Barnes Foundation to get $25 million in state money for move
By Joe Mandak, Associated Press
March 28, 2006
PHILADELPHIA - The Barnes Foundation, home to one of the world's most impressive private collections of impressionist and
postimpressionist art, will get $25 million in state money to move its gallery to downtown Philadelphia, Gov. Ed Rendell's
office said Tuesday.
The Barnes Foundation said it needs $150 million to move its collection from the small, suburban limestone gallery that
pharmaceutical magnate Albert Barnes built to house it in the 1920s.
That includes $100 million to build the museum somewhere along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and $50 million to endow
it, said Rebecca Rimel, president of The Pew Charitable Trusts, which is helping to raise money for the project.
"We're going to move the Barnes where it belongs, which is downtown on the parkway, where hundreds of thousands of people
can enjoy it," said Bernard C. Watson, of the Barnes Foundation board of trustees.
Foundation trustees say restrictions in Barnes' will and zoning regulations in affluent Lower Merion Township have limited
the current gallery to about 400 visitors each of the three days a week it can be open, causing the foundation to teeter
on the brink of bankruptcy.
In April, the state Supreme Court threw out an appeal by a Barnes art student and faculty member who wanted to stop plans
to move the multibillion-dollar collection. Opponents of the move have said it violates Barnes' vision and destroys the
paintings' unique setting.
Rendell said the $25 million would come from a fund for capital projects in the state. That money can only be used to
build the museum, not to endow it, Rendell said.
Moving the Barnes collection will turn Philadelphia "into a city that lovers of the arts and culture will have to come
and see," Rendell said.
Mayor John Street called the museum one of the "big three" projects - slot machine gambling and an expanded convention
center are the others - that will help Philadelphia compete with cities like Boston and New York.
The Annenberg Foundation and The Lenfest Foundation are the other two groups raising money for the project. Rimel
wouldn't say how much money has been raised so far, but said a fundraising drive is planned for later this year that
will give the general public a chance to make smaller donations to the museum.
"Dr. Barnes really believed that this should be accessible to, as he said, the plain people," Rimel said. More concrete
plans for the museum will be announced later this year.
"By summer, there will be a whole series of announcements about the Barnes," Rimel said. "This is months, this is not
years."
The foundation says that by moving its collection of 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos and other works
to a museum near the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum that 200,000 or more people could see it each year.
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