The late collector Albert C. Barnes is as legendary for his holdings of Renoirs, Cézannes, and Matisses as he is for the wild way he displayed them in his suburban Philadelphia mansion. Barnes, one of the 20th century’s most prominent American connoisseurs of art and antiques, famously ignored traditional organizing principles—like medium, period, and style—in favor of highly formal yet unlikely juxtapositions. “So, you’ll get an antique metal spatula next to a Modigliani painting next to a Pennsylvania German blanket chest,” says Martha Lucy, a consulting curator to the Barnes Foundation and a professor of art history at Drexel University.
