My Favorite Artists

Philadelphia is known for it’s art. From the iconic LOVE sculpture, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, some of the most famous sights to see in the City of Brotherly Love have to do with art, but when most people think about art in Philadelphia, they often skip over one of, if not, the most perfectly crafted collection of art in the world, the Barnes Foundation.

The Barnes Foundation may seem like a museum, but it’s actually very different. It’s a foundation, which means that it’s main focus is on education about art rather then just displaying it. It also has a very unique history. It originally started as a private collection in the home of a man named Dr. Albert Coombs Barnes (1872–1951) which was located in Merion, Pennsylvania. He very selectively collected and arranged art in this home from 1922 until his death in 1951. The collection eventually became quite popular, and it was clear that it needed to be moved to a location better suited to handle hundreds of visitors a day, but this was not an easy task. The art in the house was so perfectly arranged that it couldn’t just be moved to another building. Eventually, a full exact replica of the inside of the original house was created in a new building located on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and the collection was moved there on May 19, 2012.

According to the Barnes Foundation official website, Dr. Barnes’s collection includes, “Impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern paintings, as well as old master works, Native American fine crafts, and early American furniture and decorative art. He was also an early and influential collector of African sculpture” 1 Each wall is considered to be it’s own ensemble, as well as each room is an ensemble, and the entire collection itself is an ensemble. This means that every piece of art, metal-work, furniture, etc. on a wall has been placed there for an exact reason. As well as each wall being in a certain room for an exact reason, and the layout of the entire museum itself being in a certain and precise order. Each piece of art is matched perfectly with the other works on that wall, each wall is related to the one next to it, and each room connected to the ones before and after it.

Look at the layout of the wall in the photo below. Each work of art was placed exactly where it is for a precise reason. Pay attention to details such as symmetry, lighting, and color:

Take a look at the photo to the left. Notice how symmetrical the furniture and the metal-works are, how the paintings alternate between a nature scene and a portrait, and the common theme of the color green. Symmetry, color, and subject choice are all tools that Barnes used to precisely arranged each ensemble.

The Barnes Foundation contains the largest collection of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the world, totaling at 181. It also contains 69 by Paul Cézanne, 46 by Pablo Picasso, and 7 by by Vincent van Gogh, as well as many more by other well-known and not so well-known artists. A unique thing about the Barnes Foundation is that instead of the art being arranged based on artist or time-period, such as all Impressionist paintings being together or all Picasso paintings being in one room, it is instead arranged by it’s subject matter. A religious painting that was created in 800 B.C. could be displayed next to a Van Gogh Painting created in the 1880s.

For example, look at the photo to the left. The two circled paintings are Red and Blue Flowers and White Daisy by Unidentified artist, 1840, and In Vaudeville: Two Acrobat-Jugglers by Charles Demuth, 1916. At first the two paintings seem like they do not belong next to each other at all. They were made over 70 years apart, and one was created by a rather famous artist while the artist of the other isn’t even known. Dr. Barnes did not care about those details though, instead he looked at the aesthetics of the works themselves.

They share the medium of watercolor with graphite, as well as a primary color pallet. They also both contain curvy lines and similar spacing. The white flower with the yellow middle is close to the center of the painting, which resembles the pale body and yellow hair of the center acrobat. There could be a million other reasons why he chose to put these two works together, but he never wrote down any of his reasons, so it is up to the visitors of the foundation to figure it out themselves.

Here are some of my personal favorite paintings that are in the foundation:

View the entire collection online here