 Good afternoon. Welcome to our reading by Dario Gamboni and David Kim. My name is Martha Luthi, Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education. So either welcome or welcome back. Many of you were here this morning. Hello to everybody online. I will apologize in advance for reading the same sort of bio that I gave for Professor Gamboni this morning. But there are important things that you need to know. Dario Gamboni is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Geneva and an honorary fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. In addition to his influential writings on symbolist art, iconoclasm, visual ambiguity, he's published extensively about the history of museums. His books have been translated into many languages and they include the destruction of art, potential images, the brush and the pen, and most recently, the Museum as Experience, which was published in 2019. And this book is the first general study of museums that were created by artists and or collectors. And it focuses on those museums that maintain their or that preserve their original installation. There are 15 case studies in the book of different museums, including the Barnes as you may have guessed. And he will be reading today from that chapter. But as you can see, there are two people up here. And that is because this book is written as a correspondence. And I have to confess that I haven't I haven't read it yet, but I can't wait to get my hands on it because I know that it's going to be packed full of important history and research and ideas, but also the just the style of it is going to be a lot of fun. So it's written as a correspondence and and and playing the role of the of the sort of pen pal is David Kim, who is associate professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. And he he's he's a great friend of the Barnes. He teaches Southern Renaissance art and he focuses on transcultural exchange and material culture. His book, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance was published in 2014. And his current research focuses on groundwork in Renaissance painting, as well as 20th century translations of Vasari's lives. David is teaching a course for us here at the Barnes in October on on Latin American art. So sign up sign up for that. You don't want to miss that. They did Dario and and David have have a long relationship. I learned today that David was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich, where Dario was was was a professor and he was a postdoc for a different professor, but was sort of, you know, just sort of drawn to Dario's work and personality. And you'll see why you'll see why these two became such good friends. I also want to mention that Dario has been here at the Barnes for about a week doing research in the archives, more work on Dr. Barnes and his ideas about display, and we can't wait to see what he comes up with. And we are definitely going to be having him back. One last thing. I apologize that the book is not yet available in our shop. It really should be. I know you can order it online or come back. I think Dario will tell you give you more information about how to get it. But yeah, that's that's a mistake. I have a library order. Yeah. Have the library order. We will. Anyway, okay. Enjoy. Well, thank you very much, Martha. I wish first to thank Martha Lucy, Alia Palombo for the organization, Wes Barnes for the technique. And of course, the Barnes Foundation as a whole for welcoming me. And David came for sharing the stage with me. Um, for reasons that we might discuss afterwards. Indeed, this book is written in a epistolary form. It consists in 150 emails exchanged over a period of one year by two cousins, Libero, an architect, and Dario, myself an art historian. It starts with the death of Libero's father, who leaves three houses full of objects to his family. And since Libero is expected to come up with a solution by his siblings and is perplexed, he asks Dario for advice. And Dario suggests that he visits places where such collections and their display have been preserved. Libero follows his advice to the other end of the world, I have to say. And he eventually reaches a conclusion regarding the family patrimony, but I won't say which one. The order of his visits are based upon geography, the relationship between the museums, and his own professional schedule. But in fact, the sequence corresponds to the chronology of the creation of the museums in question. So that his voyage through space is also a voyage through time and proposes a history of museums of this kind. The correspondence is edited and annotated by Dario, whose job it is. There is an index, and therefore the book is a sort of handbook disguised as a novel. It starts close at home in the southern part of Switzerland in Ticino, and more precisely at the Museo Vincenzo Vella in Ligoreto. From there, Libero moves to Possagno in Italy to visit the Gypsotheca and Museo of Antonio Canova. Then in London, he visits Sir John Sohn's Museum, the Zamlong Shack in Munich, the Shack Collection, not that well known, the Musee Nationale Gustave Moreau in Paris, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. In fact, Dario has visited in Merriam, but Libero visits in Philadelphia, just opened at the time. Back in Paris for the Museumissime de Camando, Mexico City, the Museo Diego, the Musee Anuakali created by Diego Rivera, then two museums created by the same artist and that Isamu Noguchi, one in New York, in Long Island City, the other in Moreau on the Island of Shikoku in Japan. Dario visits and tells him about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Then Libero visits the Chinati Foundation and the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, the Casa Museo Mario Pratz in Rome, in fact, that's Dario, and in Tasmania, that's the other end of the world, the Museum of Old and New Art, Mona in Hobart. And finally, the end of his voyage is in Istanbul, where he visits the Museum of Innocence created by the Turkish novelist, Ohan Pamuk. Right, so now we can start. We go back, we come back to Philadelphia, and this is the 24th of May, 2012, Carro Libero. I have vivid memories of my first visit to the Band Foundation. I don't know why I hadn't been there before, but I made the trip in January 2009, Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of John House, who was working on the catalog of Renoir-Pamuk. Right, so now we can start. I have John House, who was working on the catalog of Renoir pictures in the Band's collection. I made an appointment with Martha Lucy, the co-author of the Renoir catalog. I took the Amtrak train to Philadelphia and got out at the enormous station on 30th Street to catch a SEPTA regional train to the suburb of Marion, west of downtown Philly. I've just had a look at the photos I took during this trip, and there is one that shows the Philadelphia Museum of Art bizarrely framed by... Oops, oh, sorry. Ah, yes. Right. Bizarrely framed by railways. A Greek temple that has wandered into an industrial landscape. By contrast, the station at Marion is positively viewcolic, like the road that I then walked down, which was flanked by... Every now and then by Gable, made houses in Parkland. On the right, a plaque on a gate told me that I had arrived, and I entered a tree-filled domain where stood three classicizing buildings built in warm-colored dressed stone, roofed in rather Mediterranean-looking red tile. The function of the main building was indicated, if at all, by some unexpected ornaments. Cubist low reliefs in the upper part of the facade, and African motifs in polychrome ceramics at the entrance. I received a very gracious welcome and was even permitted to take photographs of the interior. That afternoon, I also went to visit Caerphiel, Banze's country house, some 40 kilometers further west, with Judith Tolka, the curator of the collection. The only thing I didn't have time to see, unfortunately, was the arboretum behind the gallery at Marion. The discovery of the collection is quite a shock, as you will see. The density, variety, and quality are extraordinary. What I found most striking and intriguing was the arrangement, the distribution and grouping of objects, which are for the most part symmetrical. They had clearly been long meditated, but conformed to no conventional criteria, such as history or geography, nor any monographic ambition, despite the very important ensembles that Banze put together. 