The Barnes Foundation officially opened on March 19, 1925, in Merion, Pennsylvania. Albert C. Barnes had chartered the foundation in 1922 as an educational institution devoted to fine art and horticulture, then hired architect Paul Philippe Cret to design a residence and gallery on a twelve-acre arboretum site. The opening put Barnes's radically personal collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern art into a teaching environment rather than a conventional museum display. Its ensembles placed Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, African sculpture, metalwork, furniture, and antiquities in formal relationships intended to train close looking. Jacques Lipchitz's Cubist reliefs and African-inspired details further marked the building as a modernist educational experiment.
The Barnes became one of the most influential and contested private art collections turned public educational institution in the United States.
