Quite how this tough-nut provincial capitalist came to be preoccupied with art, the film doesn’t quite explain. But from 1910 he built up a collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art – 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, the list goes dizzyingly on – only rivalled by Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, which is now worth in the region of $25billion.
Yet when Barnes threw his collection open to the public, in a gallery in the suburbs of Philadelphia in 1923, the response from the art establishment, press and general public was unalloyed hostility and ridicule. Barnes’s French modernism was simply too way-out for local tastes.
Wounded, Barnes retreated into himself, turning his collection into an educational foundation. Public access was limited according to Barnes’s personal whims. “If you were the director of a New York gallery, you’d be turned away,” says Argott. “But if you were a plumber, he’d say come in.”
At the same time Barnes’s prickly personality, liberal politics and refusal to open his collection to the public prompted a barrage of criticism from the Right-wing Philadelphia establishment.
After Barnes’s death in a car crash in 1951, the terms of his will – that nothing should be changed, and no painting lent or sold – were stringently enforced by his secretary Violette de Masia. But Barnes had given a controlling interest in his foundation to Lincoln College, an impecunious African-American dominated university he had chosen for its non-establishment credentials.
Enter Richard H Glanton, a charismatic African-American lawyer, made president of the Barnes Foundation, who decided to open it to the world as the instrument of his own glorification. Thwarted in plans to sell parts of the collection to pay for the upkeep of the building, he also sent the art on a fundraising world tour in 1993 in flat contravention of Barnes’s will.
When local residents objected to the building of a car park to accommodate the crowds turning the Barnes into “the Super Bowl of Art”, as one neighbour puts it, Glanton cried “racism”, invoking legislation designed to fight the Ku Klux Klan in a legal battle that drained the Foundation of the funds raised by the world tour.
Transparently roguish, yet likeable, Glanton, who was shortly sacked, now casts himself as the fall guy who was protecting the Barnes from “the establishment” – an assessment Argott doesn’t entirely dismiss. “He was such a loose cannon that bigger interests stayed away. But once he was gone, the vultures closed in.”
In a series of complex moves that defy easy comprehension, even over a 90-minute film, three other foundations mounted an aggressive take-over of the Barnes. They then contrived the removal of the collection to the centre of Philadelphia – despite stringent protests from Barnes’s supporters and claims of flagrant illegality on the part of the courts.
Argott has assembled a wonderful array of interviewees to tell this pungent tale of deceit, from the indignant defenders of Barnes’s principles to the wolfish Pennsylvania governor Edward G Rendell, determined to absorb the collection into his plans for a “major tourism destination city”.
“The larger message of the film,” says Argott, “is that non-profit-making charitable institutions can be as ruthless and power-hungry as commercial corporations. Once these interests, which are controlled by extremely rich people, had set their eyes on the prize of the Barnes Collection, they couldn’t be stopped. Art didn’t come into it.”
Also at stake is the question of how much the wishes of a collector should limit public access to art of this quality. If more people will now see Barnes’s art, isn’t that ultimately more significant than perpetuating an old man’s grudges?
“There are enough art galleries that cater to the convenience of the tourist,” says Argott. “With the Barnes you had to make an effort. That was part of the experience. It was the product of a unique vision, and now it’s gone it can never be replaced.”

is this the exact same doc as "art of the steal" with the name changed, or is it an "updated" version? ...cause it is by the same director

I think shorter than original