180 works by Renoir, 69 by Cezanne, 59 by Matisse, and 46 by Picasso, no less. The logic of the arrangement is for the most part formal, and it transcends categories, making, for example, no distinction between the fine, the decorative, or the applied arts. There is no suggestion of a new typology, but it sets up an unexpected play of echoes and contrasts, very interesting to observe, and even to discover, since it is not explicit, and one wonders whether the relationships one perceives are what motivated these juxtapositions. To give you an example, on the north wall of room 23 upstairs, a picture by Giorgio De Chirico is closely framed on one side by Picasso's girl with a goat, and on the other by a large church, Candon, whose color and form match those of the tower, that is the principal motif of the De Chirico. The most astonishing thing is the presence of pieces of ironwork, separated from the architecture, or the pieces of furniture to which they were originally attached, which fixed to the wall above and sometimes between pictures. They are often mentioned as a sign of Barne's idiosyncrasy, but I eventually realized that they too rhymed with the paintings and tended to spotlight their composition. On the east wall of room 18, for example, a wise shape underlies the geometric structure formed by the mast and rigging of a picture by Charles Deemouth, while a large undulating hinge sets off the curves and counter-curves of Matisse's reclining nude. What is reminded of Shakespeare's Bolognaes, though this be madness, yet there is method in it. And yet there is, I think, no madness, at most, a little humor. In Barne's most important book, The Art in Painting, he uses reproductions in similar fashion, comparing Titian's The Entombment of Christ with the Cézanne Still Life, on the grounds that the design of the two pictures is very similar in structure and expressive content. Since then, I have followed at the distance the polemics that arose after the decision, taking in 2004 by Pennsylvania Court, authorizing the Barne Foundation to establish the collection in a new building that was to be constructed in downtown Philadelphia. The move was presented as the only means of saving the foundation from ruin, which had been caused by years of bad management, including of its capital and the cost of interminable litigation. The new museum was to cost $100 million, a sum which would no doubt have been quite sufficient to save the foundation while maintaining the collection at Marion. But three powerful Philadelphia institutions, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the Annenberg and Lentfest foundations, made the move to downtown Philadelphia a condition of their contribution to the collection of funds. These institutions also contrived to obtain representation from the new and larger Board of Trustees, finally putting an end to the control exercise on that board by Lincoln University, a college created in 1854 for black students, to whom Barnes had entrusted it shortly before his death in 1951. Since Lincoln University was encouraged to accept this loss of control by the promise of public subsidy, and Pennsylvania in 2001 put aside $100 million to support the move, it is clear that the principal object of the exercise was to increase the tourist attractions of Philadelphia. That seems to have been the particular object of the former mayor of the city, Edward Jean Ed Rendell, then governor of the state. For opponents and critics, including the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, this meant nothing less than looting or even destroying the foundation in contempt of the express will of its founder and the educational purpose he had decreed for it. The art dealer Richard El-Fagan, who had been at the foundation's art advisory committee till 1991, when he refused to condone an attempt to sell some of the works in the Barnes Collection, spoke of the eradication of a unique document of American cultural patronage, adding, one could wonder whether the only reason not to homogenize the Frick Collection into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Gardner Museum into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Felix Collection into the Washington National Gallery of Art is that they have endowments large enough to keep predators at bay. At all events, the architects of the new building faced no easy task. The move was only authorized on condition that the distribution of the rooms and the hanging of the objects was respected. Billy Chen, chosen with husband and partner Todd Williams after a competition that was by invitation only, spoke in 2010 of a sort of puzzle. How does one replicate anything without it being not as good? So, I should be very interested to know what you think of it. Cordiali Saluti, Dario. Philadelphia, 24th of May, 2012. Caro Dario. Don't forget I shan't be able to see the original and won't therefore be able to compare it with the new Barnes. The media are full of the reopening of the Barnes Foundation. In the Financial Times, Todd Williams says that the constraints of the commission at first were like a straight jacket, but that as we became more comfortable, it was something we enjoyed. The journalist who interviewed him took the view that the new museum brought with it enhanced clarity and accessibility, but lacked the mystique of its predecessor, which had this sense of a venue that was frozen in time. Eric Gibson, the art critic of the Wall Street Journal, spoke of Ed Rendell's dream of making Benjamin Franklin Parkway a center of cultural tourism and mentioned the unsuccessful attempt to establish an Alexander Calder Museum in the same street. Gibson believes that the experience offered by the Barnes Foundation hasn't changed, and that, thanks to new information campaigns, Albert Barnes will be recognized as the idealistic visionary he was instead of the eccentric curmudgeon of popular caricature. He nonetheless regrets the insertion into the plan of the gallery of an internal garden in the classroom, and he describes a sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly that degrades the forecourt as banal and criticizes the fact that the central atrium is dedicated to Walter Annenberg and his wife Leonora, despite the fact that the former was one of Barnes' old enemies. Roberta Smith in the New York Times also hailed a new lighting and the spatial largesse of the new temporary exhibition room. I had a glance at the friends of the Barnes Foundation website and saw that Robert Venturi, who was born in Philadelphia, is supporting them, writing that the Marian site with its buildings designed by Paul-Philippe K. in collaboration with Barnes from his part of the collection and vice versa, so that separating them vastly diminishes the value and purpose of both. In his view, a fraction of the sum that's made available for the construction of the new museum would have been sufficient to solve the access problems, for example, but the use of a regular service connecting the Barnes Foundation to the downtown museums. I also read that the Benjamin Franklin Parkway seems to sum a cultural corridor to show the friendliness of a parade ground, but also say more about this when I had been there to see for myself. Cordelli Saluti, Libero. Geneva, May the 25th, 2012. Cahou Libero. I understand Eric Gibson's feelings about the name of the atrium. Barnes must be turning in his grave. The dedication has its own logic. Walter Annenberg, a press magnate and Philadelphia mover and shaker set his newspapers to force away into Marion as soon as Barnes died. And 40 years later, he supported the controversial plan of the new president of the Board of Trustees, Richard Glenton, to raise funds by selling inferior materials, declaring that the foundation needed a brand new building in order to exhibit the best paintings as they deserved. Robert Venturi, by contrast, had demonstrated his appreciation of Cres architecture by renovating the Marion buildings in the mid-90s with his wife Denise Scott Brown. While part of the collection was touring as an exhibition, a measure that had been authorized in order to improve the state of the foundation's finances. The renovation was confined to the conservation of structures, the satisfaction of new legal requirements and the addition of a few indispensable functions. In retrospect, it seems a model of respect and some architects might be advised to meditate the declarations and touring made to the Philadelphia Inquirer. I quote, one's approach to a project like this is that it ought to end up so that people look at it and say where did all the money go? A job like this doesn't satisfy your ego, but architecture shouldn't always be egotistical and individualistic. Unlike Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was dubbed a millionaire bohemian, Albert Coombs Barnes was born in Kensington, a working class neighborhood to the north of Philadelphia. His father was a butcher, probably of Quaker origins, who had lost his right arm during the American Civil War and inclined to alcoholism. His mother was a methodist, belonging to the descendants of German immigrants who had at one time colonized a large part of the state. By a dint of a combination of intelligence, determination and pugnacity, he forged his way from Kensington to lower Marion by way of Central High School, a diploma in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, studies in physiological chemistry and pharmacy in Germany, and finally, the creation of a pharmaceutical enterprise that quickly became prosperous, the company Barnes and Hill, in partnership with a chemist whom he had met in Heidelberg. The medicine that they invented is an antiseptic made of mild silver protein compounds which was regularly used to prevent blindness in the newborn, particularly that caused by venereal infections transmitted in utero to free people from their heredity, and as it were opened their eyes, this was also Barnes' mission as a collector and teacher, since in his view, anybody at all, whatever their original status was capable of understanding art. In order to do so, they had to learn to see what the artist sees. Barnes devoted his energy and fortune to the pursuit of works that in his eyes record the perceptions of the most gifted observers of all generations. In a photo, we see him standing, looking at a little panel painting that he's holding in both hands which he rests on his raised left leg, his foot on one of the benches in the middle of the room in the foundation. He's observed by his dog Fidel. It is a carefully staged image which gives some idea of the physical and psychological intensity of the relationship between Barnes and his collection. Cordiali Saluti Dario. Philadelphia, 25th of May, 2012. Caro Dario. The Barnes Foundation was full, so I made a