ABSTRACT
The physician become collector had at hand a balm for psychic wounds as effective as the therapy for sagging shoulders and spirits that Dr. T. Matthias Alexander once provided John Dewey. Albert Barnes perceived himself not only as a “voice in the wilderness,” but one which “the combined voices of academies, newspapers, art magazines threatened to drown.” The magazine’s failure to do so had everything to do with Barnes’s personality, the quirks that propelled him toward polemics. Barnes complained that Leo had set up an unattainable “ideal of objectivity” and then attacked “any attempt to approach the relative objectivity which is possible.” The nucleus of his idea was that the university should purchase a property adjacent to the twelve-acre park where the Barneses had started “a little experiment in floriculture.” Singer was given the task of trying to convey to Barnes some sense of why his tactics embarrassed the university.
