Steve and Katie speak with critic and author Blake Gopnik about his new book The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream. They discuss Barnes’s rise out of poverty to the heights of modern art collecting and his progressive societal priorities, namely the foundation he started to educate common people through a formalist approach to modern art. This foundation, like Barnes himself, became mired in controversy and a victim of Barnes’s desire to have complete control after his death. Part II will be released next month and will focus on the legal battles involving the Foundation after Barnes’s death, culminating in the Foundation’s transformation to a public museum in a new building in downtown Philadelphia.
Resources
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/books/review/the-mavericks-museum-blake-gopnik.html
https://www.barnesfoundation.org/research/archives
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-mavericks-museum-blake-gopnik?variant=42747881390114
https://www.nytimes.com/by/blake-gopnik
Katie and Steve discuss topics based on news and magazine articles and court filings and not based on original research unless specifically noted.
Episode Transcription
Steve Schindler: Hi, I’m Steve Schindler.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I’m Katie Wilson-Milne.
Steve Schindler: Welcome to the Art Law Podcast, a monthly podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The Art Law Podcast is sponsored by the law firm of Schindler Cohen & Hochman LLP, a premier litigation and art law boutique in New York City. Hi, Steve.
Steve Schindler: Hi, Katie, how are you?
Katie Wilson-Milne: I’m good. I’m so excited about our topic today. We’re going to finally talk about Albert Barnes, the esteemed, controversial, and renowned collector of what, at the time, was controversial modern art.
Steve Schindler: Right, the famous Barnes Collection.
Katie Wilson-Milne: In Philadelphia.
Steve Schindler: Now in Philadelphia. And I know we both, in teaching art law, have taught around the legal controversies surrounding Albert Barnes, particularly after he died, and the move from the original collection location to downtown Philadelphia, and how that all came about from a legal perspective.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, which is sort of one of the emblematic cases of a donor trying to control what happens to his donation, his art, long, long after he’s dead, and all the complications that come out of that, the doctrines of cy-près and deviation.
Steve Schindler: Fun topics.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Which are great topics. So we’re envisioning that we’ll talk about Barnes over two episodes. Today, we’ll talk with Blake Gopnik about his recent biography of Albert Barnes, about the man himself and how he came to be a collector and start this foundation. And then we’ll do a part two where we dive into the numerous legal controversies after Barnes’ death, about the restrictions he placed on the foundation and how those restrictions really put the foundation’s and its collections’ survival in jeopardy.
Steve Schindler: Wow. That sounds like fun. So should we start?
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. Well, we are so pleased to be joined by Blake Gopnik to talk about his new book, his biography on Albert Barnes called “The Maverick’s Museum.” And Blake is one of North America’s leading art critics. He has served as the art and design critic at Newsweek, chief art critic at both The Washington Post and Canada’s Globe and Mail. He has a PhD in art history from Oxford University, and regularly contributes to The New York Times and other outlets. So thanks for being here, Blake.
Steve Schindler: Yeah welcome, Blake.
Blake Gopnik: Pleasure. I want to meet that guy. He sounds interesting.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. He does sound interesting. All right. Let’s begin with who is Albert Barnes, Blake?
Blake Gopnik: Albert Barnes was a very eccentric gentleman. Born shortly after the Civil War in the United States, grew up dirt, dirt poor, but found really a single pharmaceutical product, developed it, didn’t take it very far, developed it just enough to make a small fortune, which he spent on art, built himself a foundation, a deluxe foundation, and filled it with what he thought of as radical modern art. And we can talk about exactly what that meant to him. Then turned it into a kind of a very weird educational institution. And in 1951, collided with a semi-trailer full of 10 tons of newsprint and ended his life. That’s the short version of who Albert Barnes was.
Steve Schindler: I can’t wait to hear the summary of my life like that, in 30 seconds or less. And what- I mean, you wrote this book, you’ve written other books, you wrote a book about Andy Warhol. What was it about Albert Barnes that caught your attention and sort of drew you to him and this book?
Blake Gopnik: A couple of things. One is, I was actually born and, for a little while at least, raised in Philadelphia, and had been to the Barnes Foundation when it was out in the suburbs on the main line in Merion. So knew it in that version. And then of course, I knew it. I wrote about it as a, as an art critic when it moved to Center City, Philadelphia. So I kind of knew the story. But I’ll be frank with you, I am one of those horrible creatures, an archives rat. There’s nothing I like better than a really juicy archive. And it turned out that I discovered that the Barnes archive had just been sort of systematized five, six years ago. And that was really an occasion I thought I can dig into this. I, you know, my Warhol book, which is almost a thousand pages, really depended on the amazing, insane amount of material that he kept, you know, every ticket stub, every taxi receipt. And it turns out Barnes did the same thing, although even possibly even worse. Warhol never wrote letters. Barnes wrote thousands and thousands and thousands of letters.
Steve Schindler: And those are all preserved in this archive. And can anyone access that, or do you have to have special permission, or how does…?
Blake Gopnik: You know, a huge number of them are- unlike when I started this book, a huge number of them are actually online. After I finished writing the book, or mostly finished writing the book, they put all the juiciest ones online, and I think the plan is to put them all online. I don’t think they’re going to put every financial document online, and I use those heavily. Every- the receipts for all the cars he bought, and then all the cars he smashed. That was a favorite part of my research. So that stuff may not be online, but the juicy lettering will be.
Katie Wilson-Milne: We’ll try to link to those resources in the show notes from the Barnes Foundation. So as you mentioned, Blake, Barnes grows up, it’s really an incredible, almost only in America story. So you said he grows up dirt poor in what’s called “the Neck,” which doesn’t sound great, of Philadelphia, this poor chaotic working class, Philadelphia environment.
Blake Gopnik: Mud filled, I mean, not even working class, I think it’s below working class. It’s a real abject Dickensian slum of people literally living in tar paper shacks in mud. It was famous across all the United States as kind of, there was a kind of slum tourism, a kind of tourism of poverty at the time. People would go to the Neck just to see how bad it could be. And most Philadelphians have no memory of it now. It’s now just South Philadelphia. It’s where the stadiums are and, in fact, where the Italian market is. So it’s a lovely part of Philadelphia now, but it was really a nightmare when he was growing up there. And he grew up as poor as could be.
Katie Wilson-Milne: How does he get from that? Obviously, I’m assuming his parents dirt poor themselves. How does Barnes go from that environment, not only that poverty, but that environment, to such great wealth?
Blake Gopnik: You know, he’s got brains. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think every kid in his neighborhood had the kind of brains he did. He went to a totally terrible elementary school, but was, you know, one of the best kids there. Took the entrance exam for Central High School in Philadelphia, which is a super prestigious, high-level public high school. I think the second public high school possibly in the United States. And it was specifically for poor-ish, mostly lower middle class or even middle class kids who couldn’t afford private tutors, which was what the rich had. And he was a scholarship kid to this really superb high school. I mean, it was at such a high level, they were able to grant- they were allowed to grant BAs to the graduating class. It was really amazing. They had their own astronomical observatory. They had the latest science labs. He learned German there. And then he becomes a doctor, uses that again, his brains, to get a fellowship to be a doctor, to study medicine, I should say, at Penn, the Ivy League school. But then discovers that he doesn’t have the personality for…
Katie Wilson-Milne: Clinical practice.
Blake Gopnik: Clinical practice, but hand-holding.
Steve Schindler: And what is it about his personality that makes him not well-suited for clinical practice, then?
