The Art of Steal----About the Barns foundation

"The Art od Steal"depicts the on going saga of the moving of Dr. Barns's private collection from Marion, PA (35 minutes from downtown Philadelphia) to JFK Boulevard (Downtown, Philadelphia). Dr. Barns and his famous, exclusive art collections that is worth hundreds of millions of today's dollar, including works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse. The collection also includes important works by Pablo Picasso, Chaim Soutine, Henri Rousseau, Amedeo Modigliani, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Edouard Manet , and Claude Monet. The extraordinary fact about Dr. Barns, besides the fact that he became rich and famous by selling snake oil, is his vision in art. At the time when Edgar Degas and Van Gogh were rarely known to the American people, even to the most of the European countries, Dr. Barns supported the painters by purchasing their works. His collection influenced the expressionist movement in America and he became the first Non European art collector with substantial numbers of expressionist paintings. If he's alive today, he would be very glad to see how many people have been benefited by his collection.

So why the saga?

While I am really, really happy for not have to spent 30 or 40 minutes in transit, in order to witness the collection each time, I am in serious question about the integrity of the trustees and the trust lawyer's efforts to make the move legalized. Imagine this, you set up a trust based on your Will, and you specifically instruct the trust NOT TO do certain things, no matter what the circumstances are. While you are alive, things are fine and dandy, but once you are dead, you will is invalidated "for the best interest of the trust". And everything you've said not to do it's now being done, how would you feel about that?

It's a matter of breaking the Law, in the name of the Art.

The thinker--I call it.
This is a four week pose in Alex Kanevsky's class. One more week to go. Obviously I am not depicting exactly what is there and who is posing, but it's fun to be creative :)