The Billion Dollar Art Heist Storyville

Well, hello everybody.

This is a fabulous day for Philadelphia,

and we have some wonderful news for you,

and I am so proud to present to you

the Mayor of Philadelphia, the mayor of arts and culture -

John Street.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone.

Let me see, what kind of day am I having?

Actually, it is a very, very special moment for all of us

here in the city of Philadelphia. This has been a journey,

and we're not completely finished yet, but let me tell you something,

it's one of those things that will make our city special

for a long, long time.

You will not be able to go to Houston and see the Barnes Collection,

you won't be able to go to Boston, you won't be able to go anywhere else.

If you want to see it, you come to the city of Philadelphia.

And so it is with a great sense of pride that we come here today

so that the Barnes Collection can be moved from lower Merion...

..From Merion.

Actually, I pause to tell you that I was on a bike ride

not too long ago and rode right past the place.

And I said, "See you soon."

-LAUGHTER

-In the city of Philadelphia, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

You know, this is a story that should have been told as it went along.

It is the greatest act of cultural vandalism since World War II.

It's been a circus, and we couldn't take the paintings up

to heaven with him, or hell, or wherever the heck he wound up.

If you're going to leave your painting somewhere,

don't let there be a politician within 500 yards.

America's treasure to be untainted by these attacks.

Culture has become big business, culture is an industry.

There's a culture industry that requires new product.

No-one knows this story,

this is THE scandal of the art world in modern America.

The Barnes is one of the last great personal collections in the United States.

The fight now is over how closely the foundation Barnes established should follow his wishes.

Here were modern paintings so important

they were the envy of virtually every art museum in the world.

This is the treasure-trove of the modern art of America,

and of the world.

This is the best of the best of the best.

When you go through the Barnes Collection, it is jaw-dropping.

Your mouth falls open, you can't believe you're seeing this.

And then you go into another room and there's more, and more.

It's just incredible...

They've got more Cezannes then the entire city of Paris.

There's 181 Renoirs. Wall to wall.

59 paintings by Matisse.

The Joy Of Life is always cited in everyone's art book,

as it's such an important painting in the history of art.

Picasso - 46. Seven by Van Gogh, six by Seurat.

The Seurat Models. Now, of course, that really is

sort of a spectacular thing, that there is no equal for.

Simply the concentration of the work of these particular masters

is unrivalled.

The Louvre doesn't have it.

The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum,

they don't have it.

If you've been to any other museum, you're used to walking in

and seeing these white walls, and these paintings hung up.

It's like a shopping experience.

Barnes wasn't interested in a mass experience,

he was interested in a quality experience.

The rooms are intimate, they're not made to accommodate

industrial-strength Smithsonian-sized crowds.

The Barnes Collection is arranged not by period, not by artist,

but by aesthetic values.

You can see that a Cezanne, and a door lock,

and some furniture are all grouped together.

Well, he had a reason for this.

It's a completely different way of understanding a work of art,

and one's experience of a work of art.

We see this collection

with a very interesting personality stamped on it.

The Barnes Foundation is the single most important

American cultural monument of the first half of the 20th century.

Albert Barnes I've come to think of as an extraordinary character.

He tends to be dismissed as a bizarre curmudgeon,

but in fact I think he was something of a genius.

Dr Barnes is a particular interest of mine.

I'm fascinated that this working-class man

from Philadelphia, who was boxing to help to pay his university fees,

how this young man creates one of the most beautiful

collections of early modern art in the world.

He was a brilliant kid who came up out of the smoke,

and became very successful.

Dr Barnes made his way into the University of Pennsylvania,

and then its medical school.

He realised that there was a market for a substitute

for silver nitrate, which at that time,

a drop or two was put into the eyes of almost

every baby born in America to protect them from venereal disease.

The product which Barnes had come up with was something called Argyrol.

Barnes marketed something that solved a huge problem,

and the wealth that would come from, imagine that today you invented a cure for AIDS.

Glackens, a friend from Central High, who was an artist,

introduced Barnes to art.

Barnes, being this curious type, immersed himself in it,

in the same way that he did in any other objective scientific problem.

He wanted to learn about it, understand it.

But here he was in Philadelphia and Philadelphia didn't have a clue.

The money people, who were very conservative,

did not have a sense of progress.

Barnes did.

He started going to Paris,

trying to understand what was happening with modern art.

Barnes's taste is pretty well formed in about two or three years,

and he has a feeling that Renoir and Cezanne

are the new pillars of the modern movement.

He also then sees that Matisse and Picasso

are the continuators of this great tradition.

Barnes was way head of his time, ahead of his time artistically,

intellectually, culturally, politically.

He collected some of the greatest art

in the history of the world, at a time when the American art establishment

regarded this art as inaccessible to audiences, and of little value.

Just think, the Museum of Modern Art was in existence,

the Philadelphia Museum of Art was in existence,

these were his competitors.

The Met has been around for 30 years.

It's this extraordinary moment where one man

was able to buy some of the very greatest works,

before museums were competing,

before MoMA and Philadelphia and Boston were actually saying, "We have to buy these artists as well."

There's always been this tension in the art world

about the Barnes Collection.

There is this truly phenomenal collection that the museum world

can't get their hands on.

We're at Sotheby's, at a preview

for their big impressionist and modern sale.

I mean, there's a Van Gogh there,

which is a nice picture by a great artist.

This is not a great Van Gogh.

They're estimating 35 million.

I suspect in this market, with this liquidity,

it will go much higher than that.

It's not Barnes-worthy, he would not have bought that Van Gogh, but it is a Van Gogh.

Barnes wouldn't even look at that painting.

Some pictures are unattractive and significant,

some paintings are attractive and insignificant,

this is both unattractive and insignificant.

I mean, the one last night at 35 million was a much better painting.

That was a good Matisse, I don't think it was good enough for Barnes to buy.

And the Cezanne here is...is...

not even a shadow of a Barnes Cezanne.

This is estimated at seven to nine million.

I couldn't even hang it in the same room as The Card Players,

but The Card Players would probably be beyond any individual's capacity.

I mean, how much money is in any one place? The Getty couldn't afford it.

You'd need some sort of a nation to buy it.

There certainly aren't any collections like the Barnes

anywhere, any more, in private hands.

-What is a collection like this worth?

-Ohh...

Look, there are some things in the collection that...

one can't even begin to calculate.

I...I could go through the inventory,

painting by painting,

and a lot of them I could come up with some kind of a number,

but some things in there, nobody could figure out.

The Matisse La Danse, nobody could figure out what that's worth.

We don't know. There's been nothing like it, there never will be.

It's worth billions. I have no idea what it's worth.

The Cezanne Card Players, I mean, what is it worth?

500 million? Or the other one 500 million?

I mean, we're talking about billions and billions.

