I was ten years old when my cousin Barney earned his Eagle Scout badge alongside his father at a ceremony in St. Louis I was almost certainly too young to remember attending. I was twelve when he stood at the Cleveland High School starting line as the city sprint champion in three events. I was fourteen when he found Martine in a USO dance hall in Paris on December 31, 1956. I was fifteen when he brought her home to Sumac Lane in Ladue, and I was among the first cousins to meet her at the family table. I was twenty-two when, somewhere in a wig-shop office in Alton, Illinois, he made the decision to call 1967 his “B or B” year — big time or bankruptcy. I was thirty-nine when he bought Edward Hopper's Chop Suey on the strength of mental gymnastics and an interest-free loan to a New York dealer. I was forty when he spent his first night sleeping at Ghost Ranch as a new friend of Georgia O'Keeffe. I was sixty-five when he sold INTRAV to Kuoni on his sixty-fifth birthday. And I was seventy-three on April 9, 2018, when he died at Hunts Point with Rebecca and Christiane at his side.
I am writing this foreword at eighty-one. The cousin who was always ten years older than me — who set the bar for what a man from our family was supposed to be able to do with one and a half paychecks and a quarter-mile of competitive nerve — has been gone for eight years. He has been longer absent from my life than my own father was, and his absence is, in a way that surprises me to say, more present than my father's ever was. Barney is the cousin I grew up trying to keep up with, and the cousin I am now belatedly trying to write down before I forget what it was like to know him.
This is the fourth edition of a biographical project I started, in earnest, after Christie's auctioned his collection in November of 2018 for three hundred and seventeen million dollars and set a world auction record for an American painter. I assumed, at the time, that someone would write the book. The Hopper headlines were everywhere. The fifth-largest single-owner sale in auction history. Fifteen American-painter records set in a single evening. Surely a publisher would commission a biography. Surely an authorized one was already underway.
Seven years later, I can report that no such book existed. Barney was a relentlessly private man who controlled access to himself, his collection, and his family. The 2012 autobiography he self-published, A World of Possibility, was printed in such a small run by his own Hunts Point Publishing imprint that it remained almost entirely invisible. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He gave one Smithsonian oral-history interview two weeks before he married for the fourth and last time, and he died eleven months after that. The window in which an outsider might have produced an authorized biography opened in 2018 and closed without anyone walking through it.
I am the one who walked through it. Not because I am a professional biographer — I am not — but because, by accident of family geography and genealogy, I am the cousin who can. The Frauenthal grandfather we both descended from — the elder Barney W. Frauenthal, who ran the passenger side of St. Louis Union Station when it opened in 1892 and wrote the first American city guidebook for the 1904 World's Fair — gave us our common starting point. My grandfather Edward was Barney's mother Bernice's brother. The Christmas Eve gatherings at the Frauenthal house on Gannon Avenue, where Barney and Muriel and I and my sister all sat at the same long table opening presents under the same tree, are the soil this book is grown from. My grandmother knew his grandmother. Our parents played cards together. He was, until the day he died, the older cousin.
The first three editions of this biography — the original sketch, the expanded second edition, and the three-hundred-and-one-page third edition — were assembled from public records, press archives, interviews with family members, and the Frauenthal genealogy. They were written from the outside, looking in. They are real and useful. But they were missing the one source that, after April 9, 2018, no one could ever again produce: Barney's own voice.
The fourth edition is the one that has it. Barney's 2012 autobiography — out of print, never digitized, never reviewed in any major publication, surfacing only as occasional used copies on AbeBooks — was finally scanned, OCR'd, and brought into the working manuscript in April of 2026. Fifty thousand nine hundred and twenty-three words of Barney himself, on the record, telling his own story before he had any idea his daughter Christiane would, eight months after his death, send the entire collection to Christie's. The fourth edition is the first version of his life story that integrates that voice with the outside research. It quotes him directly when his own words are best, summarizes him when summary serves the narrative, and supplements him with historical context, family record, and the archival research that the third edition began and the fourth completes.
I have, in my writing of this fourth edition, worked from a single rule: the project must be honest about Barney. He was, by any measure, a remarkable man — an Eagle Scout at fourteen, an NCAA-finals quarter-miler, a self-made entrepreneur who built two cruise lines, a friend of Georgia O'Keeffe, the assembler of one of the great private collections of American Modernism, the donor of a Frank Lloyd Wright house to his hometown. He was also a man who promised the Seattle Art Museum sixty-five paintings and delivered far fewer. A man who married four times and whose wives, all four of them, stayed exactly twelve years and never remarried after he was done with them. A man whose privacy was so absolute that his only daughter, the sole executor of his estate, made the decision to auction the collection rather than honor the SAM bequest he had publicly committed to in 2007. A man who, in the autobiography he self-published in 2012, presented a lightly edited version of his own life, as we all do when we write about ourselves.
The fourth edition is the one that holds those facts together. It is admiring of Barney where admiration is honest. It is critical of Barney where the critical reading is honest. It is, above all, the version that benefits from the fact that I am his cousin: I knew him long enough and well enough to write fairly, and I have outlived him long enough to write without flinching.
I have one more thing to say in this foreword and then I will get out of the reader's way.
Barney never expected anyone to write his biography. He told me so, more or less directly, the last time I saw him in person, sitting in the living room at Hunts Point with a Hopper on one wall and an O'Keeffe on the opposite wall and the late Pacific light coming through Jim Olson's deliberately recessive architecture. He said that the autobiography was for Christiane and the grandchildren. He said he had no interest in being a public figure after he was gone. He said, with the dry pragmatism that was his characteristic mode, that the paintings would speak for him.
He was wrong about that. Christie's spoke for him in November of 2018. The Hopper world record spoke for him. The Hunts Point house spoke for him when it sold the next year for thirty-seven and a half million dollars. The 75/25 anniversary year at Ebsworth Park, currently underway in Kirkwood, Missouri as I write this in April of 2026 — seventy-five years since Frank Lloyd Wright built the Kraus House, twenty-five years since Barney bought it for a million dollars and gave it away — is speaking for him now. None of those voices is wrong, but none of them is sufficient on its own. The man who chose a Frank Lloyd Wright house over a wing in his name, a quiet philanthropy over a public foundation, a private autobiography over a press tour — that man deserves an account that integrates his own voice with the world's response to him.
This is that account. It is, at last, the one Barney himself could not write, because no one is the right person to write their own biography.
I'm the cousin. I was at the Christmas table on Gannon Avenue. I saw the Rolls Royce and the Mercedes in the driveway on Sumac Lane when I was fourteen. I watched, from my own desk in Austin, the live coverage of the Christie's hammer at ninety-one point nine million dollars in November of 2018 and thought: somebody has to write this down.
Eight years and three earlier editions later, here it is.