A new, lavishly illustrated catalog of the Barnes' two-dimensional American art - 343 paintings and works on paper (plus four sculptures) - elevates this aspect to richly deserved prominence. American Paintings and Works on Paper in the Barnes Foundation, (Yale University Press, 404 pp., $75) also helps clarify how Barnes thought about art and who helped him formulate his ideas.
It was written by Richard J. Wattenmaker, an independent scholar admirably suited to the task. An art-history graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Wattenmaker both studied and taught at the Barnes.
He wrote his 1972 doctoral thesis on realist painter William Glackens, the high school chum who helped Barnes start collecting in 1912. It's not surprising that the foundation owns 71 oils, pastels, sketches, and illustrations by Glackens, one of nine artists whom Wattenmaker features in the book.
The others are brothers Charles and Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, Jules Pascin, Alfred H. Maurer, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Horace Pippin. Their works account for about two-thirds of the American collection.
This is an eclectic bunch, to say the least. Lawson is usually classified as an impressionist and Maurice Prendergast as a postimpressionist. Maurer, though American, lived in Paris, where he helped Barnes contact dealers. Pascin, a native of Bulgaria, was a European modernist who came to the United States during World War I, became a citizen in 1920, and promptly moved back to Europe.
And then there's Pippin, the untutored African American from West Chester who became a celebrated naive painter, although the foundation owns only four of his works.
