In 1922, Albert Barnes created the Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion Pennsylvania, a couple of miles from the center of Philadelphia. The Foundation houses the most critical and valuable collection of Post-Impressionist and Early Modern art in the world. The Barnes Foundation would go after very wealthy people and people who were very powerful. As Albert Barnes said, “The Barnes Foundation would attack… the enemies of intelligence and imagination in art, whether or not those enemies are protected by financial power or social prestige.” The movie is a documentary about the journey of the Barnes Foundation and how it took active people to hold it together even though many wanted it to dismantle. The Philadephia art commission wanted to move the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia to a new location. They also wanted to put a price on many paintings that were deemed priceless by the art world. They wanted to make a unique experience of how people view art, and it made it one of the most critical places for modern art in America. Barnes created one of the earliest art collections in the entire world. No other museum for art was like it. Barnes began to travel the world to grow a more significant understanding of art, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to developing his collection.
When Barnes began to look at the paintings for his collection, he had many different options. Nobody could put a price on it because it was so valuable and many of them are one of a kind, and there will never be anything like them. Many critics have sharply criticized the type of art in his collection, and he wanted it to be kept out of the wrong hands. Barnes set out after creating the collection to build a school and lead the way in modern education through the artwork. When he created the gallery, he treated every artwork the same and in its fundamentals. He wanted every painting to be treated the same, and no work of art would stand out more than another based on the set up around it. Dr. Barnes was very critical of the people who wanted to see this art and didn’t care for the wealthy trying to buy the painting and hang it in their homes and kept it closed to the public for that reason. The Barnes art gallery includes artwork from some of the greatest artists like Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Cezanne, and Picasso.
Later in Barnes’ life, he set out to stop anyone from taking the art from the foundation when he wrote his will. He wanted to keep it from being sold, moved, lent out to anyone or any other foundation. Soon after, Barnes died in a car accident in 1951, which lead to many questions on what was his intentions were for the collection in the future. The control of the foundation was then passed down to Violette De Manzia who was passionate and ran the foundation just like Barnes. Barnes wanted to keep the foundation a school and a learning institution, not a museum. After his death, many people began to set out to attack the foundation which leads to the opening of the foundation to the public, in spite of Barnes’ wishes. Many museums started to contact the foundation to ask to borrow the paintings and Manzia would not allow it just like the will said. Mrs. Manzia then died at 89 which lead to the power of the foundation being given to Lincoln University which was a predominantly African American institution. Then the University appointed Franklin Williams to be the president of the Collection. Williams then established a committee to keep the collection together.
Then comes along a lawyer, Richard Glanton, who had very ambitious ideas for the Barnes Foundation. He wanted to start making money for the foundation and put it on the map. Glanton believed that for 50 years the foundation was being mismanaged. Glanton began working with multi-millionaire Walter Hinneberg about the future and the long term preservation and restoration of the art collection. Glanton came out and said that they would start to sell the collection and everyone who objected was fired. He began to show reporters that the building was falling apart and need to be closed down to be fixed and undermined Barnes will. The collection was then taken on a tour around the world to show everyone’s works that many had never seen before.
Glanton then begins to try to develop the property to get a parking lot in a residential neighborhood. He then began to sue anyone who tried to stop him like the people in the community which wasted a considerable amount of money and by doing this many people in the committee began to believe he was incapable of running the foundation.
In this documentary, they tell the story of the journey of the Barnes collection in a fantastic way. Throughout the documentary, they interviewed people who played a significate role in the foundation and some of the people who tried to dismantle the foundation. They used lots of footage of the foundation to show just how it looked and how Barnes wanted it to look he made it perfect and wanted it to stay that way. This documentary told the story of the Barnes collection in a unique way, and overall I enjoyed that. It was fascinating to see how it began and how over time it got passed along and how some attempted to destroy it, but it held together and is a cool place for modern art.
