Anyone can be bitten by the collecting bug, but only Albert C. Barnes would compare the bite to that of a mad dog. Though his remarkable art collection had just begun to take shape when he described how “the rabies of pursuit of quality in painting…gets into a man’s system,” his rabid pursuit of such quality never slackened. Nor did his capacity to bite back—and bite hard—whenever he felt himself or his beloved paintings threatened. Barnes also believed that most people had no idea how to look at art and that he alone knew the right way to teach them. “The purpose of this gift is democratic and educational in the true meaning of those words,” he announced upon drawing up the bylaws of the foundation that still bears his name, but such democratic aspirations, however genuine, were repeatedly complicated, if not contradicted, by the impulses of an autocrat. As Barnes had written of acquiring the Renoirs and Cézannes that had begun to fill his suburban estate, “When he has surrounded himself with that quality, bought with his blood, he is a King.”
There was nothing Renoir-like, let alone royal, about Barnes’s childhood. “I came into the world maladjusted—and I’m still that,” he wrote to John Dewey’s wife, Alice, in 1920, and the record pretty much bears him out, even if it also suggests the potential appeal of such frankness. The son of a butcher who had lost an arm in the Civil War and spent much of his remaining years as an alcoholic, the future millionaire grew up in a family whose marginal existence, both social and geographical, left a permanent mark on his psyche. The family moved six times while Albert was still in elementary school, including to a squalid area of Philadelphia, known as “the Neck,” that the health inspectors deemed “not fit for dogs to live in,” where he taught himself to box in order to ward off the local bullies. Despite already working for his “own bread and butter,” he also managed to study hard enough to pass the rigorous entrance exams for a competitive public high school, but there, too, he remained an outsider. Long after he had amassed a fortune, a Main Line estate, and a world-class art collection, Barnes continued to see himself as the embattled underdog, while doing his best to assure that there would always be another battle to fight.
Though Lydia Barnes was a devout Methodist, as an adult her son seems to have had little use for orthodox religion. But Barnes worshiped his mother, and his memory of accompanying her to summer encampments in the countryside proved as indelible as that of knocking out bullies in the city. These racially mixed gatherings, with their rapturous dancing and singing of African American spirituals, provided one of his earliest aesthetic experiences, as well as a formative sense of identification with another group of outsiders. Though it would be many years until he began to collect African sculptures—and even longer until the work of a single African American artist, Horace Pippin, joined the Renoirs and other European paintings on his gallery walls—Barnes never wavered in his belief that the songs he first heard at those meetings represented “the single form of great art which America can claim as her own.” Blake Gopnik, whose new biography of Barnes, The Maverick’s Museum, foregrounds the collector’s relation to African American culture, goes so far as to suggest that what was seeded in those campgrounds eventually blossomed into a full-blown religion of art: “The years [Barnes] later spent amassing and studying his great collection were all about transferring the aesthetic rush of those meetings in the woods into the new sacred space of the picture gallery.”
The money that built that gallery came from more prosaic sources. Having concentrated on math and science in high school—though he also took classes in art and drawing—Barnes went on to study medicine at Penn. But “Doctor Barnes,” as his admirers continued to call him, soon discovered that caring for patients was not his forte. After a year in a pharmacology lab in Germany and a stint writing ad copy, he landed a job with a Philadelphia drugmaker, where he worked side by side with a recent German Ph.D. he had recruited to the firm, Hermann Hille. Dissatisfied with his salary and increasingly close to the new recruit, Barnes persuaded him to embark on what amounted to a late-Victorian start-up: an after-hours venture in which the two men could design products to sell on their own.
The experiment paid off when the pair discovered a silver antiseptic that proved less caustic than the versions then on the market, a particularly desirable feature for a compound frequently applied to sensitive tissues in the treatment of gonorrhea. The product, which they dubbed Argyrol, was a huge success, promising to save thousands of infants from the blindness contracted from an infected vagina, and Barnes and Hille became a company. Like many of Barnes’s alliances, the partnership soon dissolved in bitterness and a lawsuit. But Barnes, who was now the sole proprietor, went on to make a fortune, his sales significantly boosted, Gopnik reports, not only by his gift for marketing but by his practice of handing over cash to scientists and journals who promoted his products. The new arrangement also meant that henceforth he need answer only to himself. Neil Rudenstine’s history of his collection, The House of Barnes, first appeared in 2012, but Rudenstine’s observation about how running such a business encouraged its owner’s “autocratic” instincts feels sadly up to date.
