We spent a few hours at the Barnes Foundation this month, so this week the newsletter got hung on the wall. Eight works, one for each section, arranged the way Albert Barnes arranged his: burlap, symmetry, wrought iron in the gaps, a Pennsylvania German chest underneath, grouped by line and light rather than by artist or century.
The archive says this is the first time in 166 art weeks that WAiR has run a French Impressionist. Bosch has run four times. Norman Rockwell has run four times. Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Degas, Soutine and Pippin, until today, never.
The wall, plate by plate
- Renoir — the birthday dinner, and the carding
- Cézanne — the drug-cost accounting, on a table that will not sit flat
- Seurat — the variant proportions, six dots in every ten
- Soutine — the kidney stone, in the idiom of his carcasses
- Demuth — Simplified Technical English, 900 words in gold
- Degas — the Marathon du Médoc, cropped mid-stride
- Gold-ground panel — the hidden-physics cabal
- Pippin — the Barnes itself, a wall inside the wall
The four renderings
The only one that actually hung a wall. Nine objects in real symmetry, frames that look like frames, the chest centred underneath, and all four gold 900s legible in the Demuth. It took "hanging carcass" literally and gave a whole side of beef instead of a kidney, which is more Soutine than the prompt asked for. The Seurat is the weak plate: the dots resolve into an autumn park, and the six-in-ten proportion is nowhere.
Best surface of the four. The Soutine is the only plate that looks like loaded paint rather than a picture of loaded paint, and the Seurat is the only one that is genuinely pointillist — separate dots, a real Grande Jatte cadence, figures that read as a crowd. The forged ironwork is right too. But it cropped to a letterbox, so the chest is cut off and the wall stops being a wall. Its waiter is checking the ID against a second card, which nobody asked for and which is the best invented detail in the set.
The roughest, and the one that most resembles a photograph of a dim room rather than a render. It declined to frame the Soutine at all and hung a raw meat form straight on the burlap, which is either a failure or the best idea any of them had. The Demuth collapses into unreadable geometry and only half the 900 survives. Its gold-ground panel is the strongest of the four: the only one that put small figures at desks inside the walls, which is what the prompt actually said.
Sanded off the least period specificity of the four, which is the opposite of what I expected from it. The heart hung on a rope is the most arresting single object anywhere in these walls, and its runners are wearing actual 1980s kit. Two misses: the Renoir is a woman rather than the twenty-one-year-old, so the plate carrying the opening no longer carries it, and the Demuth's 900 has become three gold rings. Its Pippin is the best in the set — flat colour, tipped-up floor, and a crowd looking at a wall that contains this wall.
The prompt
A straight-on photograph of a single dense gallery wall in an early-twentieth-century private collection, hung in the manner of Albert Barnes: coarse natural burlap covering the wall, symmetrical arrangement, works grouped by line and colour rather than by artist or period, wrought-iron hinges, a keyplate, a spatula and a yarn spinner mounted flat between the frames, and a painted Pennsylvania German chest below the centre. Eight framed paintings, each in a different idiom, all in warm gallery light: CENTRE, large, gilt frame — a loose Impressionist figure group in the manner of Renoir: a young man at a restaurant table holding out an identity card to a waiter, a plate of mezze in front of him, feathery brushwork, warm pinks and greens. TOP LEFT — a Post-Impressionist still life in the manner of Cézanne: a slim injector pen, a stack of coins and three apples on a tilted tabletop that will not sit flat, planes of blue-green and ochre. TOP CENTRE, small — a gold-ground tempera panel in the manner of an early fifteenth-century workshop: a robed orator gesturing toward a walled compound of low buildings, small haloed figures at desks inside, a blank unfurled scroll. TOP RIGHT — a pointillist canvas in the manner of Seurat: a crowd on a riverbank built entirely from dots, roughly six in every ten dots a single warm colour and the rest scattered cool. MIDDLE LEFT, tall — a thickly painted expressionist study in the manner of Soutine: a single dark-red organ hung against a slate ground, violent impasto, the paint itself looking painful. MIDDLE RIGHT, tall — a Precisionist composition in the manner of Charles Demuth: hard-edged industrial forms, ray lines cutting across a grain-elevator silhouette, the numeral 900 repeated in gold, flat planes of grey and steel blue. BOTTOM LEFT — an off-centre, cropped composition in the manner of Degas: runners in 1980s fancy dress caught mid-stride at a trestle table of oysters and wine glasses, pastel tones, the figures cut by the frame edge. BOTTOM RIGHT — an American folk painting in the manner of Horace Pippin: flat bright colour, deliberate perspective, a small crowded gallery room with tiny paintings on a burlap wall, a picture of this wall inside this wall. No text anywhere except the numeral 900 in the Precisionist panel. Photographic, even light, no people in the room.
Barnes hung his own walls and kept rearranging them for decades; the arrangements in the Philadelphia galleries are still his, rebuilt to the same room dimensions when the collection moved in 2012, down to which way the windows face. More at barnesfoundation.org. Every issue: the What Adam Is Reading archive.