Art, Education, & African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy.

Art, Education, & African-American Culture: Albert Barnes and the Science of Philanthropy. Mary Ann Meyers. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers (888-999-6778), 2004. Illus., hardcover, 423 pp., $49.95.

The Barnes Foundation in Merion Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia, is a fabled repository of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern paintings collected by Albert Barnes, one of America's greatest art collectors. In this text-heavy book, the author combines a researcher's patience, a journalist's eye, and a novelist's timing in skillfully weaving the sociological, artistic, political, societal, and philosophical ingredients that comprise the story of the Barnes Foundation. The stranger- than-fiction account of the foundation is laced together with a very readable biography of its provocative founder, and the ramifications of his eccentricities over the half century following his death.

The author examines Barnes' background as a physician and chemist and his aesthetic development as well as his highly personal approach to art education, and to his beliefs in an African-American aesthetic. Barnes put together the finest privately formed collection of early modern paintings in the world. In this book we are privy to his meetings with Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Lipchitz, Gertrude Stein, Durand-Ruel, Bertrand Russell, and many more.

His educational philosophy was based on a friendship with John Dewey, who Barnes describes as his closest friend. The more-than 400 pages of text are supported by some interesting archival photographs of Barnes and his friends. This limited review space doesn't allow for more than a suggestion of the book's contents, which also includes reference to Barnes' many legal battles with neighbors, the willing of his collection and foundation to the nations oldest African-American College, and much more. An engaging book for a long and leisurely summer read.