The Art of the Steal (2009)

  This is one of those documentaries that you watch and you immediately have to tell everyone you know about it.  Or at least I do.  Maybe I'm just easily swayed.

I don't know how much you know about private art collections in the U.S.  All I know is that I don't have one.  But this guy, Albert Barnes, he had a beaut.  Back in the 40's, Barnes went to Europe and fell in love with post-Impressionist paintings.  So he bought a ton of them, came home to Philadelphia, and put on an exhibit for all the museums and cultural elite at the time.

They laughed him out of the room and called his art crap.

So he said "To hell with them" and moved all of his paintings to his house.  He slapped a Private Property sign on the front and turned the whole place into a private educational institution.  When the city realized that Picasso and Matisse weren't just flashes in the pan, they went back to Dr. Barnes who, presumably, told them to go fuck themselves.  He was so adamant that the city never make a dime off his collection, he willed it into a trust, endowing the Barnes Institute with $10 million a year to continue educating people and also stipulating that the art never be loaned, moved, or sold for any reason.  As a final slap in the face to the city leaders at the time, he appointed a small black college, Lincoln University, as the board of trustees.

Was he right to do this?  That's up to you.  Was he within his rights to do this?  Absolutely.  It was his stuff.

Here's where things get crazy.  Fast forward about fifty years and the collection is now valued at $25-35 BILLION.  That's a lot of incentive for people to get creative with legalities.

The documentary itself tells the story in an extremely entertaining fashion, like hearing someone tell a juicy piece of gossip.  It shies away from making anyone look too sympathetic, because it could have been very maudlin, and focuses on the wry humor and many ironies of the saga.  The end was a bit of a letdown, in fact, because I wanted the story to keep going.  I could have listened to these people talk all day.