April 8, 2017 Walter, Stephen, & Jason do Philadelphia art museums Part 2 of 2

After a well needed lunch at the Garden Restaurant, we were ready to tackle the amazing Barnes Foundation collection.

I must tell you about the self-made, and rather eccentric, Albert C. Barnes. He was a Pennsylvania chemist who made his first fortune by co-developing an anti-gonorrhea drug in the early 1900's, way before the advent of penicillin in the 1940's.

In 1911, Barnes became interested in art and gave his high school buddy, and painter William Glackens $20,000 to buy some works of art. Glackens returned with 20 paintings that formed the core of Barnes' collection. 

In 1912 Barnes went to Paris, was invited to Gertrude Stein's where he met artists such as Matisse and Picasso. By the 1920's he had been exposed to the works of many other artists and was quite happy buying up as much as he could afford.

After buying his chemist partner out, Barnes made his second fortune by selling his company in 1928, immediately before the stock market crash of 1929.
Timing is everything.

With lots of money, an excellent eye for art, and bad economic conditions during the Great Depression, Barnes was able to acquire many more works of art at bargain prices. "Particularly during the Depression," Barnes was quoted as saying, "my specialty was robbing the suckers who had invested all their money in flimsy securities and then had to sell their priceless paintings to keep a roof over their heads."

After Barnes' Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modernist pieces were ridiculed by the Philadelphia snobs, he decided to open the Barnes Foundation as an educational institution and limited access to the collection by requiring people to make appointments by letter. Applicants often received rejection letters "signed" by his dog, Fidele-de-Port-Manech.

Barnes had his collection hung according to his

own ideas about showing"relationships" between works without curatorial commentary. Barnes did not allow his works to be reproduced or to travel to other museums, which was why so few people had ever seen the works in his collection. He even went so far as to legally require that each piece of art could not be moved from the place it was installed at the time of his death.

I didn't have the time or the interest attempting to uncover the relationships Barnes saw between each piece. 



I did, however, laugh out loud in one room where a bleak Austrian crucifixion scene was directly across from Modigliani's Reclining Nude from the Back.

No doubt this gave the almost dead carpenter something pleasant to look at before he expired.



The Barnes Foundation collection includes 181

paintings by Renoir, 69 by Cezanne, 59 by Matisse, 46 by Picasso, 21 by Soutine, 18 by Rousseau, 16 by Modigliani, 11 by Degas, 7 by van Gogh, 6 by Seurat...over 3,000 pieces and currently valued north of $30,000,000,000! 

We made a quick visit to the Franklin Institute, a remarkable inter-active museum filled with more kids than Barnes had works of art. We skedaddled out of the Franklin Institute and headed to our rooms for a well deserved rest.

That evening we had a sumptuous meal at Delmonico Steakhouse downstairs in the Hilton.

The following morning we all met for breakfast and good-bye hugs. Jason took off for the airport for his trip back to Chicago, and we made off to 30th street station for the train back to Lynchburg.

It was great to see Jason, and a good time was had by all.