reservation to visit tomorrow and devoted this first day to exploring the area around my hotel which is close to City Hall. I spent an excellent day in the city of the Barnes Foundation. I had time to consult the plans on the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings website and to read a recently published volume on the two buildings. The original one by Cray and the new one by Williams and Chen. Cray came from France in 1903 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania where he established a highly reputed school of architecture. Having qualified at the École de Boursin in Paris, he practiced a modernized version of his classicism Barnes had settled in Mary in 1905 and acquired several properties before obtaining in 1922 Red Slates, a vast estate in which a Captain Wilson, a veteran of the Civil War had been cultivating an arboretum since 1880. There he built his gallery in his new residence. Cray was then constructing the Detroit Institute of Art and his notions of museum space perfectly suited his patron. A series of varied rooms on the domestic scale naturally lit in order to avoid monotony re-creating the conditions of an artist's studio and affording a view of nature. The external forms of his Marian building suggest a simplified version of Renaissance Italian style and he chose a French sandstone whose color unusually warm Barnes used to compare to those of Cezanne's pictures. The modernism in Africanist touches were Barnes' choice but capably integrated by Cray who nevertheless suffered from the impatience and vulnerability of his client. The main building, named gallery in the plans, is connected to the residential administration building by a first floor passage while the service building is completely separate from it. That gallery is symmetrical both within and without. The little hallway leads directly into the main room whose three large French windows open onto the arboretum. This room occupies the full height of the two floors and that south wall ends in three lunettes which Barnes later exalted by commissioning a mural decoration from Matisse. It has doors at the four corners which give access to two circuits of six rooms each communicating with the others. The size of the rooms diminishes towards the two ends of the building. Upstairs, a bridge situated at the top of the modest staircase makes it possible to look down into the main gallery on the ground floor through three semicircular openings. This is the only corridor and only in two of the upstairs rooms is their overhead lighting. The building's distribution is intended to guarantee the intimacy, lighting and variety requested by Barnes while giving complete freedom of itinerary. I'll talk about the new building when I visited it. Cordalis Saluti Libero. Geneva, May the 26th 2012. Caro Libero. On the subject of Kres' work for Barnes, I found interesting pages in a work by Witold Rybczynski on the history of the Sainsbury Center for the Visual Arts. Constructed by Norman Foster on the campus of the University of East Anglia for the collection of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. For us, Robert Sainsbury, a 1957 visit to the Barnes Foundation was one of the great aesthetic experiences of his life, and it played a role in the creation of the Norwich Museum. Rybczynski quotes an article by Kres' in which the article criticized the ideal of the neutral museum, declaring such a museum to be a cemetery for works of art, in pointing out that the most respected European museums are housed in former palaces, offering a variety of atmospheres and lighting. Rybczynski also notes that Kres' was like Barnes from a working class background and had succeeded thanks to meritocratic institutions. But Kres' favored a new classicism, and the question has yet to be answered by Barnes, who was a proponent of modern art and not adverse to shocking his contemporaries should have chosen this architect. It seems to me that the attraction can be explained by Barnes' particular form of modernism. As a good scientist and businessman, he didn't believe in a tabular raza, but in a cumulative ideal. In the Art of Renoir, he writes, I quote, the traditions of art constitute the working capital of every artist. They are the records of what painters in the past have discovered and revealed as significant. And the ultimate test of any painter's importance is his ability to add contributions of his own, by means of which his successors may carry further the work of discovery. From this point of view, Barnes' inclusion of all the paintings in the collection and his hanging them alongside modern paintings were meant to demonstrate the merits of artists who were still controversial and the continuity between their works and those of their predecessors. In 1937, Barnes wrote to the art dealer Paul Guillaume that he was converting Room 14 into a repository for the peals of old, modern and contemporary art. Adding, the ensemble is truly wonderful and is a proof that good pictures of any age will hang well together, merely because they are good. The notion of progress here is relativized or even abolished by an absolute conception of aesthetic equality. This echoes the thought of the increased critic Clive Bell, one of Barnes' favorite authors. But it may also derive from the scientific tradition of morphology which would explain why Barnes was determined to establish his art collection next to an arboretum. He explained that the foundation's teachers pointed out the formal analogies connecting the pictures hanging in the gallery with the plants visible through the windows. And applying the idea of accumulation to the arboretum, he described it not only as a collection of specimens but also as a work of art started by God in creating those sensory old trees continued by Captain Wilson respecting the form that made those the nucleus of a composition and carried further by us to the point where the experts will say is a great work of art and a unique contribution to education. The us in this sentence included laurel-legged Barnes, the collector's wife who made the arboretum her own personal domain and developed a parallel program of horticultural abaricultural and civil cultural courses in dialogue with the University of Pennsylvania. The Barnes Foundation was registered in 1922 and its stated objective was to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts by constructing and maintaining a gallery for the exhibition of works of ancient and modern art. This was an enlargement of the experiment conducted from 1908 onwards in the little company of which Barnes was by then the sole proprietor. He reorganized it on a cooperative model in which of eight working hours per day, two could be devoted by the workers to a reading seminar the use of a lending library and the examination of pictures from the Barnes collection, hung on the factory premises. The organization of these activities was undertaken by particularly receptive employees notably Mary Mullen. After the appearance of John Dewey's democracy and education, Barnes followed his philosophy seminar at Columbia University and invited him to marry him. The two men became friends and cooperated throughout the history of the foundation which Dewey described as the most thoroughgoing embodiment of what I have tried to say about education. Barnes encouraged Dewey to give a course on aesthetics at Harvard in 1931 which was published under the title Art as Experience and dedicated in gratitude to Barnes. The intimate link between thought and action the application of scientific method to the problems of contemporary life and society the primacy of the direct perception of objects over the transmission of facts about those objects. These tenets of pragmatism are at one with Barnes's theory that the artist illuminates the objective world for us exactly as does the scientist differences the terms are in which he envisages it. In Barnes's view, modern painting is defined by the emancipation of the plastic content from the subject matter which again corresponds to the thinking of Bell and of Roger Frye whose collection addresses vision and design Barnes admired. But his view cannot be reduced to a narrow formalism since he considered that the importance of a painter depend on his ability to fuse subject matter with the plastic means. Barnes owned his access to new painting in the modernist milieu to William James Glackens an anti-academy painter whom he met at Central High School and recontacted in 1911. These were the years immediately the Armory Show that introduced the European avant-garde to the wider American public. Having first sent Glackens to Paris in 1912 with $20,000 to spend Barnes thereafter made his own purchases and though he dispensed with advisors and connoisseurs he had to deal with our dealers, playing them off one against another and promoting the young Paul Guillaume whom he dubbed for his secretary to the foundation. Among his models and competitors both plays belonged to Leo Stein whose Parisian apartment shared with Gertrude at 27 Rue de Fleurus he frequented. Leo several times sold him works when in need of money. The dissident and controversial character of modern art fitted nicely with Barnes' love of struggle and his faith in the ability of the critical mind to free itself of habits of thought in order to base its judgment on empirical criteria. The defense of this art justified the proselytism not to say messianic tendencies to which he was inclined, especially since there was still no major museum open to contemporary tendencies in Philadelphia as in Washington where Duncan Phillips too was creating