PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Barnes Foundation presents two concurrent exhibitions, Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen, featuring masterworks from the world’s most important collection of wrought iron, and Ellen Harvey: Metal Painting, a site-specific installation by artist Ellen Harvey (b. 1967) commissioned by the Barnes Foundation. Metal Painting engages with Dr. Albert C. Barnes’s iconoclastic placement of his extensive wrought iron holdings alongside his collection of paintings by old and modern masters, such as Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, William Glackens, El Greco, Frans Hals, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Both exhibitions are on view in the Barnes Foundation’s Aileen and Brian Roberts Gallery from September 19, 2015 through January 4, 2016.

Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles presents approximately 150 magnificent wrought iron objects—including door knockers, jewelry, escutcheons, locks and keys, plaques, signs, strongboxes, and tools—that combine technological innovation with virtuoso artistry from the comprehensive holdings of the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles in Rouen, France. The exhibition complements the 887 pieces of European and American wrought iron that punctuate the Barnes Foundation’s signature wall arrangements of old master and modern paintings, and offers visitors the unique opportunity to experience a collection that Dr. Barnes likely knew and visited. This is the first time that the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles has sent an exhibition of its celebrated masterworks to the United States.

Dr. Barnes underscored the formal affinities that the wrought iron in his collection shared with the “motives and arabesques” in the paintings. Often, he combined disparate objects—shoe buckles and door hinges, ladles and hasps—to create new forms. In a 1942 letter to the American artist Stuart Davis, Barnes noted that the anonymous craftsman of such functional items was “just as authentic an artist as a Titian, Renoir, or Cézanne.”

Ranging in date from the Middle Ages to the early 20th-century, the objects from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles’s collection reveal iron as unexpectedly versatile, with its capacity to convey both masculine heft and an impossibly fragile delicacy that is hard to square with its industrial image. Objects ennobled with silver and gold inlays show iron as more than base metal. There are locks that represent their own function, for example, such as one with a built-in faithful guard dog and one with spring-loaded trap ready to catch a lock-pick. Others show a more whimsical side: an 18th-century sign in the shape of a greyhound that looks like something Calder might have made two centuries later, and a bat-shaped light.

Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay on Dr. Barnes’s practice of collecting metalwork, one on the collection at the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, short essays on groups of works, and an illustrated glossary of technical terms.

Ellen Harvey: Metal Painting
The Barnes Foundation’s fourth visual arts commission of 2015, Metal Painting is composed of 887 oil paintings on magnetized panels of varying sizes installed as a large-scale collage on a steel wall. Harvey has painted each piece of metalwork in the Barnes collection as a metallic silhouette. Invoking Barnes’s celebration of the wrought iron collection for its formal values, she distills the essence of these objects, emphasizing their shapes.

Both exhibitions are curated by Judith F. Dolkart, the Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, and former Deputy Director of Art and Archival Collections and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau, curator in charge of the objets d’art at the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, selected the objects included in Strength and Splendor and authored the catalogue’s essay on the holdings in Rouen, as well as several entries on individual objects.

“When Dr. Barnes first installed his now iconic wrought iron collection on the gallery walls, he divorced the objects from their functions and celebrated them for their formal properties—the ways in which they underscored forms in the paintings and other objects” says Dolkart. “With Strength and Splendor, we are able to re-contextualize the magnificent objects of Le Secq Destournelles collection. Ellen Harvey’s Metal Painting recombines the forms of the wrought iron in the Barnes collection, creating a new kind of ensemble or arrangement.”