Emanoel Araújo (pronounced Ahra-OO-zhoh. 1940~2022)

 

Emanoel Araújo (15 November, 1940, Santo Amaro, Bahia – 7 September 2022, São Paulo) was a Brazilian artist, art curator, and museologist.

Emanoel Araújo (pronounced Ahra-OO-zhoh)

He Shined a Light on Other Artists. Now the Light Turns to Him.

The Afro-Brazilian artist Emanoel Araújo is considered a giant in his home country. A museum he founded is working to preserve his legacy.

The artist Emanoel Araújo at the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo in 2012. Araujo, who died last year, was also a curator and collector as well as the driving force behind the museum, which emphasized Brazil’s Black heritage.Credit...Isadora Brant/Folhapress

the Barnes Foundation

July 11, 2011, 7:00 am

An Interactive Tour Through the Barnes Foundation

By RANDY KENNEDY

The Barnes Foundation Click on the photograph for a guided tour with Randy Kennedy.

The Barnes Foundation, the stupendous collection of Impressionist and early modernist painting and sculpture amassed by Albert C. Barnes, a pharmaceutical tycoon, has been one of the strangest and most affecting art institutions in America since the day it opened in 1925 in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion. Much of what made it extraordinary was the idiosyncratic way Barnes displayed the art, in an antiquated-looking salon style that filled entire walls of its neo-Classical home with odd arrangements of paintings, organized to echo and rhyme their formal qualities and interspersed with decorative metalwork like ax heads and hinges.

Soon, though, the Barnes will become a lot more like other American museums. In 2004 a Pennsylvania judge’s ruling permitted the foundation, which had struggled financially, to bypass the rigid charter and bylaws laid out by Barnes, stipulating that no picture in the collection could be lent, sold or moved from the walls of the galleries he built. A new building for the collection in downtown Philadelphia is expected to open next May. Designed by the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, it will be four times the size of the original Barnes, which closed for good at the end of June.

For those who missed the collection in its final days in Merion, The New York Times has created a virtual tour of the galleries to convey at least a little of the flavor of the home Barnes built for his art.

His choice of Merion as a symbolic removal from the city was a reflection of his disdain for the pieties of the art establishment and his fiercely unconventional ideas about what good art was, inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey. He routinely rejected requests for casual visits and ran the collection less as a museum than as a place where students, many of them underprivileged, could attend classes to learn about art in depth.

It is difficult now, looking at the artists that Barnes collected — Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Seurat — to grasp how revolutionary such a collection was at the time he was building it, in the years just after the 1913 Armory Show in New York that shocked many Americans with the radical innovations of Cubism and Duchamp. A 1923 headline in The Philadelphia Inquirer, appearing as Barnes prepared to open the building that would house his collection, typified the view of many: “How a Pennsylvania millionaire is spending a fortune to prove the Futurists and Cubists not insane and teach us to admire their strange work as he does.”

Nearly all of this strange work soon ended up becoming canonical. But the way Barnes exhibited it kept the eccentricity of his vision front and center. It looked unlike almost anything else one could find in an American museum — a fact even more pronounced today.

Critics of the move argue that it will destroy the character of one of the last truly personal visions for what an art museum can be, putting the collection in a more conventional setting and surrounding it with the accoutrements of every other museum, like a cafe, a bookstore, an auditorium. But some supporters point out that the plan for the new building in some ways maintains the layout of the original. They add that the Barnes, like all great art collections, should not be preserved in amber, and will continue to live only if it is allowed to change.

Have you visited the Barnes? Share your memories of the collection in the comments field below.

Room 19 at the Barnes features works by Matisse (center, “The Music Lesson,” from 1917); Utrillo, Soutine, Modigliani and de Chirico.Credit...2023 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Utrillo: 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Soutine: 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; de Chirico:2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome; Photo by Tim Nighswander/The Barnes Foundation

The Barnes Foundation 2012-2023. The Barnes Foundation Loosens Its Straitjacket

The Barnes Foundation Loosens Its Straitjacket

A judge allowed the Philadelphia institution to lend paintings from the storied collection of Dr. Albert C. Barnes. It will look and behave a lot more like a global museum.

Room 10 at the Barnes Foundation features a Modigliani from 1918 at center, alongside works by Matisse, Picasso and Braque. With new permission from the court, they and other paintings can be lent to museums.Credit...2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; 2023 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris (Braque); 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Soutine); 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome (Afro); Photo by Tim Nighswander/The Barnes Foundation

By Ted Loos

Aug. 9, 2023

If a visitor goes to the Barnes Foundation, and a favorite Cézanne, Matisse or Renoir is missing because it is on loan to the Louvre, is the Barnes still the Barnes?