The initial exhibition of the Barnes art took place

in 1923 in Philadelphia,

when Barnes exhibited the collection

at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Barnes had great faith in his native abilities, and his eye,

he knew that he was in the major leagues of collecting

the greatest postimpressionist art.

He was passionate about pictures.

And there was a passion in sharing it too.

The art critics, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other people, just trashed the collection.

They said, "This is not art, this is scribbling."

It was greeted with caustic outcries from the traditional,

stuffy Philadelphia art critics.

Barnes was dismayed. I mean, he was just dismayed.

To have these provincial yahoos, who thought of themselves

as sophisticated art critics, just denounce him

must've had a profound influence in his dealings with them

for the rest of his life.

He determined that never, never

would they get their hands on this art.

A principal reason that he established his foundation

where he did, was to get it away from

the downtown interests in Philadelphia

that ruled the city, from the newspaper to the art museum.

He talks about, in one of his books, rich people using artwork as upholstery for their homes.

He didn't want that to happen with this.

The other robber barons were busy making monuments to themselves.

Barnes wanted to make something that would educate.

So he used his collection to form a school.

He really wanted to be taken seriously as an educator.

And that this project be seen seriously

as a real new step in modern education.

Dewey recognised that.

Here was a very serious philosopher,

one of America's great contributors to philosophy and education,

really embracing what Barnes was doing.

If you've spent time at the place,

and gotten a sense of what it's about,

you know that it's a very, very important place.

And it's not important because it has a great, great paintings,

the entire thing is the realisation of a set of ideas.

Dr Barnes created this perfectly appropriate building,

in the midst of a beautiful garden and grounds.

Barnes there assembled works of art from all over the world,

and from all different times, and put them on an equal plane.

He arranged in such a way

so that the art speaks to each other in a certain way.

It says something about humans everywhere,

it says we're the same.

It says that African-Americans are no different

than Latin Americans, than Asians, we experience life in the same way.

We show it in different ways,

but the basic fundamental experience of life is the same.

This is one of the many things that they say at the Barnes Foundation that makes so much sense.

Art isn't something separate from life, it is life.

Years later, the artwork had come to be recognised as important.

Everyone was so offended that they couldn't go

because it was closed on Monday,

and, "How dare you, I've shown up with my chauffeur."

Well, fuck it, Barnes didn't really care about your chauffeur,

he had a school to run and he saw that very seriously.

The hatred of Barnes in Philadelphia was fierce.

People didn't like him, because he insulted people.

He didn't have much regard for Philadelphia's society.

Dr Barnes was extremely inflammatory towards his contemporaries.

He liked to fight. But I don't think he would pick on anyone small.

It was always...

Someone would write, would say,

"I am the art critic of the New York Times, can I come and see the art?"

And Albert Barnes would write, "No,"

and he'd have his dog sign the letter.

But if you said, "I'm a plumber in New York City and I want to come see this art," he'd say, "OK, come in."

Barnes never forgot, no matter how rich he was,

that he'd grown up a poor boy in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia,

and this set him at odds not only with the arts and cultural community,

but with the political community.

He was a New Deal, liberal Democrat.

This particularly put him at odds with

the family that owned the Philadelphia Inquirer,

which was clubbable, and muffled, and WASPy.

The Inquirer was the organ of Moses Annenberg

and his son, Walter Annenberg.

Here is a bona fide plutocrat.

A right-wing, Nixonian, as he later would be, Ambassador to the Court of St James.

It was like going back to wearing knee britches, and ridiculous costumes.

How more ludicrously right-wing could you possibly be?

This man, who like to phone Richard Nixon at night,

and share jokes together.

Barnes and he were always at odds, always fighting.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was always attacking Albert Barnes

for not opening it to the public,

not doing what they thought it should. He did the things he thought HE should.

It was his art, why couldn't he do what he wanted?

One of the problems with Walter Annenberg is his father was a gangster.

He went to jail for tax evasion, which all gangsters go to jail for,

unless you can really catch them with the knife in their hand.

In the end the Feds agreed to give his young, callow son, Walter,

a pass, if the old man copped out and took a longer term.

So his father was sent off to federal prison,

and was only released as he was dying with a brain tumour.

This is something that Walter Annenberg

never forgave the Democrats for.

It was often said that Albert Barnes realised this lifetime of animosity

from Walter Annenberg because he said nasty cracks

about Mo Annenberg, and his income-tax problems,

and the race-track business, and the Mob.

There is no doubt that Walter Annenberg,

who for many, many years

would dominate the world of Philadelphia journalism,

hated Albert Barnes with a passion.

Barnes was a very, very, very shrewd person.

And one of the things that Albert Barnes learned was

the value of a good lawyer.

And Barnes's lawyer was a man named John Johnson.

Johnson was a great patron of the arts, whose art today

is one of the cornerstones of the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art.

This was not as Johnson had wished it to be, I might say.

John Johnson intended his art to be seen as a gallery in his home

on Broad Street in Philadelphia.

Poor Johnson had said, "I'm going to give you this collection to look at.

"The part of the bargain is, keep my end up of it."

After his death the house was demolished

and the paintings were moved into the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

where they have been a cornerstone ever since.

Johnson's art was, in effect,

legally stolen by the Philadelphia... the powers that be.

They argued that the building was a firetrap,

and that the paintings were a danger,

and that they'd be much better off in this new building.

"Let's get the paintings out of there, and to our new museum."

So, yeah, he got screwed.

Barnes was so appalled by this naked thievery

that he became determined

that the political and arts community of Philadelphia

would not steal his art.

Well, Barnes, as he always did,

he turned to the best lawyers he could find to draw up his will.

The goal had always been to keep

the Barnes Foundation as a free-standing educational mission,

not to fold the Barnes into the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

and certainly not to turn the Barnes itself into an art museum.

And it was to be housed

in the building that Dr Barnes had put up.

So he wrote this very sort of rigorous document.

He said, "It shall always be preserved as an educational institution.

"It can be open two or three days a week to the public.

"But four or five days a week it shall be solely

"and exclusively open to students and educators of art.

"The collection shall never be loaned,

"the collection shall never be sold.

"The democratic nature of this institution

"shall be preserved for all time."

He tried to create a collection that was proof

against commercial exploitation.

If it remains in the same place, if it simply hangs on a wall,

if it can never be lent, if it can never be sold,

the commercial exploitation of it has a value of zero.

He sought to preserve this as a school, maybe naively, in perpetuity.

But anyone who ever writes a will thinks it's going to go on for ever.

And so it was... Barnes was in his roadster,

travelling between his country place and his home in Merion,

when he was instantly killed.

It was a shock.

And I thought, "I only hope

"we can keep the spirit of Dr Barnes's ideas alive."

The question then arises, as it invariably does,

"What did Albert Barnes intend

"for the control of the great Barnes art collection?"

