The House of Barnes: The Man, the Collection, the Controversy

Abstract

If you are a Philadelphian, a lover of art, or a habitué of museums, you likely have a Barnes story. Probably not a story about the modern home of the collection, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and opened in 2012, but rather one about the saga of trying to visit Dr. Albert C. Barnes’s famous collection of postmodernist art while it was still housed in the building the collector had built in Philadelphia’s Main Line district in the 1920s. Stories of trying to scale the walls of that compound were legendary, the stuff that museum fans dined out on for generations.