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Thursday Big Chrissy and I hopped on the train to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Collection and the Philadelphia Museum. The Barnes will be moving soon to downtown Philadelphia, and we wanted to see the collection on-site, as Dr. Barnes intended. I got a little tired of all the Renoirs—really, 10 good ones would have been enough, but there are over 100, sheesh—but peppered here and there among the Renoirs were Van Gogh, Modigliani, Cezanne, Matisse… and on and on. The collection is hung is a very idiosyncratic way. Dr. Barnes spent years arranging the work according to content, the way paint is handled, use of surface, etc. The Foundation assures us that the new building will retain the layout of the current museum, but I fear it will no longer have soul, and certainly no longer as Barnes intended us to engage with this work, in a Disneyfied facsimile.
At the Philadelphia Museum, there was a knockout Michelangelo Pistoletto show, from his self-portraits of the 50s to collaborative actions of the 60s and 70s. And finally, to see all those Duchamps! And Eakins’ Gross Clinic! And another moody stunner of a Van Gogh, of diagonal slashes of rain pelting a wheat filed glimpsed from his window at the clinic of Saint-Paul-de-Mausolée.