Blake Gopnik: You know, I think from a very early age, he’s just unbelievably abrasive. I mean, you had to be, to survive in the Neck. You had to hit first before the other person hit you. He tells stories about literally hitting someone over the head with a bottle. I mean, it was absolutely brutal. And the physical brutality of the Neck carried over into his personality forever. And he always, you know, hit someone before they could hit him, so not ideal with patients or even colleagues. But he went to Germany, study, you know, Germany was the place to study chemistry, drug-making, goes to Germany, comes back, works for a really important drug-making firm in Philadelphia, and starts his own. And he really makes one product. But it’s a very important product. It’s called Argyrol. And it’s just an antiseptic. Most antiseptics at the time were quite corrosive. This was a very gentle antiseptic, which meant it was especially suitable for use on one’s gentle bits, namely one’s genitals. This is, you know, before antibiotics. So if you got gonorrhea, you had no choice but to try to use an antiseptic to cure yourself. But the crucial thing is that this gentle antiseptic could be used in the eyes, which meant that the scourge of ocular gonorrhea that all newborns were at risk for at the time could be really defeated with one drop in each eye of Argyrol. The chances are you could defeat this horrible scourge. I mean, blindness was an epidemic because of this around 1900 in the United States. And Argyrol, which was eventually mandated by law in many states, to be applied to infants’ eyes, it really had a big effect in curing this problem. But also brought in a hell of a lot of money to Albert Barnes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s pretty incredible. And so how old is he when he makes this first part of his fortune?
Blake Gopnik: About just about 33, not even, you know, young man, very young man. Well, the interesting things about him is that, you know, people often refer to him as a drug magnate or something like that or big pharma. He’s small pharma. He has this one product and one other product that’s kind of negligible, and he never pushes it as far as he can. He never makes as much of this product as he can. He makes enough of it to make a good income. And then once he catches the art bug, all he cares about art. He wants, he makes enough money off this product to be able to afford the art that he wants. It’s a lot of money, but it’s not Rockefeller kind of money. It’s just, you know, imagine the person in your neighborhood who owns a large factory, but nothing more than that.
Steve Schindler: Right. And one of the things that I picked up from your book, which I thought was interesting, since we- there’s a pattern that emerges early on about Albert Barnes and the court system and litigation. And he was a very litigious person, you know, just generally. And I read in your book that when he invented this product, he intentionally did not seek a patent for the product because he didn’t want sort of to disclose to the world the invention itself, but I guess apparently litigated fairly ferociously against anybody who is going to use the name of the product in some way.
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, it was heavily trademarked. He believed in the trademark. I think he thought he couldn’t really- there are going to be other mild-mannered antiseptics. I don’t think he really thought he could corner the market in the product per se. He could have patented it, but I don’t think he would have done that much good. But the brand was so well established. And in fact, when you talk to people, old people- I was going to say older people, I’m already an older person- but old people, they remember Argyrol even in the 50s as being one of the staple antiseptics, maybe if you got a cut knee or something like that. It was a major brand among brands. His way of protecting it often was to take a baseball bat to pharmacies that were- turned out were making it under false pretenses and demolishing it. With a couple of hired thugs.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I want to pick up on one thing you said, because I think we think of the Barnes Collection now, which we’ll talk about the details of in a moment, as being perhaps the most valuable by fair market value collection of art, one of them, in the world. I mean, it’s just one room of that museum would make an entire collection at any other museum. It’s astounding. And so I think that gives the impression that Barnes was a real baron, that he had- to have a collection like that, to see it today, gives the impression that he was a Rockefeller. So it’s interesting to think when one of the themes I hope we talk about with you and of your book is that his love of art and his eye for art was about his own taste and his own idea of what was important and not about value at the time. That kind of came later and was an incredible validation of his project. So we’re art lawyers were here to talk about his art-collecting life and all the controversies around that. But how on earth does he- so we’ve discussed how he became a doctor, how he made some money, he was smart, he went to Central High, which still exists and is an incredible school, and was his launching pad. But how did he get interested in art? I mean, why art? Especially from, given the context of where he was raised, I can understand that he would want to make money, but what’s the interest in fine art and where does that begin?
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s hard to find the very origins of it, though he said that from the age of six, he already liked to draw, whatever that means. I think his mother was involved, but we know very little about it. It seems as though she was in some way or another, culturally ambitious. I mean, he praised her to the skies. He thought she was one of the most amazing people ever. Many sons do say things like that about their mother, but it does seem as though she was unusually interested in culture for her world. And then at Central High, he befriends his two best friends, go on to become very important artists in the American avant-garde, in fact, John Sloan and William Glackens. So he is exposed to these artists, I think purely by accident, and also because he himself dabbles in painting from I think his teenage years on. So that’s really the beginning of it, but it looks as though he was collecting pretty mainstream work, maybe even junk, Victorian junk at first. And then he reconnects with his high school friend, William Glackens, who by then had become one of the most famous avant-gardists in America, which isn’t saying much, because the real avant-garde was all in France, but by American standards, Glackens was a big deal. Barnes reconnects to him, and very soon, within a couple of years, Glackens says, A, what you’re buying- because Barnes is already spending real money on art- what you’re buying is old junk, you know, let’s move you up here in the world of art collecting, and that’s really what triggers it. Almost overnight, I mean, within months, Barnes has the collecting bug for what then counts it as absolutely radical contemporary art. He buys, he gets the first Van Gogh in North America, he buys one of the first Picassos, he really is on top of things.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Blake, it’s kind of amazing that this transformation happens. The book gives this impression of Barnes becomes rich, he’s in his 30s, he sort of thinks, I should do what rich people do, buy art, buy cars, and I’ll just buy whatever everyone else in Philadelphia, whose rich is doing, who I’ve, you know, I’m sort of clawing my way to be like them from the bottom.
Blake Gopnik: He rides to the horses, he goes fox hunting, has to literally learn to ride, it’s a sort of sad story.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, because the old mainline money is never going to accept him, no matter how much money he makes, because he was born the way he was born. So, that’s a very interesting dynamic of his life. And this pivotal moment, I guess, in his 30s, where he suddenly decides, oh no, this is not just about me looking like a rich person, this is about something deeper and more about my own personal taste. And in fact, I’m going to use it as a way to distinguish myself from all these other simpletons, you know.
Steve Schindler: Right, and then…
Blake Gopnik: If you can’t join them, attack them is his model. Yeah. So certainly buying the radical art that they would hate so much, that his neighbors would hate, was part of the strategy, I think.
Steve Schindler: Do you think so? That’s interesting, because I didn’t know whether it was because he loved it so much or because it was a way to get back at the establishment. I mean, he could have collected old masters and traditional works of art, but clearly he didn’t go, for the most part, go in that direction.
Blake Gopnik: I mean, he clearly loved the work, but it didn’t hurt that the people he hated hated the work.
Steve Schindler: Okay.
Blake Gopnik: The two things went together. I mean, Barnes is so ferociously complicated that at the very moment that he seems to be the most obnoxious he can be, he’s also being incredibly generous. It’s really hard to pin down exactly his motivations at any given time, because they’re almost always a balance between hideous horrible motivations and relatively saintly motivations.
Katie Wilson-Milne: There’s this period of time you describe in the book, actually, I think quite a long time, maybe a couple of decades where he’s both running this very successful business. He’s the owner, he’s paying attention to it, he’s involved with his staff, which you describe in a really innovative progressive way. But that’s coinciding with his growing attention and devotion to his art collecting, and also to his intellectual life as it relates to his art collection. So how do those things co-exist? I mean, at some point, they don’t anymore, but for a while, they overlap.