a collector's museum devoted to modern art. The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was not hostile to innovation and in 1921 went so far as to hold an exhibition of paintings and drawings showing the most recent tendencies of modern art, which Barnes hailed buying eight of the exhibits. But the show met with strong opposition not only in the popular press but also among psychiatrists who organized a series of lectures explaining the unexpected appearance of these works in terms of mental illness and degeneration. Barnes had been interested in psychiatry since his medical studies and he replied by denouncing the incompetence of people unaware of the monumental work done by Freud, Jung and Adler. But two years later when the Pennsylvania Academy showed 75 of Barnes' latest acquisitions the reactions were no better. A critic, well known to Barnes stated that in the eyes of Charles Wilson Peale, one of the founders of the Academy, the works of Chaim Soutines would necessarily have seemed the creations of a disintegrating mind. By that time the foundation buildings were already under construction. But these polemics must have confirmed Barnes in the value of the walls that his independence and Marion's relative isolation created between his project and downtown Philadelphia. I can't wait to hear what the museum looks like now that it has left its Marion haven. Philadelphia, 26th of May 2012. This morning I reviewed my local history and the town planned before walking to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In the late 19th century the city beautiful movement sought to endow American cities with a monumental grandeur inspired by the classicism of the Paris École de Beaux-Arts. In Philadelphia, this took the form of demolishing 1,300 blocks in order to create the Fremont Parkway its original name. A broad avenue diagonally crossing the northwest quadrant of the city in order to connect City Hall and the business quarter passing through the region of educational activities grouped around Logan Square. Kareem and his share in the planning of this project but the execution was entrusted in 1917 to his compatriot Jacques Grébet who was directly inspired by the avenue de Champs-Élysées. He redesigned Logan Square in circular form in homage to the Place de la Concorde while the Act de Triomphe was given to the Philadelphia Museum of Art constructed in the park at the top of the hill between 1919 and 1928. The point of view on the museum that you immortalized from the train window was clearly not the perspective Grébet had in mind. The new building of the Barnes Foundation occupies a regularly shaped block flanked by the Parkway, Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th and 21st streets northwest of Logan Square. Having visited the Barnes at Marion Williams and Chen declared that they wanted to create a place in the garden and protect the gallery from its new urban environment including the quiet and tranquility. The parallel pipette intended to house the reconstructed or reconstituted galleries is surrounded on the east and north by an L-shaped structure sheltering the services many of them new and extended underground. The total surface area is four times that of Marion. The dominant visual element is the glazed upper part of the atrium illuminated by night and suspended over an external terrace on the west. It connects the L to the gallery. The visitors either enter from the car park situated in the north along Pennsylvania Avenue or walking around the L on foot which takes them away from the traffic and is intended to put them in the right state of mind. The landscaping was commissioned from the office of Laurie Olden. Bodies of water reflect the building and Ellsworth Kelley's Barnes totem. The cladding in Israeli sandstone is intended to remind one of crazed masonry and the variations of size and color of the panels are inspired by African textiles. To my eyes they're rather gestural and not the result of a profound study of their models, rather like the boldly door motif which Barnes adapted in ceramics and which is literally reproduced on a bronze panel to the left of the new entrance. Once the reception when it can turn right to the cafe restaurant it'll go on to the atrium which leads across to the gallery and to the left towards the temporary exhibition hall and again go down to the lower floor to find the shop and auditorium and seminar room and the library which we guide around a large lobby. The atrium lit by glazed walls to the west and by the canyon of light constituted by its upper part is enormous and intended for events. Currently the exhibition room is presenting under the title Ensemble some fascinating documents of the history of Barnes and his foundation. There is no catalog but a hefty volume entitled Masterworks served that purpose. The term ensemble is borrowed from Barnes and refers to a mural composition of the kind to hear range and rearrange in the introduction which is what Dolcott reproduces by way of example four successive versions of an ensemble grouped around Hunwaz picture before the bath between 1927 and 1952 and in a letter of 1927 Barnes indicates how to rehang the wall of room 14 in the wake of new purchases. Dolcott notes his taste for symmetry his careful balance and his use of large canvases to anchor his mural compositions. Your observations about the ironwork are confirmed in the letter dated 1942 from Barnes to the painter Stuart Davis. First the motifs such as arabesque patterns etc discernible in the picture have their analog sometimes a very close one in the ironwork. Second we regard the creator of antique wrought iron as just as authentic an artist as a Titian Hunwaz or Cezanne. From the atrium one can see the interior of the ground floor rooms of the gallery through the windows and the entrance which is on the same level and framed by ornamental open work gates. The result is a sort of ambiguity between interior and exterior and the impression that one is looking at a maquette. This sense of the unreal continued for me in the largest room strongly lit things to glass its screens out ultraviolet and where I found myself surrounded by a compact crowd equipped with audio guides in attendance very reluctant to let me see small pictures from close up. These two obstacles outweigh any advantage in increased lighting. The moldings have been simplified and the materials are for the moment brand new. In every other respect it seems that the arrangement has been reconstituted with great exactitude. Williams and Chen have nevertheless introduced two interchanges. The assault and craze plan fought lines allowing them to bring the gardens into the building proper and have introduced two rectangular spaces across the building one of which is a sort of light well which trees while the other harbors a classroom. In his article Gibson states in my view correctly that these additions break up the sequence of the rooms and isolate those at either end thus diminishing the total effect of the installation. The author of the little book Two Buildings One Mission notes that the architects compared the plan modified in this way to a sliced Philadelphia hoagie and took the view that this operation allowed them to introduce a welcome respite from that relentless succession of overfilled galleries. The other modifications consisted in the generalize of overhead lighting on the ground floor which seems to derive from the desire to improve the lighting without considering Craig's point of view on the question and the displacement of Matisse's Royal of Life from the stairwell to a little room meant for the director at Marion. They remain the collection and its arrangement and I must say that after a moment or two I had eyes for nothing else. I shall talk about them at greater length but should tell you that the play of echoes in the contrast of which we spoke both fascinated and entertained me. I have the impression that Barnes himself though he took his educational mission seriously had enormous fun making the arrangements but for the moment what I need is food. Codiali Saluti Libero Geneva May the 27th 2012 Carol Libero. The use of the building for events private or semi-private is in direct contradiction with the rules set out by Barnes who explicitly forbade them along with any other special privileges in the name of the democratic and educational purpose of his donation. This ban is consistent with his criticism of public museums. They are, he wrote in 1938, likely to be exploited to serve the ends of individuals ambitious for power and social distinction. On the other hand, I am very happy that this reopening has provided an opportunity to present archives and highlight the logic and the value of Barnes' arrangements. This is a major step forward and allows one to hope that it will contribute to a more general awareness of the value of display and context. I have read the first article that Barnes published in 1915 which is very articulate about what his pictures represented for him. He speaks of the pleasure one gets from living with them as friends, children, objects of worship, diversions, serious mental occupations, whichever role chooses to fit the mood of the moment. He defines one of the joys of a collection as the elasticity with which paintings stretch the beholder's vision which they progressively develop. In the same text, Barnes can trust his collection with what he calls millionaire's collections which, according to him, present nothing more personal than the recommendations of experts and dealers, while the pictures that he own embodied his own much and intensely worked