Art Review

A Museum, Reborn, Remains True to Its Old Self, Only Better

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The new Barnes Foundation, in a new shell in Philadelphia. More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 17, 2012

PHILADELPHIA — The Barnes Foundation’s move from suburban Philadelphia to the center of the city caused art lovers lots of worry.

Multimedia

Slide Show

The New Barnes

Interactive Feature

Collector as Artist: The Barnes Foundation

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The west wall of the main room of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, with Seurat’s “Models” over Cézanne’s “Card Players.” More Photos »

Enlarge This Image

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Matisse’s Fauve masterpiece “Joie de Vivre,” in a new spot. More Photos »

Devotees of this great polyglot collection, heavy with Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse, which the omnivore art shopper Albert C. Barnes amassed between 1912 and his death in 1951, were appalled by the idea. Barnes spent years obsessively arranging his installation cheek-by-jowl in the mansion in Lower Merion, Pa., that he built for the purpose and opened in 1925, and he stipulated that, after he died, it should remain exactly as it was. 

In 2002 the foundation’s board — constrained by limits on attendance and public hours imposed by zoning restrictions — announced plans to relocate. Many people, including a group that sued to stop the move, were sure that it could only desecrate this singular institution.

Others, myself included, did not object to the move per se, but felt that faithfully reproducing the old Barnes in the new space, as promised by the trustees, was a terrible idea. To us it seemed time to at least loosen up Barnes’s straitjacketed displays, wonderful as they often were. And why go to the trouble of moving the collection to a more accessible location when the galleries were not going to be any bigger?

And yet the new Barnes proves all of us wrong. Against all odds, the museum that opens to the public on Saturday is still very much the old Barnes, only better.

It is easier to get to, more comfortable and user-friendly, and, above all, blessed with state-of-the-art lighting that makes the collection much, much easier to see. And Barnes’s exuberant vision of art as a relatively egalitarian aggregate of the fine, the decorative and the functional comes across more clearly, justifying its perpetuation with a new force.

As a result, his quirky institution is suddenly on the verge of becoming the prominent and influential national treasure that it has long deserved to be. It is also positioned to make an important contribution to the way we look at and think about art. 

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, who pulled off this feat — and somehow managed to avoid the feeling of plastic fakeness that Barnes purists and Barnes skeptics alike were anticipating — deserves our gratitude. The Merion building and its 24 galleries, and Barnes’s arrangements within them, have been recreated with amazing fidelity in terms of proportions, window placement and finishings, albeit in a slightly more modern style. The structure is oriented to the south, exactly as in Merion; the same mustard-colored burlap covers the walls; the same plain wood molding outlines doors and baseboards. 

As for Barnes’s arrangements, almost nothing is out of place: not one of the hundreds of great French paintings, none of the pieces of Americana, nor any of the Greek or African sculptures, the small New Mexican wood-panel santos or the scores of wrought-iron hinges, locks, door handles and whatnot that dot the interstices like unusually tangible bits of wallpaper pattern, often subtly reiterating the compositions of the paintings. 

The only change to the installation — a big improvement — is the removal of the colorful fantasy of nudes in a landscape that is Matisse’s great Fauve masterpiece, “Joie de Vivre,” from its humiliating position on the stairway landing to a large alcove on the balcony overlooking the main gallery. 

At the same time, some major systemic improvements make everything breathe in a new way. Especially important is the lighting system, designed by Paul Marantz, which seamlessly mixes natural and artificial illumination into a diffuse, even light, and had early visitors asking if some of the paintings had been cleaned. (They hadn’t.) There is also the spatial largess: The recreated building is set within a larger structure that includes a raft of amenities, among them a cafe, an auditorium and a gracious garden court with lots of padded benches, as well as a 5,000-square-foot temporary exhibition gallery that pulses with curatorial possibility.

Barnes’s arrangements are as eye-opening, intoxicating and, at times, maddening as ever, maybe more so. They mix major and minor in relentlessly symmetrical patchworks that argue at once for the idea of artistic genius and the pervasiveness of talent. Nearly every room is an exhibition unto itself — a kind of art wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities — where you can spend hours parsing the echoes and divergences among the works in terms of color, composition, theme, surface and light. 

In Room 4, two Chardins flank a (school of) El Greco beneath 16th-century carved-wood reliefs from France; almost all depict women engaged in various tasks. In Room 14, painted Chinese fans hover beside Matisse’s magnificent 1907 portrait of his wife in a red madras headdress, with a folkish Surrealist painting by Jean Hugo, great-grandson of Victor, positioned above. Several American Modernists make recurring appearances, including Charles Demuth, Maurice Prendergast and William Glackens, a former high school classmate of Barnes’s who turned him on to Modern art; so, to lesser extent, do artists who taught at the Barnes. In front of several Renoirs are wonderful pots by that painter’s son, the future filmmaker Jean.