Blake Gopnik: Well, the factory is chugging along. He himself says, once he starts making decent money, good money, I’m really just not interested in making money anymore, and that’s pretty early on already. I’d have to look at the letters again, but that’s at the moment that he starts collecting art. The factory doesn’t need a lot of work. He’s more interested in the factory as a social experiment than anything else. I mean, one of the vital things about Barnes and about my book is the way in which he is for Black civil rights, I mean, in a really aggressive way. It’s a way you don’t expect for a guy who tried to run with the hounds on the main line in Philadelphia. His interest in the factory as much as anything is in the racial mixing in the factory, teaching the workers in the factory about the latest in philosophy. I mean, he gives them two-hour seminars every day for free, as it were. He lets them work only six hours, kind of on condition that the last two hours in the day be spent studying Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells. And I mean, it’s kind- and John Dewey, who becomes Barnes’s best friend. He cares about the life of the mind from very early on. He’s already as interested in philosophy as he is in art from pretty early on. And that’s really why his collection becomes an educational institution.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And is it the case, Blake, that because that interest in philosophy and sort of, I don’t know, educational possibility pre-exists his art collection, that his art collection is an extension of that? I mean, is it a separate project or is it just a way to further that sort of philosophical educational experiment?
Blake Gopnik: And that’s really hard to say. I think the two things are really happening at the same time. In his mind, they are the same thing and not just in his mind. I mean, he writes at length about the way in which he feels that art has a philosophical and educational component built into it automatically, and that the only way to understand art properly is to be educated about it. It’s a strange mix because on the one hand, he says art is a democratic phenomenon. Anyone can look at art. You don’t need to know about the subject matter. You don’t need to know about ancient Greece or the Italian Renaissance. Just use your eyes. But you have to use your eyes exactly the way he teaches you to use your eyes.
Steve Schindler: It was a very modernist kind of attitude, particularly at the time that he was formulating his ideas.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And he was using his factory as an experiment to sort of test them out, even with art, right? He started teaching with art.
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, he filled the factory with Picasso’s and you name it. There’s that work by these figures. There’s a great list. One is in the lunchroom. Another is about the safe in the office, the backs of doors. I mean, it’s kind of beautiful to see him filling his office, filling the spaces where his workers would be with his art, and then inviting them to comment on it, inviting them- those who were completely illiterate, spoke in front of people who could write down what they were saying. It’s very interesting.
Steve Schindler: Wow. And was any of the art, because one of the things, obviously, his collection precedes the idea of his foundation, and now I gather some of the art was in the factory, but was he also collecting it to put in his home and experience it himself like that?
Blake Gopnik: Absolutely. I mean, the home was, the factory often had works on paper where the home might have more paintings. The home was, you know- he built himself a mansion called Lauriston, which is still there outside of Philadelphia. I think St. Joseph’s University owns it, if I’m not mistaken. So the original mansion is still out there. People say it’s just insane the amount of art that there was. Again, in the bathrooms, on the backs of doors. He spends a fortune getting the walls retreated so they have a beautiful surface to put the art on. He really cares about it as decor. Before he builds himself this deluxe foundation building, which has an administrative building, which is actually just a new mansion for him to live in. It’s a bit of- since you’re an art law podcast.
Katie Wilson-Milne: A little bit of a tax cheat.
Steve Schindler: Yes.
Blake Gopnik: He was constantly doing everything and taking the court for it again and again and again. The tax people went after him for his fudging.
Katie Wilson-Milne: All right, we’ll get to the beginning of the foundation, but I want to hear a little bit more about this sort of turn to the avant-garde and how Barnes, as you explained, he starts going to France. I mean, how does his relationship with this limited American avant-garde turn into this real life in Europe and relationship with a Parisian dealer who really sets him up with all these young, later-to-be, some of the most important artists in the world?
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, I mean, first he sends Glackens to Paris with a nice, big, fat money order so he can bargain better. If he has ready cash, then he can really- Glackens should be able to bargain. It’s not really enough money to buy the very fanciest things, like Cezannes are already expensive, right? But he gets a nice little collection. But Barnes, as soon as Glackens comes home with the art, Barnes realizes he wants to be part of the shopping trips, too. And by the next fall, he’s already going to Paris and buying tons of material. As I say, I mean, you know, Van Gogh is still considered a shocking artist. I mean, surprisingly, this is already 1912. You know, Van Gogh dies in 89. So there’s been some time in France for Van Gogh to be known, but not in the United States. You know, as I say, Barnes buys the very first American Van Gogh. And Barnes finds it a challenging picture, and all of his friends do as well. It’s clear that the French, the post-impressionist avant-garde, still counts in the United States and really in Europe as well, in England and in France, still counts as really avant-garde. He buys a Picasso, not the most avant-garde Picasso ever, but a pretty good pre-Cubist Picasso. So he’s interested in what looks like a more outrageous avant-garde, but his tastes get formed almost at once. His tastes get formed in 1912, and he never really moves that far forward from that. So Cézanne- Renoir is his great hero. He buys a decent number of Picassos, he loves Matisse, but he doesn’t ever buy the most radical Picasso Cubism. He’s not interested in Russian constructivism. He’s not even interested in German expressionism. He really is formed on a particular generation mostly of French artists.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Which is still more representational, right? I mean, the way I read your book is he doesn’t buy into abstraction.
Blake Gopnik: He barely buys anything that’s abstract. There’s a few abstract paintings that he buys mostly later by relatively minor figures. But mostly he doesn’t believe in it. I mean, he says he writes this mammoth book in 1925, “The Art and Painting,” and he goes after abstraction. Even though, as Steven said, he’s the great formalist, the great modernist. He believes in pattern and line and color as the fundament of what art is. He wants those things to be expressed in figurative painting. He wants to look at color in a figurative painting. He wants to have the pleasure, I think, partly of ignoring the subject matter, right? This is Barnes, the bad boy. If you show him subject matter, the one thing he’s going to do is say, I’m not interested in subject matter. It’s too easy to be a formalist with abstraction, right? It’s too easy only to pay attention to color and line and shape with abstraction. Try doing that with a Renoir nude and pretending that you’re only interested in the color of a Renoir nude.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, that’s what’s so, I don’t know, interesting and bizarre about this. He’s so drawn to these works that have such emotion in them, right? I mean, the figures in the work are experiencing life in such profound, beautiful ways. It seems impossible that given his really limited scope of his taste, that that wasn’t part of it, that there was no emotional aspect to it, or he would have collected such a broader category of pieces. And how do you understand that?
Blake Gopnik: Except what’s really, really interesting about him. I mean, one of the points of my book is that he’s a much more important theoretician than we think. He’s not the first person to be interested in pure formalism, in color and line and shape for their own sakes, but he sees them as always being at the service of the things you just mentioned, of emotion, of the world, of portraying the world in its glories, maybe even in its in its sadnesses. Which is very interesting for a formalist to be, to see formalism as a way to those, those so-called humanist values is really interesting position. It’s partly because he’s pretty old already. So he’s kind of formed, as I say, on Victorian art and never completely escapes some Victorian ideas about what it is to look at art, what art can do for you. But he wants it to be done only again through those formalist values of color, line, shape, and form.
Steve Schindler: Right. As long as you mention Victorian, it’s just sort of almost a footnote in your book, but it’s there for sure is that his particular interest in female nudes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yes.
Blake Gopnik: That that’s- Anyone who’s been to the Barnes Foundation as it is now.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Except he doesn’t notice their nudes, because it’s not important to him.
Blake Gopnik: Not officially, Not officially.
Steve Schindler: But it’s there. You can’t really ignore it. And I’m just wondering if there’s any sort of overlay or color that you want to sort of put on that.
