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Getting to know a kinder, gentler Albert C. Barnes

Collingswood gallery owner Kimberly Camp, who ran the foundation for seven years before it moved to Philly, discovered the man behind the myth.

Kimberly Camp kicks off a lecture series in her gallery January 30, 2017 titled "Albert C. Barnes and African Americans." Camp ran the Barnes Foundation before the collection was moved to Center City, is a Camden native who for several years now has run "Gallery Marie" (named for her mother)  in Collingswood, where the walls resemble those of the Barnes.
Kimberly Camp kicks off a lecture series in her gallery January 30, 2017 titled "Albert C. Barnes and African Americans." Camp ran the Barnes Foundation before the collection was moved to Center City, is a Camden native who for several years now has run "Gallery Marie" (named for her mother) in Collingswood, where the walls resemble those of the Barnes.Read moreTOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

Melodic, dramatic, and intimate, Kimberly Camp's voice is that of a born storyteller.

It's another title that the artist, craftswoman, museum professional – she ran the Barnes Foundation before it moved from Lower Merion, Pa., to Center City – and Collingswood gallery owner can readily claim.

And this winter, Camp's voice can be heard Monday nights inside Galerie Marie, her Haddon Avenue home, studio, and shop, where she's teaching a class called "Albert C. Barnes and African Americans."  She named the establishment for her mother and opened the doors in 2013.

"There's a mythology about Barnes, that he was nasty and cantankerous and spiteful," says Camp, 60, who was born and raised in Camden.

"Although one of the bad books about him says he 'gave' his collection to [historically black] Lincoln University to thumb his nose at society," she continues, "Barnes had every intention, and specifically said, that the collection should be accessible to working people and African Americans."

Camp is correct about perceptions of Barnes; over the years, much of what I'd heard and read led me to regard him as something of an autocratic, idiosyncratic crank with off-putting notions about how art must be presented and appreciated.

Notions that in my view accomplished little – beyond stubbornly keeping the treasures he amassed out of easy reach for long after his death.

But as someone who visited the Barnes Foundation when it was in the 'burbs, and more often since it opened on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012, I've had my soul stirred by the astonishing collection of world-class art he assembled.

Camp was director of the foundation from 1998 until 2005, and is variously credited (or criticized) for laying the groundwork for the art collection's controversial move to Center City.

She insists there's no contradiction between her role in that process and what was interpreted by some as Barnes' ironclad desire that the collection permanently remain in Montgomery County. "The foundation's charter specifically said that if the foundation couldn't make it in Lower Merion, it should go to a Philadelphia institution," she says.

The evening of her first lecture at Galerie Marie was a bit short on dish; Camp said the memoir she's been working on for several years about the long artistic, financial, political, and legal struggle over the Barnes' future won't be a "tell-all."

But she did offer insights into the man who parlayed the fortune he made from a pharmaceutical invention into an art collection for the ages.

"When I first got there, I didn't like him," she recalled. "I thought, 'This guy was horrible.' But I began to see this whole other side."

She explained that Barnes envisioned the foundation as a school for teaching students how to see the aesthetic connections between "primitive" art created in Africa and the work of adventurous European and American artists.

Camp's own education about Barnes began there as well – when she started reading his own words on paper.

"I went upstairs into the attic one day and walked over to a stack of papers, literally a stack," she said, with a hushed touch of theatrical wonder in her voice.  "I picked up an original letter from Charles Johnson, of the Urban League, writing about 'four fine Negroes [seeking] your tutelage.' A letter, just lying there."

In addition to perusing selections from nearly a half-century of correspondence and other documents Barnes left behind after he died in a car crash in 1951, Camp also got to know a good number of people who knew him.

"He was the kindest, most generous of men," she said. Barnes grew up poor (his father was a Civil War amputee) and wrote that he had become "addicted to Negroes" as a child after hearing spirituals sung at a camp meeting.

His friendship with pioneering American education reformer John Dewey influenced his "plan for Negro education," which also was central to the foundation's identity and its mission, Camp told the audience.

The truth about Barnes is more relevant than ever given today's political climate, where matters of race and artistic expression can spark highly charged conversations, she said, adding, "we may never know what inspired him to be such a vocal advocate for ending segregation and discrimination."

Nor are there easy answers, Camp added, to "why it's such a challenge to have a place in the world where you can look at great art through an African lens."