Leseprobe

26 educational tool. He displayed his collection along lines directly inspired by the philoso- pher John Dewey, disregarding art historical considerations. Dewey dedicated his major aesthetic statement, Art As Experience (1934) to Barnes. 7 This means that the dense hang intermingles major European paintings by artists such as Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir, Seurat, and Modigliani with New Mexican devotional paintings of saints ( retablos ), sub-Saharan African carvings, Pennsylvania Dutch painted chests, and European ironwork, such as keys and door hinges. As theWebsite states: ‘The ensembles created by Dr. Barnes combine art and craft, cosmopolitan and provincial styles, and objects from across peri- ods and cultures.’ 8 This arrangement has long frustratedmany conventional art historians who have longed to ‘liberate’ the great impressionist and post-impressionist paintings from what they dismiss as their surrounding ‘distractions.’ Yet such are the terms of Barnes’s will that the foundation’s new building in Philadelphia replicates the original galleries in Lower Merion almost precisely, and repeats its philosophically inspired hang in accordance with formal principles of line, space, light, and colour to demonstrate the supposed universalism of human expression. 9 To suggest briefly that display radically affects how people apprehend things, let us focus not on a Seurat or a Cézanne, but on a New Mexican retablo of the kind sometimes characterized as ‘folk art.’ Many are dispersed among the other works in several of the galleries. Two among them are devotional images by Pedro Antonio Fresquís, who died in 1831: The Virgin as Our Lady of Protection and Saint Rita of Cascia . They flank an ensemble dominated by four paintings by Henri Rousseau, the most prominent being WomanWalk- ing in an Exotic Forest (1905). The women in these three paintings may be approximately the same size and similarly oriented towards the viewer, but the two retablos have nothing further to do with the works of the self-taught French post-impressionist. We can com- pare this idiosyncratic use of such paintings with another use, still current, to be found in NewMexico churches, such as Nuestra Señora del Rosario (Our Lady of the Rosary), Las Truchas. Devotional paintings by Pedro Antonio Fresquís dominate its interior. 10 The display of devotional images in this interior is no less contrived and purposeful than that in the Barnes Foundation. It would be a mistake to claim—as is often done—that the church is the proper context, whereas the museum is not. Rather, the museum proposes a recontextualization—in this instance perfectly ethically permissible—though such redeployments of culturally sensitive materials are not invariably legitimate. Certain northwest Pacific coast peoples’ masks, for instance, or RussianOrthodox icons, may not be appropriate items for museum collections given their inalienable sacred status. Let us consider other instances of recontextualization. Some involve the use of repro- duction, such as the perfectly legitimate pairing of reproductions of the Vermeer Geographer 7 Dewey, Art As Experience , 1934. He had earlier collaborated with Barnes to produce Dewey and Barnes et al., Art and Education , 1947 [1929].  8 See: https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/collection (last accessed 23 October 2017).  9 Gaskell, ‘The Museum of Big Ideas,’ 2016, pp. 70–71.  10 See: Hayman,