 Welcome to the 2018 Violet de Mesia lecture. I'm Bill Perthys, the director of adult education here at the Barnes Foundation. And I'd like to welcome you to this annual lecture. There are several purposes for this lecture. One is to shed light on parts of the history of this institution, this remarkable institution. And our lecture today will certainly fulfill that. The other is to honor a remarkable woman, Violet de Mesia, who dedicated her life to this institution and in many ways shaped the kind of educational institution that it is today. I will say that I consider myself very fortunate to follow in her footsteps and in the footsteps of other people that carry on her legacy. By a show of hands, how many of you studied with Violet de Mesia? That's wonderful. So her legacy lives on in you and in us. You should all know that this institution, as I'd like to say, despite our remarkable collection, is an educational institution. We are a place of learning. That is really at the core of our mission. And if you visit our website, you will see the roster of classes that will begin enrolling in the second week of July for the fall. I think it is perhaps the best collection of classes we've had the opportunity to offer. And they include a four-session class given by Brian, our speaker, in which if you're interested in learning more about this history, I encourage you to enroll in that. These kinds of introductions tend to be a monotonous litany of awards and publications. And while I could do that for Brian, I instead want to say something that I think is a little more meaningful. And that is that Brian comes to us from the community, our neighbor, the community college of Philadelphia. And Brian has for the last several years brought community college students here to the foundation to learn. The vast majority of these students are the first in their family to go to college. And the experiences they have here, being exposed to the collection and the ideas that are part of our history, I think make a remarkable impact on them, a lasting impact on them. And these are the kind of students that perhaps initially don't see themselves as college students. And the community college and community college in general give them an opportunity to explore that possibility. And if they work hard, Brian and I were talking about this just a moment ago, if they work hard, they can begin to build a pathway of education that can really dramatically change their lives. And community college has sent students to some of the top four-year colleges in the area and in the nation, including a recent student who is a Rhodes scholar that went from community college to Temple University. So it's really a pathway of opportunity. I'm very pleased to be able to introduce my friend and colleague, Dr. Brian Seymour. And he'll talk today about our founder, the early years of our founder, Albert Barnes, and the importance that this city played in shaping him as a man, a collector, and an educator. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Brian Seymour. Thank you all so much. I would like to sincerely thank the Violet de Mesia Foundation and the Barnes Foundation for having me today. And the opportunity to share my research. And I want to thank all of you for sharing at least part of your Saturday with all of us. Today, I will cast the history of Dr. Barnes, a collector, as a type of Philadelphia story. To explore how this young man who graduated from Central High made his humble beginnings a part of his story. How he went on to unimaginable success but simultaneously shaped a new public for the appreciation of modern art. While my framing will address issues related to the history of the foundation in the later 20th century, my focus, as Bill mentioned, will be squarely on Barnes experience prior to the establishment of the foundation. I'm interested in exploring how his early education and development prepared him for work as an arts educator. In particular, his concern with educating working men and women. It's my contention that Barnes was already public-minded before meeting John Dewey in 1917. I will demonstrate how his early experiences in Philadelphia prepared to make the most of the collaboration with Dewey and establish this remarkable foundation. Consider if you will how the educational space that Dr. Barnes established with the able assistance of a modest cohort of faithful followers in the 20s, the 30s, and the 40s, including an arguably most prominently, Violetta Demesia, has now come back into focus. Through the sundry efforts of the able many that have been assembled and reassembled since the opening of the Barnes Foundation in 2002 at this current location, it is undoubtedly reengaged with the broader public sphere. And in using this term, I'm not merely referring to a matter of access or the opening of the ever-growing collection to a larger museum going public through expanded outreach and education, although these things are important topics of value and significance. But I mean to call attention to the ongoing process of unpacking and explaining the discourse at the core of the collection's mission, which was nearly forgotten beyond the walls of the foundation itself for the better half of the 20th century. Stated differently, currently, this institution is actively and admirably balancing the goals of teaching and celebrating Barnes original methods while steering what is by any other name a state of the art 21st century museum toward a successful future. This is tricky work indeed. And it's worth reflecting on the particular history that contributed to the present reality. I'll leave to others to recount the details of the controversy over public access fought out in the courts and the spectacular