Sundance Selects ‘Steal’ Rights to Don Argott’s Stolen Artwork Docu

There is a little bit of irony to be found in the first official first pick-up among the doc films that played at TIFF. Sundance’s newly formed theatrical distribution arm Sundance Selects has picked up the rights to a doc film that paints the Annenberg Foundation in unflattering, black-eye kind of manner. The irony is that the annual film festival receives some considerable financial support from the Foundation and the same Annenberg people are among those who the Barnes Foundation didn’t have a high esteem for.

I was lucky enough to catch Don Argott’s expertly crafted docu on the final day of screenings at TIFF and The Art of the Steal will see more festival play as one of the rare doc films that will also premiere at the New York Film Festival. Selects are planing a 2010 release and this could quite conceivably be a strong contender for Oscar/Cinema Eye Doc awards kudos.

In 1922, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a rags-to-riches industrialist and visionary art collector, established an educational institution based on his vast, unparalleled collection of masterworks by the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne, Renoir, and Matisse. A true iconoclast, Barnes pointedly ran the Barnes Foundation as a school and not a museum, arranged the art according to his own sensibility, and housed it in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia, distancing himself from the city and cultural elite that he despised. Those who’d scorned his collection as consisting of “horrible, debased art,” later coveted and schemed to control it. After Dr. Barnes died in 1951, his foundation was bequeathed to Lincoln University, a small African-American college, with strict instructions for leaving his school and his collection untouched. More than fifty years later, a powerful group of moneyed interests have plotted to relocate the art to a new museum in Philadelphia. With the Governor, the Mayor, and several of the country’s most powerful charitable organizations on the verge of moving the Barnes, a loyal group of former students have gone to court to stop them. Will the students succeed in their David vs. Goliath campaign, or will a man’s will be broken and one of America’s greatest cultural monuments be destroyed?