The twin poles of Barnes’s world are Renoir, represented by 181 works (the largest concentration in the world), and Cézanne, represented by 69. Barnes never seemed to tire of playing these two giants off each other, alternating the fuzzy, sybaritic pinks of Renoir’s forms — whether female or floral — with Cézanne’s anxious, angular blues, greens and rusts, played out in landscapes, still lifes and numerous paintings of bathers, early and late, small and large.

Their back-and-forth dominates several galleries, and the Renoirs are so ubiquitous that at times they seem to become a kind of background noise. That is, until you come up against a great one, like “Leaving the Conservatory,” an imposing full-length grouping of several Parisians dressed in shades of gray that hangs above a predominantly gray-blue Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest. These wonderful chests, of which there are several outstanding examples, as well as the numerous ceramics, affirm Barnes’s appreciation of painting as a free-range language expressed in various materials, not only oil on canvas. 

There are also seemingly endless surprises, like the lone work by the postwar Italian artist Afro in Room 10, which also contains a veritable Matisse retrospective, including a small, early still life that you could swear is a Manet, and numerous works by Picasso and Modigliani.

And there are oddities everywhere that might not pass muster in a more conventional museum, like a European, possibly 15th-century, panel in Room 23, depicting a Flight Into Egypt. The colors are rich, the figures big and wonderfully drawn, but the real life of the picture emanates from the greenery, applied in loose splotches that bring to mind the brushy, sponged-on glazes of American redware ceramics. Looking at the slightly bizarre bits of green, you have no idea if they were part of the original picture or added later, but you don’t care, and perhaps Barnes did not, either. It made a point about continuities of human touch and technique, and he went for it.

In many ways the rebirth of the Barnes could not be better timed. It occurs at a point of intense public interest in art — witness the fact that since the project’s groundbreaking in November 2009, membership has jumped from 400 to nearly 20,000 — and it approaches art with an unfettered directness that is becoming rare among major American museums, of which the Barnes is now one. 

At a moment when so many museums seem bent on turning themselves into entertainment and social centers, or frequently mount dry, overly academic exhibitions, the Barnes irrefutably foregrounds art and nonverbal visual experience. The galleries are devoid of text panels and even wall labels; most works have the artist’s last name or some other cultural identification nailed to their frames, and there are printed guides stored in benches in each gallery that identify the works on view. 

Audio guides will be available, but really, there is nothing to do here but look at art and think for yourself. The dense clusters and juxtapositions provide more than enough to work with: a visual deluge of forms — in different mediums and materials, from widely spread times and places — that make looking and thinking reflexive, rapturous and liberating. 

At the same time, the relocation of the Barnes, with all its mixings and juxtapositions, comes at a time when curators of all kinds — from museum professionals to artists organizing gallery group shows — are increasingly interested in cross-cultural, cross-medium presentations of artworks. In this regard the Barnes looks utterly prescient. 

And let’s not overlook the implications of that temporary gallery, which is opening with an exhibition about Barnes’s life and the history of the foundation. This space creates the possibility of a new flexibility with regard to the meticulous re-creation of the Merion galleries. They suggest that the Barnes may be able to have its cake and eat it too, hold on to its past and also forge a new future. 

Barnes purists may consider this heresy, but Barnes’s installation should sometimes change and move a little. There are moments, especially in the upstairs galleries among the plethora of drawings and Greek and African objects, where the presentation palls and oppresses a bit, even now. The symmetrical patchwork doesn’t always come across as meticulously assembled; it can seem arbitrary and maniacally crowded. More generally, there is simply too much there for everything to remain in perpetual lockdown. 

The Barnes curators need to come up with creative ways — say for two or three months, every other year — to extract certain works from the gallery collection, walk them across the garden court and put them on view in the temporary-exhibition galleries for less encumbered viewing. Set out all the African works, for example. Give us a Cézanne or a Matisse retrospective. Or a survey of the Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chests and related Americana whose hues and surfaces Barnes was so alive to. 

Barnes did so much, more than he was capable of knowing. We can know how much only if his orchestrations are taken apart and rearranged ever so slightly and briefly, once in a while. It is great that Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the architects, adhered to his vision so sensitively, providing a kind of unwaveringly accurate baseline. But every so often the pieces of even his most revelatory ensembles should be freed from his matrix, just as his amazing achievement has been liberated from Merion.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 18, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Museum, Reborn, Remains True to Its Old Self, Only Better.

Room 19 at the Barnes features works by Matisse (center, “The Music Lesson,” from 1917); Utrillo, Soutine, Modigliani and de Chirico.Credit...2023 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Utrillo: 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Soutine: 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; de Chirico:2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome; Photo by Tim Nighswander/The Barnes Foundation

董成瑜小論幾家美術館或博物館

 "前天去了里斯本一家非常棒的私人美術館Museu Calouste Gulbenkian，也就是這位叫做Calouste Gulbenkian的石油大亨建立的，它立刻讓我想起洛杉磯的Paul Getty Museum，後者也是一位石油大亨Paul Getty建立的。私人美術館可以看出收藏者的個性與品味，我去過的幾家非常喜歡又具規模的私人美術館，除了這兩家，還有倫敦的The Wallace Collection和台灣的奇美博物館。

各有各的傳奇故事，例如Paul Getty最有名的故事之一是，有人綁架他的一個孫子，他告訴綁匪我不能付你錢，因為付錢贖回這個孫子，代表我其他十三個孫子都會有危險。他另一個故事是，家裡偶爾舉辦大型宴會，賓客們住在他的莊園裡，後來發現房間裡的電話都被主人一一上鎖了，大概是主人預知賓客們會盡情打免費國際長途電話吧。只能說有錢人的內心很不一樣。

倫敦的The Wallace Collection更老，是英國的一個家族五代人的收藏，加上家族中女性與外國皇室通婚獲得更多財富。我覺得最有趣的收藏之一是兵器和盔甲，後來我在台灣的奇美博物館也看到許多兵器與盔甲，覺得十分有趣。而奇美博物館的大量動物標本也是所有私人博物館中非常特別的收藏。

這些館藏各有特色，很難說我最喜歡哪家，只能說每次去到哪家就最喜歡那家。有興趣的人可以自己上網查，如果像我一樣嫌讀英文慢，可以把大段落highlight 起來用翻譯功能，就會看得很快。這些主人的故事也都很精彩，幾乎都有書出版（可惜奇美許文龍先生的書內容中規中矩，只有管理學，沒有人的故事，看了真是扼腕。）"

再回到我前天去的美術館，Gulbenkian據說是第一個開採伊拉克石油的人，他原是亞美尼亞人，家中富有，喜歡旅行，十四歲開始就住旅館，從不住在固定的城市，晚年住在里斯本（的旅館），1955年去世時，是世界上最富有的人。他一直煩惱自己的錢死後該如何處置，他想要「永恆」，後來把藝術收藏全捐給基金會，這是獲得永恆的一種方式，所以如今才有如此豐富的館藏。

此館光是建築設計就非常完美，沒有一絲細節被忽略，即使在館中看畫，從大面窗看出去的景色也如畫一般美，也就是說，整體設計是連窗外的景色、樹種、樹的姿態與密度都是設計好的。這令我有點感嘆，台灣的許多有功能性的建物，即使請了知名設計師設計，建完之後卻疏於管理維護，久了就開始髒舊破落，非常可惜，管理維護應該是最重要的事啊。奇美博物館就是一個完美又維護得很好的博物館，身在其中覺得非常有靈氣與活力。

有錢人建一座美術館把自己大量的收藏讓普羅大眾都能看到，這恐怕比去選總統要更踏實一點（我說的是美劇《繼承之戰》裡的長子），也恐怕跟品味有關吧？

Oppo 科技研究大樓 成都

 

2014年，英國的Gianni Botsford Architects與台灣的吳瑞榮建築師事務所合作，贏得了為中國手機製造商OPPO設計全新的42層科技研究中心大廈的競賽。新大樓位於成都南部的新川科技園的中心 ，旨在成為俯瞰新園區的總體規劃焦點。成都是四川省省會，也是中國的第五大城市，市區人口超過1,500萬。

 

作為區域的研究總部，大樓可容納多達5,000名工程師和技術支援人員；它提供了一個激發靈感的工作場所，鼓勵員工聚集、交流、互動並相互學習。大樓內設有獨立工作、休閒、培訓、展覽、餐飲的區域，並可欣賞到園區和城市的美景。通過在總體規劃中引入方向性，將垂直塔樓與周圍的橫向低層建築相融合，設計形成一個具有識別度的視覺焦點。塔樓被構思為一個垂直村莊，通過留白和不同層高的穿插，以促進協作、創造多種流線和互動場所。設計將塔樓的大體量分解為更符合人體尺度的小體量；並在水準和垂直方向上進行體量的偏移，以實現平面和天際線的多樣性，並確保所有用戶都能獲得異常高的日光照射量；樓層的典型平面則從核心周邊錯落佈置的「觀景房間」中獲益。

作品檔案2239｜OPPO科技研究中心大廈

Gianni Botsford Architects＋吳瑞榮建築師事務所