So he died in 1951. And here we have Violette De Mazia,

one of the great characters ever, really, in the art world,

who originally came to the Foundation to give French classes.

And she becomes his right-hand person, his great supporter,

his collaborator, his disciple.

And she's in charge, basically, for 30 years.

After Dr Barnes died, she became President,

and she ran it the way it had been run before.

She was just passionate for teaching.

She poured her life into this.

Well, hell, it wasn't a job. To Miss De Mazia and Dr Barnes,

and those of us that taught there, it was our life.

We were painters, we cared about it. It wasn't just a job.

Through the Barnes teaching, and Miss De Mazia teaching,

so many hundreds of people have said, "It has changed my life."

All I can say is the people that took the course loved it.

And that to me was a satisfactory reason to perpetuate

the Barnes as it was, which was a school, not a museum.

That's very clear in the Trust indenture.

And that the paintings were hung for didactic purposes,

and not merely because it would be the convenience

of people walking into a museum.

Well, almost immediately after Barnes's death,

the Foundation found itself subject to a frontal assault

by none other than the Philadelphia Inquirer publisher,

multi-millionaire Walter Annenberg.

Annenberg starts this campaign,

"Oh, the Barnes Foundation's not in the public,

"they're violating their tax status as a charity."

Annenberg had all the money in the world,

and he was determined to crush the Barnes.

He didn't dare try to crush the Barnes

when the old man was still alive and was a tough nut to begin with.

When they opened the Foundation - I never knew it was in the works.

The day they opened it, she called me up and said,

"They're letting the public in."

I think she was in tears.

Well, these people crowded in. I mean, one guy was out in an hour.

Said he saw enough fat ladies for a day.

And that was... That's the art lover.

Annenberg is seen as the guy who got the Attorney-General

and the State Supreme Court to make the Barnes Foundation

be open to the public at times that it wasn't supposed to be.

And so Annenberg is seen as taking the first little crack

at Dr Barnes' Trust.

Once everybody's dead, they'll do what they want.

And nobody cares about what it was.

That's why it was important to me to emphasise that it's a school.

I think he always was worried

that the artwork would become so valuable

that it would overpower his educational ideas.

You know, people see art, what do they think? Paintings.

Money, tourism. It's become just the norm for art to be traded.

For blockbuster shows, you know, to trade the art, move it around.

You know, make money off of it. And there's all this...

great art that the museum world doesn't have access to.

We had requests from various museums around the country.

"Would you please lend us two paintings?

"We'll pay all the costs and we'll send armed guards," and whatever.

And De Mazia said, "Right there in the document.

"The paintings will never be removed from the walls.

"Absolutely no, never."

De Mazia was considered to be the last living direct apostle

of Dr Barnes and his method.

And everything went according to Miss De Mazia's wishes.

The atmosphere had always been, it's for the classes. This is what it's for.

Everything about it was personal. De Mazia was a real personality.

It was a hand-made thing in a machine world.

As long as she was alive.

When she died, she was, as I said, 89.

She died on a Friday, in September, at 1:40pm.

Well, everything changed because Miss De Mazia died.

And with her death, the question then is,

"Whose hands would inherit the Barnes?"

Barnes was married, but they had no children.

So no doubt the Academy assumed,

no doubt the University of Pennsylvania assumed

that they would inherit, eventually, control of the foundation.

However, Barnes kept changing his will. Of this there's no question.

But he just didn't tell anyone this.

Albert Barnes created the foundation with five trustees,

with the power to control the foundation.

After the last of the trustees that he had appointed died,

ultimately, Violette De Mazia, the rub then became, who gets to appoint them?

As everyone knows, Barnes was a misanthrope.

He had his delicate ego badly bruised by the Philadelphia establishment

and he had a long and difficult memory.

Ultimately, his will left the control

of the great Barnes art to Lincoln University.

When he got Lincoln there,

it was just the farthest possible imaginable thing in the social scene as it then existed.

Lincoln was, if you were a black man in America,

one of the places to go to get a quality education at a time when there was segregation, and whatnot.

My father was President of Lincoln University and he

befriended Albert Barnes and from that friendship began

a relationship between Lincoln University and the Barnes Collection.

Barnes was one of those rare Americans who was open hearted about black people.

In his factory, he had an integrated working force

when almost no industrial operation in the whole country had that.

He thought, maybe in the back of his mind,

"How could I stick my finger in the eyes of the Philadelphia art establishment?

"I'll show 'em, I'll give it to this little black college."

Whether, you know, his long range objectives were number one,

just getting revenge on the Philadelphia establishment,

I think he said, "Boy, I can trust these people,

"they're not part of that awful establishment that I hate so much."

Fast-forward to 1990.

Lincoln is this state school that doesn't get enough state funding,

that can't raise enough money and if you're a trustee of Lincoln,

Why wouldn't you use this new asset you have to raise some money for your school?

Franklin Williams, this diplomat lawyer,

was named the President of the Barnes Foundation

and he really understood,

as probably most of the Lincoln trustees didn't,

that he and Lincoln were becoming custodians of the world's greatest post-Impressionist art collection.

Franklin Williams established an art advisory committee

of notable people from around the country in the art world.

Franklin Williams wanted to pick the right people,

so I went back and I drew up a list with all these in-people,

but very well-known ones.

Lincoln University felt it really should look to the outside

to help it figure out what to do with this place,

which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to have done.

It would be a resource to use as they chose, understanding the terms and conditions of Barnes Trust.

And it would have just made both of them flourish.

It would be... it's indescribable, what might have happened.

Also on the Lincoln Board at this time

was this incredibly ambitious lawyer

named Richard H Glanton.

He has designs on being Mayor of Philadelphia, maybe even Senator.

His ambitions know no limit.

Glanton has already been going round telling people that he's going to run the Barnes

but as I say, between Glanton and the Barnes and perhaps many of his other ambitions

is Franklin Williams.

What no one could have anticipated was that almost immediately,

upon becoming President of the Barnes Foundation, Franklin Williams

discovers he has a very virulent form of cancer and within the year is dead.

When I came there, the perception was that this dummy

is fresh meat for us to devour.

He's just a smart political guy but he didn't know anything about art.

So, we'll rule while he reigns.

And... I was not born that way.

I got a call from Richard Glanton,

who said, "Why don't I meet you at The Union League and let me buy you lunch and pick your brain."

I said, "Sure, why not." He said, "I've got big plans for the Barnes.

"We're going to make a lot of money."

And I said, "Why do you need money? We've got the original 10 million in there,

"it's yielding a couple of hundred thousand more than we need to run it,

"what's the point of all of this?"

And Glanton says, "I'm going to put this whole thing on the map.

"I'm going to do whatever it takes to build up as much money as I can."

"Don't worry, Dave, I've got it all figured out."

