The first time I heard of the Barnes Foundation it was still in Merion, PA. My mom had returned home from visiting the museum with friends, and I asked to go back with her, but wasn’t allowed because I was too young.

At that time, I think you had to be 13 to tour the galleries, and they only opened 1/2 the museum at a time.

There were almost no other visitors at the gallery when I was finally old enough to tour the museum. The lighting was low and it felt like walking into someone’s home who was out for the afternoon.

Entering, I looked up in the central hall at a giant Matisse mural, then to the right at one of Cezanne’s card player paintings, and then at the curious pieces of metal on the walls covered in textured fabric.

Lines, color, movement, composition, craft, texture and quiet, no one telling me the history of the painting, just looking and looking and looking. I know that it was Barnes’ vision that really taught me to see.

On the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the new museum is always overflowing with people. I appreciate that the art is more accessible in its new home, but I wonder how many 13 year olds learn to see there the way I did…

It’s hard to tune out a jostling crowd or someone’s lecture on the history of a certain piece and just look. As Magritte showed us- language and sound shape what we see. I miss the quiet in the new museum, and don’t attend so intensely to what I see now that it is easy to get there.

http://www.barnesfoundation.org/