The Art of the Steal

Director: Don Argott

2009 / 101min / 35mm

Albert C. Barnes, the collector of one of the world’s premiere collections of post-Impressionist art, who died in 1951, had specified in no uncertain terms that this treasure trove was to remain on display in a location in Lower Merion Township, outside the city of Philadelphia. The means by which the collection was moved into the city in 2012, a decades-long conspiracy by the local gentry—many of them Barnes’s enemies in his life and their heirs—to break his iron-clad will and wrangle control over the fate of his 9,000-odd pieces, is the subject of Argott’s gripping documentary, which details the six-decade process through which the Philadelphia establishment that Barnes detested finally hijacked his life’s work.