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Karen Heller: Debate will go on long after the art moves

The Barnes collection transfer begins next Sunday. Arguing about it may never end.

The Barnes Foundation in leafy Merion closes next Sunday to prepare for transporting its priceless art collection to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a move of only a few miles, yet so many years, lawsuits, and millions of dollars in the making.

On Thursday, I went to visit the paintings and metal bric-a-brac in the Paul Cret building a final time. The place was surprisingly uncrowded, once you got past the main gallery, where people tend to linger in slack-jawed wonder.

Overwhelming is the word docents and guards hear more than any other. The Barnes is a buffet of dessert, particularly the fleshy, rosy-cheeked (both top and bottom sets) Renoirs, 181 of them, the largest collection anywhere, Paris be damned.

In several galleries, I sat utterly alone, enjoying Barnes' magnificent obsession, a glorious Seurat, a quiet Picasso, and arguably the ugliest woman Van Gogh ever painted. I recalled past Barnes visits with relatives and friends, listening to impromptu art lectures by the informed and ignorant erupting at any moment, eavesdropping being a delightful pastime in such intimate rooms. "There is such a thing," I recall one woman declaring like an edict, "as too much Renoir."

I love the utter oddness of the entire place, how you must check your handbag in a locker and take notes only in pencil, the experience of one man's insistent vision, the sheer nerve of putting 24 paintings on one wall, many masterworks in a room no larger than most kitchens.

Much of the Barnes will be replicated in the $200 million building scheduled to open in May, as much as you can replicate anything. Every object will move, even the wax tapers in unexceptional candlesticks, the sort you might have been given by a stolid aunt.

The size of the galleries, the way the paintings and objects are arranged, will remain the same, open to the same intense speculation of what one man could possibly have been thinking. Instead of reading tea leaves, at the Barnes you read door hinges.

The light will improve on the Parkway. How could it not? The first-floor galleries on Latchs Lane are so dim, so sepulchral, they're like eternal twilight. You can't help but squint, so you end up missing the vibrancy rendered in paint, Cezanne's bracing fields of green, Gauguin's blaze of yellow, Matisse's emphatic pink.

So much of Albert Barnes' vision is frozen in amber, like an artistic game of freeze tag, and then, again, so much is not. Barnes' legal will was a slow-fuse explosive that ultimately backfired, mishandled by several stewards, then manipulated by powerful and wealthy interests wanting to move and open the foundation to a greater audience.

Any man who thinks he can control his legacy is a fool, but consider this: The foundation and its creator have never been more discussed or celebrated. The Barnes truly lives, if eventually in two locations.

Barnes was, by all accounts, a most difficult and disagreeable man. Fittingly, his legacy proved as fractious as his character.

The protracted legal challenges and newspaper coverage felled forests. The fight became its own theater, an artifact of culture all its own, the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the art world. The Barnes' move became the basis of the much-debated 2009 subjective documentary The Art of the Steal. The fight continues with more lawsuits, "extra innings" as one Merion supporter put it, as though litigation were pure sport.

But how great is it that, in the early years of the 21st century, we're seriously debating art?

The drama emanating from such a serene and private place encompasses many of the issues that obsessed the capricious, headstrong Barnes during his lifetime - notions of class and power, inclusion, and for whom art is truly intended.

Barnes, who viewed himself as a champion of the common man, showed his art to almost no one in the expensive enclave of Merion, where residents later battled for years to keep outsiders to a minimum.

The Barnes is a hard place to find; barely a sign exists. You have to know where you're going, as with a private club. On the Parkway, there'll be no question of location. Everyone will be able to find it. Annual attendance is projected to quadruple. Almost $48 million of the building's funding came from the commonwealth under Ed Rendell, so, yes, the Barnes is your foundation, too.

In a week, the doors close at Latchs Lane, and the challenging job of transferring the extraordinary art to the city begins. The Barnes in Merion will continue as an arboretum and place of study. The debates, you can bet, will go on and on.