Albert C Barnes

About six years ago, on the way to the Los Angeles airport, Philadelphia playwright Thomas Gibbons was telling Ben Guillory, producing artistic director of the Robey Theatre Company, about the travails of the Barnes Foundation. Collector Albert C. Barnes had willed control of his foundation, a trove of 19th and 20th century French paintings and other masterpieces in Merion, Pa., to Lincoln University, a small, predominantly African American school nearby.

The spanking new Broad Contemporary Art Museum is now open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, featuring a yearlong display of mostly borrowed paintings, sculptures and photographs. Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown has just opened "Collecting Collections: Highlights From the Permanent Collection," a show that fills the building until mid-May. Is something a bit odd here? Let's see if I've got this straight. One major L.A.

As a profession, architecture has never included many refuseniks, those who decline to work for a particular client out of principle. Architects by nature believe in the power of the new to improve upon the old or even redeem it. Often they think that a building, if completed with enough skill, can make irrelevant the question of whom it was designed for or what it replaces.

Imagine if the only way you could see Old Master paintings was through reproductions. The legendary art collector Albert C. Barnes called those "a hearsay version of a honeymoon narrated by an octogenarian." Or if the only way to experience the beauties of nature was through picture postcards. That's what the world of film would be like without the wonders of preservation.

Conspiracy theory or hostile corporate takeover? Those two options come to mind when reading the lengthy court petition filed recently in the dispiriting case of the Barnes Foundation. Nearly three years ago, the court approved moving the unique Pennsylvania school with the drop-dead $6-billion Modern art collection from suburban Lower Merion Township to downtown Philadelphia.

In December 2004, a Pennsylvania court did the unthinkable. It ruled in favor of a controversial petition to relocate the greatest collection of Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings ever assembled by an American art collector from its historic home in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb to a gritty site downtown.

Call it art appreciation as battle royal. The emotionally charged new documentary "The Art of the Steal: The Untold Story of the Barnes Collection" takes what might otherwise have remained a local matter of consequence only to art aficionados and blue bloods -- the decision to move a valuable art collection from an affluent Philadelphia suburb into the city's downtown area -- and presents the legal tussle and decades-spanning tug of war surrounding the...

If you thought the 1980s were over, make your way to the National Gallery of Art to see "Great French Paintings From the Barnes Foundation: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Early Modern," opening Sunday. It's an '80s kind of show stumbling headlong into the '90s. Which is to say, it's a glossy treasure-house show, without an idea in its head.

The Lannan Foundation swept onto Los Angeles' art scene 10 years ago with the aura of a white knight. Endowed with $100 million from the estate of a self-educated financier who was a voracious collector of contemporary art, the organization was dedicated to promoting his interest in the visual and literary arts. It quickly became a major force in national cultural circles, reinforcing the city's status as a contemporary art destination. But now the foundation--named after J.

The masterpieces on this page should be familiar, but they aren't. Although each is a major work by a pillar of Modernism, they can be seen only two days a week in Merion Station, a frustrating-to-find suburb of Philadelphia. Until very recently, the only reproductions permitted--for scholarly publications alone--were bad, black and white, and thumbnail-sized.