Barnes Foundation

Twenty-two American paintings from the collection of the late Violette de Mazia, who taught art appreciation at the Barnes Foundation in Merion for 60 years, sold for $2.38 million yesterday at Christie's auction house in New York. That amount, added to the $5 million paid earlier this month for eight impressionist and modern works and $644,000 paid in April for de Mazia's furniture and furnishings, brought the proceeds from de Mazia's estate to more than $8 million. Still to be sold are a half-dozen paintings and de Mazia's house in Lower Merion.

Philadelphia lawyer Richard H. Glanton has been elected president of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, administrator of one of the world's most renowned collections of impressionist and postimpressionist art. Glanton, 43, served as deputy counsel to Richard Thornburgh when he was governor of Pennsylvania. He had been counsel to the foundation for the last year, a post that he resigned to become president, but will continue as general counsel to Lincoln University in Chester County.

Aside from its priceless collection of French Impressionist paintings, the Barnes Foundation may be best known for the stringent restrictions its founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, placed on the collection's presentation. Before his death in a 1951 automobile accident, the pharmaceutical magnate wrote a will that stipulated how his art should be viewed and studied. Among the stipulations, the works were to remain hung in the exact floor-to-ceiling arrangement that Barnes devised when he opened the 23-room gallery adjacent to his Merion home in 1922.

Brett Miller, 47, general counsel for the Barnes Foundation who defended the foundation's move from suburban Merion to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in recent court hearings, was found dead at his Old City home Saturday, April 14. A spokesman for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office attributed the cause of death to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. "The board of trustees and the staff of the Barnes Foundation are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of our colleague and friend Brett Miller," Derek Gillman, the director of the foundation, said in a statement to the Art Newspaper, which on Monday reported Mr. Miller's death.

With the Barnes Foundation's "gala reopening" just a month away, the trustees have asked for an "emergency hearing" to appeal a ruling that apparently forbids them to hold the event on the foundation premises. Despite the ruling by Montgomery County Orphans Court Judge Stanley R. Ott, the foundation has proceeded with plans for the $500-to-$1,000-a-person event to be held on the grounds. The Nov. 11 gala is to celebrate the reinstallation of the world-renowned collection of art, in a building closed for more than two years for a $12 million renovation.

In stark contrast to the lengthy and contentious battle over its move to the city, construction of the new museum and gallery for the Barnes Foundation on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway has been proceeding at a rapid clip. On Friday, construction workers were already clambering over the in-place roof of one building section - the gallery that will house the famed collection that now resides in suburban Merion. Bill McDowell, project executive, said there had been no problems with the $150 million building effort.

Without great fanfare Friday, the Barnes Foundation gallery marked its first anniversary on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway by permanently installing the famous portrait of its founder, Albert C. Barnes, at the entryway to its even more famous galleries. Barnes, as rendered in 1926 by Giorgio de Chirico, will gaze placidly and rather glumly down on visitors right before they enter the light-drenched rooms filled with the doctor's extraordinary collection of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Van Goghs, Picassos, and works by other masters of early modernism.

IT HAS taken near financial ruin, but finally the trustees of the Barnes Foundation are making some sensible decisions regarding the future of the foundation and its matchless collection of paintings. Yesterday, trustees announced they are embracing an idea they once called unthinkable: moving the foundation and its collection of Renoirs, Cezannes and Matisses out of the constricting confines of Lower Merion and into Philadelphia. Trustees say the foundation's tumbling fortunes are behind their dramatic change of heart.

The Barnes Foundation has renewed a request to a Montgomery County court to send its celebrated show of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings to another museum. Last week, to the surprise of foes of the unprecedented tour, the foundation had withdrawn its request. But in a new petition to Judge Stanley R. Ott, the trustees said they have "an opportunity to receive substantial additional funds" to exhibit the works at "a premium art museum in Europe. " As in their previous petition, the trustees did not name the museum, the House of Art in Munich.

The court fight over moving the Barnes Foundation's $5 billion art collection from Lower Merion Township to Philadelphia has ended with a whimper in a Norristown courthouse office. There, a Friends of the Barnes Foundation member had appeared shortly before closing time Monday with a check and appeals documents to prolong the fight. But after a last minute legal consultation on her cellphone, Evelyn Yaari of the Lower Merion-based group instead ended the years-long case. "I had to go to the clerk and say, 'I'm very sorry I asked you to do that, but actually, I'm not going to file the appeal,' " Yaari said.

