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Art, Education, and African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy

[photo: Book Jacket]

Mary Ann Meyers


Transaction Publishers
HB 9780765802149
$49.95
PB 2006 9781412805636
$29.95

December 2003

"This illumination of the character of Barnes, whose collection of Impressionist paintings is currently the focus of a lengthy legal struggle, helps us understand the significance of that outcome for all concerned about art’s history. Recommended. —K. Marantz, Choice

"Mary Ann Meyers uses a journalist’s eye, and a novelist’s timing in skillfully weaving the sociological, artistic, political, societal and philosophical ingredients that comprise the saga of the Barnes Foundation. The stranger than fiction account of the Foundation is laced together with a lucid biography of its provocative founder and the ramifications of his eccentricities over the half century following his death. Dr. Meyers is exemplary in her scholarship and even-handedness in telling a story that relentlessly offers the temptation to take sides." —Frederick S. Osborne, President, Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts

A physician who applied his knowledge of chemistry to the manufacture of a widely used antiseptic, Albert Barnes is best remembered as one of the great American art collectors. The Barnes Foundation, which houses his treasures, is a fabled repository of Impressionist, post-Impressionist, and early modern paintings. Less well known is the fact that Barnes attributed his passion for collecting art to his youthful experience of African-American culture, especially music. Art, Education, and African-American Culture is both a biography of an iconoclastic and innovative figure and a study of the often-conflicted efforts of an emergent liberalism to seek out and showcase African American contributions to the American aesthetic tradition.

Mary Ann Meyers examines Barnes’s background and career and the development and evolution of his enthusiasm for collecting pictures and sculpture. She shows how Barnes’s commitment to breaking down invidious distinctions and his use of the uniquely arranged works in his collection as textbooks for his school, created a milieu where masterpieces of European and American late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century painting, along with rare and beautiful African art objects, became a backdrop for endless feuding. A gallery requiring renovation, a trust prohibiting the loan or sale of a single picture, and the efforts of Lincoln University, known as the “Black Princeton,” to balance conflicting needs and obligations all conspired to create a legacy of legal entanglement and disputes that remain in contention.

This volume is neither an idealized account of a quixotic do-gooder nor is it a critique of a crank. While fully documenting Barnes’s notorious eccentricities along with the clashing interests of the main personalities associated with his Foundation, Meyers eschews moral posturing in favor of a rich mosaic of peoples and institutions that illustrate many of the larger themes of American culture in general and African-American culture in particular.

"Meyers’ compelling and cogent analysis of the back story of the Barnes Foundation shines a bright light on the long-running debate over the proper place for one of the world’s most distinguished art collections, a place that reflects simultaneously on the African American community during Albert Barnes’ day as well as our own. Well-written and provocative, [it] is a must read for anyone who would understand the present day controversy - a work of importance." —Elijah Anderson, Charles and William L. Day Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

Mary Ann Meyers is secretary and a director of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the senior fellow at the John Templeton Foundation. She is the author of A New World Jerusalem: The Swedenborgian Experience in Community Construction and a co-author of Religion in American Life, Coping with Serious Illness, and Death in America.

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