THE MAVERICK’S MUSEUM: Albert Barnes and His American Dream, by Blake Gopnik
Albert C. Barnes, among the many first main American collectors of contemporary artwork, barrels onto the web page in Blake Gopnik’s vivid, engrossing biography in a behemoth, chauffeur-driven, seven-seater, indigo Packard. By means of a carpeted passenger door steps “an ox of a person,” in greatcoat and fedora, with “the look of an growing older vice cop — somebody who hit first and requested questions later.”
Voracious and vituperative, Barnes was a personality of untamed contradictions — a “tyrannical egalitarian,” a “patriarchal feminist,” a “Gilded Age progressive.” Co-inventor of a gonorrhea antiseptic used to forestall blindness in newborns, he amassed greater than 4,000 items of artwork and objects, and arrange a private basis devoted to utilizing the gathering to show “plain folks” (not the intellectuals and philistine Philadelphia elites he disdained) study to see.
Seventy-five years after his dying, a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals, plain and in any other case, pilgrimage yearly to the Barnes Basis to marvel at and puzzle over his “ensembles” — unorthodox preparations of Impressionist and modernist masterpieces and minorpieces, African artwork, classical sculpture, Native American ceramics, previous keyhole plates, colonial hinges and different ironmongery, all interspersed with a superabundance of Renoir nudes of the kind Mary Cassatt as soon as referred to as “enormously fats pink ladies with very small heads.”
Much less well-known are the picaresque particulars of Barnes’s life, of which Gopnik, a longtime artwork critic and a biographer of Andy Warhol, makes delectable use. There’s the brainy boy’s escape from an impoverished childhood on the margins of a infamous Philadelphia slum; the manufacturing unit the place, within the segregated, early-Twentieth-century metropolis, his racially blended employees have been allowed to spend two hours a day in non-compulsory seminars on the likes of William James and Bertrand Russell; his foray into conducting psychoanalysis; his bulldozing, bridge-burning and “sheer lust for battle”; and his dying in 1951 at age 79 in a collision with a 10-ton truck.
