“‘The guy was an eccentric, he was a crank,’ says Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky. ‘Even his friends thought he was a misanthrope. He’s my kind of guy!’”
The crank in question is Philadelphia chemist, businessman, art collector, educator, and unconventional philanthropist, Albert C. Barnes, 1872-1951. Barnes made his fortune by developing and selling an ophthalmic antiseptic. He went on to establish the Barnes Foundation in 1922, an art collection and educational institution originally based in his and his wife Laura Leggett Barnes’s home in Merion and later moved to Center City Philadelphia in 2012. Barnes collected art from 1912 until his death in 1951.
The collection includes a large portion of William J. Glackens’ work. Glackens was Barnes’s lifelong friend. The pair met as students at Philadelphia’s Central High School in 1885, and bonded over a shared love of drawing and baseball. Glackens and Barnes parted ways to study painting and medicine, respectively. In 1911, they reconnected, and Barnes sent Glackens to Paris with $20,000 (about $710,000 in 2026) to purchase modern artwork by the French avant-garde. He returned with “The Postman” (Van Gogh) and “Young Woman Holding a Cigarette” (Picasso), as well as 31 other pieces that joined Barnes’s collection. Barnes later acquired over 60 works by Glackens himself, which range from realist to impressionist depictions of urban and natural scenes alike.
The range of style and subject matter in Glackens’s art is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the diversity of Barnes’s collection. The full collection includes over 4,000 objects, among them over 900 paintings and roughly 900 pieces of wrought iron. Renoir’s work accounts for 181 of Barnes’s roughly 900 paintings alone. He sourced much of his art from France via art dealer Paul Guillaume as well as sibling art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein. The collection features works by European, American, African, Chinese, and Greek artists. The forms represented in the collection span sketches, tapestries, figurines, wrought iron metalwork, paintings, furniture, sculptures, fashion (namely belts and a corset), jewelry, and household objects (pottery, teapots, and candleholders).
The breadth of the collection is truly astounding, especially given the small size of the museum. Works are displayed in a cramped manner due to limited wall space, but this is faithful to Barnes’ original design. When the collection was moved (controversially so) to Center City Philadelphia, those involved with the transition were careful to maintain key aspects of the original property and galleries. For example, architects of the new galleries designed them as closely to the original spaces as possible, “within an eighth of an inch or less.”
The collection isn’t organized by nativity, period, form, or style, but rather unconventionally by broader thematic or visual themes within groupings of works which Barnes termed “ensembles.” Barnes meticulously curated each ensemble in the original Merion gallery spaces, and the wall arrangements remain exactly as they were at the time of his death in 1951. This curation approach, known as “The Barnes Method,” also omits explanatory placards and even the titles of the artworks on display. Most pieces are labeled only with the name of the artist. Barnes did this to direct attention to visual elements like light, line, color, and space (the Barnes Foundation has a great tool on their website where you can explore the collection by each of these elements). This non-prescriptive approach allows visitors to draw their own conclusions about the art before them.
I am often intimidated by art museums because I feel pressure to read about and “understand” each work’s context, style, and history. I quite enjoy going to art museums with friends who have a better analytical and/or historical grasp of art than I do, and there is no shortage of friends like this at Swarthmore (shoutout to Rafi Karpowitz ’27, Avery Bloom ’27, and Zephyr Weinreich ’28 for showing me around Musée d’Orsay, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Barnes, respectively). As valuable as it can be, though, to understand art within their cultural, political, and religious contexts, the art that has touched me the most in my life has been work that I have had to reach my own conclusions about. In my view, excessive explanatory labeling about the importance of the work and/or the artist often detracts from viewers’ availability to connect with the art on an emotional level.
“The Barnes Method,” to me, has an equalizing effect, and makes the museum feel homey and approachable. Displaying “mundane” objects next to acclaimed oil paintings helps to dismantle hierarchies of form and origin. Barnes focused mainly on the art itself, rather than its historical context, chronology, genre, form, or style. The ensembles, some of which appear like simple discordant hodgepodges at first glance, encourage close viewing of each work of art. One ensemble was made up of a painted American sea chest, a Renoir, an iron escutcheon, a French oak children’s chair, a Matisse, and a pair of potentially Spanish embroidery scissors. Finding throughlines between these objects is a more enjoyable intellectual endeavor, I find, than reading plaques explaining the relationships between multiple works with obvious cultural or formal connections. The somewhat tenuous connections between the items in an ensemble make the collection visually appealing — like looking inside a junk drawer (albeit a junk drawer with an estimated total value of $25 billion).
Barnes saw art as a means of social unification, drawing his own conclusions about works before discussing them with students and peers. According to William Perthes, the director of adult education at the foundation, “[artists’] works convey feelings we’ve all had such as love, happiness, fear, and despair. By viewing art and discussing it with others, we have a shared experience with the artist and each other.”
To me, the collection adds another dimension to this time-defying connection: knowing how much thought Barnes gave to the meticulous cultivation of each ensemble encourages onlookers to speculate as to what he was getting at with the curation of each room. This deepens viewers’ connection not only to the individual works in the collection, but to the collection as a whole and the man who brought it into being. This aforementioned approachability of the museum is reinforced by the fact that you can get eyelash-close to almost every object in the collection. The works are essentially unprotected, as if you were walking through your (extremely affluent and well-cultured) grandmother’s house.
All of this, from the display of mundane objects alongside Renoirs, to the lack of reverent explanatory labeling and visitors’ ability to be in extremely close physical proximity to each object, is indicative of Barnes’s pro-accessibility and anti-elitism philosophy of art. Barnes “rejected the idea of [creating] a high-tone museum. Instead, he presented the collection as a look-and-see ‘educational’ experience for ordinary people,” often rejecting wealthy individuals’ requests to visit the collection in comically crank ways.
The permanent collection of the Barnes Foundation is an extraordinary assemblage of art spanning form, origin, and more, but it is static; aside from the relocation, the main works are entirely fixed and are on display as they were upon his death in 1951. The foundation is not entirely stuck in the past, though. The foundation frequently hosts special exhibitions featuring or commissioning contemporary works by artists on a rotating basis. One of the current temporary exhibitions was what led me there. The Barnes commissioned “Red Metal Dust,” a series of photographic landscapes by Indigenous artist and documentarian Sky Hopinka for the United States’s 250th anniversary. The exhibition was accompanied by a screening of “Powwow People,” Hopinka’s feature-length vérité-style documentary. The film is a meditation on tradition, progress, and Indigeneity.
The screening of “Powwow People” and viewing the exhibition “Red Metal Dust” was entirely free to the public. Admission to the general collection is $5 for students with identification. The foundation frequently hosts free talks at their Center City campus.
In a brief talk following the screening, Hopinka shared more musings about the themes of the documentary, raising questions about what progress entails for Indigenous people and communities and how to weigh what to preserve and what aspects of contemporary life can or should be incorporated into tradition. In my view, these questions echo the Barnes Foundation’s mission to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts. Barnes’s belief that art has the power to improve minds and transform lives comes alive not only in the foundation’s preservation of the original collection, but also its offering of free educational programming and continued support for contemporary artists.
