Ever been to an open-casket funeral in which the mortician had to do a lot of reconstruction on the deceased and gets it almost right, maybe the cheek bones just a little too high or the eyes a smidgen too close together? That’s pretty much my experience of the new Barnes collection in Philadelphia. And yet, because I loved the deceased, I know I’ll be back.

I finally got around to visiting the new location in central Philadelphia the other day, an ambivalent experience for anyone who fondly remembered the masterpiece of high modernism that the collection had been in its 1924 mansion in Merion just outside the city limits. Put together for what was not much more than $250,000 by pharmaceutical magnate Albert C. Barnes, a self-made millionaire & autodidact who hobnobbed with the likes of John Dewey, Albert Einstein & the Steins of Paris, Leo & Gertrude (he much preferred Leo), Dr. Barnes’ collection is one of the great gatherings of visual art as it passes from impressionism into modernism, heavy on the European focus, and with his likes & dislikes. He never much cottoned to cubism, dada, surrealism. Photography is absent; women are the subject of nudes, not artists. But he clearly saw the connection with African art and the decorative folk arts that were not often acknowledged by the artists themselves. An irascible character who held a dim view of the moneyed elite who both ran Philadelphia and, in Merion, were his literal neighbors, Barnes’ will gave them all the finger as he left his worldly goods, including the world’s greatest collection of Renoir paintings, plus more than a few masterpieces by the likes of Rousseau, Matisse, Van Gogh, Picasso, Demuth, Hartley, Soutine, Gaugin et al to Lincoln University, a black college initially set up for former slaves and freed men at the far end of Chester County near the Maryland border.