for viewpoint. The true collection he wrote is quite as personal as its owner's face and it is the owner's personal exponent. The activity of hanging, unhanging and re-hanging that accompanied the growth of the collection was therefore at once a conversation with the works and the construction by trial and error of the artwork constituted by the gallery as a whole. The layout on the letter that you sent me reminds me of other tools employed by collectors to test their arrangements. The Swiss collector Oscar Heinhard had miniatures painted of the pictures that he was donating to the City of Winter Tour in order to work out the arrangement. When they were preparing the museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Sterling and Francine Clark had reduced scale models of the buildings, galleries and paintings made with a suitcase to contain them so that they could continue working on them during their travels. As to Barnes, in August 1926, when the excessive heat and humidity were taking all the joy out of life, he wrote to Guillaume that he could forget everything else in looking at the pictures and in creating new and more striking harmonies by hanging them in different ensembles. Judith Tolteckat told me that at the time of his death the ground floor of the gallery was more or less finished but that he was still working on changes to the upper story. Only death concluded this work in progress. There was nothing predictable about the timer and manner of Barnes's death which was the result of a car crash but he knew it would someday come. At the time of the donation he had reserved the right to continue to sell or swap any part of the collection but he stipulated that on his death the collection would be closed. All the paintings shall remain in exactly the places they are at the time of the death of donor and his said wife. The creative nature of the arrangement was the more easily acknowledged in his own circle because he thought that art was not a sphere separated from human experience but a particular department of creativity in general. In her 1923 elementary manual entitled An Approach to Art Mary Mullen took the example of the connoisseur who acquires paintings and sculptures by various artists and arranges them in such a way that each individual work contributes its share in the making of a perfect whole. The result is a wonderful creation comparable in its unity and loveliness with the separate paintings. In that case, the collector is the artist. Marcel Duchamp expressed the same idea when he contrasted in 1949 with the speculators the real collector. He is, in my opinion, an artist squared. He selects paintings and puts them on his walls. In other words, he paints himself a collection. As for Barnes, he wrote in the art in painting that there is no essential difference in kind between the experience of the artist and that of the observer of his work. Whatever may be the difference in their respective abilities. However, the ensembles that Mary Mullen were also intended to help Barnes and his students and visitors to better understand the elements, that is, the works that are expected. In my view, this function is still absolutely current and is not confined to highlighting plastic values. The south wall of room 8, for example, places two pictures of bathers, a Cezanne above and a Renoir below and flanks the Renoir with two large Cezanne landscapes. This arrangement is perhaps intended to demonstrate the primacy of color over subject, the horizontal axis, thanks to the echo of the copper tones of Renoir's nudes in the landscapes. But neither the echo nor the comparison it motivates are fortuitous as they testify to the monumental quality of Renoir's five bathers, the body as landscape and the organic quality of nature as recreated by Cezanne, the landscape as body. This contagion of an organic model beginning in the female nude is reinforced by the undulating outline of the American chest of drawers with its projections and zoomorphic feet and by the pot sent on top of it, whose swelling belly rhymes with the anatomies suspended above it. You speak of bands having fun and I'd like to know exactly what you mean by that. Bands began collecting the decorative art objects for the most part of American origin on large scale in the 1930s when it became difficult for him to travel in Europe. His country house, curfiel, Fidel's house in Breton purchased in 1940 is full of them in his all but a museum of popular art. It belongs to the tradition of the neo-colonial and shows Bands's attachment to rural culture, especially that of his region and of his ancestors. Among the models that must have inspired him in this area, there is the museum constructed by Henry Chapman Mercer for his collection of tools and everyday objects at Doilstown between 1908 and 1910. And the Musée Le Sec des Tournelles in Rouen opened in 1921 in a disused church and entirely devoted to ironwork. A plate from the first guide to this museum shows that Bands when placing ironwork close to his pictures was relying on the suggestions of figuration that he do indeed contain. The little halberdier at the bottom could be an example of the humor you refer to. Looking again at the photos of his arrangements that I took at Merriam, it seems to me that the iron pieces comment on the paintings in the manner of diagrams of formal analysis, a method much appreciated at the time, but using patterns that Bands had found ready-made. Comparisons with Tuchon's ready-made is the more relevant because Bands, when talking to Dewey about Arthur's experience, put to him the problem posed by the perception of a non-intentional image, a Picasso that he had seen opposite his office, formed by snow on a stretch of roof. According to Bands, there was no difference in the essence of the aesthetic response in the two cases, one of them produced by an artist of flesh and blood rather by God, or the combination of the forces of nature. This phenomenon was routine in the fact that vision and intelligence are co-implicative as Bands had long since written in the art in painting, but toward the end of his life he bestowed greater attention on this, speaking of values transferred from one object to another and adding the decorative art objects into the arrangement of his gallery. This is the state rendered permanent by his death, and it has caused a great deal of perplexity in many of his visitors. Cordiali Saluti Dario Philadelphia 27th of May 2012 Caro Dario If I understand you right, you see these pieces of ironwork as in some skeletons or x-rays of the pictures. Your comparison with ready-made seems to be justified if we add that they are assisted ready-mades. These are not only objects attached from the furniture or architecture for which they were intended and deprived of whatever color they may have possessed, but also sometimes assembled in unexpected fashion. There is an example of this in room 14 above the little Hunua and the large Dormier. Four distinct metallic pieces have been assembled so as to suggest a face. I don't know whether one should connect it with Hunua's young family or Dormier's the rivals, whose superimposition contrasts calm with agitation and traditional happiness with dissipation, but it seems to me that this kind of assemblage is often collocated with images of childhood. The comical effect I was talking about comes from the precision with which the ironwork sometimes seemed to imitate or even parody structures or details of composition. To give you some examples, more or less at random, there's a spoon or ladle that plays at being a halo right next to Baldung's Green's Virgin and Child. A duel of pliers above two entangled news by Dugan. A strap hinge reprising the motif of displayed legs of a rabbit by Soutine. Flat plates resembling the Murmillo-Gralier helmets and two combat scenes by Dikitiko. And another strap hinge in the shape of thorny foliage above a picture of roses without thorns. Once you attend to them, the relationships are clear, but that does not tell you how to interpret them, and this also has to do with ceramics furniture and so on. Van Gogh's The Postman of Room 2 presents Joseph Etienne Roulin on the background of a kind of imaginary wall paper featuring large plate motifs and seems therefore to have attracted the giant strap hinges placed on the same wall, and indeed to have suggested the principle of these ornamental backgrounds on the scale of an entire wall. In certain more recent works, for example those by Clay and Miro, their greater abstraction has made possible still more striking coincidences with the form of iron fittings. It's as if painting and ironwork coincided midway between figuration and ornament. Again, in an exhibition case in Room 15, little archaic idols, according to the inscriptions, Greek, Persians, and other, occupy the same intersection of figurative and abstract form, and once we admit that barn's cultivated density and enigma, I wondered if we should not prescribe a symbolic dimension to this proliferation of locks and hinges, which were, after all, made to open and close, fold and unfold. On the plate from the guide to the Huang Museum, the little halberdera makes the sexual aspect of the symbolism explicit, something that could have scarcely escaped barns as near as this, since he criticizes the psychiatrists of Philadelphia for not having read Freud. He plays two keyhole escutions on either side of Courbet's women and white stockings, not the kind of picture commonly seen in American museums at the time. Below it, he plays a trousseau chest of the kind given to young people on the verge of adulthood among the region's