Channeling Albert Barnes

ARCHITECTS
Tod Williams
Billie Tsien
Architects
www.twbta.com

PROJECT
The Barnes
Foundation
2025 Benjamin
Franklin Parkway
(215) 278-7000
www.barnesfoundation.org

Philadelphia

When I wandered into the press preview of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, I was happily free of preconceived notions. I had no idea what to expect, and no position on the decade-long controversy over whether the museum should have been built in the first place. I did, however, have a wish. I wanted this building, which was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, to somehow make up for the fate of another arts institution designed by that gifted pair; heavily in debt, the American Folk Art Museum sold its one-of-a-kind, townhouse-wide building on Manhattan’s 53rd Street to the 800-pound gorilla down the block, the MoMA. While one would hope that MoMA could simply treat the American Folk Art Museum’s building as a noteworthy work of architecture and fold the structure into its collection, it lies in the path of the big museum’s current expansion plans. Somehow, I imagined that the existence of the new Barnes could compensate for this seemingly inevitable loss.

Albert C. Barnes, a chemist who made his fortune from an antiseptic called Argyrol, which was used to treat gonorrhea, started the Barnes Foundation. He began collecting art in the early twentieth century and amassed a ridiculous number of Cézannes, Renoirs, and Picassos. He also snapped up works by relatively unknown artists like de Chirico and Soutine, and helped establish their reputations.

At the Foundation’s original home in suburban Merion, Pennsylvania, Barnes filled the walls of the neoclassical gallery building with dense “ensembles” of paintings, arranged in ways that he found edifying. While he championed the educational value of his collection, Barnes also took pleasure in keeping people from it. In the decades after his death in 1951, efforts to make the collection accessible to the public were hampered by local concerns about traffic, as well as disastrous fiscal management. In 2002, the Foundation’s board began pushing a controversial plan to move the collection to Philadelphia, where it could be seen by more people and attract backing from major organizations, such as the Annenberg Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts. Although the Barnes’s new $150 million building opened to the public in May, a group called Friends of the Barnes Foundation is still trying to persuade a judge to reconsider the 2004 decision that allowed the artwork to leave the suburbs.

I knew something about the Barnes Foundation and its Dickensian saga, but didn’t really understand how singular the original location must have been until I found myself in a second-floor gallery in the new Barnes, where a cat-eyed Modigliani nude from 1917 made eyes at a fifteenth-century Austrian interpretation of the crucifixion. The ensembles, and Barnes’s eccentric curation, were transferred from Merion with absolute precision (“to the millimeter,” I was told). The historic galleries, and, to some extent, their fusty decor, were teleported into a supremely confident modern building. The whole thing is dizzyingly weird, as if Sir John Soane’s Museum had been plucked up and inserted in, say, the Centre Pompidou.

The museum is an arranged marriage of Barnes’s obsession and Williams and Tsien’s vision. Except it’s not exactly a marriage if, by that word, one means to imply a merger. By my count, the Barnes consists of three distinct buildings. There is the Major Arts Institution, which is represented by a capacious central light court, a room that runs the length of the museum and is named after an Annenberg. The giant room’s aesthetic is dominated by the same type of Negev limestone that was used on the building’s exterior; at the top, what appears to be a giant mail slot floods the space with diffuse sunlight. It’s a gorgeous room that displays exactly the sort of beautifully wrought, slightly off-kilter composition of light, texture, and form for which Williams and Tsien are known. Of course, it’s clearly made for the kind of gala events that Barnes himself wanted no part of.

The galleries are another matter. They are a maze of rooms, the walls crammed with artwork hung exactly as it was at the original Barnes, retaining the crazy juxtapositions between artists, periods, and styles that gave the old place its charm. Here, the role of the architects was primarily to provide daylight in the most unobtrusive way possible: through skylights. Indeed, Tsien’s speech at the press opening, terse by the standards of the architectural profession, was mostly about the magic of sunlight: “When I first saw the Matisse after it was installed,” Tsien recalled, “you could finally see it.” The overall effect is redolent of the past, but doesn’t evoke any specific place or time. Standing in the Barnes Foundation galleries, I feel as if I’ve uncovered an alternative cultural history in which the idea of modern art being a break from tradition, and discontinuous from the rest of art history, never occurred. As imaginary histories go, it’s a pleasant one.

The building also features a number of interior gardens that function as palate cleansers between galleries. One moment you’re in an art-saturated room trying to figure out how a de Chirico relates to a Rousseau, and the next you’re looking into a glorified air shaft that’s full of greenery. Officially, these interior gardens are intended to relate to the exterior gardens that surround the old Barnes. But I started to see them as architectural breaks, spots where the Barnesian aesthetic lets up and the modernist nature of the building—stone, glass, daylight—popped out. It’s the architects’ way of saying, “Hey! Don’t forget about us.”

Ultimately, Williams and Tsien are at their most assertive in the building’s strange, somewhat hidden corners. The stairways, for example, are elegantly composed cool stone passageways with cutout windows and railings that bend suddenly and become vertical for no particular reason. One corner of the building, near the main entrance, is a wonderful combination of architecture and landscape design (done by OLIN). A small, ground-level window looks directly at a satin-surfaced reflection pool that’s filled with perfectly oval-shaped stones. In the spots where the architects are in control, there’s no arguing with their mastery. It’s just that the whole undertaking is so self-effacing that it’s almost a rebuke to the highly expressive architecture of the American Folk Art Museum. On that score, the Barnes offers me no consolation. But maybe I have no more business expecting it than the Friends of the Barnes Foundation have expecting their old museum back.

The third Barnes building is the one you see from the outside, and that’s the real problem. The exterior, with all that wonderfully textured Negev stone, is impressively handsome, but the Barnes deserves to be an important new presence on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Granted, the side of the building that faces Philly’s Champs-Élysées was hidden behind party tents on the day of my visit, but the fact that caterers alone can obscure it says a lot. The main entrance doesn’t meet the parkway; it faces the parking lot. (Apparently, the foundation didn’t have enough parking in Merion. Here, the trustees have overcompensated.) The entrance doesn’t look out to the Franklin Institute or the Rodin Museum, but to a Whole Foods. There are no ceremonial steps to feature in some future Rocky movie. (Perhaps an elderly Stallone could shadowbox with the Ellsworth Kelly sculpture that marks the entrance?) I can’t fault the architects for restraining themselves in the interest of hanging the collection as Barnes meant for it to be hung. But I do wonder why it was necessary to so carefully conceal Philadelphia’s most significant work of architecture since the 1930s.