Derek Gillman

The financially troubled Barnes Foundation of Pennsylvania has named a new executive director and president. Derek Gillman -- president and chief executive officer and Edna S. Tuttleman director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts -- will assume his new post in October.

The financially troubled Barnes Foundation of Pennsylvania has named a new executive director and president. Derek Gillman -- president and chief executive officer and Edna S. Tuttleman director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts -- will assume his new post in October.

The Barnes Foundation won the latest round in a legal dispute over a plan to move its collection of Impressionist art to Philadelphia, against the wishes of some residents in the museum's current suburban location. Judge Stanley Ott of Montgomery County Orphans' Court said the Friends of the Barnes Foundation lacked legal standing to oppose the relocation of the Barnes Museum from its home in Merion, Pa., where the collection has been since 1925. Though "the intensity of concern" by the Friends of the Barnes group is "real and commendable," the organization lacked an "actual interest" in the matter, Ott wrote this week.

Anne d'Harnoncourt, 64, the longtime chief executive of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and one of the art world's most influential women, died Monday at her Philadelphia home of natural causes, museum spokesman Norman Keyes said. He said her death was unexpected but did not elaborate. D'Harnoncourt joined the museum in 1967 as a curatorial assistant. She became museum director in 1982 and was named to replace Robert Montgomery Scott in 1997 as the museum's chief executive. "She broke ground and she just kept growing," said Derek Gillman, executive director of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

Is the new Barnes Museum headed for disaster? Designed to house the art collection of the Barnes Foundation, with its hundreds of Cezannes, Renoirs, Matisses, Picassos and other early modern masters, a new building is under construction in downtown Philadelphia where the collection is scheduled to move from its current home in Merion, Pa. Yet serious questions remain about the rationale for the move and the museum's long-term sustainability. The direct and indirect costs of the move downtown, including site clearance and construction, the provision of a new endowment and a substantial inducement to the Barnes' previous administrator, Lincoln University, to relinquish majority control of its board of trustees, is $300 million to $400 million.

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...