LOWER MERION, PA.- The Board of Trustees of the Barnes Foundation has announced the award of a $5 million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This extraordinarily generous gift, to be matched by $15 million, will establish a permanent endowment to support scholarly activities connected with the remarkable Barnes art collection and archives.

Derek Gillman, President and Executive Director of the Barnes, said: "It is with the deepest gratitude that the Board thanks the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its continuing generous support, including this latest challenge grant. The endowment will help to establish the institution as an important center for art historical and conservation scholarship. Now that we are embarking on an entirely new era, moving the core collections to Philadelphia, our plans for the future of the institution are ambitious. The agenda is large and varied, but nothing to my mind is more important than our responsibility for the collections, which are at the center of our educational mission. The Mellon grant of $5 million represents a significant step in reaching that goal and we are committed to raising the $15 million required to qualify for this gift."

Over the past six years, the Mellon Foundation has very generously provided funding for a thorough assessment of the collections, enabling the Barnes to develop a professional staff, to establish advanced systems for cataloguing its holdings which are now fully documented for the first time, and to launch major initiatives in research.

Dr. Bernard Watson, Chair of the Barnes' Board of Trustees, stated: "The far-sighted generosity of the Mellon Foundation will make it possible to establish a permanent endowment in support of activities in the curatorial, conservation, and archival realms. With $150 million already secured, we are now engaged in raising an additional $50 million to enable us to attain long-term stability for our future. We are profoundly grateful, therefore, for this capstone grant which will secure critical aspects of our future activities."

Among the initiatives that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded at the Barnes Foundation are two major research projects on the Foundation's collections of over 180 works by Renoir, and 59 by Matisse. In studying these highly significant, but hitherto uncatalogued works, art historians Martha Lucy, Kate Butler, and Claudine Grammont have mined the rich Barnes archives, as well as archives and other resources in New York, Paris, London and elsewhere. The three scholars are working under the guidance of Professor Yve-Alain Bois of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Professor John House of the Courtauld Institute in London.