Product Description
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Art for whose sake? It's been called the greatest theft of art
since the Second World War. The Art of the Steal reveals how a
private collection of paintings became the envy of the Louvre,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major institutions - and
the prize in a battle between one man's vision and the forces of
commerce and politics. Founded in 1922 by wealthy American drug
developer and art collector Albert C. Barnes, the Barnes
Foundation became the finest collection of paintings by Renoir,
Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh and other masters. Housed in Lower
Merion, Pennsylvania, the Barnes Foundation was envisioned by
Barnes as an art school, not a public museum, but ever since
Barnes' death in 1951, the fight over it's future has been
underway. On one side are the artists, historians and lawyers
defending Barnes' wish that the entire collection (valued at over
$25 billion) never be moved, loaned or sold; and on the other
side, the politicians, huge charitable trusts, tourism boards and
rich socialites pushing to relocate it to downtown Philadelphia.
This is a real-life David vs. Goliath story, a tale of suspense
in which hangs the e of some of the most sublime works of art
ever created.
.com
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Director Don Argott's documentary about the controversial move
of the Barnes art collection to downtown Philadelphia, The Art of
the Steal, is so adamantly against the relocation that it feels
as if the viewer is watching evidence presented in a murder
trial. Ex-Barnes student Lenny Feinberg funded the film, openly
intending it to be an argument against the relocation, in recent
years, of the Barnes Foundation, which was established in 1922.
Albert Barnes envisioned his foundation as an art school rather
than a museum, and he wrote a detailed will to dictate the future
of his highly desirable collection (valued at $25 billion) of
impressionist and postimpressionist works by artists like
Picasso, Renoir, Matisse, van Gogh, Cezanne, and others. The film
focuses on interviews given by people on both sides: advocates
and art advisers, critics such as Christopher Knight, professors
such as Dr. Robert Zaller, and those under fire, like Richard
Glanson, ex-Barnes president who planned dubious legislation in
the 1990s to move the art from its rural location. Copious
research into what some call a crime shows, and one almost gets
too clear a picture of, how a private art collection can be
usurped through government. Yet the film's didacticism is also
its weakness. Typewriters in the credits amid slips of torn paper
with typewritten notes, black backdrops with title headings for
each chapter that melodramatically read "The Last Living Apostle"
or "The Takeover," offer little in the way of interpretative
opinion. Midway through this well-played, strategic film there
appears a bulletin board of "key players," those politicians and
socialites who enabled Albert Barnes's art collection to move
against Barnes's will. Even Philadelphia mayor John F. Scott, who
holds a press conference to announce that the collection will be
relocated to the city, comes out looking fiendish because some
art was moved to a new location. While art-world viewers may find
the story in The Art of the Steal as offensive as Argott
obviously does, some viewers may be left wondering Who cares?
--Trinie Dalton