An artless way to enforce one's will

The terms of his will may be puzzling, but one indication of his motivation might be that Barnes, though besotted with art, did not collect art simply for art's sake. He was an educational idealist. Anderson quotes scholar Richard Wattenmaker observing that "what really set Barnes apart from other collectors 'was his conviction that ... works of art could be employed as tools in an educational experiment.' "

Ironically, moves afoot today could result in the Barnes finally becoming part of those very art institutions he was determined to avoid. But that is a chapter still to be told. And it would, at last, have to break the terms of Barnes's will.

Such restrictions were bound to be subjected to all sorts of attempts to break them. The temptation to deaccession, for example, and sell even one Matisse or Renoir to help lift the Barnes out of its financial pit, has surfaced unsuccessfully more than once.

Anderson is a contributing editor to The American Lawyer, and he's well qualified to steer a meandering yet clear route through the maze of chicanery, legal procedure, and argument. He is also unsparing in his dissection of the often suspect motives of his confusingly large cast of characters. It is their frequent self-interest and dubious ambitions that prompted art critic Hilton Kramer to accuse them of turning "the Barnes ... into a veritable Bleak House," when they ought to have been protecting it.

If there is a flashy villain in this story, it must be Glanton (also a notable figure in the internal politics at Lincoln University). He was so blatantly politicking that another lawyer in one of the court cases described him as "the definition of the incorrigible."

Anderson portrays him as an irrepressible egotist who thinks of himself as the collection's hero. His greatest boast was organizing, as Barnes president, the first and so far only tour of masterpieces in the collection.

But in an attempt to gain legal right to make a parking lot against local zoning restrictions, he plunged the Barnes into a costly and unsuccessful federal civil rights action against the township. Known as the Ku Klux Klan suit, it alleged, as drafted by Glanton, that the township's objections to the parking lot were racially motivated. By the accounts of others involved, however, playing this racial card was simply a cynical ploy, which eventually cost the foundation more than $6 million.

But Glanton is by no means the only protagonist in Anderson's account to be swimming around in murky or farcical legal and political waters. This book is a study of the kinds of ruthless antics in which people indulge when propelled by ambition, self-interest, greed, and status-seeking. It certainly doesn't pretend to be much about art. The supreme paintings and sculptures in the Barnes Collection are little more than very costly wallpaper in this preposterous soap opera.

• Christopher Andreae writes about art for the Monitor from Glasgow, Scotland.

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