The documentary, “The Art of the Steal,” seems poised to be one of the big art house hits of the spring.
The movie played both the Toronto and New York film festivals to great reviews last fall and the limited theatrical bookings that started late last month have been doing solid business.
Still, I was disappointed when I caught up with Don Argott’s film over the weekend at the IFC Center in Manhattan, where every seat was filled at a late afternoon showing.
Argott’s work isn’t a documentary in the traditional sense of someone going out to research a topic thoroughly and then coming back with a balanced view. It’s a Michael Moore-esque filmed essay in which all of the evidence is designed to bolster Argott’s pre-conceived thesis.
“The Art of the Steal” follows the legal wrangling over the extraordinary collection of Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Modern art held by the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia for most of the 20th century.
Albert Barnes was a cranky and extremely wealthy industrialist who loved art — especially the cutting edge work of the first half of the last century. In Merion, outside Philly, he built a home for a body of work that became one of the most important collections held outside a major museum.
Barnes set up his Foundation primarily as an educational institution, with only limited opportunities for the general public to view the collection. This situation was fine while Barnes lived, but in the decades after his death in 1951, America saw the rise of the museum as a major 
cultural/entertainment center in every major city in the country, with limited-run super-shows drawing in vast crowds (and generating lots of money for the institutions that sponsored them as well as significant ancillary tourism revenues).
Barnes hated the art establishment and museums and ran his Foundation in a happily elitist manner. After his death, the place continued for another few decades under one of his proteges.When she and then Barnes’s wife died, the dead man’s trust kicked in. He had no children to take over the estate, so a rather perverse section of his will came into play — a black college in the Philly suburbs, Lincoln University, inherited the Foundation.
Barnes did this to spite his enemies in Philadelphia, who included everyone connected with the great art museum there as well as Walter Annenberg, the right-wing owner and publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and a major art collector.
Annenberg was a terrible publisher – and a Nixon and Reagan crony - but the movie makes it look like his was the only game in town (during most of the period covered in the film there was a very strong daily newspaper rival to the Inquirer, the late great Philadelphia Bulletin.)
The big problem with the documentary is the way it glosses over Barnes’s will and his bequeathing of the collection to an institution that didn’t really know how to handle the bequest.
“Steal” takes easy shots at the politicians and other Philadelphia brahmins for their rather vulgar efforts to move the collection out of its suburban enclave and into the city. Argott seems a bit of a brahmin himself, however, in the way that he uses “tourist” as a dirty word and implies that allowing the public easier access to a world-class collection is a crime against humanity.
I agree that a man has the right to do whatever he wishes with his property while he is alive, but if he doesn’t do airtight estate planning all of those wishes can go up in smoke. Barnes apparently didn’t leave enough money in the trust for decades’ worth of upkeep of his property and when the place began to decline physically, the arguments for moving the work elsewhere escalated.
It’s hard to see the collection staying together and being made available to more people as the travesty that Argott and his carefully selected panel of “experts” suggest. If Barnes had had children and they successfully broke the poorly constructed will, the collection would have been sold off long ago.
The history on view in the movie is fascinating, but the moral seems wrong. If Barnes had done a better job with his estate — and put a panel of qualified people in charge of his bequest rather than Lincoln University — the art would have stayed in the suburban enclave where he wanted it.