"Oh, OK, well, if that's the way you're going to run it,

"you're the majority of the trustees now, but thanks for lunch."

Mrs De Mazia, God bless her soul, really did the best she could.

For 50 years, following Barnes's death, or 40 years, the money was mismanaged.

The building had water running in it.

All of the windows were just rotten. The HVAC system didn't work.

We've got conservation problems, we need climate control.

All of which, frankly, as a museum person,

seem perfectly reasonable.

At the time, when we were on this little committee,

it was very clear that you could work out a plan to try to raise money.

Everybody would want to save the Barnes Foundation.

So, that was what we suggested and that's precisely what Richard Glanton did not want to do.

They were about to figure out how to do something that was clearly illegal and unethical,

which was what they did.

Richard loved being President of the Barnes

and he loved all of the sidelines of that -

hobnobbing with the rich and famous, including multi-millionaire, Walter Annenberg.

So, I called Walter.

I said, "I'd like to just talk to you about my ideas at Barnes." He said, "Great."

Water Annenberg, who was a piece of work, was also an art collector.

First-rate collection, but certainly not an adventurous collection,

certainly not an adventurous thinker.

In the last several months, I've had two Japanese interests

after me to sell my whole collection.

My only response has been,

"You're discussing members of my family

"and I'm hardly about to sell members of my family."

It couldn't have been more ironic. Glanton and Walter Annenberg

hit upon the idea of selling Barnes' art.

I said, "I want to raise the funds to restore the gallery,

"to ensure the long-term preservation of the collection,

"and the way that I would do this would be to deaccession a number of paintings

"to raise sufficient cash to cover the cost of the restoration."

And he immediately said, "That's a great idea."

Glanton, basically, did for Annenberg what he wanted to do -

made it totally accessible to him and was going to rip it apart for him.

Up until then,

Annenberg was coming in, trying to undo from the outside.

Now what you had was trustees, the Barnes trustees -

from the inside, the Barnes board itself was saying,

"Oh, we're in dire financial straits.

"We need to undo this indenture. Let us sell the collection."

I have nothing against buying and selling art.

If there is no legal reason not to do it, it's fine.

Dr Barnes did not say that was OK

and therefore it isn't discussable, as far as I'm concerned.

We were outraged.

Glanton didn't care.

And then, when we objected, he fired the whole art advisory board.

The response of the art world was fast and furious.

There was a huge uproar.

Anybody with any familiarity of the cultural world

knew that it was absolutely the last thing that anyone

with any knowledge of a cultural organisation would do.

So even though there was sort of a big push to do that,

it didn't happen, because the museum community got up against it.

Having now failed to convince either the court

or his partners on the Barnes board to allow him to sell art

or to rent art, or deaccession art,

he now comes up with a moment of genius.

When Richard started publicly saying that the foundation

had to raise money, and this is where he started this suggestion,

the fiasco plan of announcing that he would sell some of the art,

in order to justify that, he said, "Come on, I'll show you."

And so I took a tour with him from basement to attic

of the foundation and wrote a story about it.

And so, day after day, week after week,

usually with Richard Glanton as the humble boy scout

taking Lucinda Fleeson, the reporter, through the boiler room

and on top of the roof, readers of the Enquirer were treated to

the saga of the poor old Barnes Foundation.

And it was going to take millions of dollars to fix up the Barnes,

otherwise these paintings... They were just going to fall off the wall.

Work on fear here - weapons of mass destruction, leaky roof...

It sounds like the Johnson story. The building is falling apart.

That was the beginning of the story of "why we can undermine Dr Barnes' will."

Thank you to Lucinda Fleeson and the Enquirer,

he has this marvellous excuse to persuade the court

that the building is in such disrepair

that it's going to have to be closed down for a couple of years.

"Let me take the Barnes art on tour and charge other museums for the privilege."

As a lawyer, there's a provision in the trust that provided

that in fact you could change... It's called "cy-pres."

You can change a provision if it's necessary to carry out the donor's intent

to the least extent possible.

If you can't do exactly the terms of the will,

there's the French term "cy-pres," "cy-pres c'est possible" -

as near as possible, do what the donor wanted.

And how in the world can they fucking think that this is as near as possible...?

This is exactly what he didn't want! Every, every...

ounce of it is what he didn't want.

I was told by everybody that it couldn't, it wouldn't, be done.

"Nobody will do it." I said, "Well, we got to do this."

# Do what you have to and not what you're told. #

Given the quality of the collection,

it created headlines wherever it went.

It created crowds wherever it went. It created money wherever it went.

And all of that was like shovelling coal into the furnace

until the fire was raging.

Everywhere the art went, Richard Glanton went,

and everywhere that Richard Glanton went, he was honoured.

I was treated like a conquering hero in Paris and Toronto

and Fort Worth, Texas.

Dinner seated at the table with Princess Di,

an invitation for her to come to the Barnes, letters from her.

It was literally unbelievable.

I think it was the greatest exhibition in the history of Western civilisation.

The Barnes art now returned to great fanfare and a...

Well, I was going to say the biggest finger in the eye

that you could imagine, but I think that was saved for later, but...

A showing at Philadelphia Museum.

The arch enemy, Satan's lair, revelling in their possession,

temporary though it was, of the Barnes art.

This was the great slap to Barnes -

"Well, we have to show the paintings in Philadelphia, too."

Well, why?

Basically, it raised a lot of money for the art museum.

They had a big Barnes show at the art museum here and they made a lot of money on the back of it.

Everybody involved in this had their own interests.

The only person whose interests had no champion was Albert Barnes.

Everyone had abandoned him.

The paintings come back from the tour and Glanton wants to have this big party.

Glanton's using it exactly the way Barnes didn't want it to be used,

which was as a sort of social backdrop thing.

We're talking all the wealthy people from Philadelphia,

with their Rolls and all this stuff, came to the party,

and they're just all up and down the tiny little Latch's Lane.

The Philadelphia swells came down in droves

and once again,

Richard Glanton basked in the reflected glow of the Barnes art

but what he didn't reckon with was the neighbours.

Chaos. It was absolute chaos.

Nothing had happened like that in the 18 years we'd lived here.

Was this the first of many?

Was this our neighbourhood has now changed to this?

The Barnes Foundation has been here for over 70 years,

lived in perfect harmony with the neighbourhood,

through all these years, and all of a sudden,

it becomes the Super Bowl venue for art.

This is from Quebec, also. This is three buses today from Quebec.

Our neighbourhood

was completely clogged, top to bottom - five days a week,

thousands of people a week were coming, and parking,

and eating on my lawn and parking in my driveway.

It happened to all of us.

My kitchen sink faces the Barnes

and I guess I spend half my life at the sink,

so every time I saw a bus,

I would run out with the camera and videotape it.

"I don't know how you pronounce that, but that's how I feel."

Richard Glanton referred to me that he was being harassed by the KGB.