Blake Gopnik: Well, his letters, especially to other men, are often ribald. And, you know, he was a bit of a lech. We don’t have a lot of evidence about his actual sexual proclivities, but when he has this massive lawsuit with his first partner, Herman Hiller, he’s accused in the lawsuit of having brought prostitutes constantly to the factory. He was definitely a heterosexual with some enthusiasm. So there’s no way he didn’t like the Renoir nudes as nudes as well. Anyone who goes to the foundation gets overwhelmed with the sheer breast count. There must be 500 breasts on view in that museum, thanks to Mr.Barnes and Mr. Renoir.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Well, this also reminds me that I wanted to ask you about his family life. So he marries. He has a very long marriage to Laura Barnes. They have no children. I don’t know if you know why that is by choice or…
Blake Gopnik: Well, by choice was hard in those days. I mean, there weren’t a lot of birth control options, right? So one assumes that it wasn’t just by choice.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah.
Blake Gopnik: Though it’s possible, people did, you know, there were obviously methods. My guess is that one or the other of them was sterile, would be my guess.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah.
Blake Gopnik: And…
Katie Wilson-Milne: She doesn’t feature that prominently in your book, but also in my understanding of Barnes- when we talk about the foundation, we talk about his life, she’s just not a huge presence. And was she just off doing her own thing? I mean, did Barnes sort of… What was his relationship with her in terms of his collecting and then later the foundation?
Blake Gopnik: I think it was extremely important. I think the relationship was extremely important. John Dewey, on the day of the inauguration of the foundation, says in his… writes in his speech, I should say, just how vitally important she was to the whole foundation. She was a real kind of eminence grise behind the whole foundation. She was clearly phenomenally smart. She was apparently in her family life at home with her siblings, a very powerful figure, the real boss of the family. We know very little about her, partly because she had a lot of her correspondence destroyed after her death. She ran the arboretum side of the foundation. Very few people realized that originally, from the very, very, very beginning, it was an art- we’re not allowed to say museum, he didn’t like that, but it was an educational institute for art and an arboretum. It had an important collection of American trees. Not anything like as important, frankly. People pretend that it was as important as the art, but it wasn’t. But that was a major activity and it taught classes and she was- that was really her baby. But she was also behind the scenes supporting him, I think. It’s relatively clear to me that he did have notable affairs, even not long after their marriage. It seems very, very likely that he did. But they clearly were a real team. I can’t tell you the number of people who have complained that she doesn’t feature enough in my book, and that’s because we know so little about her. I found a lovely photograph of her for the book, but we really know remarkably little about her activities.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I feel like the Barnes story, in my mind, really begins with this wedge Barnes creates with collecting a different kind of work, with distinguishing himself in many ways from other wealthy people in Philadelphia. And this wedge, he furthers through deciding to put his art collection and a lot of his money into a non-profit entity, which is the Barnes Foundation, and to do something particular with it, that he had a very fixed idea. I mean, it changed somewhat, right? But that he was doing that for a reason, to distinguish himself, to do something different, which, you know, you explained to some extent was a reaction to what he saw as inadequate in traditional art museums, probably namely the Philadelphia Museum of Art and arts education in general. So what was he reacting to? I mean, why was he trying to do something really different that he was pouring all his wealth and resources into? What was he rejecting?
Blake Gopnik: You know, in a way, I think his goals ring true to anyone who really loves art and spends substantial time with it in museums. Because one of the frustrations, I think, for anyone, you know, not just highfalutin people like me, professional art critics, but really anyone who spends time in museums is to watch other people spend, what is it? They now-it used to be seven seconds per work.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Three seconds.
Blake Gopnik: But now it’s down to three. Used to be seven.
Steve Schindler: And one Instagram.
Blake Gopnik: Yeah. Yeah. You take the picture and that’s it. And, you know, it’s not just other people. It’s, you know, when anyone goes to a museum, the temptation is to go quick. The challenge is to really, really, really look. And that’s a challenge for a professional art critic. I mean, I spent eight hours watching Andy Warhol’s static movie of the Empire State Building. I spent a week looking at one painting in the Prado, at Las Meninas. So I am the slowest of slow-lookers. But I also, when I’m in a museum and there are 300 works in front of me, you can’t do that with every work. And Barnes felt acutely that we need to look hard and long for art to be worthwhile. And he’s right. He’s totally right about that. You look for seven seconds or even seven minutes at a work of art, and you haven’t done it justice. So that was really important. And again, he was right. The problem is that he believed that when he was right, he had to force other people to do what he said. That it wasn’t enough to encourage people to look at length, but you had to bring them in as students and harangue them in front of the works and say, look, look, look, look, look, look, look. You’re not looking hard enough.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, and as you say, I mean, it’s not just his personal preference. He devotes his whole life and fortune to this. Why does he care so much about this?
Blake Gopnik: You know, I think because he cares about the art profoundly. He also believes, you know, he’s a weird figure, because he’s a horrible patriarch and autocrat, but he’s also a real Democrat in the populist sense. I mean, he believes in the virtues of the working man. I mean, look at how he had risen from nothing. He believes that that was possible for anyone. He didn’t even think he needed to be literate to look at art. He really supported the illiterate Black workers in his factory. He paid them more than anyone else did. He gave them these seminars. I mean, he really believed in the common man, and he wanted to invite them into his foundation to look at the art. In the end, surprise, surprise, just as every museum has discovered, art is mostly something for middle class people, because middle class people have the time to pay attention to it. So he never really was able to turn his foundation into a fully democratic institution, though if you wrote a letter saying you wanted to visit and signed it, you know, Blake Gopnik, Esquire, you were almost certain not to get in. There were lots of places where people said, I’m a coal miner when they weren’t, and got in to see it.
Steve Schindler: Talk a little bit about that. I mean, the process for getting in to see the works of art at the foundation once he’s set it up, because it’s some hilarious sort of anecdotes about, you know, well-known people trying to get in, but others being turned away. I think even you said once by a letter signed by his dog or some such thing.
Blake Gopnik: Yeah. I mean, officially, and this was written on pamphlets and cards that would be handed out to people. It was an educational institution, which meant like a university, you had to be enrolled in courses. You can’t go to Penn, the University of Pennsylvania, and just wander into any class you want. And so that was the model that he officially built. But of course, every single art lover in the United States and in the world wanted to see this great collection and would write letters. And if it was Monday and he was in a good mood and for some reason thought you were worthwhile, you’d get in. If your letter was at all stuffy, or if you had a fancy title after your name, or if, you know, your name began with N on a day that he preferred M, you would get a vicious, horrible, quite funny really, letter explaining why you weren’t going to get in. And as you say, signed by his dog, signed by the third assistant, male clerk, who of course was Barnes. They’re scurrilous letters, but they’re so scurrilous that they’re funny. You know, he, I think, was confused often. He thought that he was an insult comic. You know, he thought that he was Don Rickles, and other people just were insulted. You know, so it was a real problem. He thought it was hilarious. And other people, of course, were just hideously insulted by his behavior. It’s impossible not to laugh at some of the letters that were sent.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So, Blake, let’s back up a second. So, at some point, he’s working, he’s a successful business person, he’s collecting personally. What happens that makes him want to start this foundation? And what is the original purpose? I mean, what’s the idea? And how does he do it?
Blake Gopnik: Well, you guys can tell me how he does it, because that’s a legal issue. He sets up this thing called an indenture, and he gets a charter from the state. You know, the way you’d set up any 5013C, he sets it up as an educational institution. I’m sure if you were to look at the contracts, you’d realize, I mean, even I can tell, that they are set up so that he has absolute power within this institution. I mean, the board of directors is clearly him and a bunch of rubber stampers, including his wife and his employees. It’s absolutely set up for him to have complete control. But it’s set up to be an educational institution. At first, it’s not clear what that means, but then he develops it. He becomes best friends with John Dewey, one of the, at the time, the most famous philosopher in North America and still one of the greatest philosophers, American philosophers of all time. They become the closest of best buddies, and they did, I think, successfully affect each other. But Dewey’s ideas about democracy and education, about how education should be an immersive experience where you learn by doing, where you learn by thinking, not by rote memorization, really affects Barnes as well. Barnes talks about the entire foundation as being a Deweyian exercise in art education, just as Barnes believes that all education should be Deweyian. And in fact, the education that most of us had, most of the principles that govern contemporary education, or supposed to govern it, are Deweyian, and Barnes bought into those.
