Doors Ajar

"No psychologist will deny," Millionaire Albert Coombs Barnes of Merion, Pa. once wrote in a momentary surge of mellowness, "that to enjoy most deeply the things we like, we must share them with others.'' Before he was killed in an automobile wreck in 1951, Barnes was already a legend for practicing exactly the opposite of what he preached. He owned a $100 million art collection, one of the finest in the world--and only a comparative handful of people ever got to see it.

Soutines at $50. Barnes was a strange and brilliant man who rose out of a South Philadelphia slum to become a chemist and make a fortune out of an antiseptic called Argyrol. But his chief passion in life was art. He read everything he could find on the subject. He bought Modiglianis when the artist was still an unknown, once scooped up 60 Soutines at an average of $50 apiece, acquired some of the world s finest Matisses and assembled the most impressive group of Cezannes outside the Louvre. His collection was to include everyone from Tintoretto to El Greco to Picasso. In 1923 Barnes lent some of his modern prizes to an exhibition in Philadelphia. When the critics and Main Liners howled in derision, Barnes decided to keep the gates closed to the general public.

When Alexander Woollcott asked to see the collection, Barnes sent him a nasty note signed with the name of his dog (which was, impressively enough, Fidele de Port-Manech). Walter P. Chrysler Jr. got a "rejection slip" signed by a fictitious secretary named Kelly. Though the young James Johnson Sweeney managed to make the grade, the Modern Museum's Alfred Barr Jr. was rudely rebuffed by Barnes, and Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum never got in at all. Members of the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were banned as being "habitually in a state of profound alcoholic intoxication." A lady critic from Philadelphia was told that she would never understand art until she had an affair with an iceman; and Critic Emily Genauer, now of the New York Herald Tribune, was greeted in an anteroom by a flunky with two nasty dogs and told to go home.

Two a Week. The tragedy was that Barnes himself had a great deal to teach a much wider audience than the few, carefully screened students he admitted to his presence. Along with his friend Violette de Mazia, he wrote some of the most widely discussed art criticism of his time, boasted as good friends such men as John Dewey and Painter William Glackens. Yet to the time of his death at 79, he insisted that his foundation was not running a public gallery but was an educational institution with a "program for systematic work." Four separate taxpayers' suits failed to open the doors.

Last week, as a result of a long fight by Pennsylvania's attorney general, the trustees of the tax-exempt Barnes Foundation finally relented--though not too much. If all goes according to plan, the collection will be open to a maximum of 200 people a day two times a week on a first-come first-served basis. And the foundation's unlisted telephone number must now be put in the book.

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