The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream

Biographer Gopnik (Warhol) draws on extensive research for this textured and energetic biography of Albert Barnes, the collector who founded the Barnes Foundation museum and helped reshape notions of American art. Born into a poor family in late-19th-century Pennsylvania, Barnes grew up with a “ferocious... rejection of elites and elitism.” After earning a medical degree, he began a career in the growing pharmaceuticals field, co-developing the antiseptic on which he built his fortune and implementing such progressive reforms as offering educational opportunities to employees. He used his fortune to buy art that became the basis for the Barnes Foundation museum, seeking out Renoirs and Cezannes (which, while “safe” by European standards, were still considered avant-garde in the U.S.), North American ironwork, and African sculpture. Gopnik emphasizes how Barnes championed African art not as “the product of some exotic Other” but high art in its own right. In so doing, he helped to make fine art a front in the fight for egalitarianism and the eradication of “old hierarchical ways.” Gopnik remains clear-eyed, however, about Barnes’s less than savory attributes, including a tendency to attack art world rivals, occasionally in the kind of racist or antisemitic language that he purported to despise. The result is a vibrant and comprehensive portrait of an influential figure in American art history. (Mar.)