contests surrounding the relocation to Center City in order to shine some light on the roots of Barnes thinking about art and the public and why this matters. In the first two decades of the 20th century, Barnes innovated a series of discursive practices or methods of discourse that set him apart from other collectors of his time. In a general sense, discourse can refer to the exchange of ideas and social practice within a given field. And I contend that a collector actively sets parameters as a means of assembling specific works of art, exhibiting the collection in deliberate ways, designing an educational framework, and securing matters of legacy through some formal establishment like this very foundation itself. To put that in jargon-free terms, from the beginning, Barnes offered the public a new way to view and to understand works of art that challenged the status quo, namely, the art viewing experience at other institutions like Fildorf Museum of Art. Stated briefly in his own words, what we are trying to do at the foundation has never been attempted before, that it is to link an objective study of pictures to the powers possessed by every normal human being and to do it with the aid of respectable educational methods we prefer that they be poor and they have to be earnest. This quote highlights some of the key premises of Barnes' approach, the primacy of the art object and the need to experience the work firsthand, the related suspicion of prior learning, and the rejection of existing academic approaches. Other quotes often mentioned support these ideas flavored with Barnes' caustic edge. The so-called standard, I'm sorry, the standard so-called authoritative works are written by antiquarians, experts, bad painters, professional writers, or plain dunces. He actively advocated for the need to cultivate a new type of art viewer, one serious enough to put in the time to go beyond preformed opinion. His ideal target audience would be uncorrupted by prior knowledge. Often Barnes was want to cast this challenge in terms of class, using those he perceived as elites, as a punching bag, while praising those who did honest work for a living. The public, especially idle Philadelphia society eager only for amusement, could whistle in the rain for admittance. Naturally, the foundation itself, which opened in 1925, was the laboratory for his educational experiment. And for more than two decades, Dr. Barnes was a very public advocate for his own method. Following his tragic death in 1951, the educational project continued. Violetta Demesia and team brilliantly worked the gears of the machine that kept running on schedule every Tuesday. For the better part of 40 years, students studied in the galleries. They considered the writings of Dr. Barnes in related texts. And the collection came alive for those lucky few who had access. Despite the positive educational experience of decades of satisfied students, the foundation coasted in a closed loop, serving a narrow public out of sync with the art world beyond its walls. This prolonged interlude was a direct result of the well-orchestrated extension of Dr. Barnes' agency through the bylaws mapped out in the indenture of trust. Followers were true to their charge. They were earnest, hardworking, and delineated, I'm sorry, dedicated to the educational mission, even developing further Demesia publishing up until the year before her retirement in 1987. However, over time, and not surprisingly, their work grew out of step with new publics, or if you prefer, groups of individuals with a shared interest or goals around a specific topic. These publics or groups were activated by historical circumstance in the second half of the 20th century. They established networks of their own, contributed to the ever-expanding discourse in a global art world. Artists, academics, critics, museum educators, art dealers, students, museum members, tourists, trustees, and donors, among others. They came armed with fresh demands on the opaque Barnes Foundation. They were not wrong to expect that an arts institution at the end of the 20th century provide broad and equitable public access, engage in educational outreach, pursue active research and publication, solicit and expand membership, and, of course, train their guests to exit through the gift shop. Theorist Bruno Latour informs us that social relations are in process and must be performed continuously. Over the course of the second half of the 20th century, with the Barnes Collection tucked away in suburban Philadelphia, newly formed but now well-entrenched publics came to view the Barnes as something wonderful and precious, if not curious and a bit odd. Regionally or otherwise, the Barnes Foundation had built few alliances and, thus, their moment of crisis had few champions. In this light, the Barnes Foundation joined a broader cultural conversation in the 1990s after Demesia's death as a genuine outsider. I do not offer this retelling as some kind of tragic implotment, but it must kind of view the history through the lens of the public sphere in an attempt to better understand this moment in time, this dynamic and hopeful pivot for the Barnes Foundation. To move beyond the challenges of the recent past, it's useful to merely acknowledge the inevitability of an awkward and difficult reentry into the art world for an institution that had mostly withdrawn into itself. In fact, it's entirely reasonable that an educational foundation in the absence of external academic pressure, accreditation, institutional partners, and the like, or the demands of a board of director focused on things like making money, increasing membership, you know. The Barnes settled, and it's rightfully so. So for today's talk, we look to the gap