Rx 26 / Room 14
Barnes ensemble, Room 14 West Wall, Courtesy of Barnes Foundation.
We perceive only what we have learned to look for, both in life and in art.
- Albert C. Barnes, MD
With its yellow walls, double rank of paintings, and hand-crafted furniture, Room 14 at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia does not resemble a conventional public museum. 56 paintings and 76 objects from diverse traditions, of dissimilar subjects, in different media, are densely and meticulously displayed here in an unconventional arrangement known as an “ensemble.” In the center of the gallery, a painting by nineteenth-century French artist Honoré Daumier, The Ribalds (1848–1849), is displayed atop a Pennsylvanian German chest over drawers (1770) set. Our attention is called to their similar color palettes, full figuration of design, and pairing of the Daumier figures mirrored in the two hearts of the chest. Flanking the Daumier are Henri Rousseau’s, Four Fisherman (1909) and John Kane’s Along the Susquehanna (c. 1928), both in predominantly cool greens. The prominent red of the foreground figure in the Daumier piece highlights a hue in the fifteenth-century French panels on the extreme left and right, alongside two chairs and andirons.
The visual orchestration of this gallery, and all galleries at the Barnes, is unrelentingly challenging and may induce discomfort in the disarray. The notable absence of captions or accompanying descriptions foregrounds the ensembles as experiential, complex, and relational—the dissimilar artworks cannot be fully grasped without considering their proximity to one another. The ensembles embody central tenets of a unique approach to teaching visual literacy—now known as the Barnes Method—that applies the scientific method to the arts through close looking and prolonged engagement with original artworks.
Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania medical school. In lieu of pursuing a career in clinical medicine, he amassed a fortune in pharmaceuticals and embarked on a lifelong mission of arts acquisition and arts education. Deeply impacted by the American Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who asserted the arts were fundamental to democracy, Barnes went on to charter the Barnes Foundation in 1922 as an educational institution. Barnes stated, “John Dewey’s philosophy of education rests on the axiom that the indispensable elements of the democratic way of life—scientific method as intelligence in operation, art, education—are all bound together in A SINGLE ORGANIC WHOLE. To put the matter in other terms, all genuine experience is intelligent experience, experience guided by insight derived from science, illuminated by art, and made a common possession in education. ”
The Barnes Method was rigorously deployed through year-long foundational courses and seminars, engaging students with the dynamic ensemble configurations to juxtapose various visual, historical, or cultural relationships. This marked a significant deviation from traditional pedagogy, which often considered a work’s literary, historical, or moral significance and its technical proficiency. Conversely, the Barnes Method prioritized experience and accessibility over educational background or cultural proficiency. Until Barnes’s death in 1951, the ensembles remained in flux, as Barnes continuously rearranged works to explore various visual, historical, or cultural relationships.
reflections…
As art historian Rika Burnham wrote, the ensembles were intended to activate students and visitors: “The works of art hang intimately like eccentric neighbors, in solitude and in constant conversation. To the first-time viewer, the installation consumes the art; to the dedicated Barnes student, the installation frees the works of art.” Barnes’s ensembles compel viewers to eschew discrete meanings in favor of more challenging and ambiguous forms of interpretation. The Barnes Method was particularly attentive to matters of form, focusing on visual consonance of color, light, line, and space between culturally dissimilar works and a gradual recognition of emerging commonalities. The experience of viewing mirrors the ensembles themselves: a non-static entity in constant evolution, requiring a certain attentiveness to navigate a series of relationships relative to a singular object. In this way, visual competency at the Barnes is achieved through varied and sustained exposure to deeply nuanced, infinite levels of complexity.
Medicine navigates a similarly elaborate relationship between form and context, objective assessment and subjective interpretation. A focus on empiricism and anatomical form in the foundational years of medical education then shifts to accommodate personhood and the individual once physicians begin engaging with patients. Just as the Barnes ensemble artworks emerge from different cultures, centuries, and geographies to exist in tandem, clinicians are similarly charged with caring for patients who present in radically different situations. They must rely on an expanding body of experiential knowledge to seek out fundamental similarities and divergences and to delineate a discrete plan of action. How do the visual and intellectual challenges of responding to a Barnes ensemble parallel the complexities of the clinical encounter, as well as the social experience of being a physician more generally? How does the Barnes Method, which accounts for both form and context, offer a conceptual model for approaching complexity in medical situation and practice?
Barnes’s remarkable strides in unconventional, durational, and accessible arts education perhaps stipulate what is most needed now to heal a “soul-sick nation” amid the extraordinary circumstances of our current moment. In addition to courses held at his Foundation, Barnes offered arts, philosophy, and close-looking opportunities at his racially-integrated pharmaceutical factory in West Philadelphia. Occasionally, he even brought collection artworks directly into the factory for discussion. Before his death, Barnes also entrusted the historically-Black Lincoln University to appoint the museum’s trustees after all current trustees passed away.
As medicine begins to engage in broad conversations across disciplines so as to improve patient care, how can we continually reimagine ways to build upon and articulate a foundational common language among the arts, humanities and medicine? How might we utilize the Barnes ensembles as a vehicle to galvanize deep and sustained self-directed and collective reflection on race, diversity, and inclusion in medicine and society, to enable necessary cultural transformation? Can we look to the ensembles and the Barnes method and its integration of “the many forms of knowing” as a best practices model for humanistic learning in medicine? How might Barnes respond to skepticism today regarding the value of the arts to medicine, and to those who dismiss the arts as irrelevant to clinical care?
sources
Bailey, Colin B. "The Origins of the Barnes Collection, 1912—15." The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1265 (2008): 534-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40479829.
Burnham, Rika. "The Barnes Foundation: A Place for Teaching." The Journal of Museum Education 32, no. 3 (2007): 221-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/10598650.2007.11510572.
Clarke, Christa. "Defining African art: Primitive Negro Sculpture and the aesthetic philosophy of Albert Barnes." African Arts 36, no. 1 (2003): 40+.
Kneebone R, Schlegel C. “Thinking across disciplinary boundaries in a time of crisis.” Lancet. 2021;397(10269):89-90. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32757-4.
Smith, Roberta. “A Museum, Reborn, Remains True to Its Old Self, Only Better,” May 18, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/arts/design/the-barnes-foundation-from-suburb-to-city.html.
