Private Art Collection Of The Non-profit Organization Management Case Studies

In the first half of the20th century, there appeared the phenomenon of transformationfrom private collections to non-profit organizations in the realm of art of the UnitedState. Barnes Foundation had been one of the earlier cases in which its managementwas very typical. This article will serve it as the research object, trying to takeadvantage of non-profit agency’s management theory and related management modelsassociated with Museum of Fine Arts, from the perspective of the development ofmission, the Board composition, collections management, educational projectmanagement and financial management, to analyze the three important periods ofBarnes Foundation, namely Barnes and Post-Barnes era (1922-1989), Glanton era(1989-1998) and Gillman era (2000-2014), trying to clarify the issues easilyencountered by the agency management of a private collection, and their solutions.This article will eventually trace the roots of these issues back to the role-playing ofnon-profit agency’s founder, deeming that the founder of an agency casted a directinfluence on the agency’s initial establishment, and in the subsequent management,the agency’s founder should discriminate between the management’s publicity andpersonal collecting conduct, and institutional management should introduce specialmanagement personnel, to avoid becoming the founder’s one-man organization,making the organization to be “publicly owned”.