The mother of all contention remains whether it should have been moved from its 1920s suburban redoubt in Merion to central Philadelphia. Dr Albert C. Barnes, in life and death, was adamant that his collection should never be moved, lent, or sold, nor were his eccentric ensembles of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and bric-a-brac ever to be rearranged. The Barnesian fundamentalists and their ‘cultured despisers’, who treasured its exclusiveness and the absence of bustling crowds, were no less adamant. Nothing should change. They were ferocious in their claims of conspiracy, chicanery, and public theft by the moneyed interests of Philadelphia.

The size of the prize and the extraordinary nature and quality of the Barnes collection fuelled the controversy. The numbers alone tell the story – 181 Renoirs, sixty-nine Cézannes, fifty-nine Matisses, with substantial clumps of Van Gogh, the Douanier Rousseau, Picasso, Soutine, and Modigliani, to say nothing of multiple masterpieces by Manet, Monet, Degas, Seurat, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec. No other private collection of the period rivals its sledgehammer blows, room after room. Because the Barnes Foundation for years barred any colour reproduction of the works, the pictures are a continuous surprise, even from these familiar masters.

One thread in this tangled narrative of enlightenment and obscurantism is the agonising passage from private collection to public museum. In the beginning you could only see the collection if you enrolled in the Foundation’s school and learnt the Barnes method of art appreciation, a mix of John Dewey and Roger Fry. That hardly met the smell test for a charitable foundation. Reluctantly, the Barnes Foundation opened its doors two days a week, with a maximum of 200 visitors per day. You could reserve your entry in writing. Long before the ease of online booking, few made the effort to get to Latch Lane, Merion, by 9.30 a.m. to ensure their place among the 200 elect. When Syd Ball and I went down from New York in 1970 to see the collection, there was only one other couple shivering at the gate, waiting for the Pinkertons men to come crunching down the drive, pistols in holsters, to let you in. The mystiquery so incensed me that I signed in as ‘Roger Fry’.

After Barnes’s death in 1951, when he drove through a red light into a large transport, impulsive to the end, his widow and then his right-hand woman, Violette de Mazia, ran the Foundation and ran down the endowment. On de Mazia’s death, the Foundation passed to Lincoln University, a small and struggling African-American college. Barnes, difficult and abrasive of character, was socially liberal, sympathetic, and attentive to the condition of black America – way ahead of his time. A newly configured Board appointed Richard Glanton president of the Barnes Foundation. He saw the financial writing on the wall and, to near universal consternation, he blew the roof off, went to court, succeeded in overturning Barnes’s indenture that the collection never leave Merion, and took the crown jewels on a world tour, netting the Barnes a multi-million dollar bonanza.

Glanton overplayed his hand. He held a gala for the collection, and the patrons’ cars blockaded half of Merion. With the Foundation now open six days a week, the tour buses, cars, and inadequate parking drove the haute bourgeoisie of Merion crazy. A court battle ensued. Numbers were to be restricted. Glanton counter-sued, fatally playing the race card. He lost badly, and expensively.

The Barnes Foundation became an economic conundrum. It had one of the most celebrated collections of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French art, but it lacked the wherewithal to maintain itself on such a restricted basis. It needed endowment and it needed paying bodies through the door. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania pledged a large sum towards a new home, plus a substantial backhander to Lincoln University to let go of the collection. Formidably rich Philadelphian financial institutions such as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Annenberg Foundation quickly joined the state. The money would be forthcoming if the Barnes Foundation moved its collection to an accessible location and operated as a normative art museum. Money talks and money won.

The Williams–Tsien building now reproduces something like three-quarters of the old Merion galleries in the new museum. Those ensembles that Barnes set so much store by have been dutifully recreated. Pennsylvania Dutch metalwork is spread like confetti amongst the Renoirs and the Cézannes. Barnes did not have any profound aesthetic program behind these ensembles. Like many private collectors, he enjoyed playing around with his collection until it felt ‘right’. Sometimes the ensembles work; sometimes they don’t. Matisse’s Red Madras Headdress (1907) blasts away the dull and dim seventeenth-century landscapes flanking it, to say nothing of the faded Chinese fans.

The architects have made crucial changes to the Merion set-up. The lighting is now superb. Access to natural light and garden settings refresh the atmosphere. Matisse’s climactic masterpiece, Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905–06), once unhappily hung in a stairwell where you were not allowed to pause, has its own room where it glows and purrs.

The ensembles mean that in reality the collection is hung by frame as much as by contrasting mode or complementary mood. But without the ensembles it would not be the same experience. It would not be the Barnes collection anymore if the Renoirs were all herded into one set of galleries and the Cézannes into another. Each work comes at you freshly and unpredictably.

It took me over an hour to get out of the Main Room at the start. Cézanne’s large version of The Card Players (1890–92) and Seurat’s full-scale treatment of his three models in the studio, Les Poseuses (1888), hold one wall. Matisse’s immense The Dance II (1932) fills the three lunettes. Below them sits his grand Seated Riffian (1912–13) from Morocco and Picasso’s galloping, flower-laden peasants from Gosol. Then come the floodgates of Renoir – the reverberating classicism of the nudes and the intimacy of his life-sized and loving account of his family. You are in a world of painting rather than a museum of master-pieces. Away from the mustiness of Merion, the paintings and the painters finally triumph over their cranky, if gimlet-eyed, patron.