It’s an illuminating mental exercise to ponder: what if Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the pharmaceutical tycoon and physician who assembled an unmatched collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings in Philadelphia, was actually an installation artist before his time? This is the central conceit that inspired The Order of Things, now in its final days at the Barnes Foundation. Curated by Drexel University art history professor Martha Lucy, the exhibition comprises three distinct installations by Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, and Fred Wilson. It also includes a re-creation (with original objects) of the “Dutch Room” from the original Barnes site in Lower Merion as it looked from its inception, in 1925, until it was dismantled to make way for an ADA-mandated elevator in the 1990s.
The paintings that Barnes collected seem quite traditional today, though they were cutting edge at the time. Paired with his array of decorative arts and household objects and arranged in symmetrical tableaux just so, the overall effect is quaint. So it is counterintuitive, but actually quite brilliant, to reconsider Barnes’s artistic activities as a form of art in their own right. He didn’t paint or sculpt, fabricate brass andirons, build furniture, or throw pots by hand; he arranged things he loved according to a passionately specific vision, juxtaposing objects and works of art because they simply ‘worked’, the way we all do at home, and not according to the genre-driven, chronological system of display that has guided most art museums since their inception. Pennsylvania Dutch chests are adorned with American pottery or pewter objects, above which two nearly identical decorative door hinges are suspended on either side of a Cezanne portrait. The Barnes Foundation’s arrangements of art and objects invites visitors to take part in an immersive experience that only works in person, hovering somewhere between the hands-off etiquette of touring a museum and the tantalizing thrill of poking around someone’s house when they aren’t there. Barnes’s creation is not just the organization of his things, but a ritualized experience of viewing them together in a specific place.
