Our teacher, Harry Sefarbi, was an elderly gentleman with large round glasses and short wisps of white hair behind his ears. He was entering his fourth decade teaching art at the Barnes, having been trained by Barnes himself in a class just like mine in the late 1940s. Mr. Sefarbi, as he liked to be called, began with a little history lesson about Barnes.
Born to working-class parents in Philadelphia in 1872, Barnes excelled in public high school and had earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania by age twenty. He developed a wide range of interests, and became a student of the pragmatist movement, which later served as a foundation for his commonsense, everyman philosophy about art. Barnes studied chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Berlin, and returned with a German colleague at the turn of the century to open a lab in Philadelphia. Together, they invented a new antiseptic silver compound called Argyrol, a treatment for eye inflammation. The medicine dominated the medical market for the next forty years, making Barnes a millionaire many times over. He began to travel extensively and soon became an art collector, joining the legion of rich and cultured Americans, including Jules E. Mastbaum and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who sailed to Europe to snap up Old Master and Impressionist works at relatively bargain prices. By any measure, public or private, national or international, the number and quality of Impressionist and Modern paintings Barnes acquired was astonishing: 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 69 by Paul Cézanne, 59 by Henri Matisse, 46 by Pablo Picasso, 21 by Chaim Soutine, 18 by Henri Rousseau, 11 by Edgar Degas, 7 by Vincent van Gogh, and 4 by Claude Monet.
Barnes sought to bring his love of high art to others. He began with his employees, hanging valuable works in his factory and offering free art and philosophy classes. When he decided to build himself a new home on a twelve-acre plot just outside the city limits, he hired Paul Cret, the Frenchman who had laid out the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and designed Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, and instructed him to build an art gallery beside the house.
This would not be a museum, Barnes declared, but a laboratory for learning. Each of the twenty-three galleries would be a classroom, and each of the four walls in each gallery would be a blackboard with a lesson plan. It was central to Barnes’s plan to make art accessible and understandable to the masses.
Barnes believed that one could only come to appreciate and understand art by viewing it firsthand. Most Americans began at a disadvantage, he believed, because they held preconceived Western notions of art, likely learned (subconsciously or not) from ivory tower academics. The best way to understand art was to look at a painting, compare it to what you saw next to it, and come to your own conclusions. Which is why Barnes arranged his galleries like no other—masterpieces beside the mediocre, Old Masters next to Impressionists, African near European, tribal juxtaposed with Modernists. To emphasize shapes, he arranged three-dimensional objects—often simple metalwork and basic kitchen utensils beside paintings. On the floor along the walls, Barnes set up furniture, candles, teapots, and vases. He called these unorthodox and controversial layouts “wall ensembles,” and they were designed to help students see patterns, shapes, and trends you can’t teach in books. He wanted classes to be democratic, a place where free discussion was encouraged.
Study the overstuffed walls and discover two chairs that match the female derriere in a set of Renoirs, or an African mask that matches the shape of a man’s face in a Picasso painting. Notice a wooden trunk that mimics shapes in Prendergast and Gauguin paintings. Ponder the significance of a set of soup ladles straddling a series of Old Master paintings, or a pair of ox shoes hanging over a pair of Soutines. Chuckle when you realize the theme of a corner gallery is elbows.
Barnes always kept you guessing, thinking. He hung Matisse’s iconic The Joy of Life, considered the first painting of the Modern art era (and the one a conservative French critic famously labeled “beastly”) in a stairwell.
I got a kick out of Barnes’s life story, his egalitarian values and eclectic galleries, each filled with jaw-dropping art. But I dreaded my first homework assignment: the first few chapters of The Art in Painting, the 521-page treatise Barnes wrote in 1925. The canary-covered book felt as heavy as a brick and I feared the words would be as dense and intimidating. But when I cracked the first chapter, I was pleasantly surprised. The writing was, as I suspected, erudite, but Barnes’s unpretentious, workmanlike philosophy struck a chord. He wrote that his method for studying art presented “something basically objective to replace the sentimentalism, the antiquarianism, sheltered under the cloak of academic prestige, which make futile the present courses in art universities and colleges.” In other words, Barnes devised a method for his students to think for themselves, to resist the urge to simply accept the prevailing and often pretentious sentiments of so-called experts. Barnes seemed like my kind of guy.
“People often suppose that there is some secret about art, some password which must be divulged before they can discover its purpose or meaning,” Barnes wrote. “Absurd as such an idea is, it contains the important truth that seeing is something which must be learned, and not something which we all do as naturally as we breathe.” He called this “learning to see.”
First and foremost, Barnes taught that all art is based on the work of previous generations. “A person who professes to understand and appreciate Titian and Michelangelo and who fails to recognize the same traditions in the moderns, Renoir and Cézanne, is practicing self-deception,” Barnes wrote. “An understanding of early Oriental art and of El Greco carries with it an appreciation of the contemporary work of Matisse and Picasso. The best of the modern painters use the same means, to the same ends, as did the great Florentines, Venetians, Dutchmen, and Spaniards.”
The purpose of art is not to create a literal, documentary-style reproduction of a scene from real life. “The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see, and in order to do so he often needs to modify the familiar appearance of things and so make something which is, in the photographic sense, a bad likeness.” The greatest artists teach us how to perceive through the use of expression and decoration. They are scientists, manipulating color, line, light, space, and mass in ways that reveal human nature. “The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing far more clearly than we could see for ourselves.”
A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye. This was an important point. As an art crime investigator, or an undercover agent posing as a collector, I would have to evaluate and expound upon a wide variety of art, regardless of whether I liked a particular piece.
For the next year, I spent four hours a week in class with ten other students. Each week, we gathered in one of the Barnes’s twenty-three galleries, just a few feet from the three or four masterpieces we would study that day. As our teacher outlined the finer points of composition, palette, makeup, and light, I drank it in. I wasn’t only listening to the teacher—sometimes I learned more by tuning out and just staring at a wall ensemble. At the Barnes, I didn’t learn how to identify a fake or a forgery, but I trained my eye to discern a good painting from a bad one. I learned how to tell the difference between works by Renoir and Manet, or Gauguin and Cézanne—and more important, how to confidently explain in detail these differences and patterns. It’s not as hard as you might think, certainly not for a trained art historian or curator. But it’s not the kind of thing most police officers know. As I would learn years later, it’s not even the kind of thing most art thieves know.