The doc Art of the Steal is smart and engaging. It opens on the mayor of Philadelphia touting the move of a huge collection from a private trust into the city, and then you hear a talking head talk about this as a monumental theft. The backstory–adeptly narrated by talking heads and found footage–is that Arthur Barnes accrued an astonishing range and depth of paintings in the early part of the 20th-c, now acclaimed as the most important collection of post-Impressionist and modern works in the world. That’s key: the most important. Not the most important private trust collection–but outstripping MOMA and Getty and everyone.
And when he first put it together for a public exhibition at the Philly museum, it was roundly trounced by the snobs and elites of the city, and Barnes–already constitutionally inclined to despise the shallow trappings of high society–vowed to craft a trust that would keep the work out of the hands of the ‘morons’ who didn’t understand art. The Barnes trust was shaped as a school; visiting the collection confined to a couple of days and invitation, the collection arranged and displayed in a lovely “cluttered” series of rooms which defied many conventional approaches to display in museums.
And when Barnes died, the battle to strip the trust’s authority began. Continue reading Art, motherfuckers!