Leseprobe

119 hinges, door handles, locks, etc.’; and on 5 March 1948, he wrote to the antiques dealer and scholar Charles F. Montgomery that he intended to prove his case that ‘the great artists of all time’ included ‘workers in the so-called useful arts like wrought iron, pewter, glass, pottery, etc.’ by ‘putting pieces of wrought iron next to some of the best paintings covering the period from the 13 th to the 20 th centuries.’ 9 The disregard of taxonomies, therefore, corresponded to Barnes’s anti-hierarchic attitude, also expressed—not without contradictions and unintended results—in his way of granting or refusing access to the collection, which privileged workers and black Amer- icans at the expense of collectors and art historians. Barnes was not alone in his convic- tions and a 1937 article by his close collaborator the philosopher JohnDewey, entitled ‘The Educational Function of a Museum of Decorative Arts,’ called for ‘the breaking down of the walls that so long divided what were called the fine arts from applied and industrial arts,’ and hailed the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration in New York for arranging its objects ‘on the basis of community of design rather than by historic periods,’ since ‘for the purpose of learning to see the design in virtue of which an object has esthetic form, grouping together a chair, a rug, a ceramic object and a piece of iron work may be much more effective.’ 10 This purpose fitted the fact that ‘artist-designers’ occupied a cen- tral place in the public of suchmuseums and of the schools associatedwith them: ‘To learn to see for artistic purposes is to learn to detect organizing design, whether the object seen be a statue, a picture, a tapestry, a pitcher or a roll of wall-paper.’ 11 This aim corresponded to the first reason given by Barnes in his letter to Davis, in which he employed the notion of ‘motif’ in a formal rather than iconographical sense, as the examples of ‘arabesques, patterns, etc.’ make clear. Dewey spoke of ‘plastic design’ and indeed, we can consider that Barnes prioritized the ‘plastic sign’ over the ‘iconic sign’— using the semiotic distinction proposed by the Belgian Groupe μ—without defining them as mutually exclusive. 12 This could suit the art of Stuart Davis, who included iconic refer- ences but abstracted elements such as buildings, trees, boats, windows, etc. to the point where they composed a vocabulary of quasi-pictograms, combinable in colourful pat- terns. There are no works by Davis in the Barnes Foundation, but many objects attest to the collector’s preference for abstracted shapes and some of them are very similar to the silhouettes of the ironwork on the walls, for example a bronze statuette in an orant posi- tion labelled ‘Persian / 8 th century B.C.’ and animal figures painted on Native American earthenware containers. 13 Barnes did not collect ‘non-objective’ art, and the kind of abstraction he enjoyed was indebted to the post-impressionist, ‘decorative’ ideal of a depiction emancipated from the ‘servile imitation of nature.’ 14 His explanation to Davis can thus be compared to Maurice of Decorative Arts,’ 1937, p. 98.  12 See: Groupe μ, Traité du signe visuel , 1992.  13 See: Dolkart and Lucy, The Barnes Foundation, Masterworks , 2012, pp. 344–345.  14 Gauguin, ‘Notes sur l’art à l’Exposition Uni- verselle,’ 1889, p. 86. See: Gamboni, Paul Gauguin , 2014, pp. 33 –40.