Ellen Harvey has caught a ball thrown across a half century by Albert C. Barnes and run with it. “Metal Painting” is a site-specific mural installation commissioned by the Barnes in which the British-born, Brooklyn-based artist engages one of the most memorable of the founder’s many curatorial idiosyncrasies, his placement of historic metalwork amidst his amassed painting collection. Dr. Barnes once told Stuart Davis that each anonymous maker of the locks, keys, door ornaments, jewels and other wrought iron objects that obsessed him was “just as authentic an artist as Titian, Renoir or Cézanne.” Harvey’s mural accompanies a show of stunning examples of metalwork, “Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron From The Museé Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen.” The French loans are generally more rarefied and ornate examples than Barnes’s humbler, more robust, essentially modernist tastes in this area. Harvey has painted a portrait, in silhouette, of each metal piece hanging in the Barnes, and they are magnetized to a metal support, with gaps deliberately left to show that this is so. Perhaps Harvey is taking a gentle stab at Dr. Barnes’s legacy alongside her homage to his taste by making manifest that the installation is flexible.

“Ellen Harvey: Metal Painting” and “Strength and Splendor” on view through January 4, 2016 at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

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September 19, 2015 to January 4, 2016
2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, 215-278-7000

I always love going to Philadelphia because I perceive this town as a sort of capital of French art. With the Rodin Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation, it is a place where you can really feel the roots of French Modernism

And Philadelphia is also a great center of ornamental ironwork. As a young sculptor visiting from France in the 1970s, I made a special trip to visit the greatest workshop in America for blacksmithing, founded by Samuel Yellin (1885-1940). I did my first sculptures in America there thanks to the hospitality of his son, Harvey. Some marvelous ornamental ironworks by Samuel Yellin are in the collection of the PMA.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover the collection of forged metal work hanging on the walls around the paintings on my first visit to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa. I remember that for most visitors, including art historians, this looked extremely eccentric. These ornamental works show a richness of execution, invention, and beauty. It should be admitted that he French themselves would have been as nonplussed to regard these metal ironworks around a collection of painting masterpieces. French tradition establishes a hierarchy where paintings and sculptures are part of the major arts and anything else gets gathered into a secondary category of decorative arts.

As a sculptor in forged iron, it is crucial for me to see the roots and traditions of my work. We tend to say that iron emerged in Western sculpture in the 20^th century thanks to the great sculptor Julio Gonzalez. We could also add the names of Gargallo, Calder, Picasso, and Smith. The capacity of metal to be worked in extremely linear ways allows sculpture to become free of its mass and for emptiness to be exploited as solid volume. Additionally, the use of wire was a big breakthrough for freeing sculpture. Suddenly, we could draw: we could delineate the void.

But such a perception is extremely ethnocentric and limited to the history of sculpture defined by a western conception.

Furthermore, ornamental ironwork has always been a very linear calligraphic way to create. Judith Dolkart, the former Director of the Barnes and co-curator of Strength and Splendor, had this conception of ironwork in the back of her mind when she conceived of the show, she told me. The idea of seeing a union of their own and the Barnes ironwork collections was warmly received at the Musée de Rouen. In the selection from Rouen’s Le Secq des Tournelles collection we can appreciate some pieces done in repoussé sheets of metal, seen fully in the round. For instance, there are extraordinarily beautiful roosters in metal located on the roof of churches. There are superb masterpieces of andiron (firedogs) that can be perceived today as sculptures. In French tradition, the major arts have their statute mostly because they’re non-functional. I do appreciate enormously the fact that a culture supports non-functionality in art. It stimulates the artist to be free and to transgress. But I regret that we would deny and not perceive some major creativity in some functional and decorative works like those ornamental ironworks and in ivory carving.

I really admire Albert Barnes for arranging painting, furniture, and ornamental ironworks all on the same level of importance in very creative ensembles. It gave him the freedom to collect masterpieces of Native American Indian carpets, jewels, and extraordinary potteries. In his installations we can perceive a world of signs, a musical suit in which the decontextualized functional objects resonate with the pictorial signs composed in each painting. This emerges forcefully, for instance, in the juxtaposition of Matisse’s Music Lesson and the ornamental work Barnes chose to place around the painting. The metal forged balcony in the painting dialogues with the painted curves of the piano and the metal motives on the walls. Barnes installs the arts with a sense of symmetry belonging to the classical tradition as we see with the Medici at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. With the addition of the metal works, he develops a sense of humor that was never shown before. In my opinion, the collection reveals a taste of Barnes for the female body and the arabesque. The whole collection emits a tension between a world of verticality and a love of incarnated curves.

I do not always know for sure what used to be the function of some of those metal works. I don’t really care because they free me and allow me to enjoy the extreme beauty, the powerful inventiveness of those great artists of the past. They’re more than craftsmen because they don’t repeat and they’re innovating through their execution.

