their individual experiences into works of art. As a visual manifestation of individual experience, the work of art (or what Barnes called “form”) allowed viewers to share in that experience through their responses to it. Barnes’ method offered an approach to analyzing form that facilitated the viewer’s reconstruction of the experience as embodied in a work of art. The key to successful form, according to Barnes, was unity and variety: The overall composition should be united by a central theme to which all components contribute, and those components should be varied to maintain interest.27 For 95 FIG. 13 (above): Cover, Primitive Negro Sculpture, 1926. Photograph Collection, Barnes Foundation Archives. Photo © Barnes Foundation Archives. FIG. 14 (right): Seated couple for a diviner by the Master of the Barnes Baule Couple. Baule, Côte d’Ivoire. Late 19th century. Wood. H: 42.9 cm. The Barnes Foundation, A276. Photo: Rick Echelmeyer, © 2015 The Barnes Foundation. The Barnes Foundation Barnes prominently featured his African sculpture collection in promoting his developing plans for the foundation. On January 22, 1923, a preview exhibition highlighting the foundation’s “recent acquisitions” opened at the Paris gallery of Guillaume, who had just been named foreign secretary of the Barnes Foundation. In addition to paintings by European modernists for which Barnes was already well known, the exhibition included thirty-fi ve examples of African sculpture. These were described in the press release (drafted by Barnes) as “altogether a better and more representative collection of Negro art than is to be found in any museum not excepting the Congo Museum at Brussels, or the British Museum.”25 Well received in Paris, the exhibition made news back home. A headline in Philadelphia’s Public Ledger of February 5, 1923— above illustrations of paintings by modern artists Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani in Barnes’ collection— declared, “African Art Work for Merion Museum Is Most Comprehensive in the World” (fi g. 12). Why was African sculpture so important to Barnes’ vision for the foundation? If his contemporaries needed little excuse to bring together African sculpture and European modernist painting, Barnes’ interest in developing an African art collection included aesthetic pairings, but went further. By 1922, he had begun to see not only the artistic value of African sculpture in relation to his larger collection but also, even more important, its usefulness to the socially progressive mission of the Barnes Foundation. The years leading to the establishment of the foundation were important ones in Barnes’ intellectual growth. He studied the writings of naturalist philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952), whose texts on aesthetics provided a philosophical basis for Barnes’ theory of ideal form, along with the psychological studies of William James (1842–1910).26 Barnes was especially and profoundly infl uenced by the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey (1859–1952), with whom he developed a lifelong friendship after auditing a seminar taught by Dewey at Columbia University in 1917. Together, the work of Dewey, James, and Santayana offered a broad defi nition of aesthetic experience that Barnes drew upon as he formulated his own method of looking at and understanding art. That concept was eventually published in 1925 as The Art in Painting. Barnes’ method was based on an analysis of what he termed “plastic form”—how artists use the elements of color, line, light, and space to creatively translate
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