Art: Fighter from Philadelphia

In the ’80s, Albert Coombs Barnes came out of his South Philadelphia corner fighting.* A poor boy, he worked his way through high school, paid his way through the University of Pennsylvania medical school by playing semi-pro baseball, helped pay for graduate work at the University of Heidelberg by singing in a German beer garden.

At 35, Dr. Barnes was a millionaire, thanks to his development of a bland antiseptic which he named Argyrol. Albert Barnes thereupon went looking for something else worth fighting for.

He found it in modern art. A frustrated artist himself (after 106 canvases, he gave up painting in his 20s “to escape further self-deception”), he thought he saw glimmers of greatness in the ridiculed works of the French postimpressionists. In 1912 he sent Artist William Glackens, an old high-school chum and baseball teammate, to Paris to buy up the best examples he could find. The $20,000-worth that Glackens brought back made the beginning of the finest private collection of French moderns in the world.

$20 for a Picasso. Barnes followed Glackens to Paris, nosed around junk shops, Montparnasse cafés and studios, haggled with dealers, developed an unerring eye for a bargain. His first Picasso cost him $20, his first Matisse $50; both pictures are now valued at about $20,000. He found a $40,000 Henri Rousseau in a Paris jewelry shop, paid $10 for it. Other of his treasures came higher. In 1942, after 29 years of coveting it, he paid $175,000 for Renoir’s magnificent Mussel Fishers at Berneval. At that time, with a collection of some 200 Renoirs, 100 Cezannes, 75 Matisses and more than 1,000 other hand-picked masterpieces, ancient and modern, valued at from $20 to $50 million, Barnes declared that there were only nine more privately owned pictures in the world that he was still interested in buying.

Unlike many wealthy collectors, Barnes not only bought pictures, he studied them. In 1925 he published his scholarly Art in Painting, now long accepted as an art text in U.S. schools. Later he collaborated on exhaustive, book-length studies of his favorite artists, Cézanne, Renoir and Matisse.

Quacks & Cheats. Although Barnes boasted the finest private collection of modern art in the world, few can boast of having seen it. In 1921, Barnes extended his fight for modern art into a war against all art fanciers and cognoscenti. That year, he lent 25 paintings to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Conservative Philadelphians scorned his moderns as “quack practitioners” and “cheats.”Quick-tempered Alfred Barnes took his paintings back from the academy, locked up his collection in a $500,000 limestone museum on his Main Line estate at Merion, Pa. At the same time, he set up the Barnes Foundation to offer free art training to a limited number of carefully selected students a year. Since then, few besides foundation students and personal friends (including John Dewey, Katharine Cornell, Charles Laughton, Albert Einstein, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts) have seen any of his pictures.

Art critics and visiting celebrities who thought their prestige entitled them to private viewings got rude refusals or no answer at all. Socialite neighbors who asked to come and bring their weekend guests got the blunt advice: “Take your guests to the movies.” Some of Barnes’s curter notes were signed with the name Fidéle de Port Manech, his mongrel bitch. The general public crusty old Connoisseur Barnes dismissed as untutored “diversion seekers,” just as objectionable when they gushed approval as when they expressed stubborn distaste.

Last week, at 78, Albert Barnes died when the convertible he was driving collided with a ten-ton trailer truck. It looked as though death might finally have opened the doors of his collection. He had provided that, when he was no longer around to hear their comments, the general public should be allowed to look at his paintings—at intervals. The intervals will be up to the trustees of the Barnes Foundation.

* For news of a South Philadelphian who came out singing, see CINEMA.