First of three parts

Imagine visiting the Barnes Foundation in Merion and not looking at a single impressionist or postimpressionist painting. Or a single Picasso, Matisse, Soutine or Modigliani.

It might sound crazy to ignore what makes the Barnes internationally famous: its French and early modern paintings. Yet it's not only sensible, it's highly recommended.

The Barnes collection, all 8,000 pieces of it, is like a multilayer cake.

The masterpiece paintings that traveled around the world between 1993 and 1995 are the creamy, highly visible icing. Underneath, less readily noticed, other specialized groups of objects produce a fascinating and incomparable texture.

These subcollections are themselves of splendid quality and variety. Not only are they aesthetically stimulating, but they also help to create the distinctive displays, called "ensembles," that make the Barnes unique.

Some of these collections - African sculpture, Pennsylvania German furniture, and American and European forged ironwork - are prominent even when you're not looking for them. Others, such as stunning Southwestern pueblo and American redware pottery and the heartfelt devotional paintings known as retablos from New Mexico, beg for attention among the more celebrated masterpieces.

Even if the Barnes didn't own a single Cézanne or its magnificent Matisse mural, these collection would make the foundation a special place.

Start with the African sculpture, which literally greets visitors at the front door, in the form of tile reliefs that Albert Barnes himself designed. This sculpture resides in several second-floor galleries, mainly in glass-fronted cases. Most of the nearly 200 pieces are relatively small and they aren't individually labeled, which makes them difficult to engage.

Yet their powerfully innovative forms and historical significance are undeniable. Christa Clarke of the Newark Museum in New Jersey, one of the foundation's 34 curatorial consultants, explained that, while Barnes wasn't the first American to acquire African art, he was the first to develop a comprehensive collection of it.

"He also played a major role in introducing African art to the instigators of the Harlem Renaissance," she added.

Clarke said Barnes bought most of his African works from French dealer Paul Guillaume during the early 1920s. His reasons today seem unusually prescient. As Clarke explained:

"He saw in African art the ability to radically reshape human form in the interest of design. He felt that African sculpture was the highest form of sculpture that humans had created, the preeminent form of three-dimensionality."

The nearly 200 African works generally come from four present-day African countries, Clarke said - Mali, Ivory Coast, Congo and Gabon. "He felt that those areas produced the strongest sculpture."

The crowning glory is a seated couple, a man tenderly embracing a woman, from the Dogon culture of Mali; it's in a free-standing case in gallery 22.

"That's a really significant work, a beautifully executed, arresting visual form. It has become a kind of icon of African art generally," Clarke said.

A 16th-century bronze messenger figure from Benin and a carved wooden door from the Baule culture, both on the second-floor balcony, are other major pieces. Clarke observed that while African art constitutes a relatively small part of the overall collection, African motifs on the building demonstrate how central it was to Barnes' thinking.

Besides the colorful tiles at the entrance, these include African designs in the window grills and in the frieze that runs around the central, first-floor gallery's walls. The African collection represents something else in the collector's philosophy: an interest in how non-Western cultures resolved design problems, especially those involving abstraction.

Like the African sculpture, the Indian pueblo pottery, from a half-dozen villages in the Southwestern United States, handles abstraction with noticeable energy and sensitivity, and in the round.

It's a small collection - only about 60 items - but, according to consultant Edwin Wade, it contains some masterpieces.

One of those is an imposing, boldly decorated jar from Acoma pueblo in New Mexico by a potter known as Acoma Mary. "It's the best of its kind in any collection," Wade said.

He described three 19th-century pots from Santa Ana pueblo as "enormously rare objects, because Santa Ana stopped making pottery about 1880."

"These magnificent jars are the equal of any in the world," Wade said.

The earliest pot in the collection, a large buff-colored storage jar dating to about 1760, comes from San Ildefonso pueblo. "There are only a handful of these known," Wade continued. "This one is important not just because of rarity but because of its aesthetic excellence."

During several trips to the Southwest in the early 1930s, Barnes also acquired about 200 pieces of Navajo silver and turquoise jewelry, a group that Wade characterized as one of the finest such collections in the world.

"The cuff bracelets are particularly good," he said. The pieces date from the origin of Navajo jewelry in the late 19th century and feature hand-carved stones. (The jewelry is more easily located than the pottery. All the pots, and some jewelry, are installed in several cabinets in a lower-level hallway, just outside the rest rooms. Barnes didn't include pueblo pottery in his gallery ensembles, but visitors will encounter some jewelry upstairs.)

