Red Pants on Sundays

When Kenneth Clark​ , then director of the National Gallery, arranged to visit the Barnes Foundation in the mid-1930s, he knew to be careful. Albert Barnes was famously tricky and belligerent. Furthermore, Clark and his wife, Jane, were staying with an arch-rival of Barnes’s, Joseph Widener, who was, as Clark puts it in his memoirs, ‘a collector of the old style, so courteous as to be practically indistinguishable from his butler’. So the next morning they took the precaution of leaving Widener’s car a quarter of a mile from Barnes’s house. When they arrived, the door was opened and, ‘after careful scrutiny by a man who could be properly described as a roughneck (one could have struck a match on his neck), we were admitted.’ They found their host ‘alone in his fabulous gallery sitting on a kitchen chair, listening to a tape recording of his own speech of welcome to [the dealer] Vollard’. They tiptoed away and started looking at the pictures. Twenty minutes later, they were suddenly confronted by Barnes ‘with beetling brows’. Jane Clark had the tactical nous to praise the rich man’s shirt. ‘Yes, it’s a good one,’ Barnes replied, ‘And I wear red pants on Sundays.’ This was the start of a five-year friendship which Clark describes as ‘almost embarrassingly warm. I put it like that because Dr Barnes was not at all an attractive character. His stories of how he had extracted Cézannes and Renoirs from penniless widows made one’s blood run cold. But his passionate love of painting made him supportable.’

The fact that the ‘embarrassing’ friendship lasted five years is a tribute to Clark’s diplomatic ways. Others, even the most distinguished, did not last that long. A few years later, Bertrand Russell, who was lecturing in America, found himself trapped there by the outbreak of war. His situation was made worse because of his publicly expressed views on sex and marriage: for instance, the proposition, in Marriage and Morals, that ‘the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Further, as Russell recalled in his autobiography, ‘I was thought wicked for saying that very young infants should not be punished for masturbation. A typical American witch hunt was instituted against me, and I became taboo throughout the whole of the United States.’ His planned lecture tour collapsed, and no magazine or newspaper would publish him; the registrar of New York County said that he ‘should be tarred and feathered and driven out of the country’. At which point Barnes stepped in and offered Russell a job at his foundation. His lectures there were subsequently written up as A History of Western Philosophy.

Russell described Barnes as ‘a strange character. He had a dog to whom he was passionately devoted and a wife who was passionately devoted to him. He liked to patronise coloured people and treated them as equals, because he was quite sure that they were not … He demanded constant flattery and had a passion for quarrelling.’ Russell had been warned that his benefactor usually tired of people before long, so had secured a five-year contract. He duly lasted two before Barnes fired him. Russell in his autobiography gives no casus belli, but there was disharmony from the start between Lady Russell and Barnes, who liked to instruct her on how to bring up her three-year-old child. The unforeseeable tipping point turned out to be her habit of knitting (for the allied troops) during her husband’s lectures. She received an official reprimand from the board of directors of the Barnes Foundation – ‘Your constant movements in knitting during the course of the lecture were annoying and a distraction from attention to the speaker’ – and she was banned from attending her husband’s classes. It was the beginning of the end.

But you did not need to have met Albert Barnes for him to take against you. In late 1927 Ford Madox Ford, then in New York, telegraphed for permission to visit the foundation. Barnes cabled back: ‘Would rather burn my collection than let Ford Madox Ford see it.’

Barnes was born in the poorest part of Philadelphia in 1872. His father was a Civil War veteran with a wooden arm and a three-quarter disability pension who worked in menial jobs before declining into alcoholism; his mother was an ardent Methodist who supplied Albert with love and ambition and such balance as he had. He went through the public education system, became a chemist, worked for a Philadelphia drugmaker, then set up with a colleague, Hermann Hille. Between them they invented a treatment for gonorrhoea. Their product, Argyrol, became a market leader for decades and made Barnes rich, then very rich, then an art collector who established his foundation at Merion, the swankiest part of town. He was intelligent, hard-working, thin-skinned and instinctively deceitful. When his father died in 1930, he erected a tombstone claiming that John Jesse Barnes had served the full four years of the Civil War, instead of an actual six months.

