The Maverick’s Museum with Blake Gopnik and Jonathan P. Binstock
Living Room
The Phillips Collection’s Living Room is a series of intimate conversations featuring artists, authors, curators, collectors, and museum professionals. These programs offer rare opportunities to engage in discussions that connect the museum’s collection with broader dialogues.
Duncan Phillips, founder of The Phillips Collection, and Albert Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, were contemporaries and rivals. Join Blake Gopnik, author of The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream and Jonathan P. Binstock, Vradenburg Director & CEO of The Phillips Collection, for a conversation on these two museum founders’ vision and legacy. Learn about the similarities between the two museum pioneers and participate in a Q&A after the talk followed by a book signing.
About The Maverick’s Museum
A fascinating biography of the philanthropist Albert Barnes, whose pioneering collection of modern art was meant to transform America’s soul.
From prominent critic and biographer Blake Gopnik comes a compelling new portrait of the great collector of modern art, Albert Coombs Barnes. Raised in a Philadelphia slum shortly after the Civil War, Barnes rose to earn a medical degree and then made a fortune from a pioneering antiseptic treatment for newborns. Never losing sight of the working-class neighbors of his youth, Barnes became a ruthless advocate for their rights and needs. His vast art collection—180 Renoirs, 67 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, 45 Picassos—was dedicated to enriching their cultural lives. Barnes wanted to transform the nation’s aesthetic life, taking art out of the hands of the elite and making it available to the average American.
The Maverick’s Museum offers a vivid picture of one of America’s great eccentrics. The sheer ferocity of Barnes’s democratic ambitions left him with more enemies than allies among people of all classes, but for a circle of intimates, he was a model of intelligence, generosity, and loyalty. In this compelling portrait, Gopnik reveals a life shaped by contradictions, one that left a lasting impact.
Blake Gopnik, one of North America’s leading art critics, is the author of the comprehensive biography Warhol. He has served as the art and design critic at Newsweek, and as the chief art critic at the Washington Post and Canada’s the Globe and Mail. In 2017, he was a Cullman Center fellow in residence at the New York Public Library, and in 2015 he held a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He has a PhD in art history from Oxford University and is a regular contributor to the New York Times.
Jonathan P. Binstock joined The Phillips Collection as Vradenburg Director & CEO in March 2023. Dr. Binstock comes to the Phillips following eight years as the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) of the University of Rochester in New York. During his tenure in Rochester, Jonathan led an expansion and diversification of the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibition program, public engagement and outreach efforts, and audience, as well as a significant increase in the museum’s annual budget. Jonathan has also held positions at the Art Advisory & Finance group of Citi Private Bank, Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
