Customer Reviews

Great French Paintings From The Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-impressionist, and Early Modern

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I purchased this book after being completely fascinated/upset by the DVD " The Art of the Steal" ..it is a must see for any lover of beautiful images and people who really care about the wishes of art collectors and their work.

After viewing it I knew I wanted to learn more about the the Barnes Foundation and that is what lead me to this book. One of the things that sold me on it, are the photos of the art arranged just as Barnes wished for it to be viewed and studied.

This is tremendous addition to my art library.

We discovered the Barnes Foundation while on vacation in Philadelphia. Dr. Barnes amassed an amazing art collection, in both depth and breadth from the 1920s-1950s. Our main interest were the Impressionists, and with over 100, we were impressed. We were also impressed by the number of French citizens that were visiting the Foundation to view the artworks.

This book does a very good job of conveying the art that he brought together. We would recommend this book to anyone that wants to have a complete knowledge of French Impressionists. It will merely whet your appetite to visit the Foundation and see it for yourselves.

This book is the best starting point for people who haven't been to the Barnes.

The Barnes is a staggering collection, canvas for canvas arguably a better impressionist collection than even the d'Orsay in Paris (which shouldn't be that surprising -- rich American collectors like Barnes and the Cone sisters of Baltimore were snapping up Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso in the 20s long before the Parisians took much notice.)

While Barnes' mounting of his collection is quirky, it is also charming and intimate and enormously more enjoyable than the sterile and excessively spacious galleries at the d'Orsay or the discombobulated vanity galleries where most of the impressionists hang at the Met. And the new Barnes being built in Philadelphia (to open in 2012) will make it possible for millions of people to see this collection and Barnes' unique way of displaying it.

Now that the Barnes Collection has moved to a modern intown location in Philadelphia, this what amounts to the official catalogue is a great momento for anyone who has seen it in its original venue in the Barnes residence in Merion, PA. There are essays on the collection and how it came into being, and pictures as cisplayed in situ, in addition to scholarly analyses about and great reproductions of many of the "French" paintings (executed in the impressionist and post-impressionist period in France by painters of many nationslities as well as French)in the collection.

I recall reading a major art critic write that only in last few years did he visit the Barnes Foundation for the first time. Only if you've been to the Barnes and seen the overwhelmingly great collection amassed there can you understand what a strange admission this was for someone to make. But, not exactly surprising because there has long been a prejudice in the big time art world against "vanity museums". These words don't truly fit the Barnes, though there seems to have been considerable intellectual vanity in Dr. Barnes's make-up. But even allowing for that it seems a shame that Barnes' prickly personality kept his collection from the same central place of influence that, say, the Phillips Collection has occupied in art history. I think that it is really too bad that there is a judgment against private museums, especially given the strange fate that collections suffer in major museums.
Let me avoid flippancy here, yet still I must wonder what in the world curators in major museums do with their
time. They certainly don't spend it re-hanging things to accomadate the bountiful wonders they have in their storage, The National Gallery in DC has the same things in their basement year after year. And while I knew one collector who gave such important things that paintings have remained part of that eternal parade, no doubt others with beautiful but not so blue-chip offerings would do well not to give to such museums. Meanwhile, Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross has been up so long that they literally have mold spots growing on them. So I ask you, why isn't a vanity museum a good idea? I think there should be many more of them. This wonderful catalogue which is actually one of the few art books I look at regularly amongst the many I have bought, commemorates the spectacular appearence at the National Gallery. Many Washingtonians loved it, and I hope the new building for it in Philadelphia will be a success. For coincidentally I believe it was the same art critc mentioned above who wrote on seeing the the Tate Modern for the first time wrote that what inspired it was "hatred of art". Whatever one thinks of Dr. Barnes and his Deweyan approach to aesthetics, one thing is clear: he loved art. Paintings may be crammed together in the old Barnes building but that muchness says nothing against his devotion. That it is poor arrangement, and that everything looked better hung normally at the National Gallery I have found few to dispute. But it speaks to why Art Criticism as a discipline seems to have died, that critics are indistinguishable from style-gurus whose main function is to teach people how to de-clutter. No doubt a maven from the Home Channel or regular papers like the Post, would make-over the Barnes as they propose to do for collectors whose dedication they scarcely understand. A collection is a logic of sorts, not a decoration scheme. That the Barnes has been treated so shabbily over the years, show that the critical tendencies which have now destroyed criticism itself have been around for a while.