Albert C. Barnes - The Barnes Foundation

The Barnes Foundation

Barnes's collection grew to include 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris—as well as 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, and 178 Renoirs. The 2,500 items in the collection include major works by (among others) Henri Rousseau, Modigliani, Soutine, Georges Seurat, Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh. In 1922 Barnes established what is known as the Barnes Foundation to display his collection according to his aesthetic theories, strongly influenced by the American philosopher, John Dewey. He had a mansion built to display the collection, designed by Paul-Philippe Cret, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1925, the Barnes Foundation opened as an educational institution, not a museum.

The entire collection is estimated today to be worth between $20 and $30 billion. Although John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were vastly wealthier than Albert Barnes, today the value of the art assets of the Barnes Foundation are 10 to 20 times greater than either the Carnegie Corporation or the Rockefeller Corporation.

Barnes was known as an eccentric art collector, in part for his antagonism to the discipline of art history, which he said "stifles both self-expression and appreciation of art." His outspoken criticism of public education and the museums of the time were controversial. He set up his foundation to allow visitors to have a direct approach to the collection, without the interposition of curators' thoughts. He arranged it with a mixture of hand-crafted items, ancient artifacts, furniture and paintings of different ages. Items are labeled by title, artist and date. He created the Foundation, he said, not for the benefit of art historians, but for the students.