That was me. I felt very powerful for a moment.

I brought the Barnes out of the dark ages

and opened it up, and it's weird that a few people

refused to accept that.

We went to the township to see about fast-tracking permission to build a parking lot

and Richard very much wanted this parking lot

fast-tracked at this point.

It's a commercial museum in a residential neighbourhood,

and putting a parking lot in at that time would have made it easier for you to operate

a commercial museum in a residential neighbourhood.

We went to a township meeting. All the neighbours went,

and people made speeches at the meeting.

I got up and in my speech, I said I understood, now,

how a carpetbagger works.

A carpetbagger is someone who comes in from another jurisdiction and...

They call judges carpetbaggers when they do that,

and referring to Mr Glanton and his management team, I referred to him and his people,

and that was the end of it.

The township said that they couldn't fast-track a parking lot.

Richard was not happy with that response.

It wasn't about the cars, or the traffic.

It was about something else. It was about being hostile.

I don't know why. I just said, "This is enough.

"I mean, I'm just going to bring this lawsuit."

Dr Herman brought me to his house and said, "Bob, I have something

"but I need you to sit down."

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Because of my use of the word "carpetbagger," and "his people,"

they used those two phrases as the basis for a civil rights action.

Glanton ordered the Barnes' lawyers

to begin preparations for a suit against the Lower Merion township

commissioners and the neighbours, under the Federal Ku Klux Klan Act.

They accused us of conspiracy with the township

to deprive them of their rights, but motivated by racial grounds.

They compared not only me but they compared others of us to Hitler.

They showed pictures of people being lynched in South Carolina,

and associated that with the neighbours.

And I'm thinking, "What the devil did I do?"

I got up and I was concerned

that I have buses and I can't get out of my driveway.

What am I doing here,

in the middle of something like this, being called Hitler?

All over Philadelphia, in law firms hither and thither,

the legal fees on all sides mounted

and the Barnes' already skimpy endowment was being drained.

It was just being drained.

They get all this money sending the collection to Paris and Tokyo

and God knows where, and made a huge pile of money, which then was all...

I don't want to say "pissed away." I should say something

more appropriate. You can cut that one out, OK?

Richard Glanton thought that we were just going to fold and say,

"We drop out. We're dropping out."

He just picked the wrong neighbours.

Eventually, the entire case was thrown out.

Judge Brody said there was not one scintilla of racial animus

in any of the evidence the Barnes presented.

In this particular situation, there is not ever a comment

made about us that's not preceded by the word "hostile."

Their PR firm has maintained that we harassed them,

maintained that we sued them.

I mean, if that's what people are going to believe,

that we're harassing them, that we're these terrible people... We've given up trying.

Over a zoning board issue was the Ku Klux Klan Act invoked.

And the mischief that followed is incalculable.

Thus, the whole story turns on the tail of a 52-car parking lot.

The President of Lincoln University is desperate to get Glanton out of there.

And in her fury over the dismissal of the Ku Klux Klan suit,

she prepared a draft letter to the trustees of the Barnes Foundation,

suggesting that it was time to rotate the presidency.

People can have their own views. They are entitled to them.

But...

my story is that it was a second rebirth of Barnes

during my time here as President.

I tried to do something real quick that was different,

because it had to be done.

And I knew I had no time to mess around, because...

What was that dog's name - Cerebus? Guards the gates of hell.

He was after me.

I've been approached about turning the Barnes over

to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on at least two occasions,

and I was approached about turning it over to some other institutions on other occasions.

But I had no intention of reigning while somebody else ruled

and that was, in their view, the end of me.

They laid the groundwork and said the money that was spent on the lawsuits ruined the Barnes,

which is not true.

It had more money than it had when I came in, and a new building.

Curiously, Glanton said to me at the time that...

This is not quite how he put it,

but that he was the bulwark against the establishment stealing the Barnes.

And in a perverse way,

I think that Richard Glanton is absolutely correct about that.

I was just like, "OK, here are the keys."

Go do your masters' bidding, run it into the ground, into a wall.

That's what I wrote to the Attorney General - "They're going to run it into a brick wall."

I'm sure I saw the letter.

I'm not going to say that his predictions were accurate per se.

But once he left, there was not the same level of drive

with those who remained,

and in the long run, I thought that would continue to drag the Barnes down.

And so there we were, with the Barnes board,

minus Richard Glanton,

with the Barnes' already parlous endowment

reduced to virtually nothing.

The Barnes Foundation, without any funds,

without an effective leadership, is sitting in this building

as a sitting duck.

So these forces began to line up and work towards something

that had absolutely nothing to do with what Barnes wanted.

With the agreement between Barnes

and the state of Pennsylvania embodied in a legal document,

all of that was sort of left in a drawer while politicians

and billionaires and cultural mavens and foundations got busy.

The Barnes was given just enough money by the foundations

so that they could claim that they were trying to help the poor old Barnes out,

but that was never, in my opinion, the goal.

Foundations are non-profit corporations.

We're used to hearing about corporate takeovers

with for-profit corporations

but this was a non-profit corporate takeover.

And the first thing you have to do is remake the Board of Trustees, so you have a compliant board

who is on your side.

In the period after Richard Glanton was out,

the foundation was just sort of pottering along.

It was still controlled by Lincoln.

Four of the five board members were Lincoln board members.

The President of the Board of Trustees put on the board by Lincoln

was Bernie Watson.

Watson was very politically connected,

a professional foundation executive.

And he was the Chairman of the City Convention Centre -

the tourist bureau.

In the midst of that steps up these Philadelphia foundations.

They were giving to help them raise... I think it was 150 million.

From the very beginning, Pew's thought was,

"Well, we're going to give you money - we'll get something out of it. We want some control."

It was pretty clear to me they weren't just going to give

50, 70, 100 million without getting control of the Barnes board.

Well, if you're Bernie Watson, your duty was to maintain a connection

between Barnes and Lincoln, because that was part of the trust indenture.

I mean, what does Lincoln have to offer for Bernie Watson?

He makes his living from the sort of institutions

and people who want this thing to happen.

Watson went ahead and negotiated a deal that cut Lincoln out.

The only way for Pew or any other foundation to get control,

to be able to place board members was for the indenture to be changed.

And then they'd go to court and change the rules that Barnes laid down.

Lincoln didn't have a clue Watson and these Philadelphia foundations

had a plan to basically push them aside.

They flipped out.

They got an attorney and tried to intervene and stop it.

There were enough people who were making noises

that the plan was starting to fall apart

to the point where more aggressive tactics needed to be employed.

Ed Rendell, governor at the time, starts to put pressure on Lincoln.

He's the governor.

He controls the purse strings of this state-affiliated institution.

He said, "Look,

"Lincoln, you could be in a rosy position if you go along with this.

"What have you gotten out of Barnes so far?"