Steve Schindler: But pretty radical at the time. I mean, that was that was not the norm.
Blake Gopnik: And it went along with social progressivism. I mean, Barnes and Dewey were both for racial and gender parity in the world. I mean, they were, you know, Barnes was a proto-feminist, Dewey was as well. Dewey marched for women’s suffrage. And they were both against segregation. They were both pro-civil rights. Barnes more aggressively even than Dewey. Barnes was a real racial hero in some senses. At every moment that he wasn’t using racial epithets to annoy people.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right, I mean, he didn’t live today. But for, as you described really well, in that time and that environment on the main line of Philadelphia, he was two people, right? But the progressive Barnes was certainly unique in that environment. So the foundation from the beginning is really, you know, Barnes’s project and he wants to keep it that way. And I think one of the through lines of the history of the Barnes Foundation and of all the messy logistical governance, legal problems that ensue and really, you know, till a couple of years ago were continued, come from the fact that when Barnes created that foundation, he did it with a trust instrument which we call an indenture, which was incorporated into the bylaws of the foundation, that gave him, not just gave him so much control, but had very odd peculiar detailed requirements that, you know, certainly you would not see today and I think was unusual at the time as well. Like absolute detailed rules about how the investments of the foundation could be made, how the accounts could be held, you know, what becomes problematic later. And we can talk about with you, Blake, the artwork couldn’t be rearranged, it couldn’t be moved, it couldn’t exist in any other buildings, it could never be sold. Just sort of putting in place this world that was Barnes’ world.
Blake Gopnik: They couldn’t rent the space, they couldn’t. But you know, the one thing you brought up is the really vital, the only really important thing is the cockamamie ideas about how the money had to be invested. That was the real problem.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Blake Gopnik: He, you know, when he was younger, investing in civic bonds was really smart, and he made a lot of money investing in bonds, and you can just proof of it in his archive. Unfortunately, he insisted that that’s how the money had to be invested, and they started yielding less than inflation. So every single year, the endowment went down. And that was just insane to imagine that your ideas about how finances will work in 1920, are going to be the same way finances work in 2000, and it kind of destroyed the institution financially. Now, you know, Barnes was not alone. Almost everyone who endows a non-profit gives it too little money. They enjoy building a building. They enjoy building a collection. No one thinks it’s sexy and fun to give a ton of money for endowment. That’s the main problem that every museum has, is that you can get rich people to donate art. You can get them to build a building. What you can’t do is to get them to give you money for the endowment. And even Barnes did not leave enough money to keep the thing running.
Katie Wilson-Milne: But what’s different about Barnes is that he wasn’t just a patron of an existing museum. It was his project. And I think, you know, what becomes clear is that during his life, he was just giving it enough money, right? He had, he was making money. He got a lot of money when he sold his business, which he did at an incredibly opportune time. And he got out and devoted himself full time to the foundation. But he was in charge. So he was spending the money, he could see what was happening. The problem is that he envisioned this institution completely around himself and, you know, did two things. One is, didn’t do a great job of thinking through what would happen to it in the decades after he died in a certain way, right, by I think making it flexible and building a leadership structure that could evolve and where those leaders would be empowered to make changes and adjust to the times. But he also, at the same time, created these governance documents that looked so far out in the future in such detailed, strict ways. It’s an interesting sort of problem that he created, both trying to sort of not let it go beyond him, but also making sure it would go beyond him and fail to some extent.
Blake Gopnik: I mean, it should be, someone should teach a law course just using these documents to show how not to set up a foundation, you know, how to guarantee the eventual failure of your foundation.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right. I mean, and you’re right, is this is absolutely a contemporary problem about donors trying to control their donations. This is the most, you know, after they die, this is the most extreme example of a restricted gift we have in American history. So it is a great teaching tool.
Blake Gopnik: It’s important to recognize that there was really no space between Barnes and the foundation. I mean, I’d love for one of you guys to go through the legal documents and the accounting documents in the archive, because I’m just- wasn’t expert enough and it would take forever, because there’s so many of them and they’re so complicated. But it’s clear that he never really distinguished between his money and the money of the foundation. I mean, he really, when he established it, he really put almost all of his own money into the foundation. I think on the assumption that he would just use it as a piggybank, and he did. All of his trips, all of his, he lived lavishly, he bought the most lavish cars. It’s one reason the tax people were always coming after him.
Steve Schindler: And was that, was he living mostly through foundation money at that time? I mean, after he set it up in terms of the buying of the cars and the trips and the whatnot.
Blake Gopnik: As far as I can tell, I think it was very messy is what I think. I think he didn’t have accountants who were making any effort to keep it apart, which is one reason why the tax people went after him. Because you couldn’t tell what was really, and he would always claim, you know, that this was, I purchased this for the foundation. At a certain point in 19, around 1936, he starts buying antiques. And the truth is, he just gets a shopping bug. Like many of us do, if you make the mistake of going to too many, you know, cute antique stores in rural Pennsylvania, you end up buying a lot of butter churns. He’s one of those people. And then he builds an excuse for why he needs these things for the foundation. It’s a credible excuse. Lots of people were breaking down the barriers between fine and decorative arts, but he also just really likes buying.
Steve Schindler: He’s a shopper.
Blake Gopnik: And it’s insane. Oh my God, he goes crazy. I mean, the letters between him and the poor antique dealers, he’s always trying to get them to come down in price. He’s buying everything by the dozen, you know, a dozen keys, a dozen chairs. It’s really madness.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Blake, so we’ve described how argumentative, how defensive, how, you know, longing for a fight Barnes was. You write in your book that he was mired in legal controversy his entire adult life. I mean, whether that was his drug business, whether it was his personal behavior, like getting into car accidents or getting into fights with people. And that extends to the foundation pretty early. But could you talk about his relationship with the law and how he saw, you know, suing people or being sued for defamation? Or, I mean, it seemed like he was always sort of involved in a potential or real legal fight.
Blake Gopnik: You know, I bet you guys have clients like that. He loved litigation. He loved…
Katie Wilson-Milne: We need as many as possible.
Blake Gopnik: Right.
Steve Schindler: Yes.
Blake Gopnik: I’m sure he was very useful to his lawyers.
Steve Schindler: Call 212-277-6300.
