Today’s New York Times contains a front-page article on the new location of the Barnes Foundation that can be summed up as, the Barnes, Only Better. Intriguing.

I followed the story of the Barnes and the orphan court case because many of the arguments took place at the time my employer was considering the dastardly act of deaccessioning and selling a piece of furniture to generate endowment funds. The Barnes is also one of my favorite places to visit when I go to see my mother, who lives in Merion Township.

The Barnes has a fascinating history, given that the founder, Dr. Barnes, had stipulated that the collection never be moved, loaned, or reinstalled. Moving the Barnes out of the restrictive environment in Lower Merion Township therefore required, in essence, breaking Dr. Barnes’s will. The legal implications of donor intent vs. long-term museum health were what interested me in the Barnes case, but there’s so much more to the Barnes than museum legal studies.

More, as in Glackens. Bellows. The Cezanne-versus-Renoir matchup. The Barnes was a quirky installation of wonderful paintings, icons, juxtaposed with metalwork, kind of primitive Pennsylvania furniture, and African art. Barnes’s installation was saturated in its time period, like walking into every essay, article, and art history book you’d ever read on the Moderns. I’m looking forward to visiting the new-old installation when I go to Philadelphia in June.