The opportunity at the Barnes to compare two great but distinct collections of wrought iron works revealed the different spirits of each collector. The very beautifully selected collection of Le Secq des Tournelles presents an accumulation of functional objects whereas Barnes’s intention, as I have said, in decontextualizing those objects, is essentially a kind of musical semiology. We can also savor the way that pieces in Le Secq des Tournelles kept the blackness of the metal patina and how Albert Barnes took it off. These are two different approaches of appreciating these works. The Barnes Foundation is really a place that breaks hierarchy through a powerful sense of humor and joie de vivre.

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May 16 to August 3, 2015
2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy (at North 20th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 278 7200

The Barnes Foundation’s recent exhibit, “The Order of Things,” in their contemporary gallery, is at once dynamic and problematic. Intended to relate to Barnes’s enigmatic approach to exhibition design, fantasy and appropriation abound. Installations by three renowned artists — Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson — mine varying aspects of Barnes’s approach to installing artifacts and paintings. His system for exhibiting work was intended to be carried into in perpetuity and is mimicked in the work of the artists selected for this project.

Pfaff created a sprawling installation in the main space of the gallery. Center stage, this work honors Laura Barnes’s arboretum, which she cultivated alongside Albert Barnes and a cluster of specialists. The arboretum is an extensive garden of hundreds of rare trees and flora from around the world, still flourishing at the Foundation’s original museum in Lower Merion. Pfaff’s Scene I: The Garden, Enter Mrs. Barnes (2015) is a dazzling psychedelic display of photos of the arboretum and Henri Rousseau’s paintings gone awry. Perhaps an abject backdrop to Alice in Wonderland, the installation is replete with digital prints on plastic and vinyl, poured pigmented foam, natural wood and steel. Swirling renditions of a simulated pond’s edge and bank are constructed using wood and liquid foam. Repeated in several key locations within the installation, these frothy sea-green islands create a sense of boundaries and depth. Punctuating this expansive landscape are leafy steel structures, painted white.

Incongruent elements abound, with white steel chandeliers overhead and neon lights that are, disappointingly, never illuminated. An installation of plastic wallpaper with distorted floral patterns is strategically placed on the gallery’s southern wall. Plastic floor panels extend across the space and were based on Henri Rousseau’s paintings; they serve as a conceptual bridge between Pfaff’s installation and the collection. Other connections include an area over the eastern wall of the gallery that alludes to the framed lunettes of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910).

Laura Barnes was integrally involved in the development of the arboretum at the original Barnes Foundation. She cultivated an expansive array of flora from areas within the states and other countries. Laura Barnes selected blooming plants that were considered difficult to grow in the Pennsylvania’s blistery winters of Pennsylvania such as southern magnolias, etc. Her approach to constructing the Foundation’s gardens paralleled the landscapes found in the work of Calude Monet, Paul Cezanne and other landscape paintings in the collection. Pfaff’s title channels the contribution of Laura Barnes to the development of the Foundation’s botanical gardens.

Fred Wilson’s rooms, located to the right of the entrance, are conglomerates of staged tableaux, some more successful than others. At the entrance three scenes are created in a sparse, modernist fashion, using furniture borrowed from the Merion offices, desks chairs and even an early Dell computer. The interior rooms hold greater intrigue; these spaces represent a sculptural approach to furniture, art objects and glass works from the collection. While visitors walk through these spaces, African drums and chanting waft through the air. Wilson inserts the African presence through sound rather than including it materially in his installation. Perhaps using African art directly would have been too obvious a move for Wilson, based on his past installations at museums throughout America. The soundscape is a compilation tape. Wilson has chosen not to disclose its origin or name the people recorded. Nameless voices surround the viewer — the ubiquitous presence of Africa is in our midst.

In his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson uses the metaphor that if aliens descended on earth and sampled the music produced around the world, overridingly the music from Africa and the African Diaspora would be the most prevalent. Wilson has reconstructed this reality for us in Trace. However, it is interesting that he has chosen not to name the African cultural groups represented in his compilation tape. Is this again an example of a Western intervention that includes the artistry of Africa and deciding to render it anonymous?

Mark Dion’s installation is delightful, yet foreboding, in its inclusion of guns, knives and the like; however, would these be included in the collection of a naturalist? These emblems are contrasted with butterfly nets, fishnets, satchels and garden tools. Dion’s The Incomplete Naturalist is a tour de force in symmetry. According to the curator, Dion’s use of symmetry is mimetic of Barnes’s aesthetic. Like an archeologist, he puts everything in order and builds relationships to construct a narrative.

Overall, the Order of Things was a fascinating array of dissonant styles of installation art brought together. Therein lies its intrigue. Each artist serves as an individual conduit into the mind of Albert and Laura Barnes.

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