Having located his factory in West Philadelphia, Barnes distinguished himself by hiring an unusual number of Black employees and paying them well, including one man later promoted to plant superintendent and others whom he assisted with house purchases or their children’s education. (Gopnik calculates that the income of Barnes’s workers would have placed them in the top 5 percent for African Americans in the mid-1920s.) Meanwhile the dispenser of all this largesse had married the daughter of a prominent businessman and decamped for the suburbs, where he proceeded to build a magnificent manor house on a $30,000 lot in Merion, Pennsylvania. Named Lauraston in honor of his wife, the former Laura Leggett, the estate placed Barnes in the thick of Main Line society, and for a few years he was content to play the part: hiring a horse trainer, joining the local hunt club, and holding lavish dinner parties, replete with canvasback ducks, fresh turtles, and plenty of champagne. He also took to acquiring expensive cars and speeding tickets to match, a habit that persisted until 1951, when he tore through a stop sign for which he had lobbied and died in the resulting crash.
The owner of a grand new house with no ancestral portraits to hang is apt to be in the market for pictures. At first Barnes settled for relatively conventional purchases: images of peasants by Jean-François Millet, Barbizon landscapes, and the like. But the part of him that ultimately preferred fast cars to foxhunting seems to have hungered for more adventurous fare, and in this case, at least, he had old connections to tap. Two of his high school classmates, John Sloan and William Glackens, had gone on to serious careers as painters, and for a brief period both men were on the cutting edge of American art. Leaders of the so-called Ashcan School—like other such labels, it originated as a term of abuse—they specialized in realistic images of the downtrodden that might well have appealed to their former classmate’s memories of his distressed youth. After years of silence, Barnes reached out to Glackens, who henceforth remained a loyal friend, one of the few—John Dewey was another—who managed to avoid Barnes’s habit of energetically adopting and just as energetically discarding male allies. (Women on the whole seem to have fared better.)
Glackens apparently persuaded his friend to buy more contemporary paintings, including his own Pony Ballet (1910–1911), with its loose brushwork, vivid hues, and radically modern cropping. But even as Barnes continued to collect the work of other Ashcan artists, he seems to have decided that he couldn’t keep truly ahead of the curve without looking to Paris. Having announced his wish to acquire “Renoirs, Sisleys and others of the modern painters,” he wrote Glackens a draft for $20,000 and shipped him off to France in 1912 with a fellow artist and former expat, Alfred Maurer, who was presumably better equipped to serve as a local informant. Glackens was soon reporting back that “lots of things I have seen over here are incomprehensible to me.”
In retrospect, Gopnik suggests, the things Barnes’s representatives purchased look relatively tame, though the haul did include an early Picasso as well as the first Van Gogh in an American collection: a now famous portrait of the postman Joseph Roulin. One of six such portraits that the artist painted between 1888 and 1889, it was conspicuous by its absence when the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted an exhibition to the series in 2001, presumably because Barnes’s indenture prohibited any loans. The ban was not lifted until the summer of 2023, when this last remaining obstacle to the Barnes Foundation’s relations with the wider world was finally crossed out of the document.
Barnes soon followed his emissaries to Paris, and the pace of his collecting quickly accelerated. His first buying spree in 1912 added twenty more paintings, including a pair of small Matisses purchased from Gertrude Stein, four Renoirs, six Cézannes, seven small Picassos, another Van Gogh, and works by Bonnard and Gauguin, among others. Within two years there were twenty-five Renoirs and a dozen Cézannes; by the beginning of the following decade the number of Renoirs and Cézannes had increased fourfold, and Lauraston was so stuffed with pictures that its owners resorted to hanging them in stairwells and bathrooms. Some of that clutter may have decreased when Barnes’s purpose-built gallery, designed by the Beaux-Arts architect Paul Cret, finally opened in 1925, but the pictures continued to multiply. By the time MoMA was founded in 1929, Barnes was already on the verge of turning the two small paintings acquired from Stein into the largest Matisse collection in the world.