Pennsylvania Dutch. In a heart-shaped motif with the keyhole at its central divide, appear the name of the beneficiary and the date, Susanna Ackerman in 1792. On the top of the chest he arranged two ceramic jugs at the edges, and in the center appeared a picture that points upward towards the pudenda of the young women. All this discreetly but efficiently points to the subject of the action, or the presence of the chest also perhaps points to what Duchamp called the passage from virgin to bride. I also found considerable interest in the inclusion of African art objects in the collection and hanging, primarily masks and statues. Barns tended to group them in rather compact fashion, but he also organized unexpected parallels, in western and notably Christian works. In Room 20, masks flanked the devils in a healing of Lazarus from 1400, while in Room 21, six statues echo the figures on the horizontal Christ carrying the cross that bristles with halberds. On the other side, I have a handsome mask with six long horns placed directly below the figure of Christ with a crown of thorns. So when I spoke of Barns having had fun, I meant, as you see, rather serious fun. In Room 20, Libero. Geneva, May 28, 2012. Carre-Libero. Thank you for this brilliant perception. I think Barns has found himself a pupil. What you say about the Ben-Grant of Van Gogh's, the postman is very precise. The style of arrangement favored by Barns matches the art that he loved, dubbed by Robert Fry post-impressionism, in which abstraction doesn't seek to eliminate all reference to the visible, on the contrary, to multiply associations. It is thus typical of Barns that he bought Cézanne's Young Men and Skull in which a tree-trunk motif on the hanging that serves as a background seems to endow the models for it with a horn, metamorphosing him into a melancholic actaeon brooding on some absent Artemis. Of course, I remembered the Courbet but not the chest or the pewter object that sits on top of it. Duchamp visited the foundation on December the 3rd, 1933 and he was so struck by the Courbet that he engraved a paraphrase of it 24 years later, some months before his death. The African art objects are indeed concentrated in space but they're important for the foundation insignored by the motifs at the entrance and by a frieze, decorating the large room. Barns recorded the fact that the music of black Americans had been a revelation for him when he discovered it at the age of eight during an open-air Methodist congregation. In an essay of 1925 he argued that black Americans through their music and poetry revealed to the rest of the world the essential oneness of all human beings. Denouncing our unjust oppression he hoped that black Americans would consent to form a working alliance with us for the development of a richer American civilization. There may be a tinge of essentialism to this perspective but at a time and in a place where segregation raged in the economic, political and cultural domains, Barns took concrete action in favor of the equality of blacks and the recognition of their aesthetic achievements. In the field of the visual arts he nevertheless preferred old African objects or at least those that he believed to be old. To him they demonstrated the timeless quality of plastic values that embodied a primitive model from which modern artists could draw new inspiration. The place they occupy in the foundation can therefore be compared to the role played by tribal arts and more generally non-western art in the Museum of Later modernist collectors such as the Manil Collection in Houston and the Sainsbury Center for the visual arts. The same primitivism also found expression is his many objects of popular art in the 18 pictures by Duane Rousseau and in a few children's drawings most of which are by Glekin's daughter Lena. She died age 30 in 1943 so that it is possible that the presence of the drawings also had a commemorative dimension like that of the surgical saw dating from the American Civil War alluding to the amputated arm of Barns's father which he hung up above a picture by a young veteran of the Second World War Barton Church which he had just bought from the artist. With Barns, primitivism went hand in hand with egalitarianism and his wealth did nothing to extinguish his sympathy for the underdog. The rules of the foundation require the Board of Trustees to ensure on days when the gallery and the arboretum are open to the public free entry to plain people that is, men and women who gained their livelihood by daily toy and shops, factories, schools, stores and similar places. The expression plain people also designates the descendants of the anarchist movement and that there is reason to think that Barns's ferocious independence and fundamental lack of respect for everyone in power are not unrelated to the example of the Quakers who were persecuted for refusing to doff their heads to sovereigns. To visit the gallery on its opening day it was better to be a worker than a critic, art historian, collector or even artist and numerous documents testified to the arbitrary treatment that Barns gave in the name of the trustees to request to visit. The refusal letters were frequently insulting and sometimes obscene and often signed with fantastical false names above all Fidel de Port Manek. Barns was strongly aware of the value of the collection that he had assembled and had good reason to fear that people might attempt to use him but he consistently got in the way of the diffusion of his own ideas by denouncing anything that resembled him as plagiary. His attempts to establish durable relations with institutions such as the UNST of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of Art invariably failed less because of the incompetence of their representatives than because of his own impatience, control, freakery and susceptibility. In 1925 Dewey had warned Barns that the policy of negative criticism which is being adopted will result in the end in rendering the foundation isolated as an educational influence you will be left with simply a few courses of the foundation itself attended by a comparative slow small number of persons. Dewey's prediction was born out notably when 8 months before his death Barns modified the terms of the intention of trust governing the management of the foundation in order to vest in Lincoln University the right to appoint four of the five trustees. Definitely excluding from any such responsibility members of the principal universities of the region and of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Barns was a brilliant businessman and prescient enough to sell his company in 1929 and invested proceeds in the national bonds a few months before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression. But in 1941 he required that the foundation invest after his death exclusively in public bonds a restriction that combined with inflation brought about the gradual erosion of the capital endowment. Indeed more generally the extreme precision with which Barns sought to define the posthumous functioning of his foundation proved counter-protective preventing it from adapting to circumstances and rendering it vulnerable to the predators that turned a hungry eye on it. Under the management of Violette Dematia a close collaborator with Barns and co-author of several of his books the foundation strengthened its rules and exacerbated its isolation till the events which led to the loss of Lincoln's University's control and ultimately to the move from Marion to Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Cordiali Saluti Dario Philadelphia 29th of May 2012. Cateredario From what you say you're always going to go downhill with the Barns. I've been weighing up the pros and cons of the move but was lost in the transfer what has been kept and what has perhaps been gained. By way of losses it's obvious that the unity that Barns sought between the site, the architecture the works and their arrangement has been broken. This is the more regrettable because the design of the gallery was a collaboration between the architect and the patient and they expressed their ideal of a place to which to encounter art to which the natural counterpart formed and the freedom was integral. On the other hand the objects have been conserved and to the extent that it has been reconstituted their arrangement has too. The polemic aroused by the project to move the collection has indeed drawn attention to the interest and value of this arrangement giving to the notion of ensemble, a currency going well beyond the confines of the sect that watched over it. I've already begun to talk about the gains in fact to which I should add the number of visitors allowed to enter the collection whatever the reasons for wanting to do so. Indeed I'm told that they spent on average twice as long there as visitors did in Marion thanks to the presence of the cafe restaurant. As regards the new site it must be acknowledged that it is a long way from what Barns desired but it may well have compensating features. The proximity of other similar institutions is not a bad thing in itself though it can lead to cultural consumerism. And Barns' Francophilia is a good company here even though it's not exactly the Champs-Élysées. I wanted to visit the Holden Museum which stands on the block next to the Barns Foundation on the Northwest but it's being renovated. An ensemble of works by Holden does compliment those of Cezanne and Renoir brought together by Barns especially since he had relatively little taste for sculpture. So the situation doesn't seem to me desperate I'm aware that I have been influenced