ART / Barnes Foundation
On my first trip to Philadelphia, during one of the crammed days in between a meeting and a luncheon, I snuck away to the Barnes Foundation. My sister was also in the area at the time and was able to join me.
The most striking aspect as we walked up, is the architecture. It stands out amongst Philly’s Georgian streets and homes–a stately modern sandstone structure surrounded by benches and water features, it is drastically different and immediately calming in its visual quietness.
The deceiving exterior.
Inside, however, it is back to a historical, mish-mash of imagery. Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Rousseau, Cassatt. Mixed between old door hinges, metal shapes and tools, handmade wooden furniture and ancient Buddhist scrolls make up the frenetic galleries arrange salon style. It is strangely refreshing to see art displayed this way, perhaps how one would display them in one’s house. Not a hermetically sealed white room of refined cultural worship, but instead a casual viewing of objects made and collected over tangible lifetimes.
One of the mish-mash walls I loved.
This casualness adds to the shock I felt when I stumbled room through room to see Matisses I had never known existed, beautiful soft Rose Period Picassos (I will write another post about my fraught feelings about Picasso), and one particularly sneaky Bosch that I almost missed squished between a doorframe and a shaker chest.
The visual beauty of this painting in real life is shocking, no matter how you feel about the controversial life of Picasso. “Girl with a Goat (la jeune fille à la chèvre), Pablo Picasso, 1906.
It is an intriguing museum for other reasons, as well. As we walked in the sticky East Coast heat, my sister explained what we had just seen. A private collection, a controversial move, and I vaguely remembered learning about this in the so-so documentary “Exit Through the Giftshop” (as you can expect a post about Picasso, you should never expect I will write a post about Banksy). It was a small part of that movie, so I need to revisit the history and maybe explain how I had just wandered through an antique mansion full of priceless art, hidden within a modern architectural monolith where pieces are displayed like the set of an Anthropologie catalogue.
Stay tuned next week for the history of this striking art collection and museum…
The sneaky Bosch. “Temptation of Saint Anthony”, Hieronymus Bosch, Mid-16th century.