ART COLLECTING AND SHAPING PUBLICS AROUND THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A PHILADELPHIA STORY

Abstract

This dissertation traces the rhetoric of two Philadelphians, attorney John G. Johnson and Dr. Albert C. Barnes, as they collected art with a specific public in mind, namely working Philadelphians around the turn of the twentieth century. The individual bequests and resulting legacy institutions of Johnson and Barnes serve as rich case studies to assess the efforts of collectors to control the reception of their respective collections by the public. These particular histories, exceptional in their own ways, are juxtaposed to offer an objective view onto previously understudied challenges to the status quo, mounted by a few collectors by way of unique discursive practices and the establishment of distinctive single collection institutions, in the formative period for American art museums around the turn of the twentieth century in Philadelphia. The focus is on the two men’s often shared, but eventually divergent, ideas pertaining to art and the public, which can be tracked to relevant discourses that informed those views. At stake in this investigation is the relative tension between the agency of the collectors and the repurposing of their individual collections by future publics. More plainly, the goal is to study the interrelated narratives of collectors, Johnson and Barnes, as they unfolded over the course of the long twentieth century with an eye to what is gained or lost from the unraveling of the deliberate plans left by the collectors, which in both of these cases, included relocating the art work from the original site, leading to coincident shifts in the manner of display and targeted audience. It is not the point of this study to weigh-in on matters of justice regarding the individual cases, rather the goal is to probe the limits of an art collector’s vision held against the dynamic needs of publics, and evaluate what this might mean for the twenty first century.