by Stephanie A. Stanley, Art News Staff

MERION, PENNSYLVANIA- In one of her first public actions as the new executive director of the Barnes Foundation, Kimberly Camp did something drastic--she installed a collection box in the gallery. The museum that holds some of the world's greatest French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, in cluding hundreds of pieces by Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso, and Modigliani, is fast running out of money.

"The museum that holds some of the world's greatest French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art is fast running out of money."

Last August, Camp's attempts to mend relations with alienated Barnes friends brought in a $760,000 grant from the Violette de Mazia Trust. The de Mazia Trust was created solely to support the art theories espoused by the museum's founder, Albert C. Barnes, an eccentric millionaire chemist and art collector. The trust had gone its separate way from the foundation in 1996 after years of bitter litigation over money. While the reconciliation is important symbolically, the grant provides only momentary relief.

In the last ten years, under the direction of Lincoln University, a small, historically black college in Chester County, Pennsylvania, the little-known Barnes Foundation reached new heights of fame, both from a highly successful world tour of its paintings and from numerous controversial lawsuits. But federal tax records show that the caretakers were using its $10 million endowment to cover the growing cost of lawyers' fees, new employee salaries, construction, and other expenses. The financial problems bottomed out early this year, when the last of the endowment was cashed in to help cover 1999 expenses. "The money is gone," Camp said. And the Barnes doesn't have easy means to earn more. However, Camp has ruled out the possibility of another tour.

The Barnes has always been stymied by limits on its income potential, most acutely due to strict admission caps set by its founder and by local zoning codes. For years, the museum has been allowed to admit only 26,000 visitors- at a maximum $5 per person-a year. Consequently, the Barnes, which has a $2 million budget this year, has earned less than $1 million annually from gallery admissions, gift-shop sales, and educational programs in recent years. Once a planned parking lot is completed, the township of Lower Merion will permit 62,400 visitors a year, but that still won't provide enough revenue for the foundation to cover its expenses.

Since its creation in 1922, the foundation has seemed to hold itself above fund-raising. It survived--albeit in near obscurity--for decades without much outside help, relying mostly on interest earned on its endowment. In the mid-1990s, the Montgomery County Orphan's Court, which protects Dr. Barnes's indenture, allowed trustees to depart from a section limiting endowment investments to government and railroad bonds.

Camp--who previously led the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit--has been trying to bring the Barnes into the modern age of nonprofit survival. She hired the foundation's first director of development, Anthony Ng, who has spent the last several months writing numerous grant proposals. Camp says staff members are also developing individual and corporate giving programs, seeking the support of the foundation's art-school alumni, and brainstorming ways to earn money from services and products it can offer the public, including access to the 120,000 documents in its archives.

Barnes's indenture directed that once the last of his family and disciples had died, the university should be entrusted with the collection. Led by former board president Richard H. Glanton, a prominent Philadelphia attorney, the new Lincoln trustees vowed to expand access to the Barnes Collection. But over the past decade, they embroiled the foundation in expensive lawsuits, battling Barnes traditionalists who feared the commercialization of the collection, neighbors and local officials who feared increased traffic, and the court responsible for overseeing the restrictions Barnes had set on access to the collection.

But recently, the last of those multimillion-dollar legal battles has come to an end. (A defamation lawsuit the township had filed against Glanton was settled out of court.) Last June, Glanton and another trustee were replaced on the board by two leading African American educators. Bernard C. Watson, the former president of the philanthropic William Penn Foundation, and Jeff R. Donaldson, an artist and former art-school dean at Howard University, are expected to help refocus the Barnes on its educational programs, Camp says. An independent audit of the Barnes was also completed this year. Trustees have not publicly released it.

Pennsylvania deputy attorney general Lawrence Barth has requested a copy and is still waiting to see how the money was spent. Barth says, "Once we get the figures, we'll be in a position to understand what happened."