Art Held Hostage

Collecting art and issuing lawsuits are two prized American pastimes, but seldom do they come together so forcefully as in the tale of the Barnes Collection.

Art Held Hostage by John Anderson ’76 begins its story with Albert C. Barnes, an extremely litigious Philadelphia physician who assembled an extraordinary collection of modern art—the Barnes has more Cézannes than all the museums of Paris combined. He did so, in large part, with money he won by successfully suing the allies as well as the enemies he made in the pharmaceutical industry. The book then goes on to describe how an equally remarkable and even more colorful character, Philadelphia lawyer and one-time president of the Barnes Foundation, Richard Glanton, went lawsuit-happy himself in the 1990s and, in the process, threatened the collection’s very existence.

Barnes grew up in the Philadelphia slums but left them behind to become fabulously wealthy. Despite his riches, he maintained a populist distrust of elites and their establishments, and after collaborating for years with the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and Penn University, among other institutions, he grew to hate them. At his death in 1951, he had his collection transferred to Lincoln University, an African American school in the Philadelphia suburbs.

During the next two decades, the foundation was very badly managed, and by the 1970s, it was worth only one-fifth of the real-dollar value it possessed at Barnes’s death. Unfortunately, Lincoln University was in no position to right the Barnes ship. Enter Richard Glanton, the book’s dominant character. Glanton was a hustler who traded on charges of racism to force himself onto the Barnes board and then to its presidency.

Anderson paints a picture of Glanton living the high life at the Barnes’s expense. Glanton sent the collection on a controversial world tour despite criticism that he was physically abusing the art by sending it to so many locations, and he accompanied the art around the world, living like a prince in the process. But giving the devil his due, Anderson points out that the tour did bring in badly needed revenues. Eventually, Glanton made enough enemies that he lost his leadership position on the board.

But for all of the foundation’s mismanagement and Glanton’s audacious behavior, the Barnes Collection’s ongoing financial crisis—and the very real threats to its existence—are most directly attributable to its founder. Perhaps there is such a thing as karma after all. Barnes’s unique combination of brilliance and bull-headed short-sightedness produced a freak in the world of art—a six-billion dollar collection with virtually no money for operations.

As the book closes, yet another lawsuit has begun, one that will attempt to undo Barnes’s will, which stipulates that the collection remain at Lincoln. Very powerful forces are attempting to bring the collection to downtown Philadelphia, but it’s unclear whether they will be able to pry it free from Barnes’s terms. Whatever his other shortcomings, Barnes was a man who knew his way around a court of law.

—David Theis