The Barnes Foundation

I celebrated my birthday with a surprise gift from PungPung Marissa. It is an overnight stay in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania after a four hour intensive tour of the Barnes Foundation Museum in Merion, PA. Agnes "Agie" Villanueva Semana who lives in South Jersey with her husband Chris and daughter Ella sent me a hello email one day and mentioned the museum. Being a museumite with a chronic museumitis I itched to see it once i get a vaykay(vacation) from work. Luckily, Marissa got my hint in a nanosecond and I received one of the best birthday gifts ever not to forget a tearjerking heart melting birthday card from our children Jennika,Jessika,Jino,Jayne and Jiego and a singing card from Jeng and her family with a mini cone tagged "NO WHINING", greetings from Batski, Kala,family and lots of friends.
The edifice stands on a 12 acre arboretum purchased by Dr. Barnes. Albert C. Barnes, a medical doctor from U. Penn Medical School who made his money producing an antiseptic Argyrol founded the museum in 1922. Barnes' passion for the arts egged himself to try painting, realizing it was not his cup of tea he collected fine pieces and amassed a great number of impressionists, post impressionists and early modern art.
As I enter the gallery of course I am already at awe, it was a cru de te of priceless delight. You can devour into it, drink if you like but one can never surmise to even digest through its beauty. " It is not a museum, it is an art school" according to Barnes; he set pieces as a wall ensemble based on composition, color and line open to the aesthetic visual perception, exploring meaning and experience as a whole. Masterpieces of Renoir; all 181, the most number ever collected by a man, the early works of Cezanne and late paintings, the only nude piece that Van Gogh ever painted, the rose caryatid and reclining nudes of Modigliani, Seurat's "The Models" which is so huge and I never knew it was housed in the Barnes, Picasso's earthy "Flower sellers" simply entitled Composition with all its distortion speaks of only beauty beyond nirvana and my favorite of all is Henri (on-ree) Matisse's mural which grandiosely hovers on the cathedral wall of the main gallery..."The Merion Dance" in pale pink and periwinkle blue backgrounds nude dancers in rhythmic motion, mindless of whoever watches them from below. Seeing the mural as it was pointed to me by Marissa, made me sit on one of the indoor benches and quenched a parched soul. I never moved my head lower than a degree, until i knew I am straining my neck. Matisse has done it again. There are really painters and there are the few who can mellow your soul leaving an infinite mark.
I could not say if it is the same raw emotion I felt when I saw Fragonard's Progress of Love at the Frick Collection(highly recommended). Henry Clay Frick's art archive dates from old masters (Goya, El Greco, Titian, Vermeer) to post impressionist art(Renoir,Gainsborough,Stuart and Whistler). But, the four panels of French artist Fragonard is unforgettable.
The thing is, every collection I visit leaves a certain tinge of positive reinforcement on whatever dilemma I am going through my life on that particular moment. Visits replace expensive dates with a shrink and I have no qualms with that. Besides standing face to face with priceless work created before my time and telling my children and hopefully they will tell their children and do the same feat, I get to know all these wonderful stories behind each painting or sculpture and behind each man or woman involved. Take Dr. Albert Barnes, he tried exhibiting his collection, to inform and to educate on impressionist and post impressionist art and it was poorly received and insulted almost claiming Barnes with a pariah status. What with all Renoir's reclining nudes,Cezanne's bathers and Modigliani's African inspired naked women with their elongated facial structures; at that time of the depression these were perceived as trashy paintings. Today, Barnes has proven everyone wrong. Art beholds a certain degree of utopia in the human spirit. Whether it be nudes or non objective art which seem meaningless at first glance. It is a swift communication between the creator and the observer; and that is a line that no one can breakthrough.
Four hours of going through gallery after gallery is not enough. Barnes also collected a number of African art pieces and I still have the second floor to whiff through in slow pace. That will be for a next visit, my 39Th birthday perhaps. Thank you pungpung for this amazing experience, mwah mwah mwah!!!

(Photo above: Henri Matisse's "Merion Dance". Barnes commissioned Matisse for this and he painted it in three huge canvasses in Nice, France and was shipped to Merion, PA for the foundation)