Blake Gopnik: They- he loved using the law as yet another cudgel where he could attack other people. He loved daring people to sue him. You know, he was often pretended that he was at greater risk of lawsuits than he really was. You know, he pretended that he was always within one step from being arrested for libel. I think the laws were quite different though. You could actually be arrested for libel in those days and literally put in jail. So he always, he kept bail bonds near at hand in case that happened. It was, the law was just different is my understanding at the time. I think that maybe even the gap between civil and criminal was less clear than it is now is my impression, in his early days at least. Because the police would get involved in what we now think of as a civil case. So it really, it tracked with his personality, you know, anything he could do, whether it was letter writing or launching lawsuits. It’s clear that we had his first major lawsuit is with Herman Hiller, his business partner. And it’s just a hideous lawsuit. It’s vituperative like you wouldn’t believe. They’re both accusing each other of just ridiculous things. There’s a photograph of a gun in the legal documents. I mean, they really go berserk. And eventually a judge basically gets tired and says, okay, you know what you’re going to do? You’re both going to bid against the other person’s share in the company, and whoever is willing to pay most will just get the whole company. And that was actually built into the original documents for control of the company. He loved vituperation, and what’s a better place to vituperate than a lawsuit? But many of them didn’t go that far. There often were threats and things were settled. A lot of the legal problems were with the government, either the state government or I think the IRS itself. Yes, there were certainly cases where the IRS looked into things, but it was often the state. The state was concerned because, of course, and correct me if I’m wrong, the non-profit status in this case is, I think, a state issue that certifies it as non-profit. And they tried to rescind that at various times for various parts of what the foundation is doing. He buys a second house, and it really was being used for the foundation, but the state complains that it has a kind of sauna built in and say that’s not normal for an office building. So there’s all sorts of tomfoolery that goes on.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah I mean, so we’ll, you know, when Steve and I talk about this more in another episode, we’ll get into this, but the Barnes Foundation was formed in a different time for charitable entities. So as you said, it was chartered by the state, which used to be common for all business organizations and certainly nonprofits. And we have some clients who are older in New York nonprofits who were also formed this way by an act of the legislature, and it’s different now. But it is a matter of state law that you sort of get this permission from the state to become this type of entity.
Blake Gopnik: And still is? I’m sorry, was that only then? Do you still…
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s still the case. It’s just that the 501c3 status is a tax matter. So it’s sort of a double regulatory regime. Your governance is controlled by the state in which you’re formed. At that time, the legislature would give you a charter and give you permission. Now you just sort of incorporate more like a normal business. You can do it without that kind of formality. But the only reason you do that is to get these tax advantages. And some of them are state, but most of them and certainly now are these federal tax benefits that you get. And that’s the only reason you would ever start a nonprofit and subject yourself to these regulatory regimes. And so you have this double regulatory system from the state and from the IRS. And it seems like from the very beginning, Barnes cared very little. He obviously cared enough to start the foundation this way rather than just keep it in his own name or, you know, in a for-profit business structure. So he knew what he was doing. And part of that was a way to lock it up in this sort of trust-like form. But he also doesn’t care from the very beginning, right? From the very beginning, he builds himself a house on the foundation’s property where he lives. And, you know, as you said, the foundation is- he considers the collection his own collection. He controls who sees it. He controls who doesn’t see it. He controls the board, the staff members, many of them come over from his factory and are his longtime colleagues. So the flouting of any kind of formalities, it seems pretty blatant and deliberate on his part.
Blake Gopnik: And he loved flouting anything could flout. This was a man who loved flouting, and that’s part of it. So having said that, he has the very best legal advice. He has the top, top, top lawyers- who was one of the great art collectors of Philadelphia, too, is Barnes’s lawyer. So it’s not that he’s doing this, you know, on his own. He does have really good lawyers. And I think, as you say, it’s partly a different legal world than it is now. There was, I think, much less expertise around nonprofits. So the lawyers didn’t tell him, this is crazy what you’re doing. This isn’t going to work. No one knew. I mean, they’re just I don’t think there was much experience yet. You know, even the Metropolitan Museum was fairly new. The Philadelphia Museum of Art had actually not been founded yet when Barnes founded the foundation. Yeah, he had contempt for it always, just brutal contempt. He called it a “house of aesthetic prostitution,” was his favorite insult for it.
Katie Wilson-Milne: I was going to ask you, actually, if his antipathy, true, real hatred for the PMA, but also the Annenbergs, like all the Philadelphia families who were part of that official, like air quoting, “art world,” did that pre-exist the foundation or how did that come about? That real personal rejection of the rest of the Philadelphia art world?
Blake Gopnik: Well, it happened, how can I put it? As soon as Barnes could reject someone he did, so it just was a matter of when he met the particular people in charge. Often, he’d start out being friendly to them.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Blake Gopnik: Often, he’d try to ingratiate himself, because the weird thing about him is that he was a striver. He wanted to be part of the power structure, right? So he always, he courted Princeton and Columbia and Penn, Bryn Mawr as well. He would court them until they refused to do exactly what he said, and then he’d declare them monsters and idiots.
Steve Schindler: Right.
Blake Gopnik: He was always started out by courting power and then turning against them, including at the PMA. There are moments where he’s friendly with people who run the PMA, and then he turns against them.
Steve Schindler: Yeah. I was intrigued also by his courting, particularly these academic institutions, because initially they were to be part of the sort of the foundation after he was no longer there. And then he changed his mind because he got into these fights with these various institutions. And how did those fights kind of like lead toward, you know, his ultimate sort of partnership with Lincoln University?
Blake Gopnik: Well, you know, he kept dangling the foundation as he got older, especially he would dangle it as bait in front of some major institution, Penn, again and again. You know, he would dangle it. They’d have some relationship. Then he’d break off and say, you’re all morons. And then a few years later, there’d be a new principal president of the university and it would start again and then Barnes would break it off. And so there’s constant churn about who was going to be involved after his death. And Lincoln was kind of lucky in that Barnes, it looks as though Barnes would almost certainly, you know, but Lincoln, a Black…
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, what is Lincoln University?
Blake Gopnik: It’s not far from the Barnes Foundation. It’s in rural Pennsylvania and it’s a historically Black college, a very important one, trained lots of very important Black figures. And Barnes, quite towards the end of his life, gets interested in them because he’s interested in Black culture and Black success. And they have a relationship. He starts letting some of the Lincoln students come to the foundation to study. He gets some people from Lincoln to teach at the foundation. And after a year or so, of course, it all starts falling apart. He decides they’re all cretins. But that moment when Barnes runs a stop sign and gets broadsided by a 10-ton truck, he had yet to change his will to cut out Lincoln. So they ended up holding the, I don’t know if it’s treasure or about to explode bomb, but they ended up with it, you know? It was always musical chairs, and he would stop the music whenever he wanted. But in the end, a 10-ton truck stopped the music for him.
Katie Wilson-Milne: You were saying earlier how he had great lawyers. And actually, when you read the indenture, the bylaws of the Barnes, and you look at these old lawsuits, it’s actually very clear that there was a ton of legal work. It’s just that it was problematic, right? He didn’t write the stuff on a napkin. He had lawyers draft these very formal restrictive documents because he’d said to them, this is what I want. I want you to make this impossible to change. And they did it. And that required a good lawyer, you know, who didn’t give him practical long-term advice. The way he came in and out of this, we called this indenture again, the trust instrument, which informs what the foundation bylaws look like and what they can do. You know, he comes in and out. He tinkers with it. He has one rule, then he wants another rule, and he has the lawyers change it. And it’s a little bit of a Frankenstein document.
Blake Gopnik: There are a lot of addenda, a lot of addenda.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah. And then, you know, what, as you describe, he has this sort of lifelong, almost sort of off and on responsible thinking about what he should do with the foundation, both while he’s alive in terms of partnerships with these elite institutions that can bring in students and give him more reach and, you know, endow a professorship or whatever, you know, which just makes a ton of sense. That’s long-term planning that, that buoys the foundation for longevity. And then he just keeps sabotaging himself, right? And you really read this book about Barnes and you feel like there’s just a little boy, you know, from the Neck behind every decision, even, you know, in his 40s, 50s, and 60s, that just can’t, like, get the chip off his shoulder, right?
Blake Gopnik: He’s just can’t. That’s beautifully put, that that little boy is always there. It really is. You know, reaction to him, as written about in my book, is so varied. There are quite a few people who respond and say, what a jerk. How could you write about someone who was so completely evil and horrible? And other people, and I’m one of them, think it’s a kind of tragic story as much as anything. You know, there is something sad about him, the number of times he shoots himself in the foot. It’s amazing that he had any toes left by the end.
