I PILOTED MY DINKY BUREAU PONTIAC SLOWLY DOWN North Latches Lane, a wide side street framed by graceful oak trees and gated stone mansions in the heart of Philadelphia’s upper-crust Main Line. I checked my hand-scrawled directions and followed North Latches until I arrived at a black wrought-iron gate with a discreet sign that said THE BARNES FOUNDATION. I pulled to the guardhouse and rolled down my passenger window.
The guard carried a clipboard. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. Bob Wittman. I’m here for the class.”
He checked his list and waved me in.
I was early and when I found a parking spot I sat in the car for a few moments. I gripped the steering wheel and exhaled. It was a crisp fall afternoon, almost two years after the accident, and I was still awaiting trial on the manslaughter charges. Pinsky wasn’t worried about delays, because it gave us time to get to the bottom of the screwy blood-alcohol test. Every few weeks, the lawyer would mail me a stack of documents related to the case—a pleading, a medical record, a private investigator’s witness interview. I’d quickly scan whatever Pinsky sent me, but I found it incredibly stressful to read investigative records about myself. It was even harder to read the cold, clinical medical assessments about Denis. Sometimes, I would open the long legal envelope from Pinsky, stack the papers on the kitchen table, and just stare at them.
Thank God I was working. The FBI, following an internal investigation, cleared me and put me back on the street. For a while, I worked with the drug squad. We seized cash, cocaine, and Corvettes, and locked up some pretty dangerous guys. I backed up undercover agents who risked their lives in hotel-room stings. I ducked gunfire from a couple of thugs during my first shoot-out. But drug cases weren’t for me. I doubted we were making a big difference. Most people I met on the streets sold drugs because they couldn’t make it any other way; they did it to survive. The way I saw it, drugs were a social problem, not a law-enforcement problem. I asked to return to the property theft squad, and soon I was working art crime again with Bazin. It was good to be back.
Within a few months, Bazin and I recovered a set of two-foot-high tomes by eighteenth-century British wildlife artist Mark Catesby, books of sketches worth $250,000 and as impressive as any by John James Audubon. Rescuing such beautiful books meant so much more to me than busting some sad sack in a crack house. Bazin told me that if I was serious about making art crime a career, I should consider taking a class at the Barnes, an appointment-only museum in the suburbs I knew only by its reputation as a treasure trove of Impressionist art. I said OK and Bazin set it up.
As I got out of my car and headed to my first class that afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect.
I made my way to the intimidating grand entrance—six marble steps, four Doric columns, and two large wooden doors framed by a remarkable wall of rust-colored Enfield ceramic tiles, each centered with a relief of a tribal mask and crocodile by the Akan peoples of the Ivory Coast and Ghana. As I would soon learn, every arrangement at the Barnes carried meaning. The entrance theme represented the debt modern Western art owes tribal Africa.
I stepped inside, signed in at the security desk, and stepped into the first gallery, an outrageous room jammed with a collection of masterpieces unrivaled by any one room in any gallery in Europe. On the wall in front of me, surrounding a thirty-foot window, hung three works with a combined worth of half a billion dollars. To the right was Picasso’s heroic
A set of twelve folding chairs was arranged on a parquet floor in the center of the great room. Each student received writing paper, a pencil, and a copy of a thick book with a canary cover,
Our teacher, Harry Sefarbi, was an elderly gentleman with large round glasses and short wisps of white hair behind his ears. He was entering his fourth decade teaching art at the Barnes, having been trained by Barnes himself in a class just like mine in the late 1940s. Mr. Sefarbi, as he liked to be called, began with a little history lesson about Barnes.
Born to working-class parents in Philadelphia in 1872, Barnes excelled in public high school and had earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania by age twenty. He developed a wide range of interests, and became a student of the pragmatist movement, which later served as a foundation for his commonsense, everyman philosophy about art. Barnes studied chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Berlin, and returned with a German colleague at the turn of the century to open a lab in Philadelphia. Together, they invented a new antiseptic silver compound called Argyrol, a treatment for eye inflammation. The medicine dominated the medical market for the next forty years, making Barnes a millionaire many times over. He began to travel extensively and soon became an art collector, joining the legion of rich and cultured Americans, including Jules E. Mastbaum and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who sailed to Europe to snap up Old Master and Impressionist works at relatively bargain prices. By any measure, public or private, national or international, the number and quality of Impressionist and Modern paintings Barnes acquired was astonishing: 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 69 by Paul Cezanne, 59 by Henri Matisse, 46 by Pablo Picasso, 21 by Chaim Soutine, 18 by Henri Rousseau, 11 by Edgar Degas, 7 by Vincent van Gogh, and 4 by Claude Monet.
Barnes sought to bring his love of high art to others. He began with his employees, hanging valuable works in his factory and offering free art and philosophy classes. When he decided to build himself a new home on a twelve-acre plot just outside the city limits, he hired Paul Cret, the Frenchman who had laid out the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and designed Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, and instructed him to build an art gallery beside the house.
This would not be a museum, Barnes declared, but a laboratory for learning. Each of the twenty-three galleries would be a classroom, and each of the four walls in each gallery would be a blackboard with a lesson plan. It was central to Barnes’s plan to make art accessible and understandable to the masses.
Barnes believed that one could only come to appreciate and understand art by viewing it firsthand. Most Americans began at a disadvantage, he believed, because they held preconceived Western notions of art, likely learned (subconsciously or not) from ivory tower academics. The best way to understand art was to look at a painting, compare it to what you saw next to it, and come to your own conclusions. Which is why Barnes arranged his galleries like no other—masterpieces beside the mediocre, Old Masters next to Impressionists, African near European, tribal juxtaposed with Modernists. To emphasize shapes, he arranged three-dimensional objects—often simple metalwork and basic kitchen utensils beside paintings. On the floor along the walls, Barnes set up furniture, candles, teapots, and vases. He called these unorthodox and controversial layouts “wall ensembles,” and they were designed to help students see patterns, shapes, and trends you can’t teach in books. He wanted classes to be democratic, a place where free discussion was encouraged.
Study the overstuffed walls and discover two chairs that match the female derriere in a set of Renoirs, or an African mask that matches the shape of a man’s face in a Picasso painting. Notice a wooden trunk that mimics shapes in Prendergast and Gauguin paintings. Ponder the significance of a set of soup ladles straddling a series of Old Master paintings, or a pair of ox shoes hanging over a pair of Soutines. Chuckle when you realize the theme of a corner gallery is elbows.
Barnes always kept you guessing, thinking. He hung Matisse’s iconic
I got a kick out of Barnes’s life story, his egalitarian values and eclectic galleries, each filled with jaw- dropping art. But I dreaded my first homework assignment: the first few chapters of
