Worth going

Rico says the Barnes has long been on his bucket list, and now would be a good time to go. Edward J. Sozanski has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about changes at the museum:

Transformation of the Barnes Foundation from a school with an art collection to a museum with art classes is finally complete. The evolutionary process took more than five decades but, after the public was admitted by court order in 1960, the outcome became inevitable. The collection of some eight hundred paintings and 2,500 objects, housed in Merion since 1925, is simply too exceptional and too marketable to have remained exclusively a teaching tool.
Albert C. Barnes once ran his school more or less by himself. Now the foundation, which has eighteen thousand members, is invested with a full panoply of about thirty museum professionals and all the latest visitor amenities.
The metamorphosis doesn't diminish the art, but it does significantly alter the context in which visitors encounter it, something I hadn't expected. That probably will be more noticeable to those who remember Merion, than to first-timers just off the tour bus.
The new Barnes building on the Parkway, which will opens on 19 May, reflects this shift through its architectural plan, which is double-hulled, like a catamaran.
One half houses standard museum functions for which there wasn't room in Merion: a special-exhibitions gallery, an indoor-outdoor cafe, a 150-seat auditorium, and a spacious central lounge where visitors can relax and attend social gatherings. The other wing houses the what is in effect a single massive exhibit, a replica of the suite of galleries that Barnes created, and rearranged, in Merion over the course of 26 years.
It's not an absolutely precise re-creation, although the changes for the most part enhance the viewing experience.
As the foundation trustees promised Montgomery County Orphans' Court, the 23 Merion galleries have been reproduced to the same dimensions and installed precisely, to the last millimeter of exactitude, as Barnes left them on the day he died in July of 1951.
Initially, the effect of entering this wing through its single portal is disorienting. Space shrinks, time stops. If not for an occasional glimpse of parkway traffic through a window, you might well be back on Latchs Lane in Merion.
Not only do the galleries look the same, with (almost) every painting, sculpture, dower chest, and iron hinge where it has been for the last sixty years, but the foundation has resisted adding wall texts, object labels, video screens or any of the other aides to elucidation one finds just down the street at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.