“He did literally wave his chequebook in the air,” Stein wrote of Barnes’s visit, but despite what the numbers might suggest, he wasn’t just whipping it out indiscriminately. Both Rudenstine and Gopnik cite the celebrated dealer Ambroise Vollard, who later paid tribute to the discernment with which Barnes went about making his purchases:
Mr. Barnes comes to see you. He gets you to show him twenty or thirty pictures. Unhesitatingly, as they pass before him, he picks out this one or that one. Then he goes away. In this expeditious fashion, which only a taste as sure as his made possible, Mr. Barnes brought together the incomparable collection which is the pride of Philadelphia.
Vollard wrote this in 1936, by which time the only point with which Barnes himself would probably have taken issue was “the pride of Philadelphia.” Not that he had the slightest doubt about his collection’s importance, but the city had long since come to represent all the unenlightened forces he had been battling over the decades.
Gopnik dates the origin of this combative stance to the “derisive laughter” that reportedly greeted the collector’s successful bid for a small Bathers by Cézanne at a Parisian auction in December 1912—a bid that more than doubled the original estimate and prompted the assembled company, in the words of The Burlington Magazine, to see “all their standards of value shattered.” But Barnes’s campaign against the philistines acquired its Philadelphia flavor in 1921, when the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts staged an exhibition of the “later tendencies” in American art that included a number of painters he collected. The exhibition, which Barnes had championed, evoked a storm of abuse from conservative members of the city’s elite, much of it spewed forth at a meeting of local doctors specially convened to diagnose the various “diseases” from which the artists were said to suffer. Barnes predictably lashed out in turn, calling the doctors “ignoramuses with a penchant for lime-lighting” and suggesting they be “seized by the state and put in a place where they cannot pervert public morality.” Within a year of what he termed “the unfortunate situation so prevalent in Philadelphia as regards intelligence and art,” the erstwhile Philadelphian was drawing up plans to build a gallery of his own.
Barnes always relished controversy, even if he didn’t fully deserve his growing reputation as an aesthetic radical. He had no interest, for example, in Cézanne’s practice of leaving some areas of a canvas blank, and he had relatively little sympathy for Picasso’s experiments with analytical cubism, let alone for movements like Vorticism or Constructivism that threatened to do away with figuration altogether. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the collector’s increasing appetite for Renoir’s rubbery nudes may seem to confirm that his taste was never so advanced in the first place. Though Gopnik concedes that “in their early, radical years” both Matisse and Picasso also admired these paintings, he largely accepts Rudenstine’s argument that Barnes was drawn to late Renoir as a visual sanctuary from the constant struggles in which he was otherwise engaged. Evoking “the spirit of perpetual youth in a garden of perennial June loveliness”—the pastoral formula is Barnes’s own—such pictures offered the embattled observer “a repose saturated with spirit of place, where self is no more, where all is peace and harmony.”
Unlike other rich men whose collections later became museums—Henry Clay Frick or J.P. Morgan, for instance—Barnes was a would-be pedagogue, too, and even before he made that explicit in his foundation’s indentures, he was approaching his employees as potential students. An early experiment at the factory entailed setting aside two hours of the workday for “seminars” taught by a longtime staff member, Mary Mullen, who led discussions of a formidable set of readings, including William James’s The Principles of Psychology and books by Dewey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and George Santayana, among others. Barnes also hung paintings in the factory and encouraged his workers to discuss them: a prototype of the courses that have been a distinctive feature of the Barnes Foundation ever since.
It’s not clear which of Dewey’s writings appeared on the factory syllabus, but there’s no question about the one that ultimately had the greatest impact on Barnes. From the moment he read Democracy and Education (1916) he was hooked, so much so, in fact, that he signed up to audit Dewey’s graduate seminar at Columbia the following year. Barnes was forty-five at the time and already a millionaire, but he seems to have found in Dewey’s pragmatism a philosophical justification for his own investment in “doing and making”—the phrase is Dewey’s—as well as a shared commitment to what the former butcher’s son liked to call “plain people.” Barnes might have made a religion of art, but he treated Democracy and Education like scripture. When he later characterized the purpose of his foundation as “democratic and educational in the true meaning of those words,” he was clearly invoking the gospel of Dewey.
