Experiencing Art The Barnes Way

The Barnes Foundation, that incomparable collection of paintings, artifacts, furniture and all sorts of hand-crafted objects, moved to its new and controversial home in central Philadelphia in May 2012. It left behind the Merion mansion Albert C. Barnes, physician and self-made millionaire, built to house his collection and shield it from the art establishment he hated. The art now resides within a tasteful, rectilinear building designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. “Within” because the Williams-Tsien structure — late-modern, calming, surrounded by placid pools and gardens — is a shell in which the rooms of Barnes’s mansion are meticulously reproduced, the art hung and placed exactly as it was in Merion, with one major change for the better: Matisse’s Fauvist masterpiece, “Le Bonheur de Vivre,” ignominiously hung on a landing in Merion, now holds a room of its own. Each room is chock-a-block with art, some climbing the walls almost too high to see alongside farm implements, tools, metal talismans that hang over paintings; elsewhere chests — some with ceramics resting on them — and chairs often filling spaces. The sheer sensory overload of the Barnes stuns. You want help, you want the relief of explanation, as you get in conventional museums. You’re not used to finding titles, artist names and dates only. What about curatorial mediation, explication, guidance? None of that here. Viewers should engage directly with art, Barnes said, and struggle to see as an artist sees. This is hard work and takes time (more time than I had ever spent with a single exhibition. And I would happily have stayed longer.) But after the first few rooms, you feel a visual and mental rhythm taking hold of you; you sit on a bench or stand for a long time in a room and begin to see differently, more deeply perhaps. It is thrilling. But I have to confess that I downloaded the guided tour to my iPhone — free, as are the earbuds the friendly staff offers; $5 if you use a museum iPod — which introduced each room. Commentary calls attention to the arrangement of art by Barnes, to a few significant pictures or objects in the room (such as pots by Jean Renoir resting under some of his father’s paintings). The audio guide is nothing like the extensive guides at The Metropolitan Museum or The Museum of Modern Art. Barnes was particularly offended by the aesthetics of Alfred Barr at MOMA. Though both men were influenced by philosopher John Dewey’s great book, “Art as Experience,” they placed art in wildly different settings. Barr’s white cubes, with their impersonal interiors derived from the Bauhaus, were diametrically opposed to Barnes’s idiosyncratic, intensely personal rooms. Barr believed art should be open to the public of all backgrounds; Barnes limited access to his collection and even refused to admit T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier and Barr himself. Critics of the new building have bemoaned its comforts: There is a welcoming basement floor with comfortable lounge, extensive gift shop and efficient coat check. On the main floor a pleasant restaurant, more MOMA than Barnes, truth be told, offers delicious light lunches and snacks at reasonable prices. At the center are the double doors to the collection. And what a collection: 148 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos. Works from Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani, Marsden Hartley, William Glackens, Maurice Prendergast and on and on. All displayed so intimately and arranged so carefully. Room 1, the largest, though no more than a big living room with double height ceiling, is also the most shocking and distorting. So many objects fill the space that it takes several minutes before you realize astounding masterpieces wait for recognition. On a far wall hangs Cézanne’s “The Card Players,” the greatest of seven versions he painted and probably his greatest figurative painting. Above it, Seurat’s monumental pointillist masterpiece “Models” shows three nude or semi-nude artist models against a portion of the painter’s most famous picture, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” Then you look up at the south wall where two large vertical pictures, one a Matisse, the other by Picasso, are surmounted by barn door hinges that draw your eye up to Matisse’s astounding, enormous wall mural, “The Dance,” painted on commission to fill the rounded, arched indentations above the room’s three windows. Flat figures in blue, pink and black leap and frolic. Alive. Magical. But there is more in the room: Renoir’s touching “The Artist’s Family” hangs below a strange Cezanne, “The Large Bathers,” in which somewhat distorted and unconnected, bluish females occupy an undefined space. Over each of two doors is a William Glackens picture involving his charming, shimmering way with water. In Room 2, on one wall hangs a controlled, symmetrical Renoir, “Bather and Maid.” Two more Cézannes flank the central painting on each side, and finally a Van Gogh masterpiece is hung on each end of the row: the amazing portrait of “The Postman” and a gorgeous still life. And so it goes. Masterpieces appear before your eyes unannounced. Take Monet’s “The Studio Boat” for example.Monet painted the boat in which he often worked, but he moved it slightly to the left, out of center, and concentrated on the hazy reflection of painter and boat and light moving diagonally down the picture to the right. Or Rousseau’s great “Scouts Attacked by a Tiger.” Painted in Rousseau’s appealing, self-taught naive style, the picture seems to deny the notion that Rousseau’s only acquaintance with jungles and their animals was in the Paris Zoo and Jardin des Plantes. There is Picasso’s “Acrobat and Young Harlequin” and Renoir’s famous “Leaving the Conservatory.” There are late, intensely colorful paintings from Glackens. The Horace Pippin “Supper Time” stands out for its honesty and simplicity and its family’s coal-black skin. And there are hints of Barnes’s devilish sense of humor: Under each of two fleshy, pink Renoir nudes painted dangerously close to the edge of the picture’s frame, sits a large Windsor chair, perhaps waiting to catch the first nude to fall. The Barnes Foundation, located at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, is open every day but Tuesday. Call 215-278-7200 or go to www.barnesfoundation.org for information and tickets.