by discovering the foundation to make a different view of this question. I had a wander around the Philadelphia Museum of Art which I already knew and lingered in the collection of Walter and Louise Arendsburg which includes a great many works by Duchamp another ensemble of works by a French artist though this one was also a naturalized American. What most fascinated me was given, number one, the waterfall number two, the illuminating gas Courbet's Woman with White Stockings was clearly one of the models of the noob that you see stretched out before when you place your eyes up against the holes made in the old door. Duchamp spent some 20 years secretly working on this installation which he wanted to appear posthumously which was indeed revealed in the museum as he desired. My stay in Philadelphia is coming to an end. I had dinner at the Waterworks Restaurant which is in Fairmont Park pumping station below the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The food is not worth the excursion but the architecture is interesting and the view agreeable. It's even better from the side where one discovers that the museum has replicated itself. In fact, the reverse is true since the pumping station was constructed between 1819 and 1822 by the engineer Frédéric Graff. I don't know where the barns do you taught me this but looking at the bases of these little temples with their semi-circular windows and vaulted openings where the water come out I realized that Graff's buildings were not just architecture but how long, speaking architecture but anticipated the emoticon. Cordiali Saluti Libero Geneva May 29th 2012 Carro Libero I must definitely return to Philadelphia. I have never visited the Rohoda Museum and I shall take the opportunity to see the new barns myself. Thank you for putting both sides of the issue and for your very reasonable argument. Having only ever known the collection on its original side I'm even more sensitive to the unity in which you speak. The balance between gains and losses will continue to fluctuate and will notably depend on what the foundation is able financially and otherwise to make of its merry on campus. I've read that the teaching connected with the algorithm continues and that there is some idea of installing the library and archives along with the room in which to consult them in the former gallery. That would be a gain but for the moment I imagine the gallery is a haunted space. The foundation also speaks of making curfew open to visits a complex operation but equally desirable. The fact remains that all this could have taken place without any loss if the funds mobilized for the move to a new building had been made available for maintaining the collection in situ. Since the community of Marion was by then apparently willing to accept the measures necessary to welcome a sufficiently large number of visitors. In relation to that number I am like you unwilling to discuss the motivation of the visitors but it is worth remembering that in Barnes's view the quality of the experience was more important than the quantity of visitors. He wanted to give priority to persons motivated by a sincere interest and intention of serious study over those desiring any casual amusement or other ends irrelevant to genuine art appreciation. This is a meritocratic rather than a democratic criterion incompatible with a quest for maximum visitor numbers and unrelated to the notions of the cultural industry but it is nonetheless respectable. His decision to establish the gallery at Marion was in any case intimately connected with that criterion. When shown a plan by the local authorities to construct a large number of low income houses Barnes seeing no contradiction with his political ideals protested against the possibility that his gallery would be surrounded by the same urban conditions that it had sought to escape and that would destroy the atmosphere of seclusion that he had tried to establish. In the first article devoted to the foundation written in 1923 Forbes Watson said that it is not at all a bad scheme to have this just a little off the beaten track. It gives people a chance to show a little energy in their desire to enjoy art. For Barnes an experience takes place when the individual does something to the environment and the environment does something to him and he conceived the active participation that his collection was intended to encourage in terms of energy. It required an actual expenditure of energy whereas the effortless automatic process of recognition is easy but fails to generate the warmth of being alive. Today Barnes would probably have thought that art is exploited like fossil fuels and not only in the Gulf states where it is hoped that art might one day replace the energy sources whose reserves are now being exhausted. You are quite right about Duchamp's given and Courbet's woman with white stocking and you probably know the epitaph that Duchamp chose for his tomb in the Rouen cemetery. Besides it's always the others who die. More concerned with posterity than those who viewed him as a nihilist were willing to believe. He helped the Aransbergs choose the museum to which they would donate their collection and ensure the best conditions for it fully conscious that a significant part of his own work would benefit from this. These efforts took him to Philadelphia in 1949 three years after he began work on Given and he may already have been able to envisage perhaps not to its full extent the proximity that would one day unite his posthumous installation to one of his sources. Will you be staying much longer in the United States? Philadelphia 30th of May 2012. No, I'm returning to Europe and have to put this question aside for a while. But I will do a certain amount of traveling this summer and will take the opportunity to make a few visits. Now, I have the Museum the Commando in Paris down on my list. Cordiali Saluti, libero. Thank you. So this is a little advertised from the publishers so since it was not possible to have copies here quickly enough it can be ordered with a 20% discount and free shipping on the website of Brepols which is the publisher. I can only encourage you. In case you would like to know what is the solution that Libero finds for his father's collections. But now we would well, I'm sorry we would very gladly take questions and comments. Here you are in the new building and you've had the chance to spend time in the galleries which not only are unchanged but really are no more spacious ones which was what I was hoping for. The best change for me as a visitor to both places was having the bonner de vie not on the staircase so that you can walk up to it and get back from it and enjoy it without peril of your life. But if you will tell us what you think about this especially in relation to your visit to the old parts. Thank you very much. Well, to this I must confess that I wrote two parts of the dialogue and therefore I was only also the one who visited the new parts in the company of my wife and also Kéfe with Judith Tolka and so this technique or this form of writing as a dialogue made it possible to try and give justice to the various sides of the argument and the fact that I believe the experience cannot be the same whether one has was familiar with the bands at Marion or whether one would discover the bands here clearly. I should add to it now that I've come back and visited it again that also changes with time the building is changing the garden is changing it's rather I mean it's growing so this is already it's not the in Marion but it has more greenery around and yeah one also gets used to it and so I would say but I've tried in this chapter again to try and give a sort of balanced I mean another author would add other arguments but right so I think that in a sense at least at the time of writing I tried precisely to respond in a sense to your question the way I did without two voices right I loved the approach it was a lot of fun to listen to you know so very personal and I'm curious if you did you sort of did you keep a journal during those days and I mean I'm just wondering about your process you actually sort of go home after your visit and write things down yeah so maybe to very briefly it's preparing this was a long long story it started at some point by with my being invited by Rick Brotel some of you may know to contribute to what was meant to be a new series about the history and theory of museums to be published by Yale in London and he asked me to contribute one volume and he meant these volumes to be very personal I mean the idea would be authors books and not sort of systematic breaking up of the total topic which was huge anyway and I said then very spontaneously oh yes gladly and then what I'd like to deal with is museums created by an individual or a couple I mean especially collectors and artists because I like these places and I found memories of visiting them and I had already visited quite a lot of them over the years I mean some of these visits of a old and which he liked the idea I did not mention the idea came very progressively that I would not write it in the usual fashion of an academic book so and he had found money that was the nice part also of it in Texas to prepare this so there was some money for traveling and having pictures taken etc and so so I tried to do that systematically what existed the literature etc and then what I had already seen what I wanted to see all of the places I would be speaking about and I folk decided to focus on the ones which had kept something as much as possible of their original display that was for me a major criteria I also wanted