kind of between Barnes' theorized way of thinking about the public sphere. Not as a means to criticize or judge, but to recover some of that early inspiration, which in many ways is particular to the city of Philadelphia. Albert Combs Barnes was born in Philadelphia in 1872, then the second largest city in the country. They would continue to fall behind other cities in Barnes' lifetime, slipping behind Chicago in the 1890s and then behind LA mid-century and by the time of Demesia's death behind Houston. Houston. Fishtown, this is where he was born. Ironically, one of the hottest real estate markets in the nation, there at Wilt near Memphis Street and a small home. After moving several times around that neighborhood, the family on hard times retreated to an even less prosperous neighborhood in South Philadelphia, colorfully known as the Neck, which today is the site near the sports stadiums. And each and every historic photo that I could find in the archives looks like a movie set of a down and out immigrant neighborhood, right? Everything kind of looks like this. Children expecting the photographer to do something for them rather than take their photo. When Barnes lived there in the 19th century, this area had been described by one writer as this way. A low-lying, highly-polluted swamp that hugged the east bank of the school, but between Oregon Avenue and curved like a goose's neck all the way around to and draining, if it ever would drain, into the Delaware River at the city's southeastern edge. Barnes attended William Welsh Elementary School at 13th and Jackson and grew up solidly working class. His father was a butcher, but he was much more strongly guided by his mother, who was active in the Methodist Church. I have no intention of psychoanalyzing the good doctor by locating his stubbornness and competitive nature as a means to overcome a difficult and impoverished childhood or the disappointment in the relationship with his father, but he did cite that as a topic of his humble beginnings when describing his own success. It was often a go-to position for himself. As we shall consider here, there is evidence that this past made him sympathetic toward working men and women when he was eventually in a position to help. Barnes' mother drove her son to achieve academically. In 1885, he was only one of two boys from his elementary school to pass the entrance exam for the prestigious Central High School. And I have a photo here as one of the earliest taken in the United States of the first central building. You can just see the tower in the main building. Central High was built in 1838 with money granted from a surplus in the United States Treasury. Remember surpluses. It was founded to offer quality education to working-class boys and the first institution of its kind outside of New England. The trend towards public education had been on the Ascendant, evident in Philadelphia with the establishment of Gerard College in 1831. By 1834, a school tax was initiated so that all children over four were required to attend school. Alexander Dallas Bache, the great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was named president of Central High, and by mid-century it became known as the People's College and had the right to confer bachelor's degrees of which Barnes received one. The original building was at Juniper and Market, and then it moved in 1854 to Broad and Green. This was the location that Barnes attended. And it moved to its present location at only in 1939. In his third or junior year, Barnes' family moved up Broad Street to 1331 Tasker, a few blocks from the now trendy Pashyunk restaurant row. This would put him within two and a half miles of the school or a vigorous 45-minute daily walk each way in the snow, another story. At Central, there's little doubt that Barnes came to believe that through focus and discipline, he could better his circumstances in life. Central groomed a certain type of young man by creating an ethos at the school that was meant to drive competition and instill students with a sense of striving. Central's meritocratic structure relied on elaborate grading of its students every day for both achievement and behavior, a system that generated a precise ordering of students based on excellence rather than social position. This regimen where hard work could be observed by all was tailor-made for serious young men like Barnes. He would go on to be vice president of his graduating class and was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1889, so right from Central with a bachelor's degree in dependent. Surely the model set for him by successful alumni and faculty of Central who had gone on to great things helped to spur him on. As one example, consider the impact on Barnes of the aspiring scientists Edwin Houston, Elihu Thompson, and Edwin W. Rice. Houston had graduated from Central in 1864 in return to teach physics. While there, he teamed up with former students, Thompson and Rice, to design an arc light generator, whatever that is. They would leave Philadelphia and go on to create the Thompson Houston Electric Company in 1879 and then merge their company with Edison Electric to form General Electric in 1892. Without a doubt, the most remarkable phenomena surrounding the alumni at Central High for Barnes concerns the matter of art. Over the course of 50 years, the school spawned an extraordinary number of men who would go on to become influential art collectors and artists, most notably Peter A. B. Weidner, John G. Johnson, Charles T. Yerkes, William Lukens Elkins, and painters Thomas Akins, John Sloan, and William Glackens. And trust me when I say this is just a cut, right? So there's many, many more who would be famous in certain circles in Philadelphia. A