Few allies can have differed more in temperament than the mild-mannered philosopher and his improbable student. Throughout the friendship Dewey repeatedly tried to steer Barnes away from his more self-destructive impulses, most notably, perhaps, in a prescient letter of 1925 that warned lest “a policy of even ten percent vituperation, to say nothing of fifty percent…gradually and surely alienate, or render access difficult to, the persons whom you are concerned to reach.” Dewey’s convoluted wording seems designed to cause as little offense as possible, and there’s no evidence, for once, that any was taken. But there’s also no evidence that Barnes’s “ingrained habit of manipulating vituperation, venom, vindictiveness and personal abuse”—the wording is his own—abated in the slightest.
The pair nonetheless remained close, and it’s only fair to note that the intellectual currents could run both ways. According to Gopnik, Dewey didn’t begin to think deeply about art until he encountered Barnes. By the time he wrote Art as Experience (1934), however, he had come to believe that no philosophical system was complete without a theory of aesthetics, a belief that can be directly traced to his relationship with the collector. The book, which Dewey dedicated to his friend, acknowledges that debt explicitly both in the preface and throughout the text, where footnotes to Barnes outnumber those to any other writer. When Dewey sought to illustrate the dailiness of aesthetic experience by invoking the rush of a fire engine or “the tense grace of the ball-player,” he was drawing on examples, Gopnik reports, taken straight from Barnes’s mouth.
Barnes had published his own big book, The Art in Painting (1925), almost a decade before, and he later collaborated with his longtime assistant and eventual successor, Violette de Mazia, on four more, including individual volumes on Matisse, Renoir, and Cézanne. This would have been quite an achievement even for someone formally trained in the study of art, as Barnes clearly was not. Whether it also amounted to an original contribution to the subject is less clear—especially since Barnes, unlike Dewey, preferred to cover his intellectual tracks. Rather than acknowledge what he owed to his contemporaries, he repeatedly chose to deny their influence.
The pattern went back to his quarrel with Hille over the discovery of Argyrol, but it began to emerge once again on that first shopping trip to Paris, which Barnes undertook in the company of selected writings by the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe. In an influential book that had been translated into English four years earlier, Meier-Graefe had argued for the need to look at art not “vertically” but “horizontally”: to subordinate the social and historical background of the individual object to the formal relations it shares with works of other cultures and periods. As Rudenstine notes, this anticipates some of the main arguments Barnes later advanced in The Art in Painting, though one would never know it from the author himself, who makes no mention of his predecessor. It’s particularly hard to credit Barnes’s subsequent claim that he found the German critic of little use, given how concretely he put Meier-Graefe’s principles into effect when designing his gallery. Anyone who has ever visited the Barnes Foundation and contemplated its formal juxtapositions—all strictly decreed by Barnes—of objects as culturally distant as wrought-iron hinges from colonial Pennsylvania and Cézanne’s Large Bathers (1894–1906) would immediately grasp what the German critic meant by looking at art “horizontally.”
Barnes’s capacity both to assimilate and disavow others’ ideas may be even more obvious, at least to the Anglophone world, in his relation to Clive Bell and Roger Fry. On that 1912 trip, the newly determined collector stopped off in London, where he took in the second Postimpressionist show at the Grafton Galleries. He also seems to have taken in the show’s catalog essays, in which Bell first referred—famously, if vaguely—to “significant form” and both critics celebrated the assembled painters’ rejection of mere illusion in favor of the effort to convey emotion. Rudenstine, who devotes particular attention to Fry’s influence, notes how closely Barnes’s later enumeration of painting’s formal elements—color, drawing or line, mass, rhythm, spatial depth, light and shadow—tracks those laid out in Fry’s “An Essay in Aesthetics” (1909), which he subsequently incorporated into Vision and Design, published five years before The Art in Painting. What’s striking is less the convergence of their accounts than Barnes’s characteristic insistence that he alone had arrived at the truth.
Barnes liked to imply that “plastic form”—his preferred term—somehow succeeded where both “significant form” and Fry’s “plastic design” fell short. “All they see in painting is mere pattern,” he complained, but even as he condemned the others for obscuring that failure with “oracular mystification,” he couldn’t really explain why “plastic form” was more illuminating. “Judgment or criticism of a picture involves the ability to abstract from the appeal of the subject matter and consider only the plastic means in their adequacy and quality as constituent of plastic form,” The Art in Painting declared at one point, from which dictum it allegedly followed that “a picture of a massacre and one of a wedding may be exactly the same types as works of art.” Despite the ponderous prose, the subsequent history of what came to be known as the Barnes Method suggests that some people found such pronouncements a useful guide to looking at pictures. It’s still hard to imagine what they were learning to see, if not “mere pattern.”
