The Ogre of Merlon

The Ogre of Merion

ART AND ARGYROL (412 pp.)--William Schack--Thomas Yoseloff ($4.95).

On a summer's afternoon nine years ago, a Cadillac careened at high speed past a stop sign onto a highway in suburban Philadelphia, directly in the path of a huge trailer truck. The driver of the car-Albert Coombs Barnes, multimillionaire, eccentric and owner of one of the world's greatest collections of modern art--died instantly. When the news of Barnes's violent end reached him, Henri Marceau, curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, had an awed comment: "How natural." Long before his death, Albert Barnes's fabulous collection of French and American modern art, his quarrels and correspondence (frequently unprintable), his dung-heap humor and mercurial temper had made him a legend. The son of a poverty-stricken Civil War veteran, he grew up in the verminous, squatter slums of Philadelphia, with a burning determination to get rich, and then to thumb his nose at the world. He did just that--and quickly.

Discovery in Heidelberg. After working his way through the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Barnes went to Heidelberg, earning his keep as a singer of Negro spirituals in a Bierstube. He and a brilliant young German student, Hermann Hille. worked out the formula for Argyrol, a mild silver protein solution for which doctors had many uses--to treat gonorrhea, including gonorrheal blindness, relieve severe nasal congestion. Argyrol, manufactured in a former flophouse in Philadelphia, was an instant and worldwide success, and Barnes was a million aire before he was 35. In 1928, with superb timing, Barnes sold out Argyrol for an estimated $4,000,000, not long before the discovery of antibiotics, which largely replaced it.

Guided by his lifelong friend, Artist William Glackens. Barnes began to buy up French impressionist paintings by the boatload. Although many of his early purchases were mistakes, he showed taste and a fine instinct for good investment. He was one of the discoverers of Modigliani. In one moment of sound judgment he bought 60 Soutines for $50 apiece--long before Soutine was well known. In his acquisitions, Barnes was uninhibited by ethical considerations. When his friend Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, offered to sell his valuable collection of impressionist paintings through Barnes, the collector repaid Stein's early kindnesses to him by reporting that he was unable to find a buyer, snapped up the lot himself for an undisclosed price, which Stein's friends bitterly described as a steal.

Behind the Wall. In time Barnes assembled the world's greatest collection of Matisses, the largest group of Cezannes outside the Louvre, and over $50 million worth of art by Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ben Shahn. When his collection outgrew his home and factory, Barnes built a marble temple to house it in suburban Merion, surrounded the place with ferocious police dogs and a ten-foot "spite wall." Ostensibly the collection was a public institution, entitled to tax exemption, but the tiny part of the public that saw it was limited entirely by Barnes's whims.

No one who differed with his views was admitted, and those who, once inside the gates, dared to criticize any aspect of any painting, were instantly thrown out. When Walter P. Chrysler Jr. wrote a humble, flattering letter asking permission to see the paintings, Barnes replied, masquerading as a fictitious secretary: "It is impossible at this time to show to Doctor Barnes your letter . . . because he gave strict orders not to be disturbed during his present efforts to break the world's record for goldfish swallowing."

The Iceman Cometh. Barnes quarreled with Bernard Berenson, Bertrand Russell. Jacques Lipchitz--the greater the adversary, the rougher the battle. His most venomous attacks, though, were reserved for women. Marriage, Barnes often said, was just a cheap and wholesome substitute for prostitution. He delighted in bullying female employees into tears, embarrassed one young secretary by dictating letters to her from his steam bath, interspersing his correspondence with commands to fetch towels and turn on the shower for him. When Edith Powell, art critic for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, had some mild reservations about the Soutines in a rare public exhibit of Barnes's paintings, he wrote her a thunderous letter stating that she could never be a true art critic until she had slept with the iceman. "Do you think there's something in the iceman idea?" she nervously asked a sister critic, and went off for a prolonged stay in Paris.

In telling the story of Albert Barnes, Biographer William Schack, a chemist and art critic, was severely hampered by the trustees of the Barnes Foundation, who, carrying on the founder's eccentric traditions, refused Schack all help (the collection is still closed to the general public). Without their cooperation, by painstaking research, hundreds of interviews and triangulation, Biographer Schack has written an absorbing and unmalicious study of a bizarre and probably brilliant man.

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