survey of alumni records from comparable institutions during the same time period, roughly 1850 to 1920, across the Northeast yields no similar statistical distribution. The most likely explanation must surround the importance of drawing in the curriculum. Some type of drawing was included in every semester, first and second year students practiced writing and drawing, third and fourth years, learned perspective, mechanical drawing, and ornamental writing. This program sourced back to the appointment of Rembrandt Peale as Professor of Drawing and Writing in 1840. He only stayed at the school for four years, but his textbook remained in use all the way through the time of Barnes. It was a trend in 19th century education in Europe to teach basic drawing as a required skill, a key to understanding how the world worked. This was even applied, I'm sorry, this was evident in applied approaches to art, such as at South Kensington in 1857, what would later become the Victorian Albert Museum. Also, many modern French artists took required drawing courses as part of a curriculum called the Ferry Plan, this has been written about by others. While the study of drawing at Central was pragmatic, aimed at providing young men with tools to help to be productive in industry and professional life, it arguably offered something more. Peale, along with Beish, believed that careful instruction in both drawing and writing had both a moral influence on young minds and offered advantages in almost every aspect of life. This type of thinking figured prominently in the teachings of influential English artist and writer John Ruskin, who like Peale, saw moral value in the study and creation of art. For Barnes, although he did not excel at creating fine art, this curriculum afforded him the distinct opportunity to share in this broader educational trend and undoubtedly imprinted on him the fundamental importance of art and life beyond drawing. His time at Central impacted his life in three significant ways. First, he tapped the network of fellow alumni, most notably, John G. Johnson and William Glackens, that stayed with him throughout his life. Secondly, he gained a competitive drive to excel and lastly, he cultivated a sense of gratitude. The latter ultimately inspired him to facilitate the opportunities for others to thrive, mainly by including working men and women of Philadelphia in his designs. In terms of gratitude, he carried forward the idea that if offered a chance, as he was, anyone might succeed. Barnes' sympathies for working people are evident in his early educational experiment at his factory and then explicitly outlined in the mission of his foundation to educate those who were largely denied access to any formal cultural education, especially African-Americans. He later wrote in the New Republic, what we believe our experiment indicates is that great things of creation in art, literature, and thinking can be resolved to fundamental of human nature and in simple form to be so presented that they may be grasped by plain, even illiterate people to the point of the particular person's capacity. In addition to his background at Central, his motivation to enrich the cultural lives of common people can be understood as part of a broader movement in the second half of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. This moral movement was designed to educate the poor. He was largely an autodidact when it came to matters of culture and he was active in pursuing his own educational opportunities, so reading constantly left behind a large library. Barnes held books by Ruskin in his library. Ruskin famously had taught at the Working Men's College in London from 1854 to 1860, which aimed to offer students something more than the mere practical approach to drawing taught in places like mechanic institutes which tailored their education to craftsmen. These were also popular in America. Ruskin saw a more fundamental value of art to a good life and he reportedly advises students not to learn in the hope of being anything but working men, but to learn what may be either advantageous for them in their work or make them happy after their work. This resonates with Barnes' interest in the study of art as a means to enhance one's life, not as a path to social betterment. Later, under the influence of American philosopher John Dewey, Barnes would be interested in how paintings and knowledge of art might connect in some way to daily activities of art and life. There were multiple adult education projects across America offering enrichment by way of lectures and other form of entertainment such as Lyceums, the Chautauqua Movement, which flourished after the Civil War. In particular, Philadelphia, there were many initiatives specifically targeted to assist and educate the poor. This trend had been building over the course of the 19th century in the wake of the great social changes that accompanied the industrialization of America. Growing chasm between rich and poor, many wealthy Americans were morally compelled to help those less fortunate. Merchants John Wanamaker and John B. Stetson co-founded the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission in 1878, which still serves the homeless, offering meals and resources to better their current position by way of training and education. Russell Conwell, the founder of Temple University, offered night courses to working men and women as early as 1884. While Samuel Fleischer sponsored free art classes to children beginning in 1898, at which later became known as the Graphic Sketch Club and then eventually the Samuel S. Fleischer Art Memorial. In addition to education, there existed a culture of collecting in Philadelphia around the turn of the 20th century that