When Barnes first contemplated his museum, he envisaged it as a place where “no guided tours, lectures, or critical explanations whatever were to be allowed”: the public would simply “come and look for itself.” But by the time the building opened, he had come to believe, paradoxically, that looking for itself was a skill the public would have to be taught, and the gallery available to all had officially morphed into a chartered educational institution. Just who deserved that education—and who should administer it—was another matter. Between the indentures of 1922 and the controversial move to Philadelphia ninety years later, the history of the foundation was punctuated by repeated efforts to forge alliances with other institutions of learning, nearly all doomed to end in yet more vituperation and venom.
During Barnes’s lifetime, he initiated and then broke off relations with Bryn Mawr, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Haverford, the New York Art Students League, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia school system, sometimes flirting with the same institution more than once. Occasionally he blamed the students: after taking over a class from Penn, he pronounced “the time and energy devoted to them…a dead loss.” Almost always he regretted the teachers, including several young Ph.D.s he’d handpicked for the purpose. It also didn’t help that Barnes had a habit of riding roughshod over the protocols and academic autonomy of the institutions with which he was dealing. His idea of collaborating with Penn, for example, was to endow a professorship and name the person to hold it, an arrangement that fell apart for multiple reasons, beginning with Barnes’s predictable disappointment in the candidates he had chosen and ending in the usual acrimony.
Gopnik quotes a particularly repellent letter, written years after the initial approach to Bryn Mawr, that threatened any of its instructors who sought admission to the gallery with “titillation” of the clitoris or examination of the scrotum, on the grounds that “women candidates for professorship at Bryn Mawr must be sexually dead and the men candidates lacking in testicles.” The misogyny of this rant notwithstanding, some of Barnes’s most trusted lieutenants proved to be women. And while it’s not exactly a defense to observe that he was an equal opportunity offender, there’s no question that he was ready to lash out at the men who ran universities, too: he attacked Penn’s newly appointed president, Harold Stassen, as a “mental delinquent,” for example. In the late 1940s Barnes also approached Sarah Lawrence, but its president beat him to the punch, apparently well aware by that point with whom he was dealing. “As far as I’m concerned,” Harold Taylor wrote, “you can stuff your money, your pictures, your iron work, your antiques, and the whole goddam thing right up the Schuylkill River.”
The ignominious firing of Bertrand Russell from a lectureship established in his honor reads like an epitome of Barnes’s perverse gift for letting his best impulses curdle into their opposite. The lectureship had originated as a means of rescuing Russell, who had long been one of Barnes’s intellectual idols, after a moral panic over the philosopher’s views on sex and religion had prompted the City College of New York to rescind its offer of a visiting position. But what began as an act of generosity—if a generosity already colored by the zeal for combat—inevitably ended in another quarrel, this time a petty dispute with Lady Russell over her habit of knitting while listening to her husband’s lectures. Ostensibly the click of her needles distracted attention from the speaker, though the record suggests that the feisty “Peter” Russell, as the former Patricia Spence was known, had previously irritated Barnes by her unexpected resistance to his micromanagement. Having also convinced himself that she enjoyed flaunting her title, he seems to have felt justified in expelling another elite philistine from his democratic fortress.
Barnes went on burning more academic bridges, until he finally managed to build a relationship that lasted—if only because any potential to destroy it was abruptly cut short by his fatal car accident nine months later. His new partner was Lincoln University, a historically Black institution with a distinguished legacy, located about forty miles from Merion. The first HBCU to award a degree, Lincoln numbered both Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall among its alumni and had recently acquired a charismatic young president, Horace Mann Bond, with whom the collector had grown friendly. The terms of their agreement seem to have enabled Barnes to name the university’s new art instructor, who once again didn’t work out. More promisingly—or so Bond may have thought at the time—Lincoln acquired the eventual right to nominate trustees to the foundation’s board, though that privilege wouldn’t come into effect until the death of Barnes’s immediate successors: his wife, Laura, and his trusted assistant, Violette de Mazia.
