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| The Barnes Foundation's new Philadelphia campus on Opening Night. Photo by Doreen Creede. |
Imagine you've been invited to the new home of a famous art collector. In a few days thousands will come to see the place at a round-the-clock
open house, but right now you're one of a small group invited for a private tour. Controversy and litigation have swirled around this building for a decade, and you've had some mixed feelings about it yourself. When you arrive protestors stand at the curb, polite but angry still; car horns blare; a bus storms by. The million things you should have done today clatter around your brain as you step inside the gates, round a steel totem and begin a walk down an allee of red maples beside a reflecting pool. And, step by step, the outside world falls away, and a serene calm washes over you.
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| Entryway on Opening Night. Photo by Doreen Creede. |
By the time you pass over a bridge to the entryway you're smitten. Inside the warm modernism continues: an entrance hall scaled to welcome, not overwhelm; a "light court" that soars but does not make you feel small; a dramatic terrace that juts into the city's parkway yet has the feel of an outdoor room, complete with fireplace.
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| Inside the Barnes Foundation Philadelphia galleries, Media Day Preview. Photo by Doreen Creede. |
Then you arrive at the galleries. Here the art has been hung in wall collages, an arrangement you see all the time now on decorating blogs. Except in these wall collages the art's by Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, Glackens, El Greco, Modigliani, van Gogh, Rousseau. And the arrangement has been created by a man who spent his life collecting, curating and arranging the 3,000 works with intense deliberation, purpose and originality, all with the goal that you see, truly
see, each painting. And you do. With astonishment and wonder, you do.
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| A legendary collection displayed in arrangements nearly as famous as the art. Photos by Doreen Creede. |
That man was Dr. Albert C. Barnes and the building is the new Philadelphia home of
The Barnes Foundation. In his will, Barnes bequeathed his collection (which in its entirety numbers 9,000 works, including post-impressionists, early modern, African sculpture, Native American ceramics, Pennsylvania German furniture, wrought iron objects and old master paintings -- possibly the most stunning individual collection of art on earth) with the stipulation that the works remain as arranged at the time of his death in 1951. In the 1990s Foundation trustees and Philadelphia civic and city leaders decided that to save the Foundation financially and to better share this collection with the world, the art should be moved from suburban Merion to center city Philadelphia. A contentious legal battle ensued. Press materials from the foundation state that the will dictated an intact arrangement, not a geographic location (a point I'd never heard while following the decade of controversy surrounding the move) and in 2004 they won their case.
And last week, in a full day Media preview on Wednesday and then an evening at the Friday night Opening Gala I got an advance peek inside the Barnes' new Philadelphia campus, met its architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, and landscape architect Laurie Olin and took a guided tour from the foundation's executive director, Derek Gillman. If that sounds amazing, it was. Most amazing, though, was that at several times during these visits I was, with the exception of a security guard, the only person in a gallery room, completely surrounded and saturated by masterpieces of such depth that even a van Gogh
gets stuck in the corner slot.