it to be worldwide not just western Europe and North America which is usually the case and as I said from the beginning say around 1800 to the present and then I wanted to go in some depth and therefore the case studies so I went to new museums which I had not visited I also went back to some so for instance the gypsotheca canoviana in Sanio we had visited it but at the time I was very much taken by the sculpture and I had not really looked at what Scarpa the architect had done with his new wing and since architecture is quite crucial because I wanted to deal as much with what happened to these places and how they have changed over time then with the original form I had to look at that what Scarpa had so we went back and so on it was also possible to contrast various visits over time which was important and which I then distributed between my two characters so yeah thank you so much it was extraordinary I really appreciated it got a lot out of it I was just wondering is there anything remotely like the approach that you took to this book in your experience or is this like entirely unique to this I did not look into that I have to say I mean again it came progressively I wanted to emphasize to foreground the relationship of these places to the site because it's crucial it's always meant for a specific place and also wants to act upon the place it's often it's always also a monument sometimes a mausoleum so I thought well maybe oh I'm sorry I did not answer your question I did not have a diary but I did take notes and make small drawings and things like that and this I have gathered I also went back it was a sort of recapitulation some of the places I have visited 30 years ago I mean so I went back through all of my small book notes I have a lot of them and to gather all of that material because it's it was precious to me not in an autobiographical way but as a witness of experiences precisely I mean the title is a knowledge to do it but it's really because I think that these places put and that's the other reason for the form chosen they put a lot of emphasis on subjectivity the subjectivity of the founders it's their collection in the case of artists it's their work and they don't care too much about what the authorities on the topic think but they also are very accommodating and welcoming for the subjectivity of the visitor so typically I have another chapter on the Gardner and there also the expansion is quite important it's discussed I remember a critique made to the Gardner as it was by some people to justify what had been done was to say that the visitors could not know what was a masterpiece and what was not which I found so interesting as a reproach as if it were bad that you might find something a masterpiece that I mean right so you are left exactly the absence of labels well it's it's up to you it's for you and you pick up something that others don't find important and so on so that was one reason also for adopting and at first I thought of a sort of travel diary which of course is important in the history of so Goethe's travel in Italy which he wrote long time afterwards also these things also I found out while researching this that the correspondence between Katrimer de Kancy and Kanova about the Parthenon marbles which I believe to be a real correspondence actually there's a letter because I wrote the correspondence and there's a letter in which Katrimer writes to Kanova oh you know what I have an idea I'm writing about the Parthenon marbles and I'll do as if I was writing letters to you so it was so it's a typically sort of 18th century concede but and so I thought a writer of travel diary and then an assistant of mine Marco Gialla told me oh well you could also make a dialogue and I think that was a very good very good idea or at least in any case I enjoyed it and I think it's effective but I did not look into who has done what might have rather be as I say I would have been less free but I know that there has been a growing interest in fiction or using fiction or I mean opening up a bit the formats of academic writing and David is a perfect companion to this because he has already done a few films together with a filmmaker which are also at history right maybe you want to say something on that well I think we're becoming more interested in auto-theory and decided to use some critical theory based upon one subjectivity in the world and so I think it's fantastic I'm just thinking of Giorgio Vasari's correspondence with Michelangelo that he inserts in the actual lives of the most excellent artists, painters sculptors painters painters, sculptors and architects from Jimé Bois to our own time but I think it's a very lively way and what I love about the epistolary genre is that it's by nature a very open genre so you can talk about anything yeah it also made it possible central idea is again context the context changes the things the constituent parts and for that the turn of 1800 is crucial because that's the moment of this great spoliation the great dislocations Gertz speaks of dislocation Katremer condemns that with something that has been called a context theory saying you can't if you take works of art from Rome what you do is as if you were tearing off pages from an illuminated book what you get are fragments and you destroy the work the work itself and it says Rome the museum of Rome it's all of Rome it's the quarries it's the roads it's all of that together so that was important and that form made it possible to speak about that how do you get to a place what do you see on the way even how you eat I mean what is the it's and I think that not all of it may be relevant to the same point but nonetheless there is theoretically a sort of general relevance and very much often in terms of architecture clearly I mean Lisabor how you come to play that's absolutely crucial how you how you and first my small play with the with the Philadelphia it's really true I mean because when I came the first time I went straight to Marion and therefore I took the SEPTA train and I saw the museum and so oh what what is this of course it was not meant to be seen that way nonetheless it is also part of Philadelphia that you can see that way so the chapter on the the band says much more on Philadelphia but it would have been much longer the 60 minutes I had to cut and I thought that people here would know better than me about that so I cut about the the Academy of Arts and the Motor Museum and a lot of stuff so if you feel like it you can you can read the chapter yeah okay I think we one more one more question I just want to know if there are particular places that you wish you could included in this book or what you would have in mind for a sequel ah ah I had to experience the return well I'm hoping that Hollywood will be interesting Netflix Netflix option option for a series well again the 15 that I focused on it's the result of a long it's like bands selecting pruning although I had believed they would be pruning and therefore they would never be three rows so something went in another direction but so it's very slowly trying to balance a lot of things that I ended up with those ones but there's a lot of comparisons with many other other museums and the index is therefore there for that so there's an index by plays and so on and so forth um so in principle I should have no regret now let me think ah um well so the Frick for instance does not have a chapter now that was in part I also tried to balance the very famous ones and the less famous ones I found that important um the Frick it was also because again too much has changed I mean the and even the collection they have continued to buy so it's another story and um but no I think no I think I think it's fine I mean the places I haven't gone to so for instance there's a whole question of Africa so there are quite bits of the world are absent now partly and I tried to address that and I consulted an Africanist about that and he gave me lists and I look into that and then but um again this criterion which can be discussed but that where display is a sort of octorial act and is preserved that tends to exclude certain parts of the world for other all sorts of reasons so take Russia that's because of when you have a history that is too broken these things don't go through I mean they don't survive generally in that form you have documentation but that's another story um Africa there's a lot there that is clearly very interesting but as far as I know not that type maybe Egypt so there but if I have not regret but question marks that would be in these directions if you wish where I maybe just not knowledgeable enough I tried to do my homework but right yeah China I know India there are some old which seem to have I have not seen that um China I know there are some old places but the new I'd say something about that because we are in the middle of or maybe not the middle but of a new wave of creations of these places because private collectors are flush and unfortunately it's not the case with the with I mean the collect the the public places so but as far as China's concerned from what I can read the little I've seen again these things are not even meant to to reach any kind of permanence it's more generally the sort of white box model and with things that change all the time which is I mean that's fine but it's not the same thing and there's also the issue of um sustainability let's say which I think is an issue and um and there for China for instance a phrase that often comes is vanity museums which means they are not meant to last necessarily very long so so let's say I'm pleased with my selection thank you