Katie Wilson-Milne: And you described there are two things going on. One is a genuine progressive outlook, you know, which, which bucked the norms. So he was genuinely inspired and interested in Black culture and working class people and gender equality. But he also used those interests as a way, you know, to stick it to the establishment, right? It was, it was both genuine and a way for him to be anti-elitist. And you really see that with Lincoln, I think, which is, you know, a genuine belief. And almost that he seems to feel more at home with these types of people than he does on, you know, in this old-moneyed Philadelphia mainline society. That he really never fits in there, he never feels comfortable, he feels judged, he judges them, and he really feels more comfortable with the people he’s, you know, trying to help, I guess, throughout his long project. And you get that sense with Lincoln, that Lincoln is a way to be rebellious, to show how much he hates the established Philadelphia elite, but also that he’s genuinely interested in helping them, but those things somehow go together in his life the whole way through.
Blake Gopnik: The philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had one of the many, one of the worst legal battles with Barnes, said something which has an element of truth, though it’s a little cruel, which is that one reason Barnes like working people and people of color and women, is that he could lord it over them, right? They weren’t threatening to him. So there’s an element of that as well. So his progressivism is partly a way of preserving his power. You know, when he’s being generous to Black people, there’s a level of condescension in it.
Katie Wilson-Milne: He is not unique in that, I think.
Blake Gopnik: No, he is not. To this day.
Katie Wilson-Milne: To this day, yeah. All right, so Barnes dies in his early 70s, right? He dies unexpectedly and suddenly. What is the state of the foundation at his death?
Blake Gopnik: It’s being run, well, first by his wife, by Laura, and then when Laura dies, or actually even before Laura dies, it starts being run by his amanuensis, his second-in-command, Violette de Mazia. And in a way, like many apostles, they see, how can I put it? They see his word as law in a way that he might not have. He was crazy, but of course, because he was an autocrat, flexible. Autocrats like to make decisions. They tried as much as possible to just follow in his footsteps, which wasn’t always easy. So they get in trouble pretty quickly with the state. The state says, you have to open this to the public. It’s a non-profit institution. It’s got to serve the public in more flexible ways. And there’s legal battles, you know, constant legal battles. And the state keeps chipping away at the foundation, saying, you’ve got to be open more hours, you’ve got to charge less, etc. And eventually, you know, more and more days of the week, it gets to be open. But mostly, they control it strictly. It becomes a weird kind of art finishing school for people who live out on the main line, because it really mostly gives up on an effort to be truly democratic, to let working people in. In theory, they still did it, but that’s just not who ended up showing up. And it came to be a circle of devotees to the Barnes method, which in art historical terms was pretty cockamamie from the very beginning and becomes more and more out of touch with what’s interesting in art history, to the point where it becomes kind of useless from an art historical point of view. But there are all these people who study there and go back and study there again and again, and really become apostles to a kind of artistic cult, if you ask me.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So de Mazia, she just runs the foundation for decades after Barnes dies exactly the same way. I mean, except for the court battles that cause her to do something different. But her idea was, I’m going to teach the exact same class I was teaching before. I’m not going to change anything. We’re going to have classes. This is not for people to wander in and see the art. I mean, is that right, that it was just sort of this continue programming as it was?
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, in fact, I don’t know. You know, Barnes, because he was so nutty, certainly let people in. I mean, there’s lots and lots of letters where people ask to come, and he says, yeah, sure, come next Wednesday. There is many of those, more of those than there are of the insanely scurrilous letters. So he did let people in. It’s not completely clear to me, because my biography really does end mostly on the day he dies. Whether she really did much of that, my impression is not, because she wasn’t really interested in cultivating people in the way he was, is my impression. But I’m not an expert on de Mazia. Someone has written a short biography of her.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yes. Well, I mean, and it’s interesting that many of our listeners have heard of the movie “The Art of the Steal,” which is how many of us were introduced to Barnes, which is an incredibly one-sided story, and it’s just an interesting starting point to learn about Barnes, because then I think like me, we’re like, oh, this is so interesting. Let me read more about this and look at the documents and read about the cases. And you realize that it’s actually absolutely insane to have wanted these artworks more valuable than any collection in the world, perhaps to languish uncared for in a rotting house full of water. But she had her devotees, as you said, and I think it’s interesting that they both sort of created a group of people who felt so passionately about the Barnes as it was that it could not change, you know, that it created a huge controversy, whereas, you know, many a nonprofit foundation, especially created a long time ago, needs to change, right? And the board accepts that, the board gets, you know, comes to some agreement about that. They maybe go and petition a court, but there’s usually not a huge public outcry to keep things exactly as they were decades and decades ago. So, what is it about the Barnes that just created controversy after controversy about every change, you know, after Barnes died?
Blake Gopnik: Well, it did become a kind of cult, a cult of a demised personality, after all, after by the time a lot of the issues started, the people who were for protecting the Barnes, as it were, had never met the man, right? So, it’s just a very strange phenomenon. I mean, I got a note on Facebook the other day from someone who said, you know, we were just trying to preserve a wonderful educational institution, which has since been demolished. So, there are people, really, who felt so strongly about the Barnes method. You know, I have to admit that I believe that the desires of a long dead, eccentric millionaire should not be what governs our public use of this amazing collection. And who knows if he’d lived, if he’d lived to be 120, how he would have felt about it. You know, you can’t tell.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Right. So, over time, you write a little bit about this at the end of the books, or what happens after Barnes dies. You know, both the state and I believe the tax authorities start looking into the Barnes more. And part of that is because some of the Philadelphia elite are themselves outraged about how the Barnes is being run. And this causes some of the controversy, right, that the very people Barnes hated are now prodding the Attorney General of Pennsylvania to go after the Barnes and sort of stir up these investigations and pressure more opening hours and more access from the public. And, you know, I think that clearly becomes part of the story, that it sort of Barnes against his old enemies to this day.
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, and I mean, yes, they’re elite, but part of those, some of those people are actually just trying to save the place. I mean, it so happens that in our society, the elite has the money.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, and are paying attention and care about art.
Blake Gopnik: And some of those elites are foundations, right? I mean, Philadelphia’s got these amazing old foundations. So it’s not as though this is Joe Blow who’s got a lot of money. This isn’t Jeff Bezos. This is ancient, venerable foundations that do a ton of good in Philadelphia. And I feel bad for them. They’re just trying to save the goddamn place and they’re attacked viciously as an elite trying to grab a power from, you know, from what? An institution on the main line?
Steve Schindler: Right.
Blake Gopnik: This is not a genuinely populist institution and hadn’t been ever.
Katie Wilson-Milne: But that’s Barnes. I mean, that’s Barnes speaking through his students, right?
Blake Gopnik: Amazingly. Now, I’ve got a question for you as lawyers. Now, if there hadn’t been the devotees, would the judges have been happy to change the indenture? Would that have been as complicated? If the foundation itself had just said, sorry, we don’t have the money, we’re collapsing, our facilities are dying, we want to move downtown, would a judge have raised a fuss if no one else had? Would that- Should that have been a straightforward thing?
Katie Wilson-Milne: I think the fuss was not raised by the court. It was raised by, I mean, and there were many lawsuits. So we have to talk about each one, right? There are the lawsuits about opening it up to more people. There were the lawsuits that started from the foundation, realizing it wasn’t going to survive, where the board went to the Orphans’ Court, which I love saying that, which is the name of the court that governs nonprofits and orphans in Pennsylvania, and said, please, please, please, let us try to make some money. Let us invest our assets differently. Let us loan the works out in a traveling exhibition so we can make some money. Like, let us increase the size of the board. I mean, this all happens over a long time, but the board itself is the one petitioning the court. They’re the ones who have standing.
