The Barnes Foundation 97 court with an eighteen-foot-high ceiling and twentytwo smaller rooms on two levels. The importance of African sculpture to Barnes and to the mission of the Barnes Foundation is clearly evident in the development of the exterior design of the foundation’s building in Merion. In his preliminary drawing, Cret had originally planned a classically inspired design for the vestibule. Barnes, however, decided that the entrance should feature African sculpture. To realize his vision, Barnes turned to J. H. (Joe) Dulles Allen, founder of the Enfi eld Pottery and Tile Works of Enfi eld, Pennsylvania. Allen had previously worked with Cret in 1908 on the building for the Pan American Union (now known as the Organization of American States) in Washington, D.C. There, Allen designed tiles representing South American cultures, with Aztec and Incan images. Barnes commissioned Allen to create a design for the vestibule with “Negro art” as the motif (fi g. 16).30 Working from photographs provided by Barnes, Allen created tile mosaics and low-relief terracotta panels based on individual works of African art from the foundation’s collection. The entrance (fi g. 15) was meant as a visual statement, supporting Barnes’ intention that, at the foundation, “Negro art will have a place among the great art manifestations of all times.”31 The prominence of these African-inspired motifs in the building’s design sent a powerful message to foundation visitors, who encountered African sculpture before any other art traditions represented in the collection. The deliberate siting of these African motifs within a classical vestibule also demonstrated a basic tenet of Barnes’ aesthetic beliefs, that is, through the restructuring of human form in the interest of design, African sculpture—the greatest example of three-dimensional form—liberated the Western tradition of representative art from the constraints of Western classicism.32 The debt of modernism to African art was thus acknowledged and celebrated. That Barnes intended such a reading of the entrance to his foundation is supported by his own writings, in which he compares the plastic achievements of classical and African statuary: Negro sculpture has enriched contemporary painting to a great extent. In the early periods of Greek sculpture fi gures were conceived as combinations of back, front, and side bas-reliefs. Design was too often encumbered by representation, so that the arrangement of masses—head, trunk, and limbs—which would have made the most effective ensemble, is rarely found. Literature, in other words, stood in the way of plastic form. With Negro sculpture, the literary motive is submerged in the artist’s distribution of masses in accord with the requirements of a truly sculptural design. . . . Freedom from the adventitious or meaningless gives Negro art a sculptural quality purer than that of the majority of the best Greek work or of Renaissance sculpture, which is Greek in another guise.33 As with the exterior design, Barnes paid especially close attention to the interior details, arranging his entire collection in “wall ensembles” that were designed to facilitate aesthetic appreciation.34 Throughout the galleries, he installed his paintings in groupings that provoked formal connections between works of disparate periods, countries, and styles. These ensembles changed over time, as Barnes rearranged paintings, introduced new works to the collection, and eventually added examples of other genres, such as furniture and decorative arts. The ensemble on the south wall of Room 22 (fi gs. 21a and b) can be considered representative of Barnes’ presentation strategy. The African sculpture, itself carefully and specifi cally arranged in accordance with Barnes’ aesthetic philosophy, is integrated with other works from the collection, an arrangement intended by Barnes to situate art within a historical continuum of great traditions. Barnes believed that all successful art forms expressed what he termed “basic human values” revealed through plastic means. His arrangements sought to demonstrate interrelationships among works of different cultures and periods by revealing these “universal attributes.” For Barnes, the particular signifi cance of African art within a historical continuum of form lay in its relationship to modernism. He encouraged a specifi c comparison between the representation of physiognomy in African sculpture and in modernist paintings by the Expressionist artist Amedeo Modigliani and the Cubist Pablo Picasso. The angular Bamana masks hung on the FIG. 19 (above): Entry sign fl anked by relief replicas of a Senufo fi gure. Photo © 2015 The Barnes Foundation. Photo: Rick Echelmeyer. FIG. 20 (below): Heddle pulley. Guro, Côte d’Ivoire. Late 19th–early 20th century. Wood. H: 16.5 cm. The Barnes Foundation, A176. Photo: Rick Echelmeyer, © 2015 The Barnes Foundation.
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