brought art to the general public. For many, including Johnson, Weidner, Elkins, A.J. Drexel, Wanamaker. The exhibition of art at the 1876 exposition was a source of inspiration. In its wake, buyers would become active in the 1880s in the midst of an expanding art market and increasing numbers of galleries and art auctions. Barnes earned his medical degree at this time by 1892, and instead of practicing medicine, he decided to dedicate the next decade to research and went on to, of course, invent ardual with his partner Herman Hiller, which made him terribly rich. You like that? As a successful entrepreneurial scientist, Barnes was an unlikely prophet of art education. Yet he was a restless man, seldom satisfied with the status quo, and in the first decade of the 20th century in the midst of his early success with his invention, he began collecting art. I've claimed elsewhere that central alumni like John G. Johnson, whom he hired his attorney in 1907 in a dispute with his partner, mentored Barnes through this period of his earliest purchases. Johnson was a well-respected art collector by this time, admittedly. It is difficult to imagine a man such as Barnes, who is everywhere characterized as fiercely self-reliant as anyone's mentee or protégé. Yet there is a clear pattern in how he exercised his agency, and as a collector, this suggests that Johnson was more than a hired hand. He was more than a friend. A mental relationship connotes the informal sharing of a specified field of knowledge from a trusted expert, often from one generation to an eager member of another. This cultural induction model figured prominently and still does in Johnson and Barnes' respected professional fields of law and medicine. For our purposes, regarding art in the public, they had overlapping views. Their lives intersected in a small area of center city in remarkable ways over the course of a dozen years at the start of the 20th century. Johnson was the son of a blacksmith. His mother also active in the Methodist Church, who guided him through central high. As a lawyer, Johnson was a member of an emergent professional class still defining itself in relation to established tradition. He was part of a generation who improvised new status in old Philadelphia based on merit and achievement in a profession rather than on inherited wealth or social privilege beyond the very real advantage of being a white non-immigrant male in 19th century America. Like Barnes, he knew high and low. He was a modern man capable of moving between the established world of the Philadelphia Club and the body world of late night poker games. He was the most successful lawyer of his day and his hard-to-unfortunate freed him to pursue his interest in collecting. Perhaps even more influential on Barnes was that upon his death in 1917, Johnson's will bequeathed his paintings to the citizens of Philadelphia rather than to an established institution. His primary stipulation was that the works remain on display in his home on South Broad Street and open to the public. Barnes actively advocated for Johnson's case. He wrote letters, political forces in the city were too well aligned such that within 20 years the entire collection would be reinstalled in a separate wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art labeled the John G. Johnson Collection. In this way, Johnson's entire project of art was relegated to just the work of another collector among dozens that comprised the permanent collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And this lesson stuck with Barnes. He was extraordinary man who began much like everyone else in an ordinary way, taking cues from what others were doing. Barnes' advance into the art world of collecting could be considered a response to opportunities afforded by his newly found wealth. However, this explanation is complicated by the fact that Barnes was not your typical nouveau riche. He was outspokenly disinterested in the privileges of Philadelphia high society. And he spent most of his adult life battling those he considered to be social elites. Yet this poor kid from one of the roughest sections of Philadelphia took great pride in his accomplishments and was not immune to the lure of status. This is most evident in his attempt at fox hunting in the early 30s when he was first making serious money, calling to mind the image of George Kitterich in the Philadelphia story mounted on horseback trying to keep up with the main liners outside of Philadelphia. Not fair, I know, but fun. Barnes would have been familiar with the art world through Central's network, Johnson, Weidner, Glackens, and Sloan. Notice Sloan has no date because he never actually graduated from Central. Artists, you know, you could hear his parents saying, what are you going to do without a degree, right? Perhaps following the lead of more experienced collectors, such as Johnson and Weidner. By the way, he knew Weidner through his father. They were both in the field of Abattoir, so they both knew each other through there. He began with what was at hand and Hazeltine Galleries was there on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and that would have been familiar to him. It was founded in 1868 and it changed its dress up and down Chestnut over 50 years. As a schoolboy, when his parents moved to Tasker Street in Philadelphia, Barnes would have walked right past Hazeltine at 14th and Chestnut on his round trip up Broad Street. And in the first decade of the century, Hazeltine's burned down and reopened at 18th and Chestnut, and Barnes and Hiller at that time found their factory near 13th and Spruce, so just blocks away. Barnes began his educational experiment at the factory in the first decade of the 20th century and later