Numerous friends and acquaintances testified to Barnes’s ‘complexity’. The painter Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, described him as ‘magnificent … friendly, kindly, hospitable’, but also ‘a ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch’. With Barnes, there was no middle ground, minuscule self-doubt and no remorse over those he belittled, slandered and discarded; you were either in or, forever, out. As is often the case with those described as ‘complex’, Barnes had only two gears: forward or reverse, nice or nasty, the latter mode suddenly kicking in to the surprise of the baffled ‘friend’ or ‘collaborator’. He acted like a raging bull who occasionally stopped to have his muzzle stroked or his shirt praised while grazing on a piece of lush grass; then he was off on the rampage again.

At times Barnes sounds Trumpian: in his love of the chiselling deal, his determination to avoid ‘every cent of taxes he could’, his patronising rivalrousness (of Bernard Berenson: ‘I had a sense of compassion for what I thought was his lack of appreciation of good art’), his use of bribes and sweeteners, his at times insane boastfulness (he apparently discovered for himself all the principles of Freudianism a few years before Freud wrote them down), his toxic masculinity and coarseness of word and deed. Blake Gopnik observes that ‘the power he sought, in all things, at all times, had to be a cover for a psyche that always felt powerless.’ For years he had sought the backing of a university as collaborator and eventually inheritor of his collection. Many were approached without their finding favour. One plausible contender was nearby Bryn Mawr, known for its concentration on the arts. Barnes flirted with the institution for a year or so, until the inevitable one-sided quarrel broke out. Years later, the grudge was still bubbling away, and Barnes was writing with manic glee about a ‘psychoanalytic test’ he planned to enforce on any Bryn Mawrite seeking a post at his foundation:

If the faculty applicant is a woman, we test the sensitivity of her clitoris by titillation with the finger. If the faculty applicant is a man, we make an examination of the man’s scrotum to determine the presence or absence of testicles. The reason we make these tests is that it is commonly believed that women candidates for professorship at Bryn Mawr must be sexually dead and the men candidates lacking in testicles.

This leads naturally to the question of Barnes’s own testicularity. At Philadelphia Central High School, he was said to be ‘girl crazy’. When he quarrelled with Hermann Hille, the insults from Barnes were answered by retorts from Hille claiming that Barnes was ‘wild with women’, kept two mistresses at the factory at a cost of four dollars each and brought in other women off the streets. This was a few years into his marriage to Laura Leggett, the daughter of a prosperous Brooklyn businessman. (Her five siblings used to call her ‘the Boss’; now she had one of her own.) She was, according to the philosopher John Dewey, a vital collaborator in Barnes’s vision: ‘No one will ever know or be able to tell how much the foundation owes to her keen judgment, cultivated taste, remarkable executive ability and untiring work.’ Yet she is surprisingly absent from this biography of her husband, apart from references to her skill in garden design and a credit towards the end for being ‘long her husband’s éminence grise’. There were no children, and we are given little idea of the texture of this fifty-year marriage. Perhaps the marital deal was settled on both sides from the very beginning and each was contented with that. Perhaps, as Bertrand Russell observed, she was passionately devoted to him, while he was passionately devoted to his dog – aptly named Fidèle. Perhaps there are documents in the archives which would have fleshed out their marriage; perhaps not. We are told that Barnes, on his buying trips to Paris, was a devotee of the Folies Bergère. He also bought a lot of what Gopnik describes as ‘topless Renoirs’. We, as readers, are obliged to be satisfied with that.

Albert Barnes with Fidèle, c.1946. Photograph by Angelo Pinto, courtesy of the Pinto family. Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archives, Philadelphia.

Barnes clearly liked art very much, and often bulk-bought. He loved the quasi-orgasmic moment of acquisition – though ‘love’ is perhaps too gentle a word. He once described what happens ‘when the rabies of pursuit of quality in painting, and its enjoyment, gets into a man’s system. And when he has surrounded himself with that quality, bought with his blood, he is a king.’ This self-appointed monarch would stand for long hours contemplating his own collection, lecturing on it and writing long, prolix books about it. Vollard (the only dealer he couldn’t bully, and who insisted on getting Barnes’s money upfront before parting with any work) admired his taste and his decision-making. Barnes bought the first Van Gogh to land in the United States – The Postman of 1889, shipped over from Paris in 1912. But whatever he might claim – for instance, backdating his first purchase of a Picasso by three years to impress people – he wasn’t the first American to buy Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. The Steins in Paris and the Cone sisters of Baltimore were there before him, while Mary Cassatt was advising her compatriots from Paris. Barnes bought well, though he did not go the whole way with Cubism. He also believed, quaintly, that the paintings he happened to collect and own represented the greatest artistic movement in the history of humanity.

