Richard H. Glanton, an embattled president of the Barnes Foundation who in the 1990s went against the wishes of the institution’s eccentric founder by taking 80 French works of art outside its neoclassical home on a first-ever fundraising tour, died June 21 at his home in Princeton, NJ. He was 79.
His wife, Eileen Glanton, said the cause was a heart attack.
Mr. Glanton, a lawyer, wanted to turn the Barnes—long an isolated art school and museum in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion with one of the world’s largest private art collections—into a higher-visibility institution, like the Frick Collection in Manhattan.
But with its endowment dwindling and its long-neglected building in dire need of repairs, Mr. Glanton his focus in 1991 to raise about 15 million dollars for a renovation.
“The problems at Barnes were so obvious,” he told The New York Times in 1993, “Ray Charles could see them in a swamp at midnight.”
The heart of the vast collection of paintings and sculptures held by Albert C. Barnes, a patent medicine millionaire who died in 1951, consisted largely of works by Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early modern masters such as Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, Gauguin and Matisse. Mr. Barnes had arranged them idiosyncratically, trying to appeal to ordinary people rather than scholars, and emphasizing the works’ connections to everyday life.
He stipulated that after his death nothing could be moved – neither from nor beyond the walls of the gallery.
When he became president, Mr. Glanton initially to sell some works, knowing that the sale could bring in millions of dollars, even though it meant violating the conditions that had been set by Mr. Barnes. In 1991, he and Barnes’ trustees petitioned the Montgomery County Orphans’ Court, where Mr. Barnes had applied to the collection’s trust for permission to sell up to 15 works.
But the plan was dropped after a flood of bad publicity, some of which came from the Friends of the Barnes Foundation, a group of former students from the institution’s art-appreciation classes, who wrote in a court petition that the proposed sale would be as “illogical and misguided a plan as can be imagined.”
A year later, Mr. Glanton returned to court and sought approval to take 80 of the museum’s works on a tour. The court said it would be a one-time exception from Mr. Barnes’ confidence, not a permanent change. The exhibition, Great French Paintings From the Barnes Foundation, opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in May 1993 and traveled to museums in Paris, Tokyo, Fort Worth, Toronto, Philadelphia and Munich in 1995.
The tour brought in about $17 million and gave the museum time to close and renovate. When the building reopened in 1995, the works were returned to their original places.
“Overall, the effect of the renovation makes the Barnes look what might be called old-fashioned,” critic Michael Kimmelman wrote in The Times, noting that its galleries had been “obsessively restored,” including their burlap wall coverings and bronze fixtures, which were redesigned to produce brighter lighting.
In a 2002 article about Barnes in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin captured Mr. Glanton’s unwavering belief in himself and the changes he had made.
“Glanton may have been immodest,” wrote Mr. Toobin, “but he was not wrong when he claimed that ‘Barnes had disappeared into darkness since his death until I arrived and turned on the lights’.”
Richard Howard Glanton was born Nov. 21, 1946, in Villa Rica, Ga., about 55 miles west of Atlanta. He was one of 11 children of Herbert Glanton, a farmer who later worked in a mill, and Norace (Hawkins) Glanton, who managed the home. All the children worked on the farm at one time or another.
Richard was one of the first black students to graduate from West Georgia College (now the University of West Georgia). After earning his bachelor’s degree in English in 1968, he received his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1972.
He worked at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and United Airlines before being appointed deputy attorney general to Governor Dick Thornburgh of Pennsylvania in 1979. After four years, he moved into private practice at Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen (now WolfBlock) and then Reed Smith Shaw & McClay (now Reed Barn partner), where he remained a Reed Barn partner. During the 1990s, Mr. Glanton, a Republican, briefly ran for mayor of Philadelphia.
He joined Barnes through its unusual relationship with Lincoln University, a historically black liberal arts college in Oxford, Pa.
Mr. Barnes, a proponent of integration, had arranged for Lincoln to nominate four of the foundation’s five trustees when the institution’s original board members died or retired. In 1989, the College’s appointees held four of the five seats, and in 1990, Mr. Glanton, a former Lincoln trustee with no formal art credentials, on the board as trustee and president.
“I never claimed to know anything about art,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine in 1990. “But I can look.”
Edward J. Sozanski, the chief art critic of The Inquirer at the time, argued that what Barnes needed was a full-time, “artistically” director.
“Glanton consolidated in his hands more administrative power than he came to exercise so authoritatively,” Mr. Sozanski wrote in 1998. “But what the institution needed was a strategic thinker and someone who might have been able to reconcile Barnes’ vision with current reality.”
Mr. Glanton found himself embroiled in a series of lawsuits.
In 1992, a female employee at Reed Smith accused him of sexual harassment and sought at least $2 million. A federal jury sided with her and awarded her $125,000 in damages for statements he had made about her. Appeals ended in a settlement.
Mr. Glanton battled with local residents over parking and traffic issues after Barnes reopened. In early 1996, Barnes sued Lower Merion Township and its commissioners to stop approving a parking lot to accommodate more visitors, claiming the move was discriminatory because Mr. Glanton and most of the Barnes trustees were black. Shortly after a federal judge threw out the lawsuit later that year, an agreement was reached to allow the party.
But a dozen commissioners sued Mr. Glanton for defamation citing his comments about racism; he agreed to a settlement in which he made a “conditional” withdrawal and paid the commissioners’ attorney $400,000 in fees.
He resigned as president of Barnes in 1998 and never again held a position with the same public profile. In recent years, his posts included senior vice president of Exelon, a utility company, and chairman of ElectedFace, a social media site he created that connected voters to elected officials.
In addition to his wife, the former Eileen Candia, Mr. Glanton by their daughter, Georgia Glanton; a daughter, Morgan Glanton, and a son, David, from his marriage to Scheryl (Williams) Glanton, which ended in divorce; two sisters, Effie Nalls and Daisy Dansby; and four brothers, Rhonnie, Anthony, Derek and Barrett Glanton.
In 2002, four years after he left Barnes, Mr. Glanton on an article that said he had left the institution “under a cloud.” But he wrote that his tenure had been “a period of rebirth and excitement”, adding: “I predicted that the foundation would be bankrupt in a short time because of the management practices adopted after my departure.”
The Barnes family struggled financially in the years following his departure. That changed when a 2004 orphan court ruling allowed the institution to move to downtown Philadelphia to survive.
Three major foundations had agreed to raise $150 million for the move, and Barnes reopened in a new building in 2012.
