Barnes Foundation’s Director Aims ‘to Unpack the Ideas’ in the Art

The New York Times
By Ted Loos

The ghost of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the visionary collector and undisputed eccentric who once replied “Nuts” to T. S. Eliot’s request for a visit to his renowned holdings, still hovers here at the Barnes Foundation, even in the new building by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, which opened in 2012.

Certainly his presence is felt in the unparalleled trove of masterpieces on the walls, including works by Cézanne, van Gogh and Matisse, and in the famously quirky arrangement that originated in his own home and is preserved even now by the legal requirements of his trust. African sculptural masterpieces by anonymous craftsmen mingle with Manets, and shining pieces of 18th- and 19th-century metalwork are thrown in for good measure.

Would Dr. Barnes, who died in 1951, be surprised to learn that this fall, the foundation’s executive director and president, Thomas Collins, taught a course on the gay subculture, as represented by artists in the collection like Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley?

“That’s a good question,” Mr. Collins, who is known as Thom, said recently with a laugh.

A museum veteran who has worked at the Museum of Modern Art and came to the Barnes after running the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Mr. Collins is already charting a new course for the foundation in his first 18 months on the job. And it’s a direction that he said springs directly from the founder’s mission — updated to reflect the huge changes in how we view, interact with and live with art today.

“He founded it as an education institution,” Mr. Collins said. “It was meant for teaching.”

The move from the foundation’s original home in Merion, Pa., allowed only after a protracted legal battle, was in some ways just Phase 1 of the modernization of the Barnes.

“We were looking for someone to take us to Phase 2,” said Joseph Neubauer, the chairman of the Barnes’s board, who played a key role in hiring Mr. Collins.

The Barnes collection is well known and beloved around the world but has only been viewed in a certain way — and, in this, Mr. Collins sees opportunity.

“We like to say, ‘We’ve moved, but we didn’t unpack,’” Mr. Collins said. “We want to unpack the ideas in the works themselves. That broader social, historical, ideological context.”

He has made several concrete moves already. Mr. Collins has created a new position, which he said was the only one of its kind in the country, called deputy director for digital initiatives and chief experience officer, and filled it with Shelley Bernstein, hiring her away from the Brooklyn Museum.

He is also commissioning unusual and, in his words, “robust” programming — “robust” being a term Mr. Collins uses often — like next year’s exhibition “Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie,” a show about 20th- and 21st-century artworks that follow the 19th-century tradition of observing street life.

Opening on Feb. 25, it will spill outside the walls of the Barnes and feature artworks in unusual places, like billboards and store windows around Philadelphia.

“We’re opening up the Barnes and connecting in a very immediate way,” Mr. Collins said.

As is now de rigueur for museums, digitally engaging the Barnes audience is on the to-do list — but, perhaps surprisingly, that’s not the only focus.

“We are not saying everything here is going to be whiz-bang digital,” said Ms. Bernstein, who is in charge of such initiatives. “We’re saying that everything will be about experience, whether it’s digital or analog.”

Ms. Bernstein has been empowered to question the most familiar museum practices. “Everything is on the table,” she said — even the beloved audioguide.

After observing how visitors were often using just one earphone and talking to their friends at the same time, Ms. Bernstein realized that the collection naturally created social interactions and that the audioguide was “dampening the experience.”

“It’s a tool that’s not working for us,” she said. “We can figure out a better tool, though I don’t know what that is yet.”

Ms. Bernstein is also tackling long entrance lines. “We’re thinking about mobile ticketing,” she said. “It sounds superboring, but this may allow us to ease bottlenecks.”

As part of his personnel changes, Mr. Collins also hired Martha Lucy as deputy director for education and public programs, and curator.

“We gave him free rein in terms of staff, and the selections have been superb,” Mr. Neubauer said.

Ms. Lucy, previously a consulting curator for the Barnes and a professor at Drexel University, certainly has a legacy to build on.

Barnes championed basic visual literacy — he encouraged bricklayers to visit his collection and shooed away high-culture types, like art critics — and developed the “Barnes method,” which focused on analyzing form, light, color and space in a work of art. But in his view, nothing outside the frame was worth examining.

“In the old days, the tours were very Barnesian,” Ms. Lucy said. “Docents would get questions like, ‘So who was this artist?’ And they didn’t have an answer.”

So Ms. Lucy is looking to color outside the lines. “We just revamped our adulteducation course to reflect a broader interpretive paradigm,” she said. “We offer traditional visual literacy, but also two categories of courses that are more contemporary, like a social history of art.”

For Mr. Collins, his leadership of the Barnes comes after a very different experience at the Pérez museum, which opened a new building in 2013. “That was a very young institution, and really I spent most of my time just trying to get money raised and the building built,” he said.

At the Barnes, which has a $62 million endowment, his job is to capitalize on a rich history without letting it grow stale. “I want to grow the institution’s service,” he said. “We’re perfectly positioned to do that. We’re healthy.”

Not that Mr. Collins has given up fund-raising: No museum director has that option. But he has the chance to make his mark in ways that go beyond the coffers, and the bricks and mortar.

“‘Toggle’ is a very good way of describing it,” he said of his current job duties. “It’s a great moment here, because everything’s in play.”