expanded it to include display and analysis of paintings that he had collected after 1912. As Neil Rudenstein suggested, his early experiences studying and working in Germany first in 1894 and again in 1900 might have exposed him to European ideas about extending educational opportunities to ordinary workers. Moreover, Barnes Library included books by British writers not only Ruskin, but Roger Fry and George Moore, whose ideas would have been very useful regarding matters of art in the public. Interestingly, he was developing his educational theories over the exact 10 year period that he was in communication with Johnson. As the aging attorney was contemplating his own legacy, he was crystallizing his ideas regarding art in the public. So rather than the transfer of rote lessons from mentor to protégé, the two men were concurrently thinking through these related issues. Of course, Barnes was not yet focused on his own bequest as much as developing an educational method to explain the modern art that he had been collecting. He engaged with the ideas of Roger Frye seeing the potential of a formalist approach to art to upset academic hierarchies, offing away around hegemonic practices of elites and aristocrats and providing access to working people. It was with John Dewey that Barnes found a solution to the matter of deciding on an educational institution rather than a traditional single collector house museum. In 1923, Barnes wrote to Edith Dimmick, Glacken's wife, quote, the central idea in its large aspects was put into my head by John Dewey about five years ago when he learned of the work we had been doing here. Dewey was the key with which Barnes pulled together all of his thinking about art in the public. He had first used Dewey's how we think in his factory in 1911, the year after it was published. He later recalled that it brought me a means of clarifying and adapting what we had read to the needs of most of the employees. In other words, Dewey helped him to lay a foundation as a teacher, especially in reaching those with little formal education. As his interest shifted to the aesthetic world, he would connect Dewey's ideas about sharing experiences to assimilate the ideas of Frye and the insistence on the formal elements of the work as a means to get around the barriers of prior art historical knowledge and the analysis of subject matter. By way of Frye's writings, Barnes came to value experience of the object as central to appreciating art while Dewey provided the means to apply those lessons to matters of education. In the planning process for the Barnes Foundation itself, Barnes told Dewey that he imagined being open three days a week to the public and three days for art students from neighboring institutions like the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It's possible that Barnes retreated after his confrontation with critics and members of the art viewing public in the early 1920s. It's been well-narrated that Barnes lent 75 of his paintings to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the spring of 23 for an exhibition of contemporary European painting and sculpture. According to Robert Cosolino, allowing a public exhibition of his collection was in concert with his emerging democratic philosophy of experiential art education. Based on an article published in the New Republic a month before the exhibition opened, Barnes was clearly hopeful that Philadelphia could embrace his view of modern art and his new educational initiative. Things didn't work out that way. Critics harshly criticized paintings by artists like Soutine as grotesque and debased. In his vitriolic response to critics, Barnes embarked on a decades-long war with the press and the Philadelphia establishment. The entire experience reinforced his suspicions about the elitist nature of art viewing and the public in Philadelphia. And as he actively planned the curriculum, he recognized that he needed to shape a different sort of art public. We can read the notion of the desired public for his collection from later reflections in interviews and letters. Anybody serious can link up with us, but nobody is rich enough or prominent enough to get in with us on those qualities. In addition, he included similar language about access for working people in the indenture of trust that created this very foundation. Former curator Judith Dockart has suggested that Barnes identified with those subjects in his paintings that exhibited struggle as he had. This is evident in works like Acrobat and Young Harlequin by Picasso from the beginning of the Rose Period. Here we see fringe figures living unconventional lives. Likewise, it's true of the ascetic from earlier in the Blue Period. And naturally, there was the works of Pennsylvania artist Horace Pippin who worked outside of formal art establishments and Modigliani. Perhaps the issue of Barnes and the public can be clarified by juxtaposing his experience with that of American collector and sometimes rival Duncan Phillips who was heir to the Pittsburgh Steel Glass fortune amassed at the end of the previous century. He attended the best schools and was drawn to the study of art at a young age. He began collecting formally with his brother in 1916 and then not long after in 1918 was moved to dedicate an art gallery as a memorial to honor both his father and his brother who had died within the span of a year. It had become the first public collection of modern art in America when it opened in 1921. With access to ample funds, both men were entering an already expanding market for the work of living artists. Barnes and Phillips set out to create an institution that pushed against existing museum models. They raced to open the first single collection museum