101 the 1940s. Promoted in numerous publications, public addresses, and photographic reproductions, Barnes’ African art collection achieved international prominence from the 1920s on and contributed to a developing canon of African art.37 The African collection itself continued to be infl uential. Curator James Johnson Sweeney, organizer of the groundbreaking 1935 exhibition African Negro Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was a frequent visitor to Merion. Though the foundation declined to lend works to the MoMA exhibition, Sweeney credited Barnes with determining his outlook on art in general, refl ected in the aesthetic approach to African sculpture that he articulated in the exhibition catalog.38 Even after Barnes’ death in 1951, the African art collection at the foundation was considered a model for a new generation of collectors that emerged in the postwar period. Recent years have brought major change to the foundation. In 2012, the Barnes Foundation collection opened to the public on Logan Square in downtown Philadelphia, a move that generated considerable commentary. The new campus, designed by architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, is prominently located on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In its new home, the collection has been reinstalled just as it was in Merion, in galleries that replicate the precise dimensions and ambience of the original spaces; the African sculpture remains on view on the second fl oor. The galleries themselves, however, are now enveloped in a larger structure. Absent from the new architectural design is the distinctive tiled entrance that so prominently—and purposefully— heralded the African art collection inside. Instead, the new entrance refl ects African design through an irregular pattern of stone panels on the building’s exterior, their arrangement inspired by the syncopated designs of kente textiles from Ghana (fi g. 25). Inside, kente weaving is also evoked in the fl oor mosaic at the entrance to the light court as well as in the interior frieze of the main gallery. These visual allusions to kente textiles, along with references to African metalwork in the large bronze gates that now greet the visitor at the entrance to the Collection Gallery, are meant to honor the African motifs incorporated into the design of Cret’s original building in Merion.39 In its new home, the Barnes Foundation collection— including African sculpture—is now seen by thousands more visitors each year than in its original location in Merion. Although many may come to the foundation for its extraordinary collection of modern French paintings, the African art collection was equally bold and pioneering and no less remarkable for what it reveals about individual taste and the emerging art market in the 1920s. The objects that Barnes amassed helped to shape the future of African art collecting in the United States. And more than simply a collector of art, Barnes was driven by a progressive vision of the social utility of what he collected. African sculpture was tied inextricably to an appreciation of the richness of “Negro” art in all its forms and a lifelong commitment to the advancement of African Americans. There is some irony in the fact that Barnes’ original focus on the visual elements of African sculpture, free of wall labels and text panels, may have hindered a full appreciation of the cultural and social complexities of the works in his collection. My work on this collection is intended to foster greater understanding of the objects that Albert Barnes passionately collected and their relevance to the mission that brought them together in the early decades of the twentieth century. NOTE ABOUT THIS TEXT This article is adapted from a much larger text that serves as an introduction to African Art in the Barnes Foundation: The Triumph of L’Art Nègre and the Harlem Renaissance (Skira Rizzoli, New York, in association with the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, 2015). My sincere thanks go to Jonathan Fogel for this edited version of the essay. That introductory text derives, in part, from the author’s unpublished dissertation, “Defi ning Taste: Albert Barnes and the Promotion of African Art in the United States During the 1920s,” (University of Maryland, College Park, 1998), which was supported by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and fellowships from the University of Maryland. The Barnes Foundation
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