More on Barnes

Re: “Met Exec Favors Barnes Move,” by Suzanne Muchnic (Dec. 21), I am one of the three Barnes students who opposed the move of the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia, and have been intimately involved with all of the legal proceedings for the last two years. I have been studying at the Barnes for seven years.

Unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation is an art educational foundation for the study of art. It is not a museum! Why does everyone want to turn it into a museum against the wishes of its founder and creator, Dr. Albert C. Barnes?

You have a number of people trying to decide the fate of this foundation yet none of these, including the judge, the trustees of the Barnes, the head of the Pew Trust, and even the CEO of the Barnes, Kimberly Camp, have ever studied art there using the unique methods that Drs. Barnes and Dewey formulated.

Barnes’ ensemble display of his art is his method of teaching art. It is not “an insult to artists” as [Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe] de Montebello stated. What De Montebello and the aforementioned individuals need to do is enroll in some art courses at the Barnes, and only then will they have a real understanding of what the Barnes is really about.

Harvey Wank

Philadelphia