So many museum exhibitions carry the “once-in-a-lifetime” label that it is stunning to come upon one where the description is literal.
“Great French Paintings From the Barnes Foundation,” the show of 80 Impressionist, post-Impressionist and early-modern masterpieces at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is just such an exhibition, complete with a court ruling to prove it.
Last July, Judge Louis D. Stefan in Montgomery County, Pa., issued a one-time suspension of the trust indenture of America’s greatest collector of modern art, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, permitting the first and only traveling exhibition of some of the world’s most famous 19th and 20th Century French paintings.
Barnes had stipulated that his enormous artistic holdings-180 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 21 Soutines plus many, many works from other periods-were never to leave the teaching institution he had founded in Merion, Pa., and for 70 years his staff succeeded in turning away most visitors while forbidding any but black-and-white reproductions of works in the collection.
In recent times, however, trustees of the Barnes Foundation cited numerous renovations and additions that had to be made to the limestone mansion housing the collection, pleading that failure to make them would constitute “imminent danger” to the artworks.
There first was talk about selling pieces to pay for construction, though the outcry of scholars and specialists was strong enough for trustees to adopt the alternative of a fund-raising tour of some of the most celebrated paintings in the collection.
This, too, met with resistance, most extremely in the form of a pamphlet titled “The Barnes Case X Grand Scam,” which charged that some of the renovations were unnecessary. But painting restorers and Foundation students had their say, as well, complaining of added risk to the artworks and disruption of the art education classes.
In the end, however, Stefan’s ruling mollified just about everyone except those who naturally recoil from the atmosphere of blockbuster exhibitions. The thought that some of the world’s best-protected paintings should at last become part of a traveling sideshow in Washington, Paris and Tokyo was almost too painful to bear for anyone who knew the special quiet of the Foundation and the ferocity with which Barnes maintained it.
Nowadays one might discount the installation that put paintings from different periods and countries into proximity with handmade ironworks and rejected the use of wall labels. But few would openly dispute Barnes’s idea that any climate other than study diminishes the aesthetic interest of works of art, and because of that, one must do everything possible to guard against it.
“Don’t let anybody tell you that a colored reproduction by even the best specialist has any real relation to what (a) painting contains,” Barnes wrote in 1935. And even today, with videotapes and laser discs in addition to much improved print quality, can we really say the relationship is meaningfully better?
In both cases, the exhibition and reproductions in the catalog, Foundation trustees are satisfied. But everyone else should understand that those issues remain crucial, not only for the present exhibition, where contrasts are especially pronounced, but also for any big show where financial gain is pitted against inevitable aesthetic diminution.
Critics usually see such events under ideal conditions; this time, there were only a few workmen and a single other viewer. Yet to imagine those nine rooms as doubtless they look today, packed with many seeking nothing more than a headphone-guided “Barnes Experience,” is enough to make one wish the show had never happened.
A crush does least harm on the first floor, filled by 17 Renoirs plus one superb small Manet and two lovely canvases by Monet. Given Barnes’ other enthusiasms, his affection for an artist as syrupy as Renoir was a mystery, except as an affection and thereby showed less than his usual rigor.
The selection at the National Gallery gives just the pieces with which to begin the show, especially as they are some of the earliest paintings on view. Yet leading off with so many Renoirs in succession also suggests, rightly or wrongly, a motive of crowd pleasing and, so, the gulf which separates the exhibition from the values of the collector who wrote, “Good paintings are more satisfying companions than the best of books and infinitely more so than most very nice people.”
The 20 Cezanne paintings that follow take the viewer into another realm entirely. Barnes’ Cezannes constitute the greatest single private collection of the work of the artist, giving an overview of his concerns through a number of his very finest paintings.
Those on view would have made a superb small show in themselves, headed by the largest of Cezanne’s “Card Players” paintings, the densest and most energetic of his three “Great Bathers” and a group of still lifes as commanding as any in Paris.
Here one needs the contemplative atmosphere that for most people has not been a part of museum life for almost 20 years. The demand the paintings place on a viewer simply cannot be fulfilled in the close, noisy, keep-’em-moving world of blockbuster exhibitions.
Seurat’s magnificent large-scale “Models” asks nearly as much of spectators, though even at the Barnes Foundation, the hanging did it an injustice as it competed for attention with Cezanne’s “Card Players,” which hung directly below it. This, in any case, is a major canvas that each of the artist’s retrospectives has been incomplete without.
Barnes gave up on Picasso when he reached his cubist phase, though there are some arresting earlier pieces here, including two relating to “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon.”
Matisse, on the other hand, Barnes collected in depth and, again, “The Joy of Life” is one of the paintings from his holdings that has legendary status. When you see it along with the “Seated Riffian,” from the artist’s Moroccan period, and “The Music Lesson,” from just before World War I, you immediately realize how Barnes’ lending prohibition kept all major Matisse exhibitions from being quite what they wanted to be.
“The Dance,” a Matisse mural commissioned by Barnes for the Foundation, also is on view with a predecessor.
As with so much else here, the opportunity to compare them comes but once in a lifetime, though from their mounting at the entrance to the show, where the crowds assemble, one suspects that viewers will be able to make relatively few comparisons that have any significant meaning.
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“Great French Paintings from the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern” continues at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., through Aug. 15.
