I’ve now seen the new Barnes installation of The Dance for myself, and it’s clear to me that the Barnes erred. Furthermore, as you can see at right, the Barnes made a strange decision not to duplicate the molding into which The Dance was ’slotted’ in Merion. [There's a detail in the jump.] The result is an installation that looks partial, accidental and slapdash. The ‘empty’ spot on either side of The Dance is distracting and detracts from the artwork.

But when your apparent primary goal is to be a tourist attraction, maybe you think none of this matters.

Related: Jay Raymond noticed this too.

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features three distinguished critics discussing the new Barnes Foundation: the LAT’s Christopher Knight, WSJ contributor Tom Freudenheim (who agrees that the Barnes badly bungled The Dance) and Bloomberg’s James Russell. To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here.

• Christopher Knight, a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the art critic of the Los Angeles Times;
• Tom Freudenheim, the former director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal; and
• James Russell, the architecture critic for Bloomberg.

Among the topics we discuss are:

• Matisse’s great Le Bonheur de Vivre;
• Georges Seurat’s remarkable Models;
• Chaim Soutine at the Barnes;
• Possible impacts of the Barnes’ move;
• The building’s new lighting; and
• The procession a visitor must walk to enter the building.

Knight reviewed the show here for the LAT. Russell reviewed the building here for Bloomberg. I wrote about the new Barnes here on MAN.

To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program through the player below.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. This week’s show was edited by Wilson Butterworth. For images of the works discussed on this week’s show, click through to the jump.

Devil’s Slide is a strange limestone formation in Weber Canyon, near Croydon, Utah. It was made famous by some combination of the railroad and 19thC photographers, and it has stayed famous pretty much ever since.

“Devil’s Slide [is a] wonder in itself, consisting of two walls of rock about six feet wide and from twenty to fifty feet high, running parallel for six hundred feet up the mountainside, with a space of only fourteen feet between the ledges,” wrote Carrie Adell Strahorn in “Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage: A Woman’s Unique Experience During Thirty Years of Path Finding and Pioneering from the Missouri to the Pacific and from Alaska to Mexico,” her thoroughly titled 1911 memoir. “A ride down that slide in a toboggan would afford thrills and chills to satisfy the most ambitious lover of wild sensations.”

From nearly the moment the Union Pacific Railroad arrived in Weber Canyon in January, 1869, Devil’s Slide has been a prominent tourist attraction. It certainly helped that Devil’s Slide was just above the Union Pacific road: Trains passed the odd formation just a few yards from its base. Today Interstate 84 runs right under it, and two parking lots provide easy viewing.

One of the earliest pictures of Devil’s Slide was taken by Timothy O’Sullivan in 1869. It’s at the top of this post and it is included in “Timothy H. O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs,” which is on view now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The show presents O’Sullivan’s contribution to geologist and naturalist Clarence King’s United States Geologic Survey exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. It was organized by N-A curtor Keith Davis. His catalogue is a must-own book on American art and the history of the West.

The Nelson-Atkins show — and my conversation with Davis on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast — motivated me to take a look at how other 19thC photographers portrayed Devil’s Slide. [To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast's RSS feed, click here.]

O’Sullivan took at least two pictures of Devil’s Slide in 1869. Here’s the other:

Timothy O’Sullivan, Devil’s Slide, Utah, 1869. Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington.

With one possible exception — I’ll get to it a little later on — this is the most unusual 19thC view of Devil’s Slide I’ve seen. It emphasizes the weight of the limestone, the way the formation thrusts up and out of the mountain from which it protrudes. It’s terrific.

For what it’s worth, O’Sullivan wasn’t the first man to photograph Devil’s Slide. That may have been Andrew J. Russell, a Matthew Brady-affiliated Civil War photographer who moved west to become the official photographer for the eastern half of the Union Pacific Railroad. His pioneering images of the Rockies and the Wasatch sold well back east. (Some of his work even anticipates Robert Adams.) Russell shot two views of Devil’s Slide in 1868, the year before the Union Pacific entered Weber Canyon. [And yes, I know there are railroad tracks there, but apparently that road wasn't yet joined with the road further east.]

Andrew J. Russell, Wilhelmina’s Pass – distant view of serrated rocks or Devil’s Slide, Weber Cañon, Utah, 1868. Collection of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. and Library of Congress, Washington.

