May 15, 2008 4:43

Bad News About the Barnes

It looks like the judge in the court battle over moving the Barnes collection out of Merion, Pa. won't be revisiting his earlier ruling that the art could be relocated to Philadelphia.

Judge Stanley R. Ott of the Montgomery County Orphans Court, which has jurisdiction over the Barnes trust, decided today to dismiss the petitions of the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, an ad hoc group that opposes the move, and the Montgomery County Commissioners. They both wanted him to reconsider his 2004 decison in light of subsequent developments. But Ott never addressed himself to the substance of the question. He decided the case on a common threshold issue —  that the petitioners didn't have standing to bring suit in the first place.

That petition was always a very long shot. Judges don't like to be asked to reverse themselves. And it probably didn't help that the first petition submitted by the Friends' earlier attorney was a very free ranging set of accusations about the motives behind the proposed move. In his ruling, Judge Ott calls that one "a 231-paragraph diatribe, rampant with scattershot accusations, arguments and conjecture." Not long after it was filed the Friends and that attorney parted company, apparently to the judge's relief. Ott says "the real issues, as honed by current counsel [Lacayo: that would be the Friend's new lawyer] in his brief and argument, are much more manageable."

But since Ott then goes on to reject the idea that the Friends or even the County has standing to bring suit in the first place, he never has to come to grips with those issues. He did find that the Friends had made their filing in good faith and not arbitrarily, meaning they won't be assessed fees for the legal costs of the other side.

And what will this mean for the Barnes? I'll stick with what I said last year.

It simply will not be possible to "recreate" the Barnes in a much larger new building on Ben Franklin Parkway, any more than the Dulwich Picture Gallery outside London could be stuffed into the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. In an era of big box museums, the Barnes is the ultimate jewel box. The financial problems of the Foundation are real, but the snatch-and-grab solution of relocating the collection to Philadelphia is no solution at all. It isn't salvation. It isn't even euthanasia. It's death by disembowelment.

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May 15, 2008 9:32

Kaufmann House Update

I spent two days earlier this week blogging about the pending sale by Christie's of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs. But the news on Tuesday morning of Robert Rauschenberg's death overshadowed for me the outcome of the auction that night. So let's back up. For the record, the house sold for $15 million — $16.84 million with the purchase premium — the bottom of its $15 to $25 million pre-sale estimate.

Christie's wouldn't identify the buyer, but Carol Vogel in yesterday's New York Times tells us that he or she also "exercised an option to purchase an orchard adjacent to the property for an additional $2.1 million that includes three cacti that were a present from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mr. Kaufmann on his first visit to the home."

I had to laugh when I was reminded about the cactus. I wondered if these were part of the "scores of cholla cacti" trucked in from Wright's compound at Taliesin West that Franklin Toker mentions in his book Fallingwater Rising. (Toker says Edgar J. Kaufmann, who had commissioned the house, "wheedled" them out of Wright.) Whether they are or not, I find it hard to think of them as house warming gifts. Wright had been furious that Kaufmann, who had commissioned him to design Fallingwater in the 1930s, didn't also give him the Palm Springs job. Worse, Kaufmann had turned to Neutra, who had worked briefly for Wright in the 1920s. By the '40s Wright considered Neutra an apostate for adopting the astringent lines of bare bones Modernism, a style Wright detested but which was rapidly making his own work look dated. He even felt that Kaufmann had chosen Neutra deliberately to hurt him.

In which case, for a prickly character like Wright, maybe cactus was the perfect house warming gift after all — at least for a house that he couldn't stand.

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