The quality and quantity of art at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation dazzle. West African masks, Diné jewelry, and decorative metalwork are displayed alongside nearly five dozen works by Henri Matisse, 49 by Pablo Picasso, and the world’s largest single group of paintings by Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Visitors who merely ooh and ahh would have infuriated the museum’s founder Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), who regarded close looking and intelligent thought as essential for a visual experience.
Culturati are likely unaware that Barnes chartered the foundation as an educational institution and pioneered a pragmatic method to teach art appreciation. Happily, art critic Blake Gopnik’s engaging new biography, The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream (2025), provides a much-needed, warts-and-all account of this visionary collector.
During the decades following Barnes’s death, his foundation’s staffers hamstrung biographers, protective to a fault of his legacy. As Howard Greenfeld explains in the preface to his 1987 biography The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Art Collector, the institution withheld access to its archives and nixed requests for interviews. He was only able to write the book with help from his wife, Paola, who covertly registered for training in Barnesian aesthetics in the suburban Philadelphia galleries that doubled as classrooms. Here, students learned to focus intensely on one work at a time, and to decipher how each artist used color, line, light, and space. Barnes considered an object’s history, subject, and function irrelevant for appreciation; art history was not part of the curriculum.
The Maverick’s Museum explores the bony landmarks of Barnes’s life to lead us toward a refreshed understanding of his complexity. Empowered by canny archival research and a 21st-century sight line, Gopnik uncovers a nuanced story. He examines the two-way flow of influence between Barnes and the philosopher John Dewey and parses the collector’s commitment to “art as experience.” Barnes was a social and cultural reformer and egalitarian. He believed that anyone, regardless of their education, could learn to appreciate art, and he regarded his own approach to art education as one that “held the promise of canceling social distinctions.”
Violette de Mazia teaching a class at the Barnes Foundation some two decades after the death of its founder in the 1970s (photo by Angelo Pinto, courtesy the Pinto family; Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archives, Philadelphia)
Barnes was the brainy, pugnacious son of a wounded Civil War Union veteran and a devout Methodist mother who brought him to interracial Camp Meetings. It was here he first heard the Black spirituals that he came to regard as “America’s only authentic music.” The boy grew up in an impoverished, marshy neighborhood in south Philadelphia known then as “The Neck,” where his prowess with his fists presaged the punch of his vituperous insults as an adult.
While in Germany for graduate coursework in chemistry, he met the partner with whom he would formulate the patent medicine Argyrol, the lucrative, lifesaving antiseptic that would make him a fortune. Gopnik speculates that Barnes’s marketing savvy was in large part responsible for its success. The non-practicing doctor could now buy art.
Like a child who masters bike riding then disremembers ever needing assistance, Barnes usually downplayed or neglected to mention the importance of the people who facilitated his art acquisitions, including his friend, the American painter William Glackens, and his mentor, the French dealer Paul Guillaume.
It’s hard to generalize Barnes’s taste, and though many of his choices were prescient, he was not omniscient. Gopnik comments on his “blindness to the cutting edge” and lack of interest in nonobjective art. The Maverick’s Museum includes a few of his schadenfreude-inducing decisions, as when, in the 1920s, he turned down the chance to buy Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882), as well as Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889); the latter work still hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired it in 1941.
Among Barnes’s acquisitions is Henri Matisse’s 1917 “The Music Lesson” (center). (image © The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; photo by Sean Murray)
One quibble I have with Gopnik implicates his hide-and-seek endnotes, which can only be found online. To my cohort of non-fiction readers who sometimes wonder, “How does the author know that?” and easily find an answer at the back of the book, please know that, like Gopnik’s inconvenient endnotes, our days are numbered.
Perhaps Gopnik’s most trenchant observations concern the incongruities he found in Barnes’s interactions with Black art and Black culture. His prologue introduces the collector giving a talk at a huge, interracial banquet in 1924, “long considered the Harlem Renaissance’s ‘coming out party.’” The audience included the philosopher Alain Locke (whose correspondence with Barnes forms the basis of artist Isaac Julien’s 2022 installation “Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die),” commissioned by the museum), the activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, and the poet Langston Hughes, who heard Barnes expound on “the African ancestors of Harlem’s new talents.” Society’s treatment of Black people was genuinely abhorrent to Barnes, but he was ignorant of the “racialized essentialism” he betrayed in a letter, writing that “every negro is a poet and artist and the practical affairs of the world don’t interest him much.”
Today, Barnes’s disinterest in why a work of art was made might strike us as antithetical to his rare regard for African art. But Gopnik connects it to his method for teaching art appreciation, which devalued an object’s purpose and function. The Maverick’s Museum has many such illuminating insights and is enriched by Gopnik’s skills as an ace archival researcher. Chances are, after reading this lively biography of Albert Barnes, you’ll want to follow it by visiting the Barnes Foundation — and vice versa.
The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream (2025) by Blake Gopnik is published by Ecco and available online and through independent booksellers.