Along with Rendell, the Attorney General decides

he's going to help pressure Lincoln,

and the thing that he has is the ability to say,

"You get nothing, Lincoln, if you guys don't play along."

I don't know that we were ever as direct as saying,

"We can take this away from you," because that would take a court,

but I had to explain to them that maybe the Attorney General's office

would have to take some action involving them

that might have to change the complexion of the board.

And whether I said that directly or I implied it,

I think they finally got the message and...

They say - you mentioned it - it was portrayed that I was the bad cop

and the Governor was the good cop.

The Governor had the money.

And he had some money he was willing to add onto it,

so that automatically made him the good cop.

There is some money proposed for Lincoln,

to offset some of the perhaps perceived losses they might have.

As I recall, it was about 40 million and I said,

"You tell me what you want to spend the 40 million dollars on."

That's not a whole lot of money to some schools

but it's a whole lot of money to Lincoln University.

I think that was part of the price of Lincoln letting go.

They weren't blackmailed into agreeing with this at all.

If you ask the board, I made it abundantly clear

to Mr Scott and others that they were getting this money regardless.

They pressured the shit out of them.

And in the end, they caved.

What the Philadelphia foundations did

is what takes place all the time in the corporate world,

which is to take over the board by adding new positions on the board.

You don't go in and kill all the board members that are there -

you just put ten more on so that those five

no longer have a majority.

Watson negotiated a deal that watered-down Lincoln's participation

in the management of the foundation,

yet he betrayed Barnes, I think, first,

but to the extent Lincoln put people on the board thinking,

"You're going to keep Lincoln in the picture."

He betrayed them, too.

They sold Lincoln University for a shekel.

They sold it down the creek, and they had no right to do that.

The Philadelphia establishment,

who he determined that never would they get their hands on this art,

now have it in their hands.

From the public side, for me and every other newspaper reader,

the first thing we got was,

"Oh, all these foundations want to help the Barnes Foundation."

Foundations, they are there to serve public needs. They get tax benefits.

So these places, whether it's Pew or Annenberg or anybody else,

they have public responsibilities.

The responsibility should be,

how do you keep this going?

Not how do you exploit this - how do you preserve it?

They didn't say what their real goal was.

What was their real goal?

'From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Michelle Norris.'

'And I'm Robert Siegel.

'After two years of legal battles, one of the world's

'leading collections of Impressionist art is getting a new home.

'Today a Pennsylvania judge ruled that the Barnes Foundation

'can move its collection from the suburbs to a new gallery

'in downtown Philadelphia."

'Dr Albert Barnes made his fortune selling pharmaceuticals.

'He spent it acquiring paintings by Matisse, Picasso,

'Renoir, Cezanne and other masters.

'But two years ago, the foundation that oversees the art announced it was broke.

'Since it's prohibited from selling any of the works in its Lower Merion gallery,

'it asked for a court's permission to move the art to a new gallery in Philadelphia

'where it could draw more visitors and raise more money.

'Rebecca Rimel is CEO of Pew Charitable Trusts,

'one of three philanthropies offering to raise 100 million

'for a new gallery,

'and 50,000 to replenish the foundation's depleted endowment.'

'The judge felt, and of course we have felt since the beginning,

'that this is not only honouring the donor's intent but making sure

'the collection will be available for generations to come.'

'Barnes officials were giddy today but admitted there was much to be done

'before the paintings leave Lower Merion for good.'

The foundation became fiscally impossible to sustain

in its current location.

Three or four executive directors came in and tried to make

the Barnes financially sustainable in Lower Merion. They failed.

There were very strict limits on the number of people who could visit.

The community was very hard on being sure those limits were adhered to.

You've got this magnificent collection being hidden away from the world.

Down in Philadelphia,

ten times more people a day can be able to see it.

It's too small. It's too small. The building is too small.

There's such an emphasis on preserving

the artistic ensemble method

that Barnes seemed to favour, of hanging and arranging his paintings,

so I think people will then have the kind of experience that he intended.

And then you have the secondary benefit of what this would do

to continue Philadelphia's drive to be a great tourism destination city.

# There is so much to do So much to see

# There's nowhere that I'd rather be than Philly... #

Visitors here spend over 17 million dollars a day,

so if you have more visitors, and my understanding is

that even looking at it conservatively,

the Barnes located on the Parkway

would be able to accommodate four times as many visitors per year,

so you can start doing the math.

# We can see why Philly's more fun when you sleep over! #

These, I would say, are the key players involved.

The key political backers and financial backers of the move.

Primarily, the Pew Charitable Trusts and its director, Rebecca Rimel,

In consortium with, or as I like to put it, as part of a cabal,

with the Lenfest Foundation -

that's Jerry Lenfest, who has a powerful conflict of interest,

as the chairman of the trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

supported by Governor Rendell and Mayor Street,

and Leonore Annenberg, the widow of the late Walter Annenberg,

who spent much of the last part of his life

trying to gain possession of the Barnes.

I am sure many among them believe sincerely

that what they're doing will be for the good of Philadelphia.

We're going to build a world-class

centre for the fabulous Barnes Collection,

which has no peer anywhere else on earth.

And I am delighted to be here today with the mayor to make sure

this is done in the appropriate way - with intelligence, with reason

and compassion.

APPLAUSE

My feeling about Philadelphia is that it doesn't do itself justice.

Saying, we need to be a world-class city by stealing an art collection

and bringing it down to what I call a McBarnes in downtown Philadelphia.

This is going to be a great event for the city of Philadelphia.

It will attract literally tens of thousands of visitors,

I'm told, in a given year.

The Barnes Collection on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway

would have the economic impact of three Super Bowls, without the beer.

A city that has any sense of its own identity

doesn't talk about BECOMING a world-class city.

It is what it is.

And this is the world-class of cheerleading, of pep rallies,

and of building a new baseball stadium,

or a convention centre. That's not what art is about.

I see the people attempting to move the Barnes Foundation as vandals.

Tourism and generation of money, greed...

And the Barnes Foundation is an unfortunate victim

of all this bullshit.

We're at 20th and the Parkway,

where they intend to build the new Barnes.

They're having a party here, thinking that they'll go ahead with this plan,

so we're here to confront the people who are paying for this thing,

so we just want them to know it's a bad idea.

Attention, everyone! Attention!

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the predators' ball!

Everyone you see around me

and behind me are participating in a criminal conspiracy

to bring off the greatest theft of art since the Second World War.

We're sort of protesting their party because a lot of these people don't even realise what they are doing -

destroying a man's will, this collection, which half of them don't even have a clue about.

Have fun now! Wait till it's your will!

Barnes was married, never had children.

Never had anyone that could have come in after the fact

and said, "Hey, you screwed my grandfather over -

"I want the paintings."

The grandchildren were the students who showed up 50 years later.

