Unlike James Whistler, who wrote a book on the subject, Albert C. Barnes never understood how to make enemies gently. After he had become a millionaire, at the age of thirty-five, his social style was pro-grammatically ferocious. Even his moments of kindness—such as allowing some unbelieving outsider to see his art collection—were so unpredictable that they further confounded the hopes of those who tried to deal reasonably with him. But as he was acquiring the reputation of being an impossible man, he was also accumulating a collection of modern art stupendous in size and importance. In addition, he was able to play a prominent role in the reception and criticism of modern art in America. It is for these reasons that he is an important, as well as a colorful, figure and that William Schack’s Art and Argyrol1—the first full-length biography of Barnes—is of considerable interest.

To begin with, the book provides a background for the legal controversy in which Barnes’s name still figures today, ten years after his death. From 1925 on he refused to let his collection be seen by those legions of people he considered hostile or indifferent to new painting. Repeatedly reaffirming his right to privacy, he still claimed his collection as a non-profit educational institution, the Barnes Foundation. Exclusive access to his vast array of art was granted to the student body, as the core of a new education program. Even today, the Foundation maintains that its art gallery and educational facilities are inseparable, and that a mass of visitors would destroy the curriculum of the school. But the Attorney General of Pennsylvania has finally established, after a nine-year law suit, that the organization cannot continue to hold its tax-exempt status and be private at the same time. The Foundation has been forced to compromise and on March 19, 1961, the New York Times announced the conditions of the first public admission to the collection. Artists, scholars, and museum-goers—their appetite whetted by long deprivation, and their curiosity by rumor—are now preparing themselves to make the pilgrimage to Merion. It is not every day that over 200 Renoirs, 70 Cezannes, scores of Matisses, Picassos, Modiglianis, Soutines, all chosen by a man notorious for his dissatisfaction with the second-rate, are unlocked to the public.

Aside from its help in clarifying the legal question, Schack’s biography does not provide the fully illuminating study one had hoped for of Barnes, nor of the issues involved in his use of his collection as a base of operations for a polemical campaign in the world of art criticism and education. Though handicapped by the inevitable refusal of the Barnes Foundation to allow him to examine its records, Schack still could have treated more adequately such questions as the aesthetic climate that Barnes tried so hard to influence, or Barnes’s place within the over-all context of American collecting. As for his subject’s critical methods and educational philosophy, Schack has something to say, though only with average perception. On the whole, his main interest lies elsewhere: in the collection of incidents which would amplify the Barnes myth. Unhappily, the more folksy and brash was that myth, the more Schack’s prose style imitates it. One is surprised to find such words as “switcheroo” and “loony” between the hard covers of a serious biography. Schack has, in fact, written a kind of “Barnes Confidential,” weak in documentation and larded with a great deal of amateur psychologizing. (“From now on, he would buy the quality he had himself failed to create.”) All the stories he has dug up are not, of course, without their fascination; what is lacking is a unified point of view about Albert Barnes that goes beyond Schack’s frequent horror—however justified at times horror may be.

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Though Schack’s information cannot always be trusted, the portrait of an eminently self-contradictory American emerges from his treatment. Barnes began as a classically inner-directed type of the old school—born of poverty-stricken parents, pushing himself through college and medical school, inventing an effective eye antiseptic, Argyrol, which brought him millions, and then undergoing a complete re-education in the fine arts and philosophy in his middle years. Throughout his later career Barnes owed an overwhelming debt to European culture, but some of his rash (though usually temporary) judgments, such as that Corot could not be compared with Thomas Hart Benton, or that the Prado museum was inferior to the Barnes Foundation, show a kind of typical Yankee distrust of the older European traditions. There was something fractured in his own native ethic as well. While he was a loud friend of the Negro, he was capable of prejudice toward a Negro student. The patron of Lipchitz, Pascin, and Soutine could say that the Dial magazine had too many Jewish writers. Such ambivalence toward minorities is mirrored in his larger social attitudes. Priding himself on his egalitarianism, chumming with the local fire chief, and supporting Roosevelt’s New Deal, he also announced once that his Foundation class “was no place for the rabble.” Thus the misanthropic impulses of the great collector would often trip up his missionary vocation as educator and publicizer: anxious as he was to promote greater understanding of his masterpieces, he still could not help combatting the very people he wished to convert. He would provoke constantly (his declaration that Philadelphia’s Museum of Art was a house of intellectual prostitution is a fair example) and then regard the resulting alienation as philistinism. No matter how fanatic he was as an educator, he could not refrain from a destructive tomfoolery as a man. Also, while he never lost his sharpness and flexibility in business dealings in the art market (Schack implies that he was often too sharp), Barnes fell into a rigid pattern intellectually. And though in time he became a respected authority, he always retained a sense of being an outsider, an obsession which his own frantic mania for possessing, or his attempt to establish the Barnes Foundation as a great headquarters, never diminished. In short, his private character consistently betrayed his public role.

Unsurprisingly, these contradictions conditioned Barnes’s taste as a collector and prevented him from coming comfortably to terms with any work of art. He began by buying some Impressionists in 1912 chosen by two artist friends, William Glackens and Alfred Maurer, whom he sent to Paris as agents. Nicely befuddled by their choice, he embarked on a rigorous and systematic course of educating his artistic judgment. Through his contact with the Steins, he gradually overcame his shock at the French avant-garde, and beside his favorites, Renoir and Cezanne, he began to add Matisse and Picasso to his collection, though not many of the latter’s Cubist canvases. Believing that collecting should be creative, he also saw that it could be practical and, with a canny intuition, he cornered and coralled a horde of Post-Impressionists into a museum of his own, always first weighing their historical significance. Instead of allowing himself the modest pleasure of living with his pictures, he then busied himself in examining them privately and in lectures. Apparently, he extracted a passionate satisfaction from these analyses—comparable to the joys of his less theoretical and more impulsive fellow collectors.

