Another sort of culture vulture

Here’s a silly question: If you could get your hands on $6-billion worth of masterpiece-quality paintings and sculptures, and all it would cost you was $150 million, would you go for the deal?

As I said -- a silly question. Presuming one had access to the cash, who wouldn’t?

The more sobering question is why such an outlandish deal might even come up. Impossible, you say? Think again. It already has -- and in a manner that can’t help but make one blanch.

Philadelphia’s incomparable Barnes Foundation has had a rough go of it since the 1980s. In a word, the place is broke. The foundation’s eminent collection of Post-Impressionist and early modern paintings might be the most remarkable ever assembled by one person -- Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), an irascible pharmaceuticals manufacturer -- but in December, a Montgomery County court will begin hearings that could forever change its singular identity. The story is a cautionary tale of cultural tourism run amok.

Two things conspired to put the place in jeopardy.

One was Barnes’ personality. A serious control freak, he sought to monitor the foundation’s finances from beyond the grave. Barnes endowed his legacy with plenty of money -- $10 million at his death, the equivalent of about $72 million today. But like many self-made men, and as one who survived the Depression with his wealth intact, he had little faith in the business acumen of others. So the indenture that established his foundation directed that, after Barnes’ death, the endowment could be invested only in government bonds. When that long-stable market began to tumble in the 1980s, so did the Barnes’ endowment.

The other disaster was the elevation of Philadelphia attorney Richard Glanton to the presidency of the foundation’s five-member board. An art novice and a highly litigious sort, Glanton sought to raise money by selling paintings from the collection. He directed patronage to associates, threatened or sued anyone who displeased him, and reportedly tried to negotiate a 100-year lease of Matisse’s 1905-06 “The Joy of Life” -- the single-most-important painting in the place -- to the Getty Museum for $1 million a year.

The sale was thwarted by an international firestorm of opposition. The lawsuits, including a multimillion-dollar fiasco over construction of a parking lot, further drained the foundation’s assets. And perhaps it is a measure of Glanton’s brash ineptitude to note that the Getty does not collect 20th century paintings.

When the Barnes greeted the new millennium, Glanton was gone -- and so, essentially, was the endowment. Kimberly Camp, the effective leader brought in as chief executive to right the listing ship, has done an admirable job of bringing administrative order out of chaos. But financially, it’s been touch-and-go ever since, amid a small but rising pile of debt.

Making a move?

The good burghers of Philadelphia now have a plan afoot to save the Barnes. Three local philanthropies have offered to bail it out by leading a $150-million fund-raising campaign. Central to the offer is moving the Barnes from its historic home in the upscale northwestern suburb of Merion to the downtown cultural district along Benjamin Franklin Parkway. There, its neighbors would be the Rodin Museum, a planned Alexander Calder Museum and, most prominently, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which might also offer space for the Barnes’ new home.

Because the move would violate the late founder’s indenture, the rescue plan requires court approval -- by no means a certainty. Beyond legalities, however, there’s one big hitch. The salvage operation is a classic case of destroying something to save it. Moving the Barnes would wreck an essential American cultural monument.

How important is the Barnes Foundation? Let Henri Matisse explain. When the inimitable French master traveled to Merion in September 1930 to begin work on his now-revered murals for the main gallery, he made a note in his pocket diary. The Barnes, he wrote, was “the only sane place” for the display of art he had yet seen in America.

The foundation’s holdings include European Old Masters -- Giorgione, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, Watteau, etc. -- as well as Greek, Roman, Asian, Indian, Pre-Columbian and, especially, first-rate African sculpture. But the French Post-Impressionist and early modern paintings are the cream of the collection’s crop. Barnes acquired major examples by Picasso, Seurat, Rousseau, Soutine and many others. He collected three artists in staggering depth: 60 works by Matisse, 69 by Cezanne and 181 by Renoir. Most of his conservative Main Line neighbors were scandalized by his adventurous taste.

While the collection is extraordinary, however, the art is only part of what makes the place so significant. Some institutions also enjoy historical significance. They show us who we are by crystallizing where we came from.

Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum isn’t just home to the finest painting by Titian in America. The house and its collection are also the epitome of late Victorian feminine taste.

San Marino’s Huntington Library isn’t just a pretty setting in which to gaze at Gainsborough’s signature painting, “Blue Boy.” The British-style country house also embodies the patrician aesthetics of Gilded Age industrial culture, poised at the edge of its manifest destiny.

As for the Barnes Foundation, the lovely house and its staggering collections are the singular embodiment of pragmatist philosophy -- the defining American intellectual movement between the Civil War and the Cold War.

Louis Menand, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America,” succinctly described the viewpoint. Unlike its more speculative European predecessors, he wrote, pragmatism is a deeply American philosophy in which “an idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork.” Knowledge is an instrument of action, pragmatists believe, not a theoretical representation of something that exists independently in the world.