Barnes built a wonderful collection: 67 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, plus Picasso, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Bonnard, not to mention all those topless Renoirs. Unsurprisingly, he controlled everything about his foundation, from the exact hanging of the works to the conditions and numbers of entry. He also tried to control the future: no work should ever be sold or lent for exhibition or even rehung differently; the foundation was to remain exactly where and as he had first installed it, for ever and ever, amen. But posterity was one thing Barnes could not control, and over a series of lawsuits after his death, most of these terms of his will were broken.

As a collector, one of Barnes’s touchstones was the artist’s ‘sincerity’. With Cézanne, he was convinced of ‘the absolute sincerity of the man’. Around 1930, he met Georgia O’Keeffe and bought two of her paintings. He wrote to her: ‘I think they are authentic expressions of yourself and, therefore, genuine art.’ For Barnes, the words ‘sincerity’ and ‘authenticity’ were sure-fire indicators of quality. When he later expanded his collection to include metalware – locks, hinges, latches and so on, which he hung between and around his paintings – he declared ‘the creators of antique wrought iron just as authentic an artist as a Titian, Renoir or Cézanne’. Perhaps; yet almost all artists, writers, composers and so on, whether talented or untalented, are as ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’ as those anonymous metalworkers, believing in what they do, committed to their craft, encouraged and confirmed by public and critical favour – sometimes even by disfavour. Of course there are always a few charlatans and cynics and posers around, especially near the commercial edges, but it’s hard to think of any artists who aren’t predominantly ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’ in their work except forgers – and even they have a kind of ‘sincerity’, since they are making a sincere attempt at reproducing ‘authenticity’. Though for Barnes authenticity was not always enduring. He exchanged friendly letters with O’Keeffe, telling her that he was ‘enjoying the flavour and colour of your picturesque self’. But he acquired art on a ‘sale or return’ basis, and it didn’t take long for him to decide that living with her pictures didn’t work; he sent them back for the usual refund.

So we come​ to the question: what does art do? One thing it did not do was improve Barnes’s moral character – the rabid king bit courtiers, collectors and dealers indiscriminately, though he did claim in a letter ‘that his “damnable” psychological complexes finally resolved in the presence of Renoir’s paintings’. Perhaps that is why he ended up with so many of them – 180 – and judged Renoir ‘the greatest of modern painters’. Beyond that, what was art for? How did it work? The former chemist dealt in problems, answers, formulae, measurements, proofs, certainties. He believed that ‘the study of art should be no more subjective, or less rigorous in its methods, than scientific research.’ And his foundation, like his factory, should at the end of the day show a profit, both a practical and a social one. He wanted his collection to do ‘work in the world’. He hated the way gallery-goers drifted listlessly and snootily from one picture to another, pausing only for a frivolous word. He wanted them to stop and look, by force if necessary. Visitors to the foundation might find themselves ejected if they were caught admiring art in an ‘incorrect’ way. His manner was autocratic, but his instincts democratic: he thought that anyone, of any social class and income, could be taught how to look at a work of art. He believed that art’s worth ‘is determined by the extent to which the artist has enriched, improved, humanised, the common experience of man in the world in which he lives’. Such high educational ambition seems, however, to have produced small results. In 1927, Barnes quarrelled with his latest protégé, Henry Hart, who responded with a bullet-point denunciation of Barnes and all his work. Of the teaching aspect, Hall mocked his employer’s ‘delusion that eighteen boys and girls, selected by whim, listening to a woman recite with no conviction and no charm what you have drilled into her, constitute a justification for your hopes’.

