Accidental Art

We had never heard of the Barnes Foundation, but we knew about Berthe Morisot, one of Yvonne’s favorite artists. So we headed to Philadelphia to see a Morisot exhibit at the Barnes.    

It was a wonderful show, highlighting her paintings and connecting them with the work of fellow Impressionists Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, whose brother Eugene Manet (pictured) was her husband. Morisit’s paintings were also comparaed with the work of Mary Cassatt, the other prominent female Impressionist. 

After viewing the show, we wandered down the hall, past the main collection of the Barnes. We decided, as long as we were there, to check it out.   

Inside, we were stunned.

High walls surrounded us, covered with the work of some of the world’s great artists, many of them Impressionists and Post-Impressionists: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, and on and on.   

The variety was remarkable, as was the quantity. There were 181 paintings by Renoir, 69 by Cezanne, 46 by Picasso, and dozens of others—more for most of these artists than the numbers held by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay.   

Also remarkable was their display, with twenty, thirty, forty paintings crowded onto each wall. Albert C. Barnes, the pharmacologist who owned the collection, had very peculiar taste in mounting art, jamming it together onto the museum’s walls. 

And yet, in spite of the quantity and odd arrangement of the Barnes collection, the paintings themselves were of superb quality. For example, of Cezanne’s famous card player paintings, the Barnes version was by far the best I’ve seen. The same could be said for dozens of other paintings in the collection.

A new building was constructed for the Barnes in 2012, and the only way the move was allowed was for the paintings to be shown in the exact patterns Barnes had used. 

Yvonne and I will happily go back to view them again.