‘Art of the Steal’ — not a pretty picture

The Art of the Steal is a provocative, somewhat shrill, blatantly one-sided documentary about the fate of the Barnes Foundation collection of art masterpieces, especially Impressionist and modern paintings, valued at more than $25 billion.

To make an astoundingly long, many-stranded story short, Albert Barnes, a doctor who made a fortune from co-inventing an anti-microbial drug, collected 2,500 art objects, including priceless paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and many other artists. In the 1920s, he established a gorgeous, intimate showplace for the thoughtfully juxtaposed works in Lower Merion Township, a Philadelphia suburb, where select students could view them but the public at large could not.  Stung early on by the hostile critical response from Philly’s mainstream press (especially the Annenberg family’s Inquirer) to an exhibit of his collection, Barnes made a point of locking it up as a gem for select, discerning artists and scholars, and guarding it against mass exposure. In keeping with those wishes — sociologically New Deal but intellectually elitist — when the childless Barnes died in a car crash in 1951, he left the foundation in his will to Lincoln University, a historically black school.

Over the decades, Barnes’s apostles and the Lincoln U.-dominated board stayed true to his vision but — even according to this documentary, directed by Don Argott (Rock School) and financed by former Barnes student Lenny Feinberg — mismanaged the foundation considerably, letting the building run down (though how much so is debated) and alienating (even suing, under a civil-rights statute no less) the collection’s Merion neighbors in disputes over traffic congestion, crowds, and a Barnes-proposed parking lot. According to the film, the state of Pennsylvania (under Gov. Ed Rendell), the Pew Charitable Trusts (under Rebecca Rimel), as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its downtown tourist-hungry allies sinisterly swooped in, bailed the museum out of its short-term financial straits, bought off Lincoln U. for a relatively paltry student center, and hijacked the Barnes collection to downtown — against Albert Barnes’s clear and express wishes — where it is scheduled to open in 2012. (An alternative view might be that those parties, um, saved the collection, but what kind of film would that make?)

Producer Feinberg is an arch opponent of the downtown move, and The Art of the Steal, as its title suggests, has a decidedly muckraking, conspiracy-minded feel to it. Aside from Rendell’s, it includes no rebuttals to its central premise from Rimel and other key targets of the film, who were understandably distrustful of the filmmakers. (More on that in Philip Kennicott’s astute Washington Post article, and more on the docu’s stylistic predictability in Manohla Dargis’s insightful New York Times review.) The film’s talking heads are all old-Barnes partisans, and some of them, particularly civil-rights activist Julian Bond (whose dad once ran Lincoln U.) and L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, are very articulate.

To be clear: They and the other Barnes partisans fully persuade us that the downtown relocation is, indeed, diametrically opposite to what Albert Barnes would have wanted. The problem is, they persuade us equally that years of mismanagement — in terms of fiscal discipline, institutional vision, and simple civic diplomacy — gave the state, the city, and Pew the perfect opening to make their moves.

Moreover, the downtown relocation prompts some interesting counterfactual thinking. For instance, what if Barnes’s early exhibit had been greeted by the Philadelphia establishment with open arms and gracious thanks? Would that have inspired him to open his arms to throngs of Philadelphia natives and tourists eager to ogle his accumulated masterpieces? Put more brashly, whatever Barnes’s issues with the Philly establishment and the Annenberg family in particular, was he simply a bit of a Scrooge for not letting more of us see his fabulous objets? Should great art be held hostage to parochial grudges?

Hey, I’m just asking.

Who knows. Clearly, what was his was his, and Barnes could do what he liked with it. But while estate-law professors parse this near-Dickensian, endless case for lessons, flaws, and precedents, I for one look forward to visiting in a few years the new Barnes location on Franklin Avenue.

Meanwhile, a memento mori moral for us all: Not only can you not take it with you; you can’t even be sure to leave it where it was!