Albert C. Barnes Correspondence 1902-1951 ABC
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In the 1930s, Barnes’s enthusiasm for Native American fine crafts broadened to include additional
acquisitions of Early American decorative art. He purchased Pennsylvania German chests, cupboards,
tables, chairs, ironwork, brass, tin, copper, pewter, ceramics, textiles, and glass from local antique dealers
in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In the Gallery, Barnes displayed his collection of ironwork along with
the paintings because he thought the patterns observed in fine art reflected those found in wrought iron.
He believed the creators of these pieces to be artists, as authentic as Titian or Renoir. By including the
iron work in the ensembles, Barnes demonstrated how their patterns also offered a link to what had
gone before, something that he attempted to do with paintings – “to show how the modern painters are
legitimate successors of the old masters.”(32) Barnes also included furniture in the Gallery for the same
purpose – to demonstrate how the earliest prototypes of foreign pieces of furniture had served as points of
departure for American craftsmen.
FIDELE DE PORT MANEC’H
By the time that Barnes severed his relations with Paul Guillaume in 1932, he had already established
another working friendship with art dealer Georges Keller, director of Etienne Bignou gallery in Paris
and Bignou Gallery in New York. Barnes purchased paintings by Moderns such as Matisse and Soutine
as well as Cézanne, Seurat, and Renoir through Keller. Barnes expressed his partiality for Keller by
giving him a Ford sedan for Christmas and, when Guillaume died in 1934, assigned Keller to his post as
“Foreign Secretary” of the Barnes Foundation. Keller introduced Barnes to Port Manec’h, a small fishing
village in Brittany, France, where Barnes and his wife vacationed in the years leading up to the Second
World War.
While vacationing in Port Manec’h, Barnes befriended Jeanne Guillerm, innkeeper of the hotel Tante
Jeanne, launching a friendship that survived language barriers, an ocean, and a world war. Barnes grew
so fond of Port Manec’h and its lively Breton inhabitants that he proposed to purchase property there to
create a school and cultural center, a haven for artists to work in peace. In 1937, Barnes sent instructions
from Merion to Georges Keller in Paris to make an offer on Guillerm’s hotel and, also, to take two
hundred francs and buy a mongrel puppy that he had met in Port Manec’h the summer before. Barnes
thought he was “a wonderful dog, … neglected there, and … worthy of a better home.”(33) Although
Keller’s negotiations to buy the hotel proved unsuccessful, in early 1938 he bought passage on a steamer
sailing from La Havre for himself and one small dog. The dog, Fidèle (1937 – 1951), became Barnes’s
constant companion.
KER-FEAL
When Barnes purchased an eighteenth-century field stone farmhouse in 1940, he named it Ker-Feal,
Breton for “Fidèle’s House.” Ker-Feal is situated on almost 138 acres of mixed farmland and forest in
Chester County, Pennsylvania. Barnes hired the architectural firm of Kneedler, Mirick and Zantzinger
to make two additions flanking the main house, an expansion necessary to accommodate his growing
collection of American decorative art as well as to provide a “modern” kitchen and personal living space.
Barnes intended to create a “living museum of art and to develop a botanical garden,” which would
become part of the Foundation’s educational mission.(34) In 1942, the magazine House & Garden
devoted an issue to Ker-Feal, featuring articles written by Barnes and Violette de Mazia regarding the
educational importance of the collections at both the Foundation and Ker-Feal.(35)
PAMPHLETEERING
Albert C. Barnes Correspondence 1902-1951 ABC
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Barnes and his staff compiled a number of pamphlets in response to published articles and local events
involving the arts and education. In 1938, Barnes published a pamphlet stating the mission for the
“Friends of Art and Education,” an organization he launched in response to a published statement
comparing the Foundation’s painting Large Bathers (BF934) by Paul Cézanne and one of the same
title and artist acquired by the Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia) Museum of Art. The organization
published two more pamphlets, Cézanne Bathers at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and A Disgrace
to Philadelphia. In 1942, after the
Saturday Evening Post ran a less than flattering four-part series on
Barnes entitled “The Terrible Tempered Dr. Barnes,” Barnes countered with the pamphlet, How It
Happened, which he advertised and mailed to a national audience. Also in 1942, the board’s decision to
terminate English philosopher Bertrand Russell from the Foundation’s teaching staff resulted in a lawsuit
brought and won by Russell. To state his side of the case, Barnes published a pamphlet, Bertrand Russell
v. Democracy and Education. In 1945, Barnes wrote two pamphlets, Sabotage of Public Education
in Philadelphia and Whitewash: Board of Education Style, in response to a brochure published by the
Philadelphia Board of Education.
CHARITY
Publicly, Barnes’s belligerent temperament and vituperative language were as renowned as his art
collection but, for those who knew him personally, he was a caring man, kind-hearted and exceedingly
generous. While records in the Barnes Foundation Archives have uncovered the many anonymous
monetary contributions that Barnes made to major organizations over the years, his gifts during the Great
Depression of the 1930s were of a more specific nature. He gave generously to organizations such as
the Seeing Eye to provide training for guide dogs for the blind, to the Tindley Temple in Philadelphia
to provide food for the poor, and commissioned and donated a memorial sculpture of a firefighter to
the Narberth Fire Company. At the onset of the Second World War, Barnes offered to support twenty
European orphans for the duration and, later, donated crops grown at Ker-Feal to support the war effort.
When Barnes, along with many other Americans, became aware of the war’s devastation in Europe, he
sent monthly food parcels to his friends in Port-Manec’h, and food and books to Leo and Nina Stein in
Italy.
Barnes also continued to support young African American artists and musicians with scholarships to
study at the Foundation. At the suggestion of Charles S. Johnson, he admitted artists Gwendolyn Bennett
and Aaron Douglas (1898 – 1979) as scholarship students in 1928. Douglas continued to illustrate books
and paint murals before leaving to study and work in Paris. Barnes gave scholarships to singers James
Boxwill and Florence Owens to study at the Foundation, and also provided funding for violinist David
Auld to study at the Juilliard School, and for singer Lillian G. Hall to attend the Westminster Choir
College in New Jersey. In 1943, Barnes sent California musician Ablyne Lockhart into the Deep South to
become acquainted with “her roots.” Lockhart sent Barnes vivid descriptions of her trip which included
transcriptions of the spirituals she heard while visiting St. Helena Island in South Carolina.
Dr. Barnes’s support of African Americans extended beyond the cultural disciplines. As early as 1917,
Barnes helped his African American workers buy houses in Philadelphia. In the early 1930s, he provided
a fellowship for Philadelphia physician DeHaven Hinkson to study gynecology in Paris. He also paid for
the education of Louis and Gladys Dent, the children of Jeannette M. Dent, widow of an A.C. Barnes
Company employee, at the Manual Training and Industrial School for Youth in New Jersey, an example
of his abiding commitment to his employees and their families.