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IN AN ERA OF BLOCKBUSTER TRAVELING exhibitions, mass-merchandising museum shops and high-profile curatorial politics, the Barnes Foundation, housed in a limestone mansion in suburban Philadelphia, is one of the most striking -- and perplexing -- anomalies of the international art world. It is the repository of a fabled collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist works (180 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 44 Picassos and numerous Seurats, Gauguins and Modiglianis). Yet because of the harshly restrictive policies of its embittered founder-patron, the Barnes has largely withheld its treasures from public view.

( Dr. Albert Barnes, a Philadelphia physician who made millions from an antiseptic he invented and marketed in 1901, had a Medici-like eye for art. But his taste shocked the blue bloods of his day, who scorned him -- and earned his unrelenting enmity in return. At his death in 1951, he directed that no picture from his collection could be loaned, sold, reproduced or even moved from its position on the wall. Future control of the foundation, he decreed, would be in the hands of trustees appointed by Lincoln University, a small black college in Lincoln University, Pa. Since then, alumni of the school he founded in 1922, which replaced factual art history with a proto-New Age veneration of beauty, have increasingly formed a fiercely loyal and protective cult.

The foundation denied the public access to the collection until a Pennsylvania judge in 1960 forced open the doors for 2 1/2 days a week. Now the trustees, led by Richard Glanton, a Philadelphia attorney who is general counsel for Lincoln University and the Barnes' new president, are trying to break the hold of tradition further and, as they see it, move the Barnes into the 21st century.

They need court approval to alter the trust, so they have asked for permission to extend gallery hours, increase the admission charge and reinvest the foundation's $10 million trust fund. Security must be beefed up, they say, and the antiquated galleries need climate controls, new lighting and fire protection. While those renovations are in progress, the collection would be removed to an undecided location. Most radical of all, the trustees are proposing a traveling show of 80 Barnes paintings (possibly among them: Matisse's The Joy of Life and Cezanne's The Card Player) that would go to Washington's National Gallery and abroad, from which they hope to raise $7 million.

The reaction of old-line Barnes adherents to all this can be described in one word: horror. "It would be a tragedy," says Richard Segal, a former teacher at the Barnes. "To break apart such a collection would be like taking a masterpiece by Rembrandt and cutting off a corner of it and selling it." The traditionalists charge that the trustees' plans will subject the paintings to too much wear and possible damage. They also fear that the Barnes education program is being diluted, if not dismantled.