I’ve been going to museums my whole life, and of all the ones I’ve been to more than once and continue to revisit, the Barnes Foundation is the only one where each successive visit brings back the memory of the first one.
It took place in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I was recently out of college and living in New York and entertaining thoughts of a career as an art critic. A friend and I were chatting one day when, at some point, the Barnes came up. It emerged that neither of us had ever been there. He had a car and the weekend was looming, so I proposed that we drive down, “do” the Barnes in the morning, and move on to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the afternoon.
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