If advanced for his time, Barnes’s taste as a collector was hardly revolutionary. As regards the Impressionists, Mrs. Have-mayer had purchased Degas in 1875; James Johnson, Manet in 1888; and Mrs. Potter Palmer, Renoir and Monet in 1892. The Steins were already buying Picasso and Matisse in 1906, and so was John Quinn seven years later. These collectors took risks simply because of their undaunted appreciation or as an expression of their faith in a man or a movement. Their taste was so visionary that it awaited confirming, in most cases, for a generation and represents one of the most enlightened chapters in American cultural history. At the time of the First World War, Barnes was still years behind them in the schooling of his eyes, and had arrived, at any rate, too late on the scene to match their originality. With the exception of a successful gamble on Soutine in 1923, he was limited to a rather inspired mopping up, and compensated by giving free expression to his instinct for proselytizing. His distinguished predecessors had high-handedly collected art in a society almost completely uncomprehending of their activities. Barnes’s vanity was less innocent, just as his self-consciousness was greater than theirs. Not being able to countenance indifference, he was the first collector to attempt to lessen the gap between the modern artist and the public. In this, at least, he was quite original.

Like Duncan Phillips and Sidney Janis after him, Barnes wrote art books for the interested layman. However, except for a group of his fanatic former students, everyone knows how tedious and dated the Barnesian critical approach is today. His The Art in Painting, in fact, was already regressive when it appeared in 1925. The book derived from the Clive Bell concept of “significant form” (Art, 1913), which in turn depended in method upon the earlier Wölfflinian schemes of pure visibility. Barnes’s “plastic values” (not that much more of a rigorous concept than Bell’s—despite Schack’s opinion—and certainly more repetitive) was the swan song of “element” conscious art criticism. It relied upon the belief that paintings could be classified, analyzed, and judged on the basis of purely optical criteria, and that the experience of the work of art lies in the process of isolating its components—line, color, space, mass, etc.

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The scientific ring to Barnes’s formulation was characteristic. He wrote in the preface to the first edition of The Art in Painting: “This book is an experiment in the adaptation to plastic art of the principles of scientific method.” Though he was aware of the danger of such methods (“mechanical registration, an inventory of meaningless detail”), his writings and teachings are sodden with these very mistakes. On the other hand, though he recognized the necessity of general principles, none of them seems to have guided the mass of his silly pronouncements, such as that Matisse’s drawings were inferior to his paintings, or that the Cubists misunderstood Cezanne and hence failed to attain “intrinsic importance.” His jargon never succeeded in providing a mutually nourishing link between ideas and sensibility. He subjected Renoir, of all people, to schematic measurements, as if there were only colors, spaces, and surfaces in the Impressionist painting—admirable technique, he would have said, but no sensations. Above all, one could not “daydream” before art, a thing for which Barnes had a schoolmasterish horror. For all the mechanism of his approach, Barnes was never sympathetic to the mechanical in art, nor, for all his formalism, was he receptive to abstract painting. An underlying puritanism, perhaps, kept him from finding a vocabulary to describe the power of what he thought to be merely seductive, while—still another contradiction—his attachment to the material and his intense but ineffectual addiction to human values opposed that retreat from representation already prophesied by many of the paintings in his own collection.

However, he knew how to publicize his ideas and create disciples, and it is no accident that after being clarioned in his books, the cliché of “plastic values” descended into the art education departments, museums, and public schools, there to chasten a couple of generations of American students and painters. Critical of Barnes’s intellectualist dismantling of art, Schack comments succinctly: “Indeed, wonder without analysis is a truer appreciation of art than analysis without wonder.”

But “appreciation” was not so much an issue in Barnes’s career as was the problem of authority. Public taste might flounder toward self-improvement, abetted by actual contact with works of art; but eventually there had to be men, Barnes thought, who were knowledgeable, experienced, objective, and who could lead public opinion. The critics he saw around him were merely charlatans and woolly heads. The underlying significance of the Barnes program was in its warfare about credentials: the progressive amateur combatting the conservative or incompetent professional. Barnes himself, the perpetual amateur (though not in the old, honorific sense of the word), was only relatively “advanced,” and even those opinions which we agree with today were often held for the wrong reasons. Undoubtedly he became the victim of his own extremism, but this may have been the price he was willing to pay in order to make a dent in the provincial art criticism of the 1920’s and 1930’s. He lacked knowledge, and certainly that moderation and unity which he claimed were essential to the work of art; but he did insist that one’s responsibility was, above all, to see. At its most modest, authority meant to him the ability to make a decently verifiable statement about a painting.

Since Barnes, there has been a breakdown of the kind of optimism which sponsored such a belief, but the problem of authority remains as primitive as it was then—perversely enough, because of our excessive sophistication. The exposure to a greater variety of viewpoints has led us to an immense tolerance, with such side-effects as paralysis of judgment and the protection by relativism of all kinds of hypocrisies and confusions. Today, far richer and subtler aesthetic discriminations are possible than Barnes ever dreamed of, but there has also been a deterioration of good faith and self-confidence in criticism, despite our knowing tone. To this extent, Barnes’s polemics have failed. To paraphrase Delacroix about Ingres, they are “the complete expression of an incomplete mind.” But if they can be ridiculed mercilessly, so can most of the orthodoxies of the present. Meanwhile, thank goodness, there is his collection.

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1 Thomas Yoseloff, 412 pp., $4.95.

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