visit to the Barnes

I took time off from my presently soul-squashing job and drove down to the Barnes Foundation last Friday. The Barnes Foundation is at the moment caught up in controversy regarding a proposed relocation to a more central and modern venue. So as perhaps the chances of seeing this collection of Impressionism and other stuff are perhaps fewer, I really had to go. I lived in Rome for a few years and made the mistake of never going to all the churches and seeing all the art until I was about to leave, you take it all for granted. Likewise I think the Barnes deserved a visit now rather than later.
It's a pretty strange gallery by today's internationalist, global standards, paintings are often more than a dozen to a wall, objects from Egypt, China, and pre-Columbus America are displayed in cabinets under works by Matisse and Klee. There was in Barne's mind a reason for every arrangement, and the present 'crisis' centres on whether the displays can be disrupted. It is like giant curiosity cabinet, though when you go into the largest room, it is exhilirating. There is something light and optimistic in spite of the tattered faded cloth wall covers. Seeing paintings in real life, in real time, that are considered 'key' in some sense, is exciting, as a spectator about to stand in front of them, ownership is about to pass to you, if only for a short time,if you sort of like painting in the first place, that is. I know 'ownership' is a weighted word, not totally irrelevant but also over-determining, because this is a space that can convince you that there is room for places and experiences that do not in the end fundamentally rest of a notion of property - of ownership. This is part of the mystery of painting, objects that are in themselves pretty unremarkable, fragile, hesitant flat objects that can be easily damaged, flimsy things that become objects of ridicule when put up for sale and fetch huge amounts of money, but given a wall, a flat surface, an almost marginal place, how else do we think of the wall, can create a film, a surface, that is a place for something profound to happen, and continue to happen. A little bathetic perhaps but to hell with it.
Perhaps Barnes liked Renoir a little too much, but even those nudes are so physical, so material, how Impressionism and then Matisse were concerned with the density and weight, the consequence almost of the world. We think generally that this art is airy, light, ephemeral, superficial, but really, especially with Cezanne as the linchpin, it is the description and equivalence of a physical reality that is there at the centre of things. Even Matisse - nothing doodely, terrific density, which makes 'realist' art pretty pale in comparison, and even pendantic in some strange way, as if reality had to go cap in hand to the artist and ask for the close attention, and precision of more exact representation.
Very positivist, very un-Romantic, even a painting like 'Joie de Vivre' of pre-Lapsarian life, is basically robust and somehow 'consequential', though I don't know what I mean by this exactly, they register in the world, and are about this registering - like notches on a stick perhaps.
But I think this painting is great, although it was probably a couple of small works by Klee that I would have tried to smuggle out. Just the feeling of invention, of rule breaking and rule making - simultaneously occuring in the same moment, bending everything into relation with it, by that I mean a total perceptual world. Connections between making and perception that seem very distant to us now, rather like the ancient Greeks appeared to medieval artists, the sense that a world has been closed off to us and become inaccessible. Not that it is, rather I think today with some exceptions art-making is self-identitified as somehow autistic, paratactic processes predominate, deriving from ironically much of this art, but it is a partial understanding, perhaps a deliberate misunderstanding. Even Seurat the champion of divisionism, to say he is the 'father' of empty mechanism in contemporary art is a meaning we retroactively evoke. Impressionism can 'look' like the start of a reductive process, as something that had to lead to the next 'discovery' or breakthrough, although of course it didn't really, we have only imperfect and often contingent reponses by subsequent artists to what went before. I think to realise this is liberating.