Transforming a Museum for a New Era

NEW ON THE JOB

On Derek Gillman’s first visit to the Barnes Foundation, in suburban Philadelphia, he found the art collection there — featuring a trove of Impressionist and modern masterpieces, including a specially commissioned 47-foot-long mural by Henri Matisse — “endlessly breathtaking” and “intriguing.”

He was also stunned by another aspect of the gallery: its poor lighting.

Now, seven years later, Mr. Gillman is doing something about it. Starting next month as the Barnes’s new executive director, Mr. Gillman will oversee the institution’s move to a new building in downtown Philadelphia.

There, he says, the artwork will be displayed under much improved lighting conditions.

“We’ll be fixing that,” says Mr. Gillman, who has served as chief executive of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia, since 1999, and before that, helped run museums in Australia and Great Britain.

Much about the Barnes, in fact, needs tending. The institution, founded 84 years ago by Albert C. Barnes, a Philadelphia physician, entrepreneur, and art collector, is just emerging from more than two decades of legal disputes and financial troubles that have threatened its very existence.

At the heart of the discord were limits put on the operation of the foundation’s art-appreciation school and gallery, both by Dr. Barnes and by local authorities. The foundation’s management, board members, former art students, and neighbors have clashed repeatedly over their differing interpretations of the legacy of Dr. Barnes, who died in 1951.

Several costly legal battles brought the foundation near bankruptcy in 1998, when it spent the last of its endowment. The Barnes was saved from collapse a few years later only with a last-minute infusion of cash from local foundations.

Since then, more foundation support — especially from three local grant makers, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lenfest and Annenberg Foundations — and a plan to move the foundation’s gallery and classes to a higher-profile location in the city, have set the Barnes on a new course.

A pivotal court decision last year cleared the way for the foundation to make the move even though Dr. Barnes had stated in legal documents that he wanted his collection to be kept at the 13-acre estate he built in Merion, a Philadelphia suburb.

Barnes officials have promised to recreate in the new location the unusual way Dr. Barnes chose to display his collection — grouping seemingly disparate pieces of art according to color or design, for example, rather than by artist or time period, as is the convention.

Despite those plans, critics of the court decision contend a move would violate the founder’s wishes. Supporters maintain, however, that moving to a more-accessible location that will draw more visitors conforms to Dr. Barnes’s desire for his collection to gain greater exposure, and will alleviate the foundation’s financial problems.

The Barnes has so far raised $150-million to pay for the move, and it recently announced that it hopes to attract at least $50-million more for an endowment that would help cover annual expenses.

Tops on his to-do list at the Barnes, he says, is securing the foundation’s finances, hiring an architect, and assessing staffing needs.

He also plans to spend time in the foundation’s galleries, and, on the weekends, get back to creating some art of his own. Mr. Gillman, 53, has been busy writing a book about art culture, but now that it has been published, he says, he’ll have more time for his ink and pencil drawings.

“Many people who end up running art schools or many people in museums, they are people like myself who thought at one point of becoming an artist, but didn’t,” he says.

Mr. Gillman, a native of England, takes over from Kimberly Camp, who announced her resignation last year, after leading the Barnes for seven years. In an interview, he talked about the institution:

What is your vision for the new facility?

To go back as much as possible to the founding vision, which was the combined vision of Dr. Barnes and [the philosopher] John Dewey, of helping people appreciate art in a particularly deep way. Barnes wanted people to have a rich experience with his collection. He didn’t like the idea of the casual visitor who just looked at something and then passed on.

He and Dewey, who was his mentor, had another important agenda: to be egalitarian. Barnes wanted the art to be there for people who were, as he put it, ordinary folk, the working man. It was an anti-elitist vision, but it had contradictions built into it because it is hard for people who are working all day to spend time absorbing art. Barnes wrestled with that.

How do you plan to handle the opposition to the move?

The best way to do it is to simply say what is going to be there, and what we are trying to achieve, and why we are trying to achieve it.

I love the idea that art ought to be put in the service of promoting democracy and social justice. It’s a hard one to argue against. But you know this from politics: Sometimes it is very hard to move people who have strong agendas. They decide that this is how it should be and that’s it. It’s much more likely that one will bring over people who become compelled by the original vision of the foundation, who like the idea of rediscovering the vision for social justice and making art a part of people’s lives.

What do you think about the court decision that allowed the Barnes Foundation to move its collection?

You mean, what do I think of permissions to deviate, or depart, from [Dr. Barnes’s instructions]? Brits probably have slightly different views than Americans about such decisions because British judges, British courts tend to have less concern about the dead hand than Americans do.

It may be that Britain is an old country and there have been more of these cases. English judges don’t like people to rule from the grave. Americans have a greater predilection to say the will is sacred.

That said, one has to accept that such court decisions are a fact of legal life because conditions change, and the whole point of such decisions is you are trying to maintain the intention or the spirit of the bequest.

What needs to be done to burnish the foundation’s image after so many difficult years?

We need to bring some stability into the operation, which it is beginning to have.

We need to continue to professionalize. We mustn’t mess about in terms of the process of getting the move for too long. We need to appoint an architect. We need to get the planning under way.

We need to get on with it, because there’s been enough uncertainty and indecision in the past that hasn’t helped that sense of drift. And most importantly, you have to make clear again what the Barnes is for and what it was designed to achieve and why we are going to achieve it on the parkway, and why that is not only a very good thing for Philadelphia, but also a very good thing for America.

The Deweyian idea was most concerned about American democracy, and the Barnes was about how to create an institution that helps move the country forward.

ABOUT DEREK GILLMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE BARNES FOUNDATION, PHILADELPHIA

Education: As an undergraduate at Oxford University, in England, Mr. Gillman studied philosophy and psychology, and later moved on to Chinese studies, with a specialization in Chinese art. He holds a master of laws degree from the University of East Anglia, also in the United Kingdom.

Previous employment: Mr. Gillman began his career in the art world as a specialist in Chinese art at Christie’s auction house, in London. His museum career started in 1981 at the British Museum, where he was a curator. He then directed the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, at the University of East Anglia, later moving to Australia to serve as deputy director of the National Gallery of Victoria, in Melbourne. In 1999, he joined the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as executive director and provost, and two years later became the institution’s chief executive officer.

What he has written: After three years of working nights and weekends, Mr. Gillman’s book The Idea of Cultural Heritage was published in August. In it, he examines how value is assigned to cultural activities and objects; he analyzes the competing claims that works of art belong either to a particular people and place or to everyone in the world.

Favorite work of art at the Barnes: Paul Cézanne’s “Card Players.”