Art | A modest proposal for new Barnes

On Tuesday the battle of the Barnes moved back to court, probably for the last time. The Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a citizens group, filed a lawsuit in Montgomery County Court seeking to halt the foundation's planned move from Merion to Philadelphia.

The suit represents a last-ditch, long-shot attempt to force the Barnes trustees to do the right thing and preserve the Merion school and gallery in the most literal sense of the term.

Although the Friends hold the moral and aesthetic high ground, their suit isn't likely to succeed because the trustees have been exceptionally single-minded about leaving Merion. Besides legal sanction, they have considerable political and financial backing to push on to the Parkway.

So the suit isn't likely to affect an impending major development in the contentious plan, the appointment - possibly this week - of an architect to design the foundation's new home. The architect will be selected from among six semifinalists announced in April.

It really doesn't matter who the trustees choose because even another Guggenheim Bilbao couldn't overshadow the Barnes collection. It's unique, but in a way that demands of its audience some basic art knowledge and repeated exposure; otherwise it can seem simply odd. It's not a grab-and-go kind of experience.

It's entirely possible that the unorthodox gallery installations in Merion, which the trustees intend to replicate on the Parkway, won't be effective in a mass-tourism environment. A Las Vegas-style simulacrum might not attract the big audience numbers the trustees are seeking. (The French and the Japanese will still come, of course.)

So if the lawsuit fails and the Barnes is fated to move, let's consider a more radical approach. Let's not hobble the architect at the post by asking him to design a chocolate box - fancy outside, deja vu inside.

If Albert Barnes' magnificent achievement is going to be compromised, attenuated and exploited, the trustees should at least do it with imagination and flair, qualities they so far have not exhibited. Ironically, Barnes' passion and genius as a collector make this easy.

He built his collection on three foundation stones - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, masters of, respectively, impressionism, post-impressionism and modernism. Barnes II could be similarly organized around concentrations of work by each.

On entering, visitors would be greeted by a condensed version of the international traveling exhibition of 1993-95 - the paintings that attracted nearly four million people around the world, from Paris to Tokyo. This highlights gallery would offer a quick, easily digested introduction to this astonishing collection.

That might be enough for some museum-goers, especially if their buses are double-parked. Otherwise, visitors would proceed into discrete suites of galleries devoted individually to Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse. Each would constitute a small museum by itself that would include, peripherally, paintings by other artists associated with the same movement.

Renoir would be enhanced by Manet, Monet and Sisley; Cezanne by van Gogh, Rousseau and Seurat; and Matisse by Picasso, Soutine and Braque.

In other sections of the building, the architect could provide galleries for the foundation's principal specialty collections. African sculpture, for instance, could reside adjacent to modernism, on which it was a major influence.

New Mexican retablos, pueblo pottery, and Navajo jewelry could constitute a synergistic grouping within a large area devoted to American art. Besides paintings, this area also could house Pennsylvania German chests and the Colonial redware pottery now housed at the Barnes' Ker-Feal property in Chester County.

Finally, the architect could include a replica section that would duplicate not the entire Merion gallery but enough of it to give visitors the flavor of Barnes I. Without the context of the Barnes aboretum, they couldn't get much more than that anyway. The art classes, should they continue to exist in some form, would use this section as a remembrance of things past.

What a fabulous museum this would be, as unique in its own way as Barnes I, albeit not nearly as historically resonant or as aesthetically challenging. Though radically iconoclastic, such a reconfiguration would be almost as true as the original to the founder's core principles, seen from an entirely fresh perspective.

Don't tell me this can't be done. Albert Barnes specified in his indenture that after he and his wife died no works of art were to be moved. But certainly that stricture already has been shattered. For all practical purposes, the indenture's meticulously crafted restrictions have been sliced, diced and macerated in spirit if not in law. So why shouldn't the trustees rearrange the pictures, sculptures and decorative objects in a way that supports the argument that the court accepted in permitting the relocation?

I'd rather none of this transpired, because not only is the Barnes being hijacked under dubious assumptions, it's a national treasure that should be preserved in the most literal sense of the word, as if it were a historic monument or a stand of first-growth virgin forest. Barnes I still works.

Appointing an architect doesn't mean that the game is over. The proposed Alexander Calder museum on the parkway got as far as an architect - Tadao Ando, one of six on the Barnes short list - and he even had a design, but that wasn't enough to prevent the project from collapsing.

Yet there's so much big money and philanthropic muscle behind Barnes II that collapse seems improbable, even if delay has proved to be inevitable.

The last, best hope for aesthetes, preservationists and art purists is a deus ex machina - for example, if some exceptionally enlightened philanthropist or foundation should offer to trump the $150 million subsidy from three local foundations that is making the move possible, but only if the Barnes stays put.

At the moment, City Council majority leader Jannie L. Blackwell functions as an inadvertent Heroine of Art by refusing to sign off on the relocation of the Youth Study Center. Until the center can be moved and its building on the parkway demolished, Barnes II can't rise in its place.

This stalemate isn't going to last forever. I expect that Blackwell sooner or later will negotiate satisfaction and the center will disappear in a cloud of rubble. Then we'll either get our chocolate box or, if the Earth shifts and the planets realign, something more imaginative, useful and - let's not forget the prime directive - profitable.

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