The American Southwest is further represented by what consultant Lane Coulter described as a prime group of retablos - devotional paintings by folk artists from the Hispanic culture of New Mexico.

Also purchased during the early 1930s, these small paintings represent almost all the artists who made such icons from the late 18th through the 19th centuries, Coulter said.

"He [Barnes] was interested in the compositional part of retablos, which are painted on pine boards in water-based pigments," Coulter explained. "He also seems to have been interested in getting as many different saint images as he could. There are relatively few images of the most common saints and quite a few of uncommon ones."

Finding the roughly 35 retablos at the Barnes is like going on a treasure hunt. They're smaller than a magazine page and scattered throughout the galleries. Easily spotted examples hang in galleries 14, 15 and 17.

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Barnes' interest in folk pottery and Pennsylvania German furniture, especially painted chests, is far more apparent.

He placed his 20 or so chests at the center of wall ensembles - symmetrical displays of paintings, ironwork and decorative objects - in many galleries. Consultant Jonathan Fairbanks called the chests, elaborately decorated with hex signs and other motifs, "the cream" of the foundation's early-American furniture.

Dating largely to the early 19th century, the chests retain their original paint. Barnes used the chests functionally and aesthetically, Fairbanks observed.

"They keep people away from the paintings, but he also saw comparable motifs and color schemes in them and the paintings. If you see pinwheels or hearts or unicorns in the chests, you find some of those elements either in the paintings or in the iron.

Barnes amassed hundreds of pieces of American and English pottery, but you'll find very little of it in the galleries.

Consultant Beatrice Garvan, who's cataloging part of that collection, noted that Barnes used only a few three-dimensional ceramics such as small jugs in his ensembles. They're often set on top of decorated chests.

Most of the pottery - 19th-century American redware, particularly - is installed at Ker-Feal, Barnes' 18th-century country house in Chester County.

The foundation plans to open the house to the public eventually, but first has to work out the logistics of allowing visitors into an old house of small rooms crammed with furniture and fragile pottery.

The house boasts stunning displays of plates, mostly dark with lighter decoration, in cupboards and on mantels. Some plates are Pennsylvania German, some Moravian from North Carolina, and some from other pottery centers.

Garvan considers the pottery collection outstanding for two reasons: It represents a broad geographical range, from New England to western Pennsylvania to the South, and it includes a broad range of pottery types, from purely functional ones such as crocks to elaborately decorated plates.

Garvan observed that the pottery displays at Ker-Feal mimicked the wall ensembles in the Merion gallery - "big in the center, then tapering down at the ends."

Among the 400 to 500 American pieces, the Moravian ware from North Carolina is especially distinguished, she said, citing the large number of examples, the quality of the throwing, and the decoration. "You could never get such a collection together today," she remarked.

If you can't see most of the pottery yet, you can't miss the ironwork - hinges, door-pulls, locks and similar hardware - at Merion.

That is probably the most remarked-upon aspect of the ensembles that Barnes composed, because the juxtaposition of hardware and fine-art masterworks seems so incongruous.

Consultant Richard Wattenmaker estimates the metalwork collection at about 1,000 pieces, half American and half European, dating as early as the late 15th century.

As visitors can see, many of the pieces are functional, but in an elaborately decorative manner. Their swelling curves and fanciful shapes are intended to reflect analogous contours in paintings and on decorated furniture.

Wattenmaker said most of the American ironwork is Pennsylvania German. Besides door hardware, it includes things such as household utensils, fireplace tools, belt buckles, and even fittings from Conestoga wagon toolboxes.

Probably the prize iron item is a French sculpture of a rooster, an emblem dating to Gallo-Roman times that traditionally announces the coming of Christ. It's on top of the case holding the Dogon sculpture in gallery 22.

The ubiquitous ironwork isn't as incongruous as it seems. As Fairbanks observed, Barnes wasn't just collecting to please the eye, "he wanted you to experience what you would not ordinarily see.

"He wants you to see the things in a unified way, as little compositions," Fairbanks continued. "He's saying, 'Look, art has an essential unity, it doesn't matter what culture it comes from.'

"It's really like visual music. He was great at that. It's one of the things that holds vast appeal that the Barnes Foundation has for people, although they might not realize it."