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June 30, 2008

Opinion: Defenders of an Arts Donor Are Right, Even Though Courts Don't Agree

The Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a group fighting to keep a museum in suburban Philadelphia, as its founder said he wanted in his will, continue their battle even as it seems their last-ditch efforts have been exhausted, writes Edward Sozanski, an art critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Friends’ petition to reopen legal hearings on the move was dismissed on a technicality, and it does not look like there are many more options to challenge the move.

But, Mr. Sozanski writes, “by filing their petition, they were representing the person who truly lacked standing, and whose historical and esthetic legacy is being threatened by a cabal of interests that appear not to appreciate its essential nature” — Albert Barnes, the donor who founded the museum known as the Barnes Foundation.

“The people who best understand and appreciate the significance of the Barnes collection and its educational program within the context of American cultural history have been ridiculed as cranks, crackpots, and cultists. And yet they have been mostly right all along,” writes Mr. Sozanski. “They still are, despite the fact that momentum for the move, generated by powerful political, economic, social, and cultural pressures, now appears too inevitable to overcome.”

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