Art: Focus is on 'the steal,' not the art

The Art of the Steal is a film about one of the world's great art collections, the Barnes Foundation, told mainly through interviews with a dozen or so talking heads. Some of them are quite knowledgeable about the collection, which for now resides in Merion. John Anderson wrote a book about the battle to control it, Nick Tinari studied at the Barnes and knows the institution and the art intimately, as only a Barnes student can.

Yet the curious thing about The Art of the Steal is that no one in the documentary speaks primarily for art. The various witnesses, including civil rights leader Julian Bond, comment on just about every twist and turn in the two-decades-long battle to transfer the collection from its original home to Philadelphia.

That's what the film is about - control, power, money, not art per se. And yet without all those Renoirs and Cezannes and Matisses, there wouldn't be anything to fight about.

Albert C. Barnes, who assembled the collection and commissioned a gallery building to house it, loved art. So did his protegee and alter ego, Violette de Mazia, who took over the foundation's educational program after Barnes died in a car crash in 1951.

For more than 60 years, from its founding until de Mazia died in 1988, the foundation lived and breathed art and education. Philosopher John Dewey helped form the curriculum, which addressed aesthetic analysis. Philosopher Bertrand Russell taught there.

After de Mazia died, lawyers and businessmen took over. The classes continued, but emphasis shifted to making money, especially during the reign of board president/chairman Richard Glanton. Glanton couldn't tell a Cezanne from a potato pancake, but he could see potential in the Barnes collection as an instrument of power and as a revenue generator.

By the time Glanton was ousted in 1998, the foundation needed money to stay afloat. The eventual solution, allegedly suggested by the board president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was to move the collection to downtown Philadelphia, where it could attract more visitors. Court approval was needed, but that didn't prove much of an obstacle.

The relocation plan triggered the involvement of three rich and powerful foundations, which bankrolled it. Tourism promoters were exultant; so were political leaders, from Philadelphia's Mayor Street to Gov. Rendell. All spoke of an economic windfall for the city and financial security for the Barnes. But none spoke about art.

It seems obvious in hindsight that none recognized that the Barnes Foundation was more than a fungible collection of paintings, it was a work of art in itself, perfectly integrated into a 12-acre aboretum. It was an aesthetic totality - great art nestled in a sympathetic environment created by Barnes and his wife, Laura. Yes, he was as much an artist as the people whose work he arranged into beautifully symmetrical wall displays designed to illustrate how seemingly disparate art objects could speak to, and reinforce, each other.

Most people, and certainly not any of the Barnes trustees or the foundation nabobs or the political manipulators or the tourism promoters, can connect as deeply to art as Barnes could. Perhaps only Barnes students and teachers experience the rich resonance of his creation. That's why the protracted struggle to control this collection has been waged on a more pedestrian level - legalistic, commercial, promotional - in language that lawyers and business can understand.

The people who oppose the relocation understand the Barnes collection in starkly different terms. They see it first, and perhaps exclusively, as art. To them, that is its ultimate value. Tearing the collection from its Merion foundation is like slicing a fresco from the wall of a Tuscan church, or cutting a great painting into pieces to maximize profit. (Both have been done.)

So The Art of the Steal, ironically, explains the Barnes conflict in terms that lawyers, businessmen, and marketers would grasp. Art is a civic trophy to be claimed by anyone with the money, power, and chutzpah to carry it off. It's an argument that would have made sense to Napoleon, or Hermann Goering, for that matter.

Barnes was naive - he thought that art was its own reward. Unwittingly, he created a collection that eventually became too valuable to resist predation. He entrusted its conservation to an institution, Lincoln University, that could barely manage itself, as events in the 1990s demonstrated, let alone a resource of this magnitude and uniqueness.

Lincoln was bought off, a judge was bamboozled, and the raiders who lusted after the Barnes collection triumphed. It's a sad and sordid story that The Art of the Steal isn't equipped to fully explicate. Especially, the film isn't able to - or declines to - penetrate to the core of the Barnes mystique, to what makes it such a special place and why some people defend it so passionately.

The continued exertions of the move's opponents notwithstanding, the essential Barnes is sliding toward its 2012 reincarnation as the Faux Barnes, while the Merion building has already closed five galleries in preparation for the move.

The war is over, the perfect kidnapping achieved. As Kasper Gutman observed to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, it was neatly done.

A discussion of the move of the Barnes Foundation. C3.EndText