Deb 7 Me 8
This movie is a straight documentary. It looks like it was made for TV and I hope it is aired soon so more people can enjoy it. I really liked it. The subject is the art collection of the Barnes Foundation, a topic Deb and I have been interested in for many years.
I don’t want to give anything away, but here’s the basic points. A guy named Barnes starts buying art. He buys quality art from quality artists, and he buys it just ahead of the curve of social recognition. By the time the rest of world figures out that Renoir and Picasso and VanGogh are the real thing, he has amassed a huge collection of them. People that were dogging his collection now envied it.
But it was his collection and he built a nice place to house it and placed his own restrictions on who and how it could be seen. He made an art school and the students had first hand access to the collection. He wanted to keep the snobs and social elite at bay, welcoming the students and the “common man”. If you were Rockefeller you probably had a harder time seeing the collection that if you were Rockefeller’s gardener.
And Barnes put that in his will too. He decreed that the collection stay in tact exactly as he hung it, for perpetuity. It wasn’t to be sold, loaned out or even moved. It wasn’t to be offered to the general public, open to select viewers no more than two days a week. It was never to become a backdrop for hoity-toity elitists.
Over time the collection became extremely valuable and a power struggle emerged over control of the art. That’s the story the film explores and it’s fascinating. This is a very interesting study of the struggle for power by people who don’t take no for an answer. If you’re not interested in art, draw your own parallels, antique cars, baseball cards, furniture. It could be a family story, heirs fighting over their parents estate, but it’s a good story and worth checking out.
No comments:
Post a Comment