Museums grapple with the art of change

The museum that is the product of a single ego, be it an artist's or a collector's, is an altogether more eccentric entity than the big encyclopedic museums that have to have one of everything and please as many constituencies as possible. The museum that is the result of one person's passion can have any sort of collection it wants and doesn't have to please anyone save its creator. If that creator is alive, the museum is, too: It can change according to the founder's whims and wishes.

Consider the recent case of the Prince of Liechtenstein, who wanted to house his collections in the principality named for his noble family. His subjects didn't agree. So in March, he relocated his family's breathtaking collections of paintings by the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Giorgione to the restored Liechtenstein Palace in Vienna, footing the entire 20 million euro bill himself.

''No public funds are being used," the museum's literature proudly proclaims, also referring to ''the Baroque ideal of princely patronage based on a fine understanding of art." More than a whiff of noblesse oblige seeps out of the glorious porphyry and parquet palace. Lingering in the air is the unspoken idea that all those 20th-century political revolutions and reforms botched their missions, and that Europe's ruling families are resurfacing to straighten things out.

When there's no one around with the hereditary authority to straighten things out, when the guiding spirit of a museum is dead, matters are messier -- especially if he or she has left specifications that make it all but impossible for the museum to function in the 21st century. Two recent cases of this are the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Barnes Foundation in suburban Philadelphia, neither of them particularly visitor-friendly, both planning to address their problems through real estate.

The Gardner wants to add a Renzo Piano-designed building in the backyard that almost no one knew was there.

Even more dramatically, after years of wrangling in court, the Barnes Foundation won the right this month to move from its suburban Philadelphia home in a residential neighborhood to the downtown Benjamin Franklin Parkway, already home to institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum. There, the Barnes will no longer annoy the neighbors.

The town of Merion, home of the collection formed by Albert C. Barnes, restricts the foundation's attendance to 62,000 a year to keep as much of the leafy suburb's serenity as possible. With the move, many more people will have the chance to see its dazzling Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, valued today at $25 billion.

The move, though, violates the foundation's charter, which dictates that none of Barnes's collections ever leave the precise place where he installed them. That rule was already broken in a 1990s international tour of masterworks from the museum that was supposed to make it solvent. It didn't.

The move will be funded by donors who have pledged $150 million. The money comes mostly from the Annenberg Foundation, the Lenfest Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. While architects for the project have not yet been selected, they will be restricted by the Barnes Foundation's intention to keep the odd installation designed by Barnes himself. The juxtapositions were justified on formal grounds: A metal tool is placed next to a painting by an Impressionist master on the basis of a common shape, for instance. Barnes, who died in 1951, was also an early champion of African art, displaying it alongside European art it had influenced, but also acknowledging it in its own right.

The move is controversial in the art world. Some say there is a place for quirky museums that are reflections of their founders' theories and tastes, and that moving the Barnes would rob it of some of its distinct character. Others say the move represents progress and an opportunity for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to become Philadelphia's Champs-Elysees: The Philadelphia Museum of Art is being renovated and expanded by architect Richard Gluckman, and Tadao Ando is designing a Calder Museum for the parkway.

Barnes, though, intended his foundation as a teaching tool, not as a museum dedicated to cramming in as many people as possible. Every museum doesn't have to be a major tourist attraction, and people who really want to see the Barnes usually can, with some planning. Some museums -- the Miho outside Kyoto for one -- are valued in part because of the sheer challenge of reaching them, which becomes a sort of pilgrimage.

The Barnes debate has been viewed as an either/or. But with around 2,000 works in its collections, is some compromise not possible? Couldn't the Barnes have a presence in downtown Philadelphia that would give the mildly interested tourist an idea of the founder's theories and his stunning acquisitions, while maintaining the Merion property for serious students and scholars?

At this point, the stated intention of those in charge of the new Barnes is to replicate the old one as much as possible. How much remains to be seen. One major complaint visitors have had is that some great pictures are hung over tall doors and in other places where it's difficult to see them.

Visitors to the Gardner have the same complaint. But the Gardner administration isn't about to tackle the formidable founder's will by rearranging things. They're going to tiptoe around it. A new building will allow for a much-needed orientation center. (It's hard to imagine the reaction of someone stumbling across this weird museum with no prior knowledge.) The cafe and gift shop that are tucked into odd corners in the original building will get some breathing room in the new one.

Ditto for the temporary exhibition space, although there will be an effort to keep some contemporary presence in the palace itself. School groups will have a place where kids can be messy, and everyone will enjoy the sort of salon atmosphere Gardner cultivated, with a lively exchange of ideas in a comfortable setting. (''So many chairs and nowhere to sit" is one of the sayings about the Gardner that its ambitious director, Anne Hawley, would like to eliminate with lots of places to plunk yourself down in the new building.)

Hawley envisions the museum as a community of creators of all kinds: not only visual artists, but musicians, poets, and philosophers, reflecting the mixed patronage of Gardner herself.

The Gardner has chosen its architect: Piano, one of the most discreet designers anywhere, not a man to force a signature style on a client. Piano, says Hawley, ''refers to the sacred and the profane, with the sacred being the palace." Mrs. Gardner would agree.

Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays.