August 27, 2005
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barnes Foundation
“The Temptation of St. Anthony,” formerly ascribed by the Barnes to Bosch, is now said to be a 16th-century copy by an unknown artist.
August 27, 2005
The Barnes Revises Attributions of Old Masters
By JULIA M. KLEIN
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 26 – A review of the vast collection and archives of the Barnes Foundation is upending attributions of some of its old master paintings and revealing new details of its founder’s relationships with painters, collectors and other artistic luminaries of the 20th century, administrators say.
Among the 22 paintings whose attributions are changing in a continuing assessment project, now four years old, are works formerly credited to El Greco, Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Giorgione and Bosch.
“I don’t think any of it was shocking or surprising,” said Emily Croll, the Barnes Foundation’s senior administrative officer, who has headed the project at the foundation, in suburban Merion, Pa. “For decades people have been saying some of our old masters weren’t what we said they were.”
Lending momentum to such stock-taking is an eight-month-old court ruling clearing the way for the financially troubled Barnes to relocate to Philadelphia, where it is expected to draw far bigger crowds. Students affiliated with the Barnes had challenged the move, saying it would violate the terms under which the patent-medicine magnate Albert C. Barnes founded the institution in 1922.
Although a study of the foundation’s large holdings of Matisse and Renoir is under way, said Joseph J. Rishel, a senior curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who is chairman of the assessment committee, none of the 19th- or 20th-century works for which the Barnes is renowned are likely to be reattributed.
“These are very published, very exposed paintings,” Mr. Rishel said of the collection’s Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos. “When purchased, they were some of the most famous things of their kind.”
The de-attributions of old master works were reported on Sunday by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
In an interview with The New York Times, Larry Silver, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, said he had known for years that “The Temptation of St. Anthony” ascribed to Bosch (circa 1450-1516) in the Barnes collection was a copy, in part because he has seen the original twice in Lisbon and again at an exhibition in Washington.
Mr. Silver, one of 39 consultants involved in reassessing works owned by the Barnes, said the mid-16th- century copy represents only an excerpt of the original canvas and lacks Bosch’s “handling – the way he uses paint in thin, rather loosely brushed layers, and his color harmonies, which are much more delicate in undoubted originals.”
On the other hand, Mr. Silver said, his review confirmed the authenticity of other Northern European paintings in the collection, including “a spectacular example” of a late portrait by the 17th-century artist Frans Hals (“Portrait of a Man Holding a Watch”) and “The Square Watch-Tower,” a landscape by Jan van Goyen that the professor said would be the envy of many museums. The assessment project, which also includes the organization and preservation of the archives, digitizing files and images from the collection, and conservation assessment, is intended to remedy what Ms. Croll described as “80 years” of benign neglect since the foundation was established.
Conservation assessment at the Barnes over the last several years has turned up an array of problems, including Pueblo ceramics in the gallery with “inactive mold,” moth-eaten Navajo rugs at the Barnes’s Ker-Feal estate in Chester Springs, Pa., and a need for stabilization of paintings and especially works on paper. “We’re stopping the damage,” said Barbara Buckley, the foundation’s chief conservator.
As for authorship, Ms. Croll said, “reattributions are something that every museum does constantly, and we haven’t had the opportunity to do it officially till very recently,” she said.
Among the other reattributed works are “The Disrobing of Christ” (now considered “School of El Greco”) and an “Annunciation” (described as a “possibly 17th-century” copy of an El Greco); “The Holy Family With St. John and an Angel” (ascribed to the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens); “Christ and the Woman of Samaria” (ascribed to a follower of Tintoretto), and “Portrait of a Gentleman and Son” (credited now to an “unidentified artist, Brescian School” rather than Titian).
Ms. Croll said the project has also helped the foundation identify previously unidentified works, confirm the authenticity of others and establish the quality of some of its less-well-known collections of objects. For example, Edwin L. Wade, senior vice president of the Museum of Northern Arizona, described the Barnes’s Navajo jewelry as “one of the finest holdings of its kind in the United States.”
The Barnes Foundation is celebrated internationally for its multibillion-dollar collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early modern masterpieces. Most hang in ensembles assembled by Barnes himself in his galleries, with sculpture, textiles, ironwork and decorative arts objects.
The move to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia will allow the Barnes to expand its visiting hours and facilities. Rebecca W. Rimel, president and chief executive of the Pew Charitable Trusts, said yesterday that more than $110 million had been pledged toward a $150 million fund-raising goal to pay for the move and an endowment. The Pew is spearheading the drive with the Annenberg and Lenfest Foundations.
Ms. Rimel said that she was hopeful that a new Barnes could open on the parkway by late 2008. “If we beat that, that would be great,” she said. The search for an architect has not yet begun, she added.
Ms. Rimel also said that the Barnes board of trustees had named the search firm of Russell Reynolds Associates to find a replacement for Kimberly Camp, the former Barnes president and chief executive who resigned in June. That search should be completed in about four months, Ms. Rimel said.
Mr. Rishel said the assessment project, which has been supported by more than $2.1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, $1 million from Pew and other grants, had yielded significant new information about Barnes’s collecting habits. The archives are “a treasure trove,” he said. “It’s a whole level of documentation that was not known before.”
“What’s most fascinating is Barnes’s own take on what he did and didn’t buy,” Mr. Rishel said. “Even then, it was clear how shrewd he was in his choices, and how he did have a very broad number of choices. He was a very famous collector and a very rich man. The world’s greatest collectors spread a great bounty of temptations before him.”
Katy Rawdon-Faucett, the foundation’s archivist, said that among “the things that really make me say wow” was correspondence in the 1930′s and 40′s between Barnes and the American landscape artist Georgia O’Keeffe. “It’s really a back and forth between two people who knew each other and had some kind of connection and understanding,” Ms. Rawdon-Faucett said.
In a letter dated March 21, 1930, Barnes, who had purchased two paintings from O’Keeffe that he called “Still Life” and “Indian Girl,” praises them as “authentic expressions of yourself and therefore, genuine art.” But he adds, “Like every other new arrival in our gallery, they will survive or die on what they have in themselves.” Ms. Rawdon-Faucett said Barnes later returned the two paintings with apologies, and although O’Keeffe expressed disappointment, their friendship continued.
In a July 17, 1914, letter to Leo Stein, the art collector and brother of the writer Gertrude Stein, Barnes tries to explain his fascination with Renoir, which has mystified some contemporary critics.
“Renoir has been to me the most all-satisfying of any man’s work I know,” Barnes writes. “Perhaps the thing that most interests me in Renoir, that most strikes a personal response is, what seems to me, his joy in painting the real life of red-blooded people, and his skill in conveying his sensations to my consciousness.”
Ms. Rawdon-Faucett said that as far as she knew, that material had not previously been published.
She said that when she first entered the storage room in the Barnes administration building that housed much of the archives, “it was basically like the attic of an old house,” with filing cabinets, boxes and other material in disarray.
Along with Barnes’s letters and writings, she said, the archives contain blueprints and drawings of foundation buildings and the arboretum, photographs and institutional records, including deeds for the land dating back to the 18th century.
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