March 8, 2001 | Read Time: 12 minutes
Foundation-run gallery’s hopes hang on fund-raising strategy
In early February, the Barnes Foundation received its third $500,000
grant since spreading the word last summer that it would run out of money in six months and be forced to close its art-appreciation school and world-class gallery. The organization, beset by legal and financial troubles for more than a decade, said the gifts would help keep it afloat while it tried to turn around its fortunes.
Just days after the grant announcement, however, came a reminder of the distractions that hamper the Barnes’s efforts to find firm ground. A state court ordered the organization to prove it is complying with a 1997 ruling that limited social events held on the foundation’s property in a suburb of Philadelphia.
That sequence of events — announcing a sizable grant one day, then being dragged into a long-simmering legal dispute on another — is typical for the 79-year-old Barnes Foundation, which may be as well known for controversy as it is for its art.
The foundation, started by Albert C. Barnes, a physician, entrepreneur, and art collector, has teetered on the brink of collapse since 1998 when it spent the last of its endowment. Years of costly legal disputes, infighting among the foundation’s trustees, and limitations put on the Barnes both by its founder and by local authorities had drained the institution of money and energy. Along the way, the foundation had offended neighbors, clashed with Lower Merion Township officials, stirred up racial disputes, irritated the art world, and angered alumni of its art-education program.
But Kimberly Camp, an artist and museum administrator who became the Barnes’s executive director three years ago, says the foundation is on a new course.
“My strategy now is to stop the bleeding,” she says, adding that the Barnes hopes to repair its tattered relationships.
It also intends to rebuild its own financial house. Under a strategic plan unveiled last fall, the foundation hopes to raise $34-million in the next five years, and another $50-million after that for an endowment. The initial money would be used for operations — about $3-million a year — and would cover big, one-time projects, such as the creation of a “living history” museum at a Barnes-owned 18th-century farmhouse. It will also pay for a complete inventory of the thousands of paintings and objects in the Barnes collection.
The collection, which Ms. Camp estimates could be worth as much as $20-billion, includes art spanning thousands of years and from around the world. Among the holdings are paintings by Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso, Greek and Roman antiquities, African sculptures, and Native American weavings.
Foundation Grants
The J. Paul Getty Trust, in Los Angeles, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, each awarded $500,000 to the Barnes late last year, the Pew gift earmarked for the inventory project. Last month’s gift — $500,000 over the next five years — came from the Wilmington Trust Company, a Delaware bank that has also promised to provide the Barnes with financial and fund-raising advice. It intends, for example, to help the foundation set up a program to encourage and accept planned gifts, such as charitable trusts.
Barnes officials allow that the fund-raising goal — a total of nearly $85-million over the next 10 years or so — is ambitious, especially for an organization that raised little more than $6,000 just three years ago. But they are encouraged by the grants they have so far received, and hint that at least a few more sizable foundation gifts are on the way. In addition, the Barnes is starting efforts to attract individual donors, including the thousands of alumni of the foundation’s art-education classes.
This month, the foundation is scheduled to open the Barnes Society, a separate fund-raising arm intended to woo donors through membership programs, special events, and direct-mail campaigns, says Anthony C. Ng, the foundation’s first-ever development director, hired in 1999.
The Barnes is also beefing up its attempts to attract corporate money. This year, the foundation expects that at least 10 companies will contribute $50,000 or more, with some companies also paying for the cost of fund-raising events.
Along with counting on more contributions, the Barnes intends to increase its earned revenue, such as by adding classes, selling gift items via the Internet, and charging higher fees to reproduce images based on works in the Barnes’s collection.
In many ways, when it comes to raising money, says Ms. Camp, the Barnes is starting from scratch. “We have the dynamics of a 79-year-old start-up organization,” says Ms. Camp, whose office is furnished with a hodgepodge of pieces from the Barnes’s extensive collection, including an 18th-century trestle table, a ceramic lamp painted by the artist and moviemaker Jean Renoir, and a painting by the 20th-century French Expressionist Chaim Soutine.
Art for the Common Man
Mr. Barnes established the foundation in 1922 to promote his notion that the life and ideas of what he called the common man could be transformed by access to and appreciation of art. He filled the 23 small rooms in his gallery with paintings and objects grouped in a way that the untrained eye might identify and appreciate the works’ symmetry, color, or light. He would hang a Picasso next to a decorative metal door hinge, for example, or a Cézanne above an Amish blanket chest.
Mr. Barnes, who was born into a working-class family in 1872 and amassed his fortune inventing and manufacturing an antiseptic, flouted conventions of his day in other ways, too. A white man, he advocated equal rights for blacks.
The trust he created for the foundation, which went into effect at his death in 1951, reflects his unwavering desire that the collection be used to teach his vision of art and education. But the document is also rigid on other issues — issues that have made it tricky at times for the Barnes to raise cash in ordinary ways. Mr. Barnes instructed, for example, that admission to the gallery was to be free for the “plain people,” that no works could leave the gallery, and that the foundation’s endowment — he left $10-million — be invested in government and railroad bonds only. Those restrictions, and others, have been dropped, loosened, or temporarily lifted by the state court that oversees charitable trusts, but Mr. Barnes’s instructions still limit the foundation in many ways.
A copy of the original trust and the court’s interpretations of it — a document nearly two inches thick — sits on a desk in the middle of Ms. Camp’s office because she consults it so often. The foundation intends to ask the court for at least one more interpretation: whether the Barnes can lend or put on tour pieces of the collection that are not in the gallery, but in storage.