American pragmatism as it evolved from the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James and Charles S. Peirce guided John Dewey’s radical thinking about aesthetics, which asserts that art is about experience, not merely ideas.

Dewey thought that giving special status to ideas reflected class bias -- specifically the bias of the leisure class, for whom stability, certainty and fine art took precedence over change, contingency and the useful arts. For him, the mind should not be privileged over the hand, any more than the leisure class should be favored over the working class -- in keeping with democratic principles of tolerance and equality.

Barnes was Dewey’s great patron. In turn, Dewey’s thought helped shape the Barnes Foundation. Born dirt-poor, Barnes worked his way through medical school, first in Pennsylvania and then in Germany. When he grew rich after developing and marketing a silver-based compound used to fight infections in newborns, he began to develop an interest in art.

What he didn’t do was follow the lead of other typical American tycoons, who used their immense wealth to provide themselves with the conservative trappings of European aristocracy. Morgan, Frick, Altman, Huntington -- most great collections of the day were built to establish patrician legacies for American princes of capitalism. Barnes’ collection, by contrast, was built to teach democratic ideals.

Pragmatist philosophy informed his decision to create a school, not a museum. It had an effect on the school’s location, away from the downtown corridors of establishment power. It assisted the resolve to give Lincoln University, the oldest black college in the nation, the authority to nominate a majority of Barnes trustees in perpetuity, after the founder’s death.

And it influenced the unusual installation of the collection, which juxtaposes art and design objects of different times and places according to their visual structure.

The odd installation is often remarked upon, but in it Barnes took the lessons of Dewey’s aesthetic pragmatism to heart.

For example, he hung Cezanne’s monumental painting “The Card Players” on a wall beneath an enormous hand-forged iron hinge, where the shifting planes of one resonate in those of the other. He put a chromatically decorative portrait by Matisse above a Pennsylvania Dutch chest decorated with brightly patterned trees of life.

And so on through the galleries, where disparate works of art and decorative objects echo, rhyme and reverberate against one another, and against the architectural spaces of the rooms.

Eccentric? Yes. Fascinating? Absolutely. Something that can be experienced anywhere else in the world? No.

I don’t know a soul who has made the pilgrimage to Merion who doesn’t recall the experience with some awe.

Even duplicating the unusual hanging in a museum downtown, as required in the plan, would fundamentally alter the character of the Barnes Foundation.

The euphemism of choice about the move is that it will make the Barnes “more accessible to the public.” An enthusiastic article in the Philadelphia Inquirer is more blunt -- and honest. The plan, jubilantly described as “a tourism promoter’s vision of heaven,” is hailed for the potential of “attracting tens of thousands of new domestic and foreign cultural tourists.”

More public accessibility? No -- more paying customers.

Turning the Barnes into a tourist trap -- Bilbao by the Schuylkill, a freak show for looky-loos -- accurately reflects today’s consumer-oriented cultural values. But it also would demolish the historical significance of the place. The Barnes would no longer be a cultural pilgrimage site for modern American secular democracy. Matisse’s “only sane place” for art would be just another roadside attraction.

More bizarre than the collection’s installation design is that this demolition is being led by local philanthropies that should know better -- the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lenfest Foundation and the Annenberg Foundation. John Anderson, a journalist whose recent book, “Art Held Hostage: The Battle Over the Barnes Collection,” chronicles in almost wearying detail the depredations of the Glanton years, notes that before his death, the late Walter Annenberg, who also collected Post-Impressionist art, had conveniently favored Glanton’s disastrous plan to sell off some Barnes paintings.

Web of influence

That sort of shocking self-interest now seems to guide the “rescue” operation.

Anderson charts the interlocking web of establishment figures lined up behind the planned move: H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest is also board chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which stands to benefit mightily from the move; Bernard C. Watson is the current president of the Barnes -- and chairman of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority, which wants to double the size of Philadelphia’s convention center; his predecessor in that job is fellow Barnes trustee Stephen J. Harmelin, managing partner of Dilworth Paxson -- a law firm that collected $1.59 million from the Barnes during the Glanton years, and whose client list includes the Annenbergs. And so on.

A $6-billion collection for $150 million? The move downtown is not a rescue effort, Anderson has rightly observed, it’s a corporate-style takeover plan -- the sale of the century, engineered by the same Philadelphia elite Albert Barnes spent his life combating. The saviors are behaving less like cultural philanthropists than like spokesmen from the Chamber of Commerce. Their canard about improving “public accessibility” merely applies market principles to a nonprofit enterprise.

Want proof? Pew, Lenfest and Annenberg are reportedly believed to be pledging $80 million toward the move. Pledged instead to the Barnes endowment, that amount would easily cover the institution’s roughly $3-million to $4-million annual operating budget.

The incomparable Barnes Foundation, both collection and cultural monument, would then actually be saved -- presuming that was really the goal.

Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic. He can be reached at christopher.knight@latimes.com.