ART COLLECTING AND SHAPING PUBLICS AROUND THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A PHILADELPHIA STORY A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Brian Seymour December 2017 Examining Committee Members: Dr. Tracy Cooper, Advisory Chair, Art History Dr. Gerald Silk, Art History Dr. Erin Pauwels, Art History Dr. Philip Glahn, Painting, Tyler School of Art ABSTRACT My dissertation traces the rhetoric of two Philadelphians, attorney John G. Johnson and Dr. Albert C. Barnes, as they collected art with a specific public in mind, namely working Philadelphians around the turn of the twentieth century. The individual bequests and resulting legacy institutions of Johnson and Barnes serve as rich case studies to assess the efforts of collectors to control the reception of their respective collections by the public. These particular histories, exceptional in their own ways, are juxtaposed to offer an objective view onto previously understudied challenges to the status quo, mounted by a few collectors by way of unique discursive practices and the establishment of distinctive single collection institutions, in the formative period for American art museums around the turn of the twentieth century in Philadelphia. The focus is on the two men’s often shared, but eventually divergent, ideas pertaining to art and the public, which can be tracked to relevant discourses that informed those views. At stake in this investigation is the relative tension between the agency of the collectors and the repurposing of their individual collections by future publics. More plainly, the goal is to study the interrelated narratives of collectors, Johnson and Barnes, as they unfolded over the course of the long twentieth century with an eye to what is gained or lost from the unraveling of the deliberate plans left by the collectors, which in both of these cases, included relocating the art work from the original site, leading to coincident shifts in the manner of display and targeted audience. It is not the point of this study to weigh-in on matters of justice regarding the individual cases, rather the goal is to probe the limits of an art collector’s vision held against the dynamic needs of publics, and evaluate what this might mean for the twenty first century. ii For Melissa and Cooper. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...II DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………...III LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………....V CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….1 2. JOHN G. JOHNSON: BECOMING A COLLECTOR……………………………...32 3. RECONSIDERING THE COLLECTING HISTORY OF DR. ALBERT C. BARNES……………………………………………………………………………..60 4. A SHARED APPROACH: DISPOSITIONS AND DISCURSIVE PRACTICES….97 5. ART COLLECTORS AND THEIR PUBLICS: JOHNSON AND BARNES……..144 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………............189 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Johnson Purchases from Haseltine Gallery in Philadelphia in 1880s…………....52 2. Viggio Johansen, My Friends……..……………………………………………..56 3. Pierre-Étienne-Théodore Rousseau, Mountain Path October……………….......75 4. Jan van Eyck, Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata………………… 126 5. Unknown, Portrait of a Nobleman with Dueling Gauntlet..……………………137 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION My dissertation traces the rhetoric of two Philadelphians, attorney John G. Johnson and Dr. Albert C. Barnes, as they collected art with a specific public in mind, namely working Philadelphians around the turn of the twentieth century. Johnson famously left his collection of nearly 1,300 paintings, not to the art museum as a wealthy collector might, but to the “citizens of Philadelphia,” on the condition that the art remain on display in his home on South Broad Street for easier access. Barnes established an educational foundation around his collection of Post-Impressionist art for the purpose of educating “men and women who make their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories, schools, stores, and similar places.”1 Juxtaposing Johnson and Barnes is based not merely on their identity as significant Philadelphia collectors, but on the fact that they shared a wealth of personal and professional connections. Both men had the same training in art education at Central High School in Philadelphia, established in 1836 as the first public school in the country with the specific mission to offer a quality education to working-class boys.2 True to their !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Mary Ann Meyers, Art, Education, & African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 66. “…Ensure that it is the plain people…men and women who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories, schools, stores and similar places, who shall have free access to the art gallery upon those days when the gallery is to be open to the public.” Elsewhere in a letter to Leopold Stokowski, Barnes wrote that he was interested in attracting a “plain, ordinary person, with little schooling…”Albert C. Barnes to Leopold Stokowski, March 18, 1925, ABC, Barnes. 2 William Hafner Cornog, School of the Republic, 1893-1943: A Half Century of the Central High School of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Alumni of Central High School, 1952); Franklin Spencer Edmonds, History of the Central High School of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1902).!! roots, throughout their lives as collectors, they proved sympathetic to the ideal of lifting up the public through cultural means and designed methods to achieve that goal. A key feature of my dissertation is to foreground Johnson as Barnes’ mentor. The historical span, from Johnson who started collecting in the 1880s through Barnes who begins around 1912, places these men within the context of what many have identified as a formative period for art institutions in America, bracketed in time by the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. During this period, Philadelphia saw a rise in art collectors from a new class of successful men who realized fortunes through effort rather than inheritance. My method centers on networks, which connected fellow stakeholders engaged in the active exchange of discursive practices related to collecting and exhibiting art. To this end, I claim that Johnson and Barnes significantly contributed to framing nascent publics for viewing art in Philadelphia in the twentieth century. Considering the hundred-year unfolding of these narratives allows us to view the distance between the original vision of the collector and the reception of their collections today. To connect my investigation to contemporary issues, I will then address shifting ideas of the public which occur when circumstances of exhibition and access changed over the course of the twentieth century contrary to each collector’s specific intentions. Johnson’s collection was moved from display in his home to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the 1930s, and then in the 1990s it was divided up and reinstalled throughout the Museum. The Barnes Collection was relocated from is original location in Merion, Pennsylvania and opened in Center City Philadelphia in 2012. These cases complicate the 2 matter of the public by raising issues of how collections of art objects originate in one time but endure through change to serve the demands of future publics. Current Thinking on Dr. Barnes The standard narrative of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, as art collector, opens with his appeal for guidance from American painter and high school chum, William Glackens. As it goes, after a crash-course in Modern art, Barnes sent his able tutor off to Paris in 1912 with $20,000, and Glackens dutifully returned with paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, and dozens more, seeding the now multi-billion-dollar collection.3 It is widely agreed that, thereafter, Barnes made all buying decisions; yet in an interview thirty years later he insisted: “I never bought a painting under the advice of Glackens or any other person.”4 The tone of this comment is in line with the common perception of Barnes as arrogant, but in this instance it is something more. Rather than reading it as a slight to one of his few lifelong friends, it should be understood as a willful revision of history intended to bolster a key tenet of Barnes’ educational method for appreciating art–developing one’s own judgment. There has been a growing conversation surrounding Dr. Barnes and his collection over the past two decades. Heretofore, much of the scholarship has understandably !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 For the most recent retelling of this narrative see: Stanley Meisler, “Say What They May, The Feisty Doctor Had an Artful Eye,” Smithsonian Magazine, v. 24, no. 2 (May, 1993): 96-98. In addition see the recent catalog of the Barnes Collection: Barnes Foundation, Judith F. Dolkart, and Martha Lucy, The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012), 11. 4 Albert C. Barnes to Students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, February 24, 1944, Fiske Kimball Correspondence 1923-1926, Fiske Kimball Papers, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Archives. The letter countered the suggestion in a book by R. Sturgis Ingersoll on Henry McCarter that Barnes relied on the “advice of Glackens.” 3 focused on the dynamism of the man himself, the remarkable high quality of the paintings in the Collection, and controversies surrounding him and his art, including the posthumous