Andrew J. Russell, Serrated rocks or Devil’s Slide (near view) – Weber Cañon, Utah, 1868. Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington.

Russell’s pictures have some flair: In that picture, the serrated rocks seem to cascading from the upper right toward the lower left.

The next year, when the transcontinental railroad was finished a few dozen miles to the west, Devil’s Slide became a magnet for 19th-century photographers, many of whom, like latter-day Canalettos, provided views for the tourist market. Charles R. Savage, a British-born, Utah-based photographer who also worked for the Union Pacific and whose work was often seen in Harper’s magazine, was among that group. (Savage spent some time with the King Survey and with O’Sullivan in the spring/summer of 1869, as did Western painter Gilbert Munger.)

Charles R. Savage, Devil’s Slide, ca. 1870. Collection of the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. The related stereograph.

Savage liked Devil’s Slide so much he went back twenty years later.

Charles R. Savage, Devil’s Slide, ca. 1890. Collection of the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Neither of Savage’s views is particularly compositionally interesting. He includes the Union Pacific road. One of the pictures includes the Weber River, which runs between the tracks and Devil’s Slide. In neither of Savage’s pictures does the formation feel particularly imposing, as it does in O’Sullivan’s picture. When I look back up at the O’Sullivan after seeing the Savages, O’Sullivan’s limestone almost seems to be moving down the picture.

Speaking of rather pedestrian views of Devil’s Slide, Eadweard Muybridge was apparently there in 1873, in the spring, when he made this stereograph (and this one). I can’t help but wonder if the Union Pacific road is under that water.

Eadweard Muyrbidge, Devil’s Slide, Upper Weber Kanyon, from the RR looking south, undated. Collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

It’s kind of fun to see the Weber River in the Muybridge, but I still prefer this similar, undated view by Charles Weitfle, a German-American Civil War photographer who moved — you guessed it — out to the West.

Charles Weitfle, The Devil’s Slide, undated. Collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, via Calisphere.

During this era the star of Rockies photography was undoubtedly William Henry Jackson. The mostly Denver-based Jackson also shot for the Union Pacific, and like O’Sullivan did government work on geologic surveys, notably an 1870 trek up the Rockies to Yellowstone. Jackson was famous for other things — such as his prolific Denver photo studio and for his work as a technical adviser to the film “Gone With The Wind” — but what we’re interested in here is Devil’s Slide, which Jackson photographed in 1880.

William Henry Jackson, Devil’s Slide, 1869. Collection unknown? The related stereograph of Devil’s Slide, also from 1869.

Apparently Jackson went back to Devil’s Slide in 1880 — remember, the Union Pacific ran right under it, so it was easy to reach — when he shot this image, which seems more dramatic than the earlier picture.

William Henry Jackson, Devil’s Slide, 1880. Collection of The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth.

Jackson’s picture emphasizes the unusualness of Devil’s Slide within the landscape. Contours of the earth on either side of the famed thing seem to hint at related geologic processes. (Or maybe not. I got a C-minus in geology in college.)

I’ve saved the best for last.

Carleton Watkins, The Devil’s Slide, 1873. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Me.; Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif.; DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas [which has the only known copy of a second Watkins mammoth plate of Devil's Slide, not online]; Royal Geographical Society Image Library, London; University of California, Riverside, California Museum of Photography.

Watkins was far from the first photographer to reach Devil’s Slide, but I’d offer up his picture as the best of the bunch. Unlike the rest of his contemporaries, Watkins included a dramatic patch of sky, played up the contrast the late-day (?) sun created against the mountain and the limestone, and then, in a coup de grace, threw in a train for good measure. The result is a picture that moves the eye around, from Devil’s Slide, to the train, back up Devil’s Slide to the clouds in the sky above the Uinta Mountains and back down the rocks again. Obviously it was popular in Watkins’s day: At least six copies of the picture are known to exist.

If readers know of other 19thC takes on Devil’s Slide, please leave links to them in the comments. This is kind of fun.

The Barnes is home to a remarkable collection of Cezanne  – including the best Cezanne in America. The second-best Matisse is here too. And there’s more: Jaw-dropping Seurat, Courbet, Rousseau, Demuth, Gauguin, van Gogh, Picasso, Soutine, Monet, Modigliani, African sculpture and Pennsylvania German decorative arts.