Barnes’s ideas about the supremacy of form came initially from Clive Bell (which he later denied), and his hopes for the democratic usefulness of art from his friend Dewey – about the only person with whom he never quarrelled. Barnes firmly declared the ‘irrelevancy of subject matter to plastic values’; so you examined a Titian Entombment of Christ in the same terms as a Cézanne still life. He also loathed the idea of the spectator coming to a picture with intrusive presuppositions, especially skewing doses of biography and art history. The painting and the spectator should face each other like naked innocents. Further, as he put it in The Art in Painting, ‘the person who comprehends and appreciates the work of art shares the emotions which prompted the artist to create.’

There seems to be a central contradiction between Barnes’s purist aesthetic and his desire for art to do real work in the real world. He drains art of subject matter, of biography, of religion, of the artists’ own notions of what they were up to, and boils it all down into axes, planes, curves, rhythms and volumes. He makes it abstract and theoretical. At the same time, as Gopnik notes, ‘for him, forms came with political stakes and humanist implications.’ Perhaps; but art with overt subject matter can surely have stronger and more direct stakes and implications: think only, say, of Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists. Furthermore, if the person who comprehends and appreciates a work of art thereby shares the emotions of the original artist, then the devout art lover who looks at a Crucifixion or Annunciation will be seeing a true depiction of their faith, a version of which also presumably animated the painter. Why should these emotions be doubly irrelevant?

Kenneth Clark had also started out as true a believer in formalism. His initial admiration for Roger Fry had been little short of ‘idolatry’. He attended a lecture in which Fry applied his principles of pictorial analysis to a Poussin and a Cézanne, side by side:

One realised how hastily and superficially one had looked at a composition and failed to recognise the complex architecture which underlay it, the calculated intervals, the thrusts and stresses, the changes of direction and the assonance between one form and another. We hardly needed telling that, compared to these abstract ingredients, the subject was of no importance … [Fry] could apply the same critical criteria to a Negro mask or a Chinese bronze. Looking back, I wonder how much I was ever persuaded by the doctrine of ‘pure form’. If I had been asked for an honest answer, I suppose I would have admitted that subject matter, with all its implications, was overwhelmingly important to me.

Clark thought that for all Barnes’s unattractiveness, his love of painting made him ‘supportable’. He also wrote of the ‘flamboyant and aggressive’ collector Chester Dale that ‘he was redeemed by his passion for painting.’ Gopnik comes to judgment on his man like this: ‘Barnes’s public cruelties might be just about balanced by private kindnesses … His gifts to posterity, as a collector and thinker, pretty clearly outweigh his own lifetime’s faults.’ This notion of redemption goes a long way back – to those donors of paintings kneeling at the edge of the canvas, praying that their commissioning of this holy scene would assist their cause at the Final Judgment. Or in modern, non-Christian terms, the beetle-browed bully receives society’s approval because he bought some fine paintings. But is art such a zero-sum matter? And presumably any such weighing presupposes a possible outcome in which a great genius can also be such a great shit that the two filled scales weigh exactly the same? As for the notion of the collector’s ‘gifts to posterity’, this commonplace is also somewhat curious. Barnes didn’t discover any of the artists he collected, nor did he save their work from destruction; with a large amount of money, good advice and not much conscience (remember those penniless widows), he acquired some very fine paintings which would increase in value while in his possession. But any ‘gift to posterity’ is surely that of the original artist, much less so that of the collector. Lastly, there are Barnes’s supposed gifts to posterity as a ‘thinker’. Does posterity note and applaud them? Are any of his prolix texts still read or referred to? The Albert Barnes who today floods the pages of Amazon and AbeBooks is a tireless commentator on the Bible; those rare titles available by the sage of Merion seem to be kept in print by the Barnes Foundation itself.

In July 1951, the 79-year-old collector, who over the years had survived many automobilic scrapes and scratches and insurance claims, was driving his 1938 Packard convertible coupé from his country house back to the foundation, with Fidèle at his side. He reached a dangerous crossroads where, some years previously, at his insistence, a warning sign had been erected. In a final demonstration of his famous ‘complexity’, Barnes drove straight over, right into the path of a tractor-trailer loaded with ten tons of paper. The Packard turned over several times, and its mangled occupants were thrown out onto the road. When state policeman Private Gerald Robinson arrived at the scene, Barnes was already dead, and the trooper did the only useful thing he could. He drew his gun and shot the dog.