Barnes Foundation

Barnes Foundation, museum in Merion, Pa. Founded in 1922, it houses the impressive art collection amassed by Albert Coombs Barnes,. 1872–1951, a wealthy Philadelphia physician, patent-medicine inventor, and pharmaceutical manufacturer. Introduced to art by a schoolmate, the painter William Glackens, Barnes acquired thousands of works of art and objects. The collection, which is particularly rich in impressionist and postimpressionist paintings, includes European and American moderns, Old Master paintings and drawings, African sculpture, American folk art, antiquities, Native American artifacts, antique furniture, and metal objects. Barnes, who scorned traditional museum practice, displayed his eclectic collection in a highly idiosyncratic fashion, envisioning it and the courses offered by the foundation as means of providing art education to the masses. He also wrote several books on art and carried on running feuds with various critics and museums. Ten years after his death the collection opened to the public on a regular basis. Barnes left control of his foundation to Lincoln Univ., an African-American institution in SE Pennsylvania, with the stipulation that the collection not be moved or altered. During the 1990s extreme tensions developed between the foundation's president and the university. In 2003, in a move to prevent foundation bankruptcy, Lincoln's board voted to relocate the collection to a new museum to be built in Philadelphia.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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