Bringing the Museum Home

The eye came first, long before the money did. As a young man in France, Barney had spent his Saturdays in the Louvre, and what he learned there was not history but looking. “My mentor was my eye,” he said flatly. “I never took an art history class. I trained myself by looking at the art up close in museums.” Later in life he would enjoy pointing out that he had taught art history at the university level — he had simply never taken it.

The Rembrandt That Got Away

His first instinct was to collect what he loved best: the Old Masters. That dream died on a single afternoon in Rotterdam. The owner of Holland America Line took him to see his uncle's private collection — fifteen Rembrandts, twenty-seven Frans Hals, an entire private museum — and Barney understood, standing in that house, that the game was over before he'd started. “It was hopeless,” he wrote. “I was never going to own the best of the Old Masters.” A lesser collector would have bought a second-rate Rembrandt anyway. Barney went looking for a field where he could own the best.

He sat down with Charles Buckley, the director of the St. Louis Art Museum, and worked through the possibilities out loud — the Quattrocento, the School of Paris, the Impressionists — and couldn't afford the first rank of any of them. Buckley finally suggested American Impressionism. Barney's reply is one of my favorite things he ever said, because it is so honest: “What is it?” The answer led them to the Ashcan School and, past it, to American Modernism — a whole national art still so undervalued that a St. Louis businessman could hope to own its masterpieces.

The First Love

The first American picture Barney bought, in 1972, was a William Glackens: Café Lafayette, a beautiful woman with a cocktail in a Paris restaurant, painted with a Renoir-like glow. Buckley — who happened to be the world's authority on Glackens — had spotted it in an auction catalog and flown to New York with Barney on two tickets he bought himself. Barney walked into the room, saw it on the far wall, and was gone. “I fell in love with it instantly,” he wrote. “‘I'm going to buy this picture,’ I told him.”

The woman in the painting turned out to be Kay Laurell, a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl who had once appeared on Broadway with her costume draped to bare one breast, representing — naturally — “the spirit of France.” Years later Glackens's own son filled in the rest for Barney: “Kay was my father's mistress.” At the very same auction Buckley steered him to a peeling Charles Burchfield watercolor that Barney thought “looked like two alcoholics who had been sleeping in an ash pit overnight — one was waking up, and one was still asleep.” He bought that too, then called Buckley to confess he'd gone back for seconds. “Good for you!” Buckley said.

This became a pattern — Barney concentrating so hard on the pictures themselves that the paperwork blurred. One day he bought three works at auction, focused entirely on the images, and only afterward realized what he'd done. “My gosh,” he said, “I bought three landscapes, and I wasn't aware I bought even one!” A bystander who overheard him put it best: “Somebody had better help this man!”

Quality, Quality, Quality

What saved him from being merely enthusiastic was a set of iron rules, and the first was a slogan. In real estate, he liked to say, everything is location, location, location. In collecting it was something else.

From that flowed the rest. He would buy only what could “hang on the museum wall right now,” nothing merely decorative. He bought an artist only at the peak of their powers — the great decade, not the famous name — and he would refuse a late, “flabby” O'Keeffe or a twilight Picasso “at any price… just because he's Picasso.” And — the rule that surprised people — he collected only dead artists. Two reasons. First, only with a finished life could he see an artist's whole arc and choose the summit; buying a living artist was “like trying to hit a moving target.” Second, he wanted to judge the object, never the personality: “I didn't want to meet the artists or learn about their personal lives.”

Twelve Children

Buckley gave him one more piece of advice, meant to keep the collection ruthless: buy the twelve greatest American Modernist pictures you can, and whenever you find a thirteenth better than your weakest, sell the weakest and trade up — “until you're standing on Mount Olympus.” Barney couldn't do it, and the way he explained why tells you everything about him:

He kept buying and stopped selling. When he blew past Buckley's suggested ceiling of twelve, he didn't agonize — “I bought thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen the same day.” He never haggled, on principle: “If a dealer sees that you're a haggler, he just adds ten percent.” If the price was fair and he wanted the object, he said yes and moved on. It drove some of the New York dealers a little crazy. When one grand figure, Larry Fleischman, sneered at “you ignoramuses from the Midwest—you come to New York, and you don't know anything about anything,” Barney simply froze him out and bought elsewhere. The ignoramus from the Midwest was, by then, quietly assembling a collection the New York dealers would one day fight over.

An Eye for What Others Missed

The deepest reason it worked was that Barney was looking at American art the way almost no American of his generation could — from the outside. He'd been schooled by Europe, and he came home able to see what his countrymen still couldn't quite believe: that the best American Modernism was radically underpriced, held down less by the market than by a national inferiority complex.

He never set out to be a collector, exactly. “Nobody starts as a collector,” he said. “You buy a few things you like, and then eight or ten items in, someone says, ‘Boy, you have a great collection,’ and then you realize you have a collection.” By the time anyone said it to Barney, he had a great one — and the greatest pictures, Hopper's Chop Suey among them, were still ahead of him.