A really engaging biography, The Maverick's Museum is a portrait of the iconoclastic chemist and businessman whose art collection became the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It also gives me a clearer and more three-dimensional picture of how modernism made it to America.

Blake Gopnik's latest work The Maverick's Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream introduces readers to an amazing man, a scientist-salesman-art collector with dreams big enough to fill Pennsylvania. He established the Barnes Foundation as an institution to first educate, and second to house and maintain his collection - items from all over the world he began to collect in 1902 (he had too much money) and had fortune enough to connect with powers in the art world such as Picasso, Guillaume and Modigliani, among many others.

While some of the art came from those who did traditional work, the art he most sought in his collection travels was not traditional. He would at first head for famous artists, but as he hunted more seriously his heart was firmly set on art that wasn't their usual work - it was work that, within the context of the time they painted, proved to be outside public expectations. Too much this, not enough that, outside all the rules. AC Barnes trusted his own eyes and preferences, and had gathered a revolving cadre of expert companions. Not just any Renoir or Picasso that would do. . .it had to be different and communicate something specific to the viewer, it had to create something new combining with the viewer's experience. Collected art pieces were not limited to paintings. Sculptures, cultural artifacts, anything that caught his eye that qualified according to his own selection process, the more shockable the better. Many of his pieces were nakedness in all its many, too naked for prime time, forms.

This well-researched read provides a fascinating presentation of this eclectic man - brilliant, opinionated, quixotic - hard to pin down unless it was his idea. Even given a project was of his own making, there was no guarantee that he wouldn't turn on it within a sliver of time or a whiff of disappointing execution. The author provides readers with the competing responses Albert Barnes evoked in the people he worked with and for, the artists he supported and used, and the movers and shakers who could help him realize his dreams and the ones who stood in his path. Albert C. Barnes was a fierce man with a message, and wanted his museum to carry that forward past his time with boots on the ground.

The work itself is well-supported with photographs of Barnes' world, where he lived and worked, as well as some of the most famous pieces from his collection. The Barnes Foundation is still up and running, although the decision-makers have allowed themselves to relax some of its founder's strict rules. Meaning more time open and available, and parts of the collection are allowed to go on tour enabling people in other parts of the world to see the significant consequence of Albert Barnes' Great American Dream.

My museum fav? Van Gogh's Postman, and oh, so many others!

*A sincere thank you to Blake Gopnik, Ecco, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.* #TheMavericksMuseum #NetGalley

I really enjoyed learning about Albert Barnes, it had that element that I was looking for and was engaged with what was happening. It worked well with the art element and was enjoying learning about this man and how he worked with art. Blake Gopnik has a strong writing style and enjoyed the feel and was everything that I wanted.