Weather cooperates as ‘Barnes Totem’ is installed

Shortly before 8 on Tuesday, with the long morning sunlight coming in low over the city, Ellsworth Kelly's The Barnes Totem finally settled into its permanent home outside the new gallery of the Barnes Foundation on the Parkway.

The slanting sunlight caught the bead-blasted steel surface of the 40-foot sculpture, brightening its matted gray and propelling geometric shadows onto the limestone panels of the new Barnes building nearby.

Gusty wind Monday had delayed the installation a day - no one, and certainly not the 88-year-old artist, wanted an eight-ton artwork swirling uncontrollably high above 20th and Callowhill Streets.

Tuesday was breezy, but calmer, and the crane-hoisted artwork smoothly settled into place.

At midmorning, with dozens of the city's cultural community and moneyed elite looking on, Kelly mounted a small stage in front of his newest work and told his listeners that the totem, sitting at the head of a long reflecting pool lined with red maples, was in an ideal spot.

"It was obvious to me that it should be presented this way, against the sun," he said. "It's reflecting the sun."

And in that reflection, the totem is "affirmative" and full of warmth.

"I want you to look at it and feel what you feel about it," he said. "I've done a lot of totems and this is the last one and it's my favorite now."

The Neubauer Family Foundation acquired the piece for the Barnes. Jeanette Neubauer told listeners that the acquisition came during a visit she made with her husband, Joseph Neubauer, head of Aramark Corp. and vice chairman of the Barnes Foundation, to Kelly's Upstate New York studio more than a year ago.

Kelly, she said, was in the midst of preparing for a major show in Europe and was finishing a suite of paintings.

"His studio was a beehive of activity," she said.

But in the midst of this hubbub, she saw her husband quietly scrutinizing black tape laid out on the floor.

"What's that?" she heard him ask Kelly. The artist then brought out a small model of what became The Barnes Totem.

Jeanette Neubauer looked at her husband and "saw that gleam in his eye."

That was the moment that climaxed in the installation of the piece Tuesday, she said.

Joseph Neubauer said his association with Kelly on the project gave him a true appreciation of the intellectual and aesthetic decisions that go into the making of a work of art.

How should the piece be set? Where should its stepped element be located? What direction should it go? The decisions, he said, were countless and critical.

Neubauer said the placement of the Kelly work outside the Barnes Foundation gallery - soon to open with Albert Barnes' early modernist collection relocated from suburban Montgomery County - is a continuation of Barnes' rigorous aesthetic vision.

"Dr. Barnes wanted to create art for everybody," said Neubauer. "This was the inspiration for Jeanette and I in commissioning this piece and bringing it here.

"The installation," he continued, "is for us a dream come true."