But we already know that. What was unclear before the new Barnes opened was this: Is the new Barnes, lifted against Dr. Barnes’ wishes from where it was doing just fine financially and otherwise, by latter-day Philadelphia’s one percenters, a good place to look at great art? I guess that depends on what you think art is for. [Renoir, Bather Gazing at Herself in the Water, c. 1910. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]

First, the details: The Philly establishment’s installation of the art collection of the anti-establishmentarian Albert C. Barnes, a patent medicine mogul with a preference for French painting, is a near facsimile of the Merion galleries that Barnes himself hung. (The evident exceptions to the current crew’s mimicry of Barnes’ installation include the installation of Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre in an upstairs semi-alcove and some changes to the plaster-work around Matisse’s The Dance mural.)

These replica gallery spaces effectively sit inside a big, expensive-looking box designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The building feels more expensive than thoughtful. It includes one other exception to the Xerox approach: The galleries do not flow together in the same way that Dr. Barnes’ galleries did in Merion: Williams and Tsien have placed gaps between many of them for study centers or for short hallways with views of in-planted trees. These disjunctive intrusions seem to be crowd-control-and-flow measures. [Image: Renoir, After the Bath, 1910. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]

The effect of this mix of mimicry and expansion is that the new Barnes emphasizes the experience of visiting A Place rather than on seeing art. That approach starts from the moment you enter the Barnes property, which was once the home of Philadelphia’s youth detention center, the former host to such notables as artist Zoe Strauss. Williams and Tsien, apparently with some help from landscape architect Laurie Olin, have created a self-consciously theatrical entrance by which the walk from the city sidewalk to the galleries requires a dizzying number of turns: You enter the property by walking past a dreadful new Ellsworth Kelly, turn right, walk between a row of red maples, turn left, proceed over a rocky moat and into the building, turn, face the entrance desk, turn, see a post-Bertoia mistake of a sculpture/chandelier designed by the architects, turn, enter a cavernous atrium, turn, walk toward the galleries, through a pair of heavy, grandly ostentatious doors and into the first gallery of actual art. The Barnes’ architectural team has transformed the famed Beaux Arts staircase, which lifted visitors into the temple of culture, into a mannerist procession.

With this combination of old hang and new building, the new regime has tried to have its fake and bleed it too (admission is $18). Walking through the new Barnes is nothing short of a Twilight Zone-like experience, a weird bit of time travel during which everything seems just a little bit wrong: The garden isn’t quite what it was or where it was, the natural light is a bit off, the flow from gallery-to-gallery is different, and so on. By putting real art in a knock-off setting, the Barnes has cheapened the experience of great art. The Philly Barnes is slickly retrograde, Philadelphia’s power class’s belated, wincing admission that, you know, maybe, after all, there was some good in what it dismantled. [Renoir, Nude Woman Reclining, c.1917-19. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]

The stage-managing of the art feels ridiculous, even kitschy. The fetishized mimicry of the Merion presentation reminds me of the way every Abercrombie or American Eagle store feels about the same in every shopping mall from Minnesota to Mississippi. For Big Retail, it is the brand that matters most. Here, too… because the new museum isn’t about the art, it’s about drawing tourists to the Barnes Foundation brand.

That’s too bad. Once the keepers of the Barnes found a way to pry the art away from its founder’s John Dewey-influenced vision of art-plus-installation-plus gardens-plus-education-program, a unified field,  they should have devoted themselves to a smart, respectful, thoughtful and new presentation of great art, a place in which the art was The Thing. Instead, they have placed the emphasis not on the art, but on a Thomas Kinkadeian reminder of how it used to be-ish. Think of the team that brought you the new Barnes as the Administrators of Light. [Renoir, Nude from the Back, 1917. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]

(Alas: While the Barnes has touted its lighting system has a vast improvement over Merion; it is not. The upstairs galleries are substantially lit by natural light from these rectangular ceiling-vaults, with the result that art in the corners of the galleries is in the dark, as it was in Merion. Furthermore, the light from those vaults extends only about a third of the way down the walls, leaving the lower two-thirds (where the art is!) less lit than the empty upper walls. Fortunately the lighting in the ground-floor galleries is better, but it’s still not at the level you’d expect from a top art museum. )