For anyone who's familiar with Dr Barnes' will,

everything that he said, this will be destructive to his creation.

I implore you to vote "no."

The motion passes. Thank you very much.

Right now, The Friends of the Barnes is an organisation with one reason

to exist - to prevent the relocation of the gallery art collection.

It's such a great all-American story.

It's almost a Barnesian story of the heroic little guy

fighting the forces of City Hall and the downtown oligarchy.

-That's what Barnes was doing.

-You get a choice here,

to listen to the folks who live near the Barnes Foundation,

who went to school there...

We're going to be happy to have it, but thanks for trying.

Friends of the Barnes

approached the county

and said, "We're struggling.

"We'd like you to come out and be part of this fight to save the Barnes in Montgomery County."

I think it was that point that the momentum began to build

and the residents of Montgomery County had a feeling that

Philadelphia can't just take our art.

So, would the Barnes Foundation, one of the world's greatest art collections,

move from the suburbs to the city of Philadelphia?

As Fox 29's Gerald Kolpan explains, while it appears the legal hurdles

have been cleared, some say, "Not so fast."

'Montgomery County and the local group Friends of the Barnes

'have retained counsel, saying if the Barnes board has raised the money for the move,

'they should have been able to raise the same money to improve the Barnes where it is.

'There are still unknowns in this case.'

No-one knows just how much it'll cost taxpayers.

And no-one knows how hard Montgomery County is willing to fight.

I don't have any respect for the cultural

and political lead of Pennsylvania.

You know, these are grade-B players

who, basically, are doing tourism promotion.

This is the Disneyland of paintings.

That's not what Dr Barnes wanted.

My primary goal is to reopen these proceedings

by filing a petition and persuading this judge

that there were things that he didn't know about,

that if he had known about them, that the outcome would have been different.

What happened is this became a feeding trough for politicians.

The story is that

the Barnes has to move in order to be saved.

It's not true.

People wanted it to happen and they assessed the situation,

they saw what was needed to make it happen,

and were powerful enough to do it.

I'm convinced Judge Ott is a wonderful judge,

and he's going to do the right thing

and find that yes, we can survive in Montgomery County,

and that's where the gallery belongs.

The move is not a done deal.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a deal coming undone.

It was a combination of the establishment forces

and I think they focused on it like Ahab focused on the white whale,

and I think the objective took over.

I don't think that anybody there thinks about Barnes or alternatives

or consequences.

I think that this is the glory they wish to capture.

The reason it was permitted to move to Philadelphia

was because the presentation by the foundation showed

that it was financially not feasible to stay in Montgomery County

and to survive.

It was going down the tubes

and there was no answer to its problems.

If anybody can't fund the Barnes, which is a tiny little budget,

out of the private sector,

then they ought to find another job.

You can't get enough people in because of the restrictions and the parking problems.

They couldn't get enough people into the Barnes to see it,

to make it even close to financially workable.

That's not the way it is any more.

Lower Merion township, on its own, did go ahead

and they changed the zoning restrictions.

The township was able to say to the gallery, "You're allowed to admit

"more persons per day and open the gallery more days per week."

So there is real potential here to bring in more revenue.

There was no movement whatsoever from the foundation,

so they didn't allow themselves to take in more visitors

and to gain more revenue.

And the supposition is the trustees liked it that way,

because they didn't want people to feel the ease of accessing the Barnes,

that they wanted people to say, "Get it out of there -

"bring it to Philadelphia, where we can get into it."

There are a lot of ways this gallery can remain in Montgomery County.

If there was a deal offered to the foundation -

we estimated 50 million -

the county would float a bond for 50 million,

which enables the foundation to have an ongoing endowment

that would allow it to remain in Montgomery County.

You know, in six weeks, the Barnes Foundation

could have 50 million in the bank and, you know, they could be fine.

This was all opened up to the foundation for purposes

of negotiation. "There's a way we can make this work."

We had a response back from the foundation, outright saying "We're not interested in this."

There has to be a reason that they're not interested in responding to that.

They never wanted to raise money.

They wanted this place to go bust.

They wanted it to go bust so that they would have a reason

to bring people in, to dissolve the indenture,

because they could then argue that they couldn't operate

on the basis of the indenture,

and they could do it with impunity

and then get autonomy to operate the way they wanted.

So anybody that tells me

there wasn't the money to keep it where it is...is nonsensical.

The forces wanted it moved, no matter what.

Why wouldn't the great foundations of Philadelphia want to save

the Barnes Foundation exactly where it is?

I mean, they are Philadelphia institutions -

they should want to preserve a Philadelphia institution

as a really original institution.

Why wouldn't they want to do that?

'One of the nation's largest private foundations is now a charity.

'The Pew Charitable Trust control 4 billion in assets.

'The change in status will save Pew millions of dollars in taxes

'and it will have fewer restrictions on how it can spend its money.'

One thing that a public charity has to do

is demonstrate that it has the capacity to raise money.

Coincidentally, Pew stepped forward and said, "We would be happy to be

"the lead foundation to assemble the funds to facilitate

"the move of the Barnes Foundation."

Our application to become a public charity

had absolutely nothing to do with the Barnes.

You know, in court, Rebecca Rimel said,

"Oh, the Barnes Foundation, that's nice,

"but that's not why we did it."

Well, you go look at their application to the IRS,

that's all they talk about, the Barnes Foundation.

Look, charity is big business.

If you're really in it for altruism, you're going to be a pink lady in a hospital,

you're going to be going out, feeding the poor from your church's outreach group.

These people are power-brokers.

Don't for one minute think that if Rebecca Rimel finds,

"I now have 400 million a year to give away,

"and manipulate various things in the state or in the city with what clout I have.

"Boy, can you imagine how much clout I'll have with a billion a year to give away

"instead of only 400 million?"

It was in the filings, the first time we discovered that Pew had now

estimated that the value of the Barnes art was not,

as Glanton had thought, 4.5 billion, or I had thought, 6.5 billion,

but according to the Pew it was 25 billion to 30 billion worth of art.

The three foundations never said that they would give 150 million,

-they said they would

-raise

-150 million.

-Even if they

-gave

-150 million,

it's the greatest bargain maybe in the history of the art world -

to get 25 billion worth of irreplaceable Post-Impressionist masterpieces

for what for them is a drop in the bucket.

On a Friday,

in October of 2006, I got an e-mail...

..from someone within the Friends of the Barnes,

saying that squirreled away in the 2001-2002 Budget

of the state of Pennsylvania

was 107 million.

7 million for upgrades of the Merion property,

100 million for the move downtown.

It's amazing to me. In the case,

I called the appropriation the immaculate appropriation, because it had no father or mother.

Nobody knows who asked to put the money in.

So maybe it was divine inspiration. We don't know.