dedicated to the art of living artists. However, they took different approaches to matters of the public. If aesthetic disposition according to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a matter of cultural capital, it might be fair to say that Barnes rejects the importance of previous learning or understanding surrounding the arts and in the end might view it as an impediment to understanding. His entire approach to art education centered on helping others to develop judgment, Barnes preferred to train the viewer directly. Art historian Richard Wanamaka wrote, quote, Barnes saw his school as a laboratory for student experiments as participant observers in perception and judgment. Perhaps based on his own privileged educational experience at Yale, Phillips actually preferred training experts to guide the experience of the viewer. Despite his interest in education, he did not share Barnes' faith in the ability of ordinary visitors to learn to understand outside of traditional educational frameworks. Barnes and Phillips of course were quick out of the gate and the founding of institutions dedicated to collecting and displaying modern art. The Museum of Modern Art founded in New York in 1929 would dominate discourse around modern art by the time of both of their deaths. MoMA engaged in experiments of its own, trying out several exhibition styles, staging a series of influential shows of the course of the 1930s and 1940s that set in place a definitive narrative of modernism and effectively taught generations of Americans how to interact with modern art. In Philadelphia, Barnes was often at odds with the Philadelphia Museum of Art that it emerged as the locus of art exhibition in Philadelphia in the 1930s. The PMA was the culmination of decades of collecting by public spirited citizens, including John H. McFadden, William Lukens Elkins, George W. Elkins, his brother, and William P. and Anna H. Wilstack. Despite their common working class backgrounds, these patrons rose to what I will call the American noblesse oblige model of collecting, allawning with the example set by the very famous Wallace Collection in London, of which they mostly knew. Contemporary theories by critics, including James Jarvis, that collectors should donate paintings for the benefit of the public were often cited. However, most of these donors did not worry about how their art would be displayed or how the collection would remain intact. Following his mentor, Johnson, Barnes pushed against this dominant model in America, both were part of a narrower set to establish single collector museums, right? So you're thinking of those who did fuss over these things, like Isabelle Stewart Gardner and such. Henry Clay Frick stands as a prominent example of an individual who designed a collection during his lifetime, but closely conformed to the American noblesse oblige paradigm. As a point of contrast, Frick displayed no interest in art education or ultimately the needs of the public. Barnes and Johnson, in their own ways, actively presented alternative spaces outside the larger museum frame to display works of art with specific publics in mind, beyond merely accumulating cultural treasures to be displayed to an undetermined public. Barnes created new associations for objects. He pioneered an entirely all-new, all-encompassing format for viewers to experience. This involved creating wall ensembles to challenge viewers to see modern art not in an isolated manner, as an assemblage of new works, but within the context of a long history of creative arts. There's no other way to access the collection without actually viewing it, because he insisted that photos not be allowed. You can read that one yourself. Those seemingly mundane, discreet actions, Barnes marshaled his agency to provide a new forum for public formation. These actions accumulated into ongoing projects that, while not explicitly articulated or planned in the aggregate, resulted in valid forms of discourse. To borrow a term from Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach's article, The Universal Survey Museum, visitors to museums such as the PMA or the Met entered ritual spaces where their response to the work of art amounted to a well-rehearsed performance with which the museum bracketed the experience of the viewer. The art was presented as the most cherished objects of the culture, and in response, the viewer charged with a sense of awe and reverence cannot help but be preconditioned by the imposing neoclassical setting. Barnes offered an alternative. He invited the viewer to consider relations between the works of art without a clear guide as to how they were to respond. In its ideal form, this eschews a ritualized approach and engages the public in the shaping of new forms of knowledge. What was at stake was how art should be presented to the people of Philadelphia. How art could be used to ennoble the life of the common man. In the preface to the art and painting of 1925, the same year the foundation was opened, Barnes claimed that his method offered something not present in university and college classes. He drove this point home in a letter to Edward Singer of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pennsylvania, another central alum. The purpose of the foundation was to serve as a bridge between fellows like yourself, Dewey, St. Diana, Russell, et cetera, and the well-meaning, well-endowed human beings who have never taken you seriously. In this moment, the future of the Barnes Foundation is indeed promising. It has something to offer that no one else has. The educational mission of Dr. Barnes, the remarkable collection itself, and the opportunity to continue to shape connection between art and the public into the future. Thank you.