Without great fanfare Friday, the Barnes Foundation gallery marked its first anniversary on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway by permanently installing the famous portrait of its founder, Albert C. Barnes, at the entryway to its even more famous galleries. Barnes, as rendered in 1926 by Giorgio de Chirico, will gaze placidly and rather glumly down on visitors right before they enter the light-drenched rooms filled with the doctor's extraordinary collection of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Van Goghs, Picassos, and works by other masters of early modernism.

The past has come back to haunt us at the Barnes Foundation, big time. It returned this weekend in the form of a monumental mural by painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly called Sculpture for a Large Wall . Kelly created the mural in 1956-57 as a commission for the former Philadelphia Transportation Building at 17th and Market Streets. It's a landmark work of art, the first abstract sculpture in Philadelphia and a piece that looks as fresh and lively today as it did when it was installed in the building's lobby 56 years ago. The sculpture left Philadelphia in 1998 under circumstances that shocked the city's cultural community.

The planned alliance of Philadelphia's rare-book collectors' mecca - the Rosenbach Museum and Library - with the Free Library of Philadelphia could mean greater access to literary treasures, in much the same way as the Barnes Foundation art masterpieces' move downtown. Even better, the library merger looks to bring nothing like the messy, emotionally wrenching legal battles surrounding the Barnes' move. The ease of the union can be credited, in large part, to the foresight of the Rosenbach founders, who established their legacy under a reasonable and flexible bequest wholly unlike the Barnes' strict directives.

Exclusive taste in art patrons Now those who have hijacked the Barnes Foundation art collection are increasing admission prices by approximately 20 percent. Given reports of unprecedented interest and attendance, why would prices be hiked? Clearly, the motivation is to keep the riffraff out and get a better class of visitor. Once again, never mind what collection founder Albert C. Barnes wanted: art education for the working class. Perish the thought. Better to have trust-fund babies.

We know the ladies are luscious, but please do not touch the Renoirs. Or sit on an 18th-century Windsor chair, no matter how welcoming. Or pat the Modigliani limestone head. Which visitors to the Barnes Foundation on the parkway have been doing since the new location opened last May. A guard told me, "The kids are often better behaved than the adults. " This, I believe, having observed an animated group of young art lovers stay within the brown lines delineated on the gallery rooms' wooden floors.

However strenuously Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire portrays madness, the listener's reaction is often bewilderment and disorientation, mainly because this song cycle about a comedia dell'arte character becoming drunk on moonlight completely bypasses typical theatrical portrayals of madness. It's insanity from the inside out. So on Tuesday at the Barnes Foundation, when art lovers hoped to catch up with the 101-year-old Schoenberg masterpiece alongside more readily apprehensible paintings of the same era, you wished them the best of luck, knowing that you can listen to Pierrot for decades and never feel on top of it. The occasion was the Curtis Institute's debut at the Barnes, in what may be the first of many concerts there and one that played well off the foundation's art collection.

I RA GLASS is the Jessica Simpson of public radio. Not the new, pregnant designer Jessica Simpson. The old, singing, can't dance a lick Jessica Simpson. That Jessica used to surround herself with dancers to hide her own immobility. And that brings us to Glass. The "This American Life" host will present the world premiere of "One Radio Show, Two Dancers," a night of stories and dance, courtesy of Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass , Saturday and Sunday at the Annenberg Center.

The Barnes Foundation has increased ticket prices more than 22 percent, from $18 to $22, for most hours of the day, effective May 1. Officials at the gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway said that the increase would generate revenue, but that the main motive was to relieve congestion during high-traffic periods and to increase use of the Barnes audio guide, which now carries injunctions about appropriate gallery behavior. The audio guide is included in the new ticket price.

Upon encountering Thomas Gibbons' play Permanent Collection by InterAct Theatre Company, you're likely to think: "Didn't this play start here?" "Didn't we live this drama?" "Do we have to go through it again?" The answers are yes, certainly, and indeed. The play premiered at InterAct in 2003 and went on to tell the world about the Barnes Foundation's agonized journey into the real world, focusing not on the move from Merion to Philadelphia but on the first stages of undoing Albert C. Barnes' wishes by Richard Glanton, the foundation's African American president in the 1990s.

Penn Dixie Productions Animal Animal Mammal Mine . This dance-theater piece - inspired by the changes wrought by the Pill, enriched by interviews with 50 childless women, and involving an installation by sculptor Martha Posner - creates a vision of female fertility and ecological collapse. (Underground Arts, April 10 to 20.) Taller Puertorriqueño Sounds of Rhythm and Resistance . With a nod to the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and a stomp to Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, Pleneros de la 21's music foments Kulu Mele African Dance and Drum Ensemble and Familia Rojas' multigenerational ensemble to dance the drums.