-By Maria Garcia

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The Art of the Steal is about the art world’s latest swindle—not headline news in a business dominated by wealthy patrons, museums with endowments large enough to bail out an ailing bank, and nonprofit foundations the size of multinational corporations. Of course, this narrative would be incomplete without a few cranks who actually care about art. Director Don Argott found journalists, art historians and the odd dilettante to weave a sensational tale about the seizing of the famous Barnes Collection by powerful interests—but The Art of the Steal is itself an exercise in spin.

The saga begins when the Pennsylvania-based Barnes Foundation—guardians of Albert Barnes’ French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art—allowed its substantial endowment to dwindle to the point that the collection became a target of other art institutions, some of which had coveted the paintings since Barnes’ demise in 1951. Those institutions, with the help of a former Barnes Foundation president, and Pennsylvania’s governor, then stepped in to “save” the Barnes Collection. It is scheduled to be moved next year from Barnes’ mansion in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia, to a new building in Philadelphia’s museum district. The relocation breaks provisions of a trust that Albert Barnes established in his will to keep the collection intact.

Argott could not photograph inside the Barnes mansion or in its spectacular arboretum—the legacy of Barnes’ wife, the former Laura Leggett, a Brooklyn-born author who left her art collection to the Brooklyn Museum—so the documentary depends on archival materials and some clever visual effects, such as the redlining or, in this case, blacklining, of Barnes’ will. Barnes, a medical doctor and a shrewd businessman, became a millionaire at 35. His collection, like that of Isabella Stewart Gardner, is displayed idiosyncratically, and as he left it. Among the spectacular Van Goghs, hundreds of Renoir paintings and drawings, and sixteen Modiglianis is Henri Matisse’s La Danse, which was designed for the wall where it hangs. Barnes established an educational institution, mostly to further his own theories about art, and for many years his collection could be seen only by students of the school and invited guests.

Executive producer Lenny Feinberg took classes at the Barnes Foundation, and said at the New York Film Festival in October that he searched for the best filmmaking team he could find to tell the story. The documentary is well-edited, and while it skillfully lays out its case, it sometimes does so with more detail than might interest the average viewer. A nonstop score picks up the pace, but it also hypes the story which, for most of us, is a tempest in a very expensive teapot. Claims of objectivity, made by the filmmakers at NYFF, are an artful dodge: The title says it all. The filmmakers side with those who argue that the Barnes Collection has been stolen, with the help of judges and politicians, by the Annenberg and Pew family trusts. One wonders whether they know anything about the history of art.

Striving for balance, the filmmakers interview some of the “swindlers”: Richard Glanton, a former president of the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania’s Governor Edward Rendell, and former attorney general Mike Fisher. If the alliance of power and wealth, responsible for so much wrongdoing in every sphere of public life, is at work here, it is nevertheless difficult to feel outraged. If the filmmakers had simply explained why the audience should care, beyond the fact that an imperious, dead millionaire’s trust had been broken, The Art of the Steal would have served the interests it ostensibly represents—the people who care about art. Instead, it portrays the art oligarchy and its profligate methods, and perhaps the fears of the art establishment that wealthy donors will think twice before leaving their collections to museums.

Anyone who visited the Barnes Collection in Merion, and who prefers the creaky staircases and sometimes insufficiently lit interiors of the Frick and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or the less ambitious but lovingly assembled portraits of cats and cat-lovers at Kattenkabinet in Amsterdam, for instance, to the crowded, white-walled art warehouse atmosphere of well-known museums, savors the memory of quiet, unhurried hours spent with wonderful art. Something ineffable will undoubtedly be lost when the Barnes Collection moves to its new, modern space, but many more people will see it than have ever seen it before. The Art of the Steal uses politically progressive sensibilities—a distaste for the alliance of wealth and power—to support the reactionary idea that without private collectors art itself is endangered. Just the opposite is true: The preservation of art depends on the esteem in which it is held by an entire culture. The rich, private collectors and family foundations alike make it a commodity.