Leseprobe

116 The Barnes Foundation is both famous and infamous for the way in which it displays the works of art collected by Albert C. Barnes. The displays were designed by Barnes himself and for some commentators, they express the collector’s idiosyncrasy and amount to great art being held hostage to a richman’s whims. 1 For others and especially for Barnes’s collaborators, his disciples, and the students of the Foundation, they are the instruments of a veritable school of seeing. 2 Another controversy surrounding the Barnes Foundation concerns its location. When it decided tomove from suburbanMerion, where Barnes had established it, to downtown Philadelphia, opposition resulted in the courts authorizing themove only on condition that the displays be recreated in the new building, which itself replicates the dimensions and disposition of the rooms. A positive outcome of this turn of events is that a greater amount of scholarly and public attention has since been devoted to the displays as such. Masterworks , the catalogue written by Judith F. Dolkart andMartha Lucy for the reopening of the Foundation in 2012, and the didactic apparatus included in the new presentation explicitly discuss Barnes’s ensembles, the mural compositions that he arranged and rearranged until 1951, when his death and his testament made them final. 3 Signs on the Wall A particularly odd aspect of Barnes’s displays is the inclusion of ironwork on the walls alongside the paintings. It never fails to strike visitors but remained unstudied until very recently. 4 Yet in relation to the question of display and the agency of objects, this aspect DARIO GAMBONI Ready-Made Eye-Opener: Models, Functions and Meanings of the Ironwork in Albert C. Barnes’s Displays 1 See for example: Greenfeld, The Devil and Dr. Barnes , 1987; Anderson, Art Held Hostage , 2003.  2 See: Meyers, Art, Education, & African-American Culture , 2004.  3 See: Dolkart and Lucy, The Barnes Founda- tion, Masterworks , 2012.  4 See: Wattenmaker, ‘In the Light of New Material,’ 2015. In her preface to this catalogue, Judith Dolkart estimates the number of objects concerned at ‘nearly nine hundred’ and lists them as ‘hinges and hasps, locks and keys, door knockers and latches, dough cutters and surgical saws’ (Cathelineau and Dolkart (eds.), Strength and Splendor , 2015, p. 7). Wattenmaker considers that it is ‘one