different set of rules. Entry is no longer an achievement on par with getting past the bouncer at Berghain. All you have to do is cough up $30. Inside, you can interrupt your viewing with a cup of coffee in the café or a visit to the gift shop, where you can buy a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin's African American family at prayer (a strange choice for footwear, but maybe the logical outcome of pure formalist thought—the colors and shapes look fine on an ankle). In other words, outside the re-created rooms, you get the standard, bustling, consumer-oriented museum experience, not arboreal serenity, and inside the rooms, you have to put up with the presence of other people, not all of them models of rectitude. But there is nothing like it. The absence of wall texts can be a welcome relief from current museum practice. And if the ensembles depend more on visual rhyming than on ideas, they really do get you to look. If you want, you can even take classes in the Barnes method, without passing some capricious test of merit. Arthur Danto was right, though: Barnes is still remembered 'for the spectacular collection of early modern art that bears his name, for the enthusiasm with which he kept people from viewing it and for the terrible temper he expended on behalf of these two projects. He was a gifted but an extremely tiresome man.' Barnes's obvious intelligence, Gopnik observes, is 'overshadowed, even eclipsed, by his real emotional and social stupidity.' And yet, there is something gripping about his struggle, year after year, to solve the riddle of art. By all accounts, Barnes was a man with no theory of mind: Lacking any insight into the subjective worlds of other people, he found their behavior relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It must have been exhausting. In an essay soon after he started collecting, he wrote: 'Good paintings are more satisfying companions than the best of books and infinitely more so than most very nice people.' In art, he believed he saw the subjective experience of others—Renoir, El Greco, a Fang craftsperson—made concrete and visible, even measurable. It sat still for examination. His arguments circle endlessly (Rudenstine rightly calls them tautological), seeking the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one person to another via form. Each work of art, he wrote, 'records a discovery and that discovery can be verified, the artist's experience can be shared, [but] only by one who has himself learned to see.' Like mercury, however, the objective mechanism he sought for this intuitive process always wriggled away from his touch. Look at Cézanne's The Card Players or Renoir's Henriot Family and you see shifting edges, unstable spaces, fragmentation, dissolution, impermanence. But in life, Rudenstine observes, Barnes found 'ambiguity, irresolution, incompletion, obscurity … impossible for him to tolerate.' His need to lock things down nearly killed the foundation that was his great life's work. The tragedy of Barnes was that the things he could understand least held the key to what he loved most.
