N.Y. Times Brings Barnes Galleries—in Merion—Virtually Back to Life

The New York Times, in what can only be called high public-service journalism for art lovers and those mourning the recent closure of the Barnes Foundation’s galleries in Merion, has created an interactive tour of what it calls “some of the old museum’s highlights.”

“Barnes’s unique juxtapositions of paintings and objects were intended to help the viewer learn to look closely at art,” the Times says in its introduction to “Collector as Artist: The Barnes Foundation.”  

The tour features 360-degree, fully orbital views of the Main Room and Rooms 6, 8 and 22, and the images can be paused or played as if floating through at a desired speed. By checking the “Allow overlays” box in the upper right corner of each room’s image, the frames of certain works are highlighted in white. By moving one’s mouse, or touch pad, over these pieces, one can click on them to see a reproduced image with the artist and title.

The Barnes’ “stupendous” collection of Impressionist, early modernist and African paintings and sculpture “has been one of the strangest and most affecting art institutions in America since the day it opened in 1925 in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion,” wrote Randy Kennedy, on the Times’ Arts Beat blog on Monday. “Much of what made it extraordinary was the idiosyncratic way Barnes displayed the art, in an antiquated-looking salon style that filled entire walls of its neo-Classical home with odd arrangements of paintings, organized to echo and rhyme their formal qualities and interspersed with decorative metalwork like ax heads and hinges.”

Kennedy gives short, audio “room highlights” for each of the four galleries, which will continue to play even if you stop to click on a particular painting. Listen for his personal anecdote about Madame Cezanne’s big dark hat on the Main Room’s north wall, described for him by a longtime Barnes instructor.

The virtual tour, Kennedy wrote, is intended “to convey at least a little of the flavor of the home Barnes built for his art.”

It does just that. The tour lacks the technical wizardry of Google’s Art Project, which allows you to take “Street View” walking tours of 17 world-class museums and brings your wide eyes within an inch of master works via high resolution imagery (start with zooming in on van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”—90 minutes later, move on). But the Times’ Barnes offering still packs a “wow” factor, which is the word I said aloud immediately after opening the link a colleague sent me Monday.

It’s also perhaps the best attempt possible at capturing and presenting the aura of the Barnes as it was—four rooms of it, anyway. So much has been written about the galleries over the past month, it was nice to get the feeling of sneaking back inside for another look at the art, the rooms themselves, the corner entrances into other galleries, the benches and curtains, the marble floors…

A Critic With Integrity

…Speaking of which, as , reports, salutations, lamentations and other forms of notice have been served all over the world about the closing of the Barnes on July 3, in anticipation and preparation for the move to the Ben Franklin Parkway, scheduled for next Spring. The other day, Philanthropy Daily weighed in with a brainy treatise that easily eclipsed some of the other editorial musings we’ve seen (or written)—pro or con. Executive Publisher Jeff Cain’s piece was decidedly con, calling the move “cultural vandalism.”

“What is it about us that we could not tolerate the Barnes Foundation as it was and as it was intended to be by its founder, Albert C. Barnes?” Cain wrote. “There were claims of faulty finances and the once leaky roof, the stubborn indenture with its idiosyncratic provisions, cries of mismanagement and old scores to be settled. Year in and year out came another complaint. Yet whatever their veracity, each somehow tolled a hollow ring, echoing a greater emptiness as their numbers grew.”

Cain’s argument is eloquent, even his detractors would agree. But it is strangely flawed—he admits he had never visited the Barnes. Proponents of the move to Center City, or even those neutral on the issue, could easily scoff at Cain as an intellectual blowhard, writing as he does that the Barnes affair amounts to “generational selfishness masking as public interest,” when he has never even been there.

But it is to his great credit that he was truthful about this salient fact, and one could argue that his take on the situation at least was not informed by any form of nostalgic conceit. If he had omitted it, the article—by its nature and by the standing of the author—would have amounted to a sort of big white lie. Still, no one would likely have been the wiser. Except for Cain himself, that is. That he did not omit it says a lot about this particular publisher, and his particular publication.