Blake Gopnik: And the court is somewhat reluctant. The court doesn’t just say, of course, if this is what you need, they do their best to preserve some elements.
Steve Schindler: Yeah, and they’re supposed to.
Katie Wilson-Milne: They’re supposed to, right.
Steve Schindler: They’re there for it.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That’s normal, and that’s why they have to go to court in the first place, because they’re governed by these legal instruments, which were the terms on which Barnes gave this property to the foundation. And Barnes said, I’m giving it to you on these terms, and you have to follow these terms, or the gift’s no good. And so the board needs to go to the court to say, please let us out of this contractual arrangement. Please override this, even though it would otherwise be legally enforceable. And there are a couple of equitable doctrines that are now in many state statutes, but one is called Cy Pres, one is called Equitable Deviation, where courts can basically overlook a donor’s intent for really compelling reasons. They can’t just be for the whim of the foundation, because, oh, whoops, we didn’t fundraise, or sorry, we didn’t figure this out in time. You know, it has to really be a compelling urgent need. And so that proof needed to be before the court. And of course, the foundation asks for different things over time. So every time they’re asking for a new deviation from the indenture, they have to go to court and ask again. And then there’s all this sort of public opposition. There are interest groups that try to intervene, even if they don’t have standing. So it becomes both legally, but even more so, I think, a public relations sort of disaster for the Barnes.
Blake Gopnik: Although, you know, I did obviously speak to the people at the Barnes and know them, and it’s fading away. The issue is really at long last- I think we’re now 13 years after the reopening in Centre City. And I think that most people see it as a non-issue now. I really do think so, except for people writing to me on Facebook. Most people do. Although I think the friends of the Barnes still exist. The organization against the move, I think still exists and occasionally rears its head.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So Blake, can you just before we end, can you give us sort of a summary of what happens? So there’re all these- as we described, the Barnes is in Merion, still in the foundation building Barnes builds. It’s run by his wife, and then it’s run by de Mazia. You know, through the late 80s when she dies, she lives forever basically. And during that time, there’s some legal issues. But when she dies, you know, things really heat up. And sort of what happens after that? I mean, one part of it is definitely that the board that Barnes put in place has died. So the succession plan comes into being and Lincoln University, which, you know, we didn’t fully describe before.
Blake Gopnik: A small place, not a lot of money, of course.
Katie Wilson-Milne: They suddenly, they’re suddenly in charge. They can appoint the whole board of the Barnes Foundation. And, you know, they’re sort of handed this, as you said, this gift, and they’re like, oh, no.
Blake Gopnik: It’s a poison gift, for sure.
Katie Wilson-Milne: So what happens, like, from the late 80s on? What’s the story with the Barnes?
Blake Gopnik: You know, the real central problem is financial, right? The real central problem is that Barnes had these crazy rules that over the years, and there was clearly mismanagement at various times, but basically they have less and less money and it costs more and more to keep this thing up, to repair the building’s standards, museological standards go way up, and the worth of these works go way up. So insurance is an issue, you know, and old buildings leak, so it just becomes less and less tenable. And they, as you say, they go to the courts and the courts let them do an international tour, which I caught in Toronto at the time. And then it really, but at a certain point, it’s clear that it just isn’t going to work out in Merion. And my understanding is that a bunch of nonprofits in Philadelphia get together and say, okay, look, we can put, we’ll help save this institution, this dying institution, but it has to move to Centre City, it has to be available to all Philadelphians. Really, it has to stop being a cockamamie, pseudo-educational institution and become a museum.
Steve Schindler: And the board has to be expanded to include other people than the Lincoln.
Katie Wilson-Milne: It’s to dilute Lincoln’s power, which I think Lincoln was okay with.
Blake Gopnik: Yeah, I mean, I can’t speak for Lincoln, but the truth is, I mean, unlike Barnes’s board, the reason you have a board is to get money. The way museum boards work is you have a lot of rich people who want to be on the board and want to contribute and want to help preserve the place. So they needed that, obviously. So they could run like any other museum. Now, they now run like any other museum, but they sure as hell don’t look like any other museum. I mean, the works are still in exactly the same position relative to each other and relative to the walls as they were out in Merion. They’ve recreated the interiors from Merion almost exactly as they were in 1925, at least the walls.
Katie Wilson-Milne: That was part of the deal. That was actually part of the court’s deal.
Blake Gopnik: That was- within a millimeter, they say. It’s encased in this beautiful modernist building, but inside, it’s very similar to what you saw at Merion, which is charming. It’s a little window into an eccentric moment in the history of museology, and it doesn’t stop you from looking at the works. You can still do your contemporary art history if you want on those works. Some of them are in lousy positions where they shouldn’t be, but you survive, but there’s a room with dozens of amazing Cezannes. One of the reasons I love it, I’ll be frank with you, is that because there’s no sensible order, you end up walking through these galleries and spotting things you might never have noticed before. There are no names on any of the works. There are tiny little labels that you would never ever see in a million years. So it just lets you wander and use your eyes, which of course is what Barnes would have approved of, and make discoveries. It’s still a fabulous place to discover art, because it’s so unsystematic in any normal museological way. It’s not chronological. It’s not gathered together by schools. It’s just stuff on the wall, and that’s a lot of fun.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Why did these Philadelphia foundations, and in the PMA itself, why did they get so invested in the Barnes? I mean, they really went to bat to save this collection. Was it just pure love of art and art history and knowing that there was nothing like this in the world and how much it meant to Philadelphia, or why did they care so much?
Blake Gopnik: I think all of the above. It would have been a tragedy. I don’t think you guys would know better than me. Could the whole thing have been wrapped up and sold? I don’t think that’s likely.
Katie Wilson-Milne: No, it could not have been.
Blake Gopnik: So it had to be saved one way or another. And really, the way it was saved was the only way that it could be saved, and that was fabulous. I mean, it still looks the way Barnes wanted it to look. They still do teach courses on the Barnes Method. If you want to learn the Barnes Method, you can go there and learn the Barnes Method. But it’s no longer mandatory. I can go and look at a Cézanne and decide I’m interested in its gender implications. I can look at African sculpture and think about neocolonialism. You can do whatever the hell you want instead of having to look only through the eyes of Dr. Barnes.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yeah, I agree. It’s a magnificent project. I never went to the old building, but the current one is magnificent.
Blake Gopnik: Well, you have, by being inside the new one.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Yes, true.
Blake Gopnik: True, true, true. Yeah.
Steve Schindler: Well, that seems like a good place to end. Yeah.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Thank you so much, Blake.
Steve Schindler: Thank you, Blake.
Blake Gopnik: It’s been a treat.
Steve Schindler: It’s been a pleasure. Really fun. And that’s it for today’s podcast. Please subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts, and send us feedback at podcast@schlaw.com. And if you like what you hear, give us a five-star rating. We are also featuring the original music of Chris Thompson. And finally, we want to thank our fabulous producer, Jackie Santos, for making us sound so good.
Katie Wilson-Milne: Until next time, I’m Katie Wilson-Milne.
Steve Schindler: And I’m Steve Schindler, bringing you the Art Law Podcast, a podcast exploring the places where art intersects with and interferes with the law.
Katie Wilson-Milne: The information provided in this podcast is not intended to be a source of legal advice. You should not consider the information provided to be an invitation for an attorney-client relationship, should not rely on the information as legal advice for any purpose, and should always seek the legal advice of competent counsel in the relevant jurisdiction.
Music by Chris Thompson. Produced by Jackie Santos.