Esthetic Tyranny
RODMAN, SELDEN
Esthetic Tyranny The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector By Howard Greenfeld Viking. 306pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Artists in Tune with Their...
...Henceforth Barnes claimed that he and he alone had concocted it...
...But when Barnes insisted that he have the first choice of all Pippin's future paintings, and Carlen—who envisioned a wider future for his painter— refused, the collector stormed out of the gallery in a rage...
...For a mere $3,000 he bought up to a hundred Soutines, boasting later, "I caught him when he was drunk, sick and broke and took the contents of his studio for a pittance...
...Barnes saw the early work at Carlen's Philadelphia gallery, and bought several pictures...
...Barnes' role in the venture was characteristic...
...I will have you know that my ancestry is simply unassailable...
...He was also a gifted polemicist—again like Pound— as the following fake letter, signed "Bella Donna van Byttsche," will testify: "I want you to know that you are too, too, perfectly horrid to say all the nasty things about us aristocratic art lovers who have done so much for the common herd by making the Philadelphia Museum of Art the truly marvelous institution it is...
...In contrast, John Dewey never ceased to be on good terms with Barnes...
...Hille was unable to match a bid of $350,000 and was ordered by the judge to cook up the secret formula in his former partner's presence...
...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Artists in Tune with Their World, " "The Eye of Man" My only encounter with Albert C. Barnes took place at his Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, late in 1946...
...He was determined to get even with them by amassing his own collection as well as by disparaging their taste and integrity...
...He caught Russell during World War II when the philosopher was hard up and under fire for his pacifist and sexual theories, and offered him a lectureship at the Foundation...
...Dewey complied...
...On the other side of the ledger, the author credits his protagonist with the " discovery" of the great Lithuanian expressionist Chaim Soutine, though it was actually Barnes' Paris adviser, Paul Guillaume, who brought Soutine to the collector's attention...
...Barnes to buy the 200 Renoirs, 100 Cezannes and 60 Matisses making up the backbone of his collection came from the enormous success of Argyrol, a popular eye remedy...
...Barnes rejected the avant-garde—Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism—though he did buy a big figurative Picasso for $300, plus 16 of that master's drawings for $1 apiece...
...Glackens then convinced him that in order to gain recognition he should focus on the emerging School of Paris...
...At the outset Barnes purchased academic art...
...His idols, Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, and Seurat, were a bit more expensive, but with his fortune and aggressive tactics he was able to virtually corner the market in their paintings...
...He even backed up the collector's character assassinations, as in the case of their friend Barrows Dunham, head of the Temple University Philosophy Department...
...And besides Herts, many of the great nobles of Harts, Nerts and Farts are my relatives...
...I am a descendent of the Blighs of Dartmoor...
...Pippin was permitted to snooze (and snore) through the daily, stupefyingly boring lectures he was obliged to attend as a beneficiary of the Foundation...
...How was Barnes able to pull such commanding figures as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey into his orbit...
...Years later when I visited the Foundation with Carlen, the "devil" in Dr...
...Unhappily, Barnes' ability to amuse made him no less unbearable...
...A remarkably naïve and humorless man, devoid of esthetic sensitivity, Dewey nonetheless felt that art should be part of his system and leaned on Barnes for exposure to it...
...Our great-great-grandfather was Lord Costermonger of Billingsgate Mews, and founded that great British institution, 'The Hulks.' Another ancestor was the Earl of Droolingtoole of Houndsditch Manure, Sluppington-on-Slops, Herts...
...They're full of sunlight and look at them tits...
...Nevertheless, the evidence furnished on the millionaire's egomaniacal conduct, deceit and vituperation is more than enough to hang him posthumously...
...He had formed a partnership with Herman Hille, Argyrol's inventor, to promote the product...
...Thefortune that enabled Dr...
...As long as he could pose as Pippin's "discoverer" the cantankerous collector was willing to be the artist's patron...
...Art was still cheap in those days...
...As soon as sales skyrocketed, Barnes sought and won a court injunction dissolving the partnership and stipulating that all assets go to the highest bidder...
...Greenfeld documents the man's sorry tale with impressive restraint...
...My visit to the fabulous Barnes collection, then virtually inaccessible to the general public, had been arranged by Robert Carlen, Pippin's first dealer and tireless champion...
...Dunham was eventually dismissed by Temple for displaying "intellectual arrogance" in refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee by denouncing his falsely accused colleagues...
...Barnes, having unjustly charged Dunham with being a Communist stooge, asked Dewey to withdraw his unequivocal praise for Dunham's book Man Against Myth...
...She was promptly informed that in the future she would be prohibited from entering the Foundation's premises...
...Barnes had dabbled in painting, but critics and museums showed no interest...
...He was even allowed to comment uninhibitedly on some of the famous pictures: "That Renoyr...
...That man [Matisse] put the red in the wrong place...
...Horace Pippin, the great self-taught black artist, had just died in nearby West Chester, and I was engaged in writing a monograph about his life and work...
...Greenfeld rightly stresses Barnes' lifelong devotion to the art of his friend William Glackens, however, and the genuineness of his feeling for the cultural achievements of American blacks...
...Carlen was left outside on the sidewalk in the rain...
...Howard Greenfeld passes over Carlen and Pippin in a few sentences, without mentioning Barnes' outrageous attempt to monopolize the artist's output or his subsequent defamation of the dealer...
...Barnes was in full command: I was escorted in to see the early burnt-wood panels...
...Russell temporized, only to be told at the end of his first y ear's lectureship that his threeyear contract was terminated...
...To the collector's subsequent distaste, Russell's wife Patricia brought her knitting to her husband's enormously popular classes and ventured an opinion or two...
...Thus began his lifelong war with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania and other nearby institutions...
...The motive behind the acquisition of the art was hardly more admirable...
...Like his admirer Ezra Pound, Barnes was a pedagogue who lived to impose his tastes and prejudices on others by fair means or foul (the collector was known to don a janitor's garb and eject guests to his gallery who had the temerity to criticize a painting...
...There the old traditions are still preserved, with tea and strumpets served every afternoon...
...Thereafter he was to proclaim that Pippin had painted no important pictures since leaving the Foundation, and that the artist was being "exploited" and "commercialized...
...The collector thereupon made the first of dozens of trips to France, where he enlisted the support of Gertrude Stein's brother Leo and of Paul Guillaume...
Vol. 71 • February 1998 • No. 2