The Budget bill was a very thick piece of legislation

and 99% of the other members of the General Assembly, I'm sure,

didn't know when they voted on that capital budget bill that particular project was in there.

It was never publicised. The judge didn't know.

But the people who were trying to take over the foundation, within that group of people...

..it's... It would be unbelievable that nobody knew.

The rescue operation said, "We will raise 100 million

"to build a new building in downtown Philadelphia for the Barnes Foundation."

The state budget allocated 100 million to build a new building

for the Barnes Foundation in downtown Philadelphia.

What a coincidence! A shocking coincidence.

Somebody with influence got that put in there.

Whoever that person was, or people, or institution,

never let on in court that that money was available.

You come to court, you say, "We're broke,

"there's no other way we can raise the money, we've got to move this collection."

Had the judge known that, "Oh, the state could put up 100 million,"

it would have been a whole other story.

Rebecca Rimel professes, "We didn't have anything to do with it."

People involved in the takeover of the Barnes Foundation

knew it was there and kept that information from the court.

Is that a linchpin? Yeah.

What are the surrounding circumstances

that should have been brought to the attention of this judge?

If I was Judge Ott, I'd be furious.

I'd be looking for a way to turn this thing around.

Because he got taken for a ride.

I don't know many judges that like to get duped in their courtrooms.

I don't know many judges that like to be made fools of.

Judge Ott was made a fool of by these people.

So you see all these interlocking relationships,

and if I were a conspiratorial figure,

I'd think an enormous conspiracy is at work here

of monied interest to have their will, to have their way,

to manipulate the Treasury of the state of Pennsylvania,

to manipulate the legal system of Pennsylvania,

to manipulate Dr Barnes' desires and wishes,

to manipulate Lincoln University,

to play on this needy little college so desperate for money

and know that 50 million would blind to their eyes to what was really in their grasp.

I just think they wanted to capture the prize.

And the whole establishment mobilised to that end.

They don't like to have the whole thing questioned.

I think they used to getting their way, and this was the way,

and if you question it, you're standing in the way.

If any major figure within the Philadelphia art world wanted to speak against this idea,

they could kiss the Pew Charitable Trust goodbye,

they could kiss the Lenfest Foundation goodbye,

they could kiss the Annenberg Foundation goodbye.

Perhaps they could kiss their own job goodbye. No-one could speak.

-Yeah, but the news is in here.

-That's all I'm asking.

I'm just asking a question.

-And I'm telling you the answer.

-You're not giving me an answer. Are news crews allowed in or not?

-If the news are allowed in, though, and we're part of the press, then we should be allowed inside.

-No.

So even though the Mayor's office said it was open to the press

-and that we could come...

-We're not going to keep talking about it.

Please step out.

People in museums in New York and San Francisco and Chicago

and Dallas and other places didn't say a goddamn word

while all this was going on. I think they were scared.

They were frightened of these foundations who are benevolent

and give great sums of money to all kinds of causes. Some of them have supported the NAACP.

I've often wondered if I'm not endangering my organisation

by complaining about their bad behaviour in this case.

The force of that, in effect, is keeping the Barnes hostage.

Almost overwhelming.

You could ask the simple question, who speaks for the art,

or the legacy of Dr Barnes, when so many powerful political

and economic forces are at work against it?

Yeah, it's a big day.

Today is oral arguments,

which means what both sides have already said to the judge in writing

they're going to repeat, you know, in front of him.

And he'll decide whether to...

grant our petition and convene some hearings to decide

whether the Barnes Foundation should still be permitted to move downtown.

Or he'll pretty much, in essence, throw us out of court.

That'll be bad news.

It's all in Stanley Ott's hands.

If Stanley wants to undo it, he can undo it.

He can say he was given a lot of baloney the first time through

and the record can now be set straight

and it deserves to be set straight. And I think he's a good enough judge to make that decision.

We have an obligation to do what Dr Barnes wanted us to do

and I think that's the essence of this whole thing -

that not enough was done to fully explore what can be done to keep the Barnes where it is.

Some people, like Friends of the Barnes, won't let that happen.

Hopefully, they'll be successful.

Unfortunately, the thing has gotten to be a big political football.

And it never should have gotten there.

In that sense, Richard Glanton was absolutely right.

Glanton said, when I asked him what it's all about, he said,

"It's about who controls 4.5 billion worth of art

"and everything else is bullshit."

Well, no, Richard was wrong.

It's about who controls 25 billion worth of art

and everything else is bullshit.

Well, Wednesday night, I got home, and there was an e-mail on my computer.

The subject heading was that the judge had issued his decision.

He apparently has decided that he's not going to conduct...

He's not going to investigate any of the...

any of the matters that our petition brought to the court's attention.

He had declined to order new hearings by declaring

that none of the petitioners - the Friends of the Barnes Foundation and Montgomery County -

had standing to intervene in the matter.

I don't think the judge or the trustees of the Barnes Foundation

or anybody who's supporting the move, who sincerely supports the move,

the gallery downtown, that they understand what it is they're doing.

It'll be a tragedy and it'll be a tragedy long remembered.

This is not some minor thing.

It's not often in life you get to really try hard for something you deeply believe in

and I've gotten a chance to do that.

I would much rather be celebrating this than...

than...

whatever the opposite of celebrating is. Mourning.

So the city gets its tourist venue.

The Governor does, too. The Governor makes his friends at Pew happy.

Pew gets to control the art.

Gerry Lenfest, of the Lenfest Foundation,

is the chairman of the museum. The museum finally, in effect, gets the art.

It's virtually an appendage.

And Annenberg people get Walter and Leonore's dream.

And if it's not the destruction of the Barnes Foundation, what is it?

Sort of expect there will be an Annenberg and Lenfest in a Pew wing of this new Barnes building.

At some point, Barnes will somehow be...

I guess you'll probably get a sweatshirt or something with his name on it.

But that will be about it.

Maybe that's a way of having Philadelphia come back to the forefront

and be one of the leading cities. It'll be the leader in showing people how to break trusts

and had to break trusts with the public.

Maybe that's a good, new role for Philadelphia.

They could have a... Ring a special liberty bell for it.

I think not only will Barnes be violated by having it moved,

he will be violated in the experience he wanted you to have.

And that's important, because it was his art. It belonged to him.

He had the right to do with it as he chose.

And these people, these vandals, stepped in and took it away from him.

These are not people concerned about the art.

These are people who are concerned about money and power,

and who would destroy what is...

a perfect jewel box...

..and also a kind of... a living piece of history.

To walk into the Barnes is to see the art as Barnes,

for all of his greatness and all of his foibles, had it.

And it is, in its way...

..perfection.

Matisse said it was the only sane place to see art in America.

I'll wager Matisse against Bernie Watson

and Rebecca Rimel any day.

And I bet Dr Barnes would too.

I think he might say, "Let Matisse speak for me."

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