Albert C. Barnes

Albert Barnes was an American pharmaceutical scientist who amassed one of the largest private collections of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art in the United States. His holdings also included African sculpture, Native American pottery and jewelry, Greek antiquities and decorative metalwork, mixed with key examples of early modernism. Housed today in Philadelphia at the Barnes Foundation, an institution he founded, the collection still reflects Barnes’s installation at the time of his death.

Barnes grew up in a working-class family in Philadelphia and studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Germany in 1894 to study physiological chemistry. Back in Philadelphia, in 1900, Barnes began developing an antiseptic with scientist Hermann Hille; marketed as Argyrol in the United States, the medication was used to treat infant blindness and brought Barnes great financial success. He founded his own pharmaceutical company, A.C. Barnes Company, in 1908 and just two years later, Barnes used his wealth to begin collecting art. He hired American artists Alfred Henry Maurer and former classmate William Glackens to buy paintings in Paris for his growing collection. The two purchased over thirty works for Barnes over the spring of 1912, largely from Galerie Durand-Ruel. In 1912, Barnes traveled to Paris, where he met Picasso and other artists through the collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, and was introduced to the dealer Paul Guillaume (who would become Barnes’ dealer in the 1920s). That December, he purchased seven works by Picasso from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. His collection later expanded to include examples of African sculpture, Native American art, American furniture, modern art, and wrought-iron metalwork. By 1926, Barnes held forty-six works by Picasso, twenty-seven by Matisse, and forty-eight by Cézanne. His Picasso holdings included several studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York), the Cubist painting Glass and Packet of Cigarettes (1911–12; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia); and a suite of drawings from the artist’s Rose Period.

In 1917, Barnes enrolled in a course with American philosopher of aesthetics and educator John Dewey and sought to build an educational arts center according to a pedagogical system informed by a synthesis of Dewey’s philosophies and those of Spanish philosopher George Santayana. In 1922 Barnes received a charter from the state of Pennsylvania to create the Barnes Foundation as an educational institution that emphasized active and direct experiences with works of art and privileged students and researchers over visitors. It initially functioned as a school and also operated an in-house press through which Barnes published several books on art and his collecting methods. Following Barnes’s death, the foundation opened to the public in 1961 at its original location in Merion, Pennsylvania; a legal battle in the 2000s led the Foundation to move to Philadelphia, where it re-opened in 2012. To this day, Barnes’s collection is installed according to his unique aesthetic beliefs. Rather than follow chronology, style, or genre, the collection is grouped into “ensembles” that bridge artistic periods and cultures. Barnes often arranged works according to formal concepts such as light, space, and color as a means of encouraging a more focused mediation with works of art.