Albert C. Barnes

From Philosopedia

Barnes, Albert (2 January 1872 - 24 July 1951)

Barnes by Giorgio de Chirico, © Barnes Foundation

Barnes had a factory that made Argyrol, a product that had antiseptic powers without the burning quality of nitrate. He prospered, saved his money, invested it into art, and in 1922 housed the art on the grounds of his private home, in what became a huge private art collection in Merlon, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The collection includes works by Paul Cézanne (69 works), George de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse (60 works), Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (100 works), Maurice Utrillo, Vincent Van Gogh, as well as numerous Old Masters and a variety of African artworks.

A disciple first of William James, then of Dewey, he established a six-hour day for employees and had a mid-day one hour seminar during which James, Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Santayana were discussed. At times, Barnes was known to have disagreed with Russell as well as with Alexander Woollcott.

Barnes also disagreed with philosopher Barrows Dunham and wanted him to be fired from Temple University because he felt he was a Communist. He got John Dewey to retract a favorable statement about Dunham’s Man Against Myth. Later, when Dunham refused to answer questions of the House Un-American Committee, Dunham was suspended from his professorship.

Barnes’s first Picasso cost $10, his first Matisse $50. As an art collector, he amassed a distinctive collection said to have been the finest privately owned collection in the country.

Once, he invited Dewey to attend a lecture of art with him at the Louvre. In the late 1940s, now an extremely rich man, he took one of Dewey’s classes at Columbia University, and Dewey said he never met Barnes’s equal for “sheer brain power.” Like Dewey, Barnes was a naturalist in philosophy.

Barnes was killed immediately in 1951 when his car was struck by a ten-ton trailer truck, and his body was hurled forty feet into a nearby field. No funeral services were held, and his body was cremated.

In 2006, plans started to move the entire Barnes Foundation collection to downtown Philadelphia. Involved will be the moving of 2,500 objects, including 800 paintings estimated to be worth more than $2,000,000,000.

In 2007, The Board of Trustees of the Barnes Foundation announced the award of a $5,000,000 challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Barnes Home and Museum, Merlon, Pennsylvania

The Cantankerous Freethinker

Albert C. Barnes - The Cantankerous Freethinker

By Tim Madigan

The Greater Philadelphia Story (May-June 2006)

The philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) was by all accounts a lovable, gentle and self-effacing man who seldom made enemies, and almost always sought a compromise between opposing points of view. And yet, surprisingly enough, for over 30 years he was a close friend to a man who was, by all accounts, unlovable, pugnacious and selfaggrandizing, with a penchant for making enemies with almost everyone he met, as well as a reputation for never compromising, even in the face of overwhelming evidence against his position. How could it be that Dewey could remain close to this outrageous individual? Dewey’s other close associates were befuddled by this friendship. Sidney Hook wrote in 1952, shortly after Dewey’s death, that “Dewey’s goodness was so genuine, constant, and sustained, even under provocation, that I sometimes found it somewhat oppressive. It was almost a relief that I discovered one shortcoming in him: his indulgent friendship with Albert C. Barnes.”

Who was Albert C. Barnes, and why was Dewey so found of him? Barnes (1872-1951) was a successful physician, scientist, and entrepreneur. He co-discovered the antiinflammatory drug Argyrol, which went into production in 1902, making him a millionaire. He later quarreled with Hermann Hille, the German chemist who co-discovered Argyrol. This was not the first time he had a bitter falling out with a close associate. The profits from his business made Barnes a wealthy man. He became a highly influential art collector, and managed to keep his personal fortune even during the height of the Great Depression. This allowed him to purchase many masterpieces, especially from the Impressionist School, which he displayed in his Merion mansion in the Philadelphia suburbs.

As a self-made man, Barnes despised phonies and snobs. He had a love/hate (primarily hate) relationship with the Philadelphia art community, which he felt did not truly appreciate the works of art in various museums. One of the things Barnes attempted to do at his Argyrol factory was encourage the workers there to develop their artistic and intellectual capabilities. He initially became an art collector to show his workers some of the best paintings being produced, as well as to thumb his nose at the Philadelphia curators who did not see the significance of such contemporary artists as Renoir, Picasso, Seurat, Modigliani, and Matisse.

Barnes became enamored with the writings of William James, a philosopher who he believed truly understood the common people. James’s pragmatism was in line with his own “can-do” approach to problem solving. Much to his disappointment, however, James was already dead by the time he discovered his writings. Barnes learned that a professor at Columbia University named John Dewey was considered to be James’ successor as an exponent of pragmatism. He promptly wrote to Dewey in 1917 and asked if he might sit in on one of the professor’s philosophy courses. The always-courteous Dewey agreed to this. It was said that Barnes promptly fell asleep at the beginning of each lecture and only awoke when the class ended. Dewey was 12 years older than Barnes, and was flattered by the younger man’s attention. It also didn’t hurt that Barnes was fabulously wealthy and treated the professor to many trips to Philadelphia to see his growing art collection. In fact, Barnes later gave funds to supplement Dewey’s Columbia salary, which no doubt helped cement their relationship.

There are three main events in the Barnes/Dewey friendship that should be noted. The first was the so-called “Philadelphia Study of Polish-Americans.” In 1918 Barnes funded a study by Dewey and some of his students, who wanted to explore why Polish immigrants did not seem to be assimilating into the American democratic community in the same way as previous immigrants had. The study proposed that this was due to the baleful influence of the Catholic Church and its clergy, which kept the immigrants from learning English and discouraged them from communicating with non-Poles. The study was widely criticized at the time, and continues to be a bone of contention for Polish-Americans, who felt that Dewey and his associates were insensitive to Polish-Catholic concerns. Dewey, however, refuted this saying that many members of the Polish community welcomed interactions with the broader culture when they were allowed to do so, and that Poles in general would benefit from coming into contact with democratic forms of life.

The second event of great importance in the Barnes/Dewey friendship was Dewey’s publication of the book Art as Experience in 1934. It is Dewey’s major contribution to aesthetics, and he dedicates the book “To Albert C. Barnes, in gratitude.” He wrote most of it while staying at the Barnes Foundation, and in it states that Barnes went over every page and made substantial comments. It is in many ways a collaborative effort and expresses their common view that art is something natural to all human beings and should not be overly explained or theorized about before being experienced.

The third event occurred in 1940, when the philosopher Bertrand Russell was denied a job teaching at the City University of New York because of his controversial views on sexuality, religion and politics, even though the courses he was scheduled to teach were all in mathematical logic. Knowing that Russell desperately needed a job, Dewey asked Barnes if he might be able to employ him at the Foundation. Barnes agreed and paid for Russell to give lectures on the history of Western philosophy to the factory workers and other students. Not surprisingly, the equally headstrong Barnes and Russell soon clashed. It was said that Barnes could not stand the fact that Russell’s wife knitted throughout her husband’s lectures, forgetting perhaps his own tendency to sleep through his friend Dewey’s lectures. Barnes fired Russell, who promptly sued and won. Ironically enough, the lectures which Russell prepared for the course were eventually published and the proceeds from the book essentially supported him financially for the rest of his long life.

(See painting of Barnes.)