THE MAVERICK'S MUSEUM

One man’s journey from successful chemist to prominent art collector.

Born in Philadelphia, Albert Barnes (1872-1951) grew up working class in a part of town where bullies were so prevalent that he “taught himself to box by sparring with his brother.” Barnes eventually attended the University of Pennsylvania to study medicine yet remained “as keen to fight as ever.” That bulldozer attitude served him well. After graduation, he got a job with the drug company H.K. Mulford and Company, where, during off hours, he and a colleague developed the drug that made his fortune: Argyrol, a “silver-based antiseptic” used to treat gonorrhea. He would use his riches to build the Barnes Foundation, one of the most extensive modern art collections of the 20th century, with a focus on artists “with a socially progressive slant.” In this admiring work, Gopnik, author of a celebrated biography of Andy Warhol, documents the highlights of that collection, with its Cézannes, Renoirs, and El Grecos, and Barnes’ egalitarian impulses, such as his efforts to educate the public for the “improvement of human nature” and to provide opportunities for Black artists, although he “had the same white-savior complex as many of his peers on the left.” He even wrote books about art, one of which, The Art in Painting, is so prolix that, Gopnik writes, “reading analysis after analysis of his favorite paintings can feel like consulting the lab notes from a year’s worth of assays on a silver colloid.” As one can tell from that sentence, Gopnik is no slouch at wordiness, either. His prose can be arch, as when he notes that, in The Art in Painting, “Barnes perorates on the yellow and green rhythms in a Cézanne.” But this is a clear-eyed assessment of a champion of modern art, even if Barnes’ judgment wasn’t always keen. When he saw Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, he called it “so incoherent that it might as well have been called Cow Eating Oysters.”

A comprehensive portrait of a noteworthy patron of the arts.