In turning to Lincoln, Barnes was obviously seeking to revive his early affiliation with Black culture, and there is some evidence that the arrangement worked as intended, prompting him to fund some of the university’s poorest foreign students, for example, and to encourage Bond in his attempts to integrate the local schools. As Gopnik takes pains to demonstrate, such antiracism was among his subject’s more attractive features, even if it, too, was riddled by contradiction. This was a man who had welcomed the Harlem Renaissance in sweeping terms—writing in 1924 that “our unjust oppression has been powerless to prevent the black man from realizing in a rich measure the expressions of his own rare gifts”—only to turn around a few years later and boast to his lawyer of having wielded “the negro menace” in a failed attempt to forestall a change in local zoning regulations. (He had threatened to establish a Black cultural center on his property.) Even his praise of African Americans could be hard to distinguish from racial stereotyping, as when he characterized their experience as “shot through and through with natural-born artistic expression.” Russell observed that Barnes “liked to patronize coloured people and treated them as equals, because he was quite sure that they were not.” Whether the philosopher knew enough to issue this verdict is far from clear, but the paradox does have a Barnesian ring.
The double bind in which Lincoln eventually found itself had little to do with its patron’s racial views, however, even if one can imagine Barnes relishing the narrative that some angry opponents of the move to Philadelphia wove from the episode, in which a democratic and Black-run institution, dedicated to the study and preservation of great art, was subject to a hostile takeover by the city’s greedy and philistine elite.* Though Gopnik addresses this aftermath only in a brief epilogue, Rudenstine, who joined the board of the Barnes Foundation in 2005, became a participant in its subsequent history as well as its chronicler, and his meticulously documented account makes clear that the arrangement the university inherited was unsustainable.
Caught between Barnes’s paradoxical belief in an aesthetic democracy for the privileged few and an endowment constrained to act like a savings bank—a surprisingly conservative investment strategy for such a self-proclaimed radical—the foundation never had a way of acquiring the funds to sustain itself over the long haul. Originally open to the general public just one afternoon a week, it was later forced by a series of lawsuits to expand its visiting hours, but the number of visitors was always limited, and even these met with resistance from the neighbors, who resented the invasion of their quiet suburb. Few visitors, of course, meant few receipts, a dilemma exacerbated by the bylaws’ strictures against other means of fundraising, like holding social events for wealthy supporters on foundation property.
Meanwhile most of the staff’s time was devoted to teaching, and most of that teaching was confined to those who had first passed the idiosyncratic tests by which Barnes’s acolytes had learned to distinguish those worthy of benefiting from their instruction. (Too much prior knowledge, it appears, might prove disqualifying.) The privilege of studying at the Barnes was further restricted by the need to travel to Merion on a weekday, which meant that the classes were predictably dominated by well-off women from the neighboring suburbs.
It was an outcome that Dewey had foreseen when he warned Barnes in 1925 that “one group after another [would] fall away” until all that remained was “a few courses…attended by a comparatively small number of persons.” But by the time that Lincoln was able to nominate its own chair of the board in 1988, there was little it could do to reverse the pattern. Even controversial attempts at fundraising—the first traveling exhibition of masterpieces from the collection, the first catalog to defy Barnes’s prohibition on color photography, the first celebratory dinner on foundation grounds—succeeded only in delaying the inevitable. In 2004 a court officially affirmed the board’s request to move the collection to Philadelphia, where it could be seen—and supported—by many more people. Eight years later the new museum welcomed its first visitors.
The Barnes now sits on a downtown parkway, but its softly illuminated building, designed by the architectural firm of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has been set back from the street and surrounded by a tranquil garden clearly meant to evoke the collection’s former pastoral setting in Merion. There’s the usual shop and café—both of which Barnes would surely have hated—but the galleries have been recreated precisely as Barnes left them, with each painting hanging in its appointed place and no titles or other labels to distract the viewer from its formal pleasures. Matisse’s exhilarating mural The Dance has been reinstalled in lunettes that replicate the originals; Seurat’s Models continues to rhyme with Cézanne’s Card Players on the wall below, while a handy app permits the curious visitor to point her camera at any work she chooses and retrieve the information about it that the museum otherwise scrupulously declines to supply. It would be tempting simply to acclaim all this elegant compromise—if it weren’t so clear that elegant compromise was never Barnes’s style.
English (US) · 