The trust, says Ms. Camp, says that the collection is meant to be used for educational purposes. But, she says, since the trust also bars the foundation from adding to or changing the works that are displayed in the gallery, it appears that sharing with other institutions the thousands of items in storage — including such valuable works as etchings by Rembrandt — would meet Mr. Barnes’s desire. Being able to lend such works, Ms. Camp adds, would also earn the foundation some money and help improve its relations with other arts organizations.
Anger Over Sale Plan
About 10 years ago, the Barnes damaged its image in the arts world and raised the ire of many of its former students when foundation officials raised the possibility of selling works to earn money for much-needed repairs to the gallery. Selling works, its critics said, would be irresponsible and would fly in the face of Mr. Barnes’s wish to keep his collection intact.
The idea of selling paintings never got very far, but foundation officials did ask for and receive court approval for the first-ever tour of some of the collection’s works. A lawsuit by former students to stop the tour was unsuccessful, and in 1993, the show of French Impressionist paintings was an international hit, raising $17-million for the Barnes.
But the Barnes’s new popularity triggered even more clashes. Some critics said that the growing number of visitors to the gallery, attracted by the show, was not in keeping with Mr. Barnes’s desire to preserve his collection primarily for educational purposes, not as a museum.
Residents who live near the foundation — a 13-acre property that includes the gallery, Mr. Barnes’s former residence that is now foundation offices, and an arboretum — were also dismayed by the many visitors. They complained about traffic and noise, and they fought back by using zoning regulations to restrict, among other things, the number of gallery visitors each week: no more than 1,200.
Even with such restrictions, Robert Marmon, a management consultant who lives across the street from the Barnes, says the foundation does not act like a good neighbor.
“They continue to press the envelope and believe that the same rules we all live by don’t apply to them because they have a world-class art collection,” he says.
Last month, he protested to a state court, saying that the Barnes had held social events on its property last year in violation of a 1997 court order limiting such affairs. He complained that the events were social evenings for pharmaceutical companies, not fund-raising parties for the foundation. The 1997 order restricted on-site social events to those that directly benefit the foundation.
Ms. Camp declined to comment specifically on the case. She did say, however, that Pennsylvania’s Superior Court had earlier overturned the 1997 lower-court order.
The foundation remains haunted by other conflicts, too.
Some Merion residents, including Mr. Marmon, are still bothered by a civil-rights lawsuit filed against them and the township by Richard H. Glanton, a former Barnes trustee who spearheaded the 1993 tour. Mr. Glanton, who is black, claimed that racism was behind the opposition he faced — charges he later retracted. The case was settled with the township. A federal appeals court has yet to rule on whether the foundation owes legal fees to the residents’ lawyers.
While the disruptive racial tensions have passed, the issue of race still resonates at the Barnes. As prescribed in the foundation’s trust, Lincoln University, a nearby historically black institution, nominates four of the Barnes’s five board members. Like Ms. Camp, four of the trustees are black.
“Here is an art organization that has one of the best collections in the world — predominantly, in sheer numbers, European art — that is, for all intents and purposes, a black organization,” Ms. Camp says.
That fact, she adds, has surfaced at times in not-so-subtle ways. Once, a potential donor told her that the Barnes would probably have greater fund-raising success if it had more white board members.
Ms. Camp says such perceptions will change as the Barnes continues to put distance between itself and its past.
Already, she says, the Barnes has improved relations with other foundations and arts institutions around the country. Even officials from the Philadelphia Museum of Art — whom, the story goes, Mr. Barnes once banned from visiting his gallery because he felt snubbed by the art establishment — are pitching in to help the Barnes with an assessment of its collection. The Getty Trust is lending staff members to work at the foundation in such areas as painting conservation and gallery security.
Barry Munitz, Getty’s president, says the trust’s gift was meant to give the foundation not only an infusion of cash, but also expertise and credibility.
“We knew that our support might help restore confidence with other funders and potential audiences,” Mr. Munitz says. “If we help tell their story, we’ll find more and more supporters.”
Money Not the Answer
For former student Nicholas Tinari, however, looking for more and more money is not the answer. He worries that the foundation’s fund-raising and expansion plans are too lofty. He says that the plans, such as to add the farmhouse museum, stray from the institution’s art-education mission, and are too expensive.
“It seems they are molding the place just to attract donors,” says Mr. Tinari, who joined with other former students in 1994 to create a nonprofit group called Barnes Watch. “I would have liked to have seen a much more focused effort to raise money for basic operations.”
Such sentiments don’t deter Ms. Camp.
“This organization is an international treasure that has one of the most significant collections in the world, and now it is cash-strapped,” she says. “We want to take responsibility for ourselves, and we will use our resources to do that.”
History and purpose: Founded in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, a physician, entrepreneur, and art collector, to promote his vision that art can transform the lives and ideas of the working class. The foundation, which holds one of the world’s most-valuable private art collections, runs classes in its gallery and the arboretum situated on its 13-acre property. The gallery and grounds are also open to the public on a limited basis.
Finances and source of funds: The Barnes nearly ran out of money late last year after it spent the last of the $10-million endowment left to it by Mr. Barnes at his death in 1951. Most of the $17-million the foundation earned from a 1993 international tour of some of its paintings was used to renovate its gallery. The balance — $5-million — is reserved exclusively for gallery maintenance in a court-restricted fund. Last fall, the foundation started a fund-raising campaign to collect $34-million over the next five years, and $50-million after that for endowment funds. So far, it has received three $500,000 grants. Its operating budget this year is $3-million.
Key officials: Kimberly Camp, executive director and chief executive officer; Bernard C. Watson, president of the governing board.
Address: 300 North Latch’s Lane, Merion, Pa. 19066-1759; (610) 667-0290.
Web site: http://www.barnesfoundation.org
