Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Pennsyvania Academy of the Fine Arts: Washington Foyer

Art Museums have cut back on the postcards they sell in gift shops. This disturbs me because I've always enjoyed taking pieces of the collection home, either to display somewhere (usually where I write), to include in a scrapbook, or maybe to file away in my official postcard box. That box is a museum of places, art, and whimsy just waiting for me to revisit.

PAFA: The Rotunda

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) does sell postcards, ten for $5.00, and I was pleased to find some of my favorites from the Academy's collection of art by Americans.

Washington Foyer, detail

• Daniel Ridgway Knight's (1839-1924) "Hailing the Ferry" (1888) was my favorite in my favorite room, the Henry S. McNeil gallery of landscapes. It's a rather large (64.5" x 83") oil painting showing two girls hailing a ferry by a river much the same way we'd hail a taxi at Broad and Cherry Streets in Philadelphia. What knocked me out about this painting was the exquisite detail of the girls' faced and clothing, realistic enough to pass for a photograph. Ridgway painted this landscape thirty years after he was a student at PAFA, but still too early suspect this work to be a mashup of oil paint and photograph.
• "George Washington (Lansdowne Portrait)" (1796) by Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) is one of the many familiar portraits that greet the visitor around almost every corner. You've seen this portrait of Washington, looking like he does on our dollar bill, standing on an Oriental rug in front of a fancy red-velvet-upholstered side chair, gesturing toward a drapey red tablecloth with a quill and inkpot on top and big books underneath. A red drape is pulled back revealing an American nature scene outside. Is that a Colonial-dressed male doll slouched against the column by the window? It seems Mr. President has been to a Colonial Williamsburg gift shop!
• I just read James McBride's National-Book-Award-winning The Good Lord Bird last month, so my eyes were drawn to the modern but primitive "John Brown Going to His Hanging" (1942) by Horace Pippin (1888-1946). It's a somber scene with cold white and gray buildings, black trees that have lost most of their leaves, and faceless people clad in shades of black and charcoal. The only colors are the scarves around the people's necks and the ropes binding John Brown's arms to his body...until...you notice the scowling black woman down in the lower right, wearing a bright blue and white gingham skirt. She's the only black person in the painting, and none too happy about this execution. It turns out this is Pippin's own grumpy grandmother.

I didn't see a postcard of Benjamin West's (1738-1820) showstopper, "Christ Rejected," (1814). West was born in Springfield, which is now Swarthmore, and was one of the first American painters to win fame and respect outside of this country. This gigantic (200" x 260") painting was created near the end of West's life after he had been living in England for fifty-four years. Jane Austen looked at this very painting and said, "...it pleased me." That nugget of knowledge pleases me!

Looking from The Rotunda to the Washington Foyer

I wasn't allowed to shoot photos of the art (hence the links above--please click on them to see the art), but I was allowed to snap flashless photos of this glorious Frank Furness building from 1876. It's now called the Historic Landmark Building. (PAFA's newer, modern Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building is next door.) It's Victorian and Gothic and it represents Philadelphia and the Gilded Age. I didn't focus much on labels because I'd rather concentrate on focusing my Nikon.

PAFA exterior

PAFA puts their Mission ("PAFA promotes the transformative power of art and art making") on the free map along with the history of the Academy. Although the building didn't appear until 1876, the Academy was founded in 1805 by a group of Pennsylvanians including Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, and Benjamin Rush. It's the country's first art museum and school of fine arts, right here at Broad and Cherry Streets in Center City Philadelphia.

Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ

This scary bigger-than-lifesize sculpture by Seward Johnson is as yet unnamed, but if you have
 an idea, Grounds for Sculpture wants to hear it. Note the contents of the steaming cauldron!

If anyone asks you to go to Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, you should

1. Go.
2. Don't wear sandals.

Go because it is a quirky, remarkable, one-of-a-kind place that will look different every time you go because of changing exhibits and changing nature. Don't wear sandals because many of the paths are gravel and larger stones and this becomes a challenge of grace and dexterity. Do bring the camera because besides the art itself there are vistas, flowers, trees, buildings, and peacocks to photograph.

A unique peacock perspective

Grounds for Sculpture is the creation of renowned sculptor Seward Johnson who acquired the old New Jersey Fairgrounds for his atelier and his clever park in the 1980s. The park has grown over the years since it opened in 1992 and its landscapes have changed dramatically. We old-timers who remember when the State Fair was in Trenton (actually Hamilton) until the 1970s would never recognize the place except that some of the original buildings have been re-purposed for indoor galleries and have kept their original State-Fair names.

Margie and Fred having some fun with Autin Wright's Lunar Brilliance (1979) in front of the
 Domestic Arts Building (1920s).

Most of the sites are outside along paths or hidden in little compartments formed by a variety of unusual trees. One could spend all day meandering, and sitting on benches contemplating, or imagining how to replicate a Chamber of Internal Dialogue in your yard. According to GFS's "Park Etiquette" document, photography is permitted, even encouraged, as long as it is for personal use only. I interpret this to include a humble non-monetized blog such as this, especially when citations are supplied. Here are more samples:

The Nine Muses (1990-7) by Carlos Dorrien, a nice place to sit and chill

Detail of Seated Figure from Womaen in the Sun (1988) by Leonda Finke (near The Nine Muses above)

On Poppied Hill (1999) by Seward Johnson (she's bigger than lifesize; the poppies are real)

Dana Stewart's What Was That? (1997)

So if someone suggests a ride over to Hamilton Township's Grounds for Sculpture, you're going, right?

Philadelphia Museum of Art: 6/22/12, locus amoenus

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, from the South

I stole a page out of my graduate school Summer Survival Handbook yesterday and spent hours in the cool and cooled Philadelphia Museum of Art. When I was a graduate student in Music in Philadelphia, I used to retreat to the museum on hot days and just wander the galleries becoming acquainted with the collection, and making connections to the music history I was learning. It gave my studies depth, and created my appreciation and knowledge of art for its own sake. Yesterday's visit (the temperature outside was 95+ degrees) was inspired by the "Visions of Arcadia" exhibit, a special lecture by the senior curator, and a desire to wander around to visit my old art friends.Each time I visit this, my most familiar museum, I see paintings differently. For example, I recognized straight off John Singer Sargent's depiction of Paris's Luxembourg Gardens because I now have the experience of sitting their blissfully one July afternoon in 2007 eating pear ice cream. Other connections are formed by an attention to color theory, literary topics, and random interests, whatever's on my mind that day. (By the way, notice that the paintings mentioned here are linked to museum pages that furnish images and descriptions. Click away!)

One of