The Barnes’ decision to lean on its quirky past rather than the greatness of its art is the biggest problem with the new place: The Barnes was moved and re-built to be a tourist magnet that might boost the sagging economic fortunes of its city rather than to be a place where art lovers can enjoy and experience art. (Its companion tourist-magnet, an Alexander Calder museum, never made it out of the planning process.) As if to underscore the point, the Barnes has has priced itself just about on par with its tourist-destination peers, museums such as MoMA and SFMOMA: $56 for a family of four, plus another $15 for parking. At last week’s public unveiling of the Barnes, it sounded like some public-relations professional had begged every speaker to emphasize how the new Barnes was newly accessible to the people of Philadelphia. That’s snake oil. Civic-minded institutions such as the fantastic art museums in St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland, Indianapolis and beyond are free to the public. Even though 25 percent of the cost of the Barnes move was paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers, the Barnes is not offering regular free or low-cost access to the very people who paid for it, to those it claims to most want to serve. [Renoir, Bather in Three-Quarter View, 1911. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]

Ultimately, the new Barnes Foundation is a victory for those who think that great art’s primary purpose is ancillary or supplemental, that art is a resource that should be exploited to fuel business, development and tourism. For most of America’s history, going back to the establishment of America’s first great civic museums in New York, Boston and St. Louis, we believed that art should be shown, studied and celebrated because we have a lot to learn from our shared cultural history. That was the right and honorable idea, and it’s increasingly being abandoned. [Below: Renoir, Nude Study, Bust of a Woman, c. 1910. Collection of the Barnes Foundation.]

The new Barnes is part of an accelerating trend: Over the last generation, governments, private funders, philanthropies and administrators have increasingly pushed art and art collections out of contexts in which access to aesthetics, history and cultural knowledge are primary and into ‘civic service’ as rainmakers for tourism or development. There has been little concurrent examination — least of all in Philadelphia — of how or if art should be made most accessible. Instead the question has been how to use art to serve other goals. That’s how we got the new Barnes. That’s how we got the $25 art museum admission fee. That’s how we got art museums renting their art to Las Vegas casinos. And that’s how great art is becoming a hobby for the leisure class, something available to an increasingly narrower socioeconomic band of Americans, an enterprise in which dollars matter more than ideas, engagement or discourse. The biggest success of the new Barnes is that it draws those lines more starkly than any other museum in America.

Procession of Maharao Ram Singh II of Kota, c.1850.

Throne, ca. 1876.

Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, London, 1911.

Procession of Bhim Singh of Mewar to Eklingji  Bakhta and Chokha, 1802.

The exhibition is the first career-length survey of Lichtenstein’s art and the first retrospective of the artist in 18 years. Currently in member previews, the show opens at the AIC on May 22 before traveling to the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern and to the Centre Pompidou. The exhibition catalogue is published by Yale University Press.

Rondeau’s previous exhibitions include “Jasper Johns: Gray” and “Cy Twombly: The Natural World: Selected Works 2000-2007.” Rondeau and I discuss:

• Why now was a good time for a Lichtenstein retrospective;
• Lichtenstein’s mining of art history and why he chose the subjects and art historical examples he chose;
• Major works such as Brushstroke and Spatter and Mustard on White; and
• What artists today have most mined Lichtenstein.

In the second segment, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art curator Keith Davis tells us about “Timothy H. O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs,” which is on view in Kansas City through September 2. The exhibition is accompanied by a fantastic Yale University Press-published catalogue, a must-own for lovers of both American art and photography.

To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. You can stream the program through the player below.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast is an independent production of Modern Art Notes Media. It is released under this Creative Commons license. This week’s show was edited by Wilson Butterworth. For images of the works discussed on this week’s show, click through to the jump.

Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963. Collection of the Tate, London.

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke with Spatter, 1966. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Roy Lichtenstein, Haystack and Haystacks (studies), ca. 1968. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Roy Lichtenstein, Haystacks, 1969.

Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape in Fog, 1996.

Roy Lichtenstein, Nude Street Scene, 1995.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada, 1867. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Shaft of Savage Mine, Virginia City, Nevada, 1868. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Pyramid and Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada, 1867. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Cottonwood Lake, Wasatch Mountains, Utah, 1867. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

Timothy O’Sullivan, Captain Buck and Shoshone Indians, East Humboldt Mountains, Nevada, 1868. Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo.