An artless way to enforce one's will

Few would disagree that the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pa., is one of the world's great private art collections. It contains 69 Cézannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus, and 180 Renoirs. Yet half a century after Albert Barnes's death, comparatively few people have actually seen these extraordinary treasures.

The will Dr. Barnes left behind sets out peculiarly restrictive and idiosyncratic terms of indenture. And as John Anderson puts it in his book, "Art Held Hostage," a great amount of "mischief" has ensued because of this will. "Quarreling and politicking" is how he sums it up, but it requires a narrative more complicated than a colony of spider's webs to spell it out.

Ironically, Barnes's mischief has brought the endowment he left behind to the brink of bankruptcy, mired the foundation in litigation and political shenanigans, subjected it to local protest, and even made it appear, spuriously, to be the victim of racial prejudice.

If all this were Barnes's ultimate intention, one would have to assume that he wished on his legacy (and posthumous reputation) a melodramatic future of notoriety and mayhem. It would seem a perverse use of the glories of great art.

But some people believe that Barnes, a physician who made a fortune marketing pharmaceuticals, may not have meant what became his final testament to be final. It may have been only a temporary part of his own politicking - when his accidental death intervened in 1951.

In any case, Barnes's trust indenture granted control solely to Lincoln University, near Wilmington, Del., the oldest black college in America. It's not impossible that Barnes intended this to be a direct snub not only to all the white educational institutions in Pennsylvania, but to the state's art establishment, too.

His will also went out of its way to make public access to the Barnes limited and difficult. He ruled that the trustees may not sell, lend, tour, or move the collection. And he insisted that the endowment be invested exclusively in government securities, a policy that, by the early 1970s, reduced the value of the endowment dramatically.

Great art is not, of course, just beauty. It is also great monetary value. One of the more expressive (and unstintingly litigious) presidents of the foundation, lawyer Richard Glanton, hit this nail squarely on the head when Anderson asked him what all the quarreling and politicking involving the Barnes were "really about."

"About who controls $4.5 billion worth of art," he said with a bluntness that Barnes would have appreciated.

Anderson leaves no doubt that the self-made, social-climbing Barnes could be spiky, opinionated, eccentric, and eager to fight with factions he disliked (art historians and critics high on the list). He was even described as "a crude man" who "liked to shock people." Anderson calls his personality "extreme."

But this potent mix of a "high-minded Victorian" and a blatantly nouveau riche entrepreneur was also a white, lifelong student of black culture and, above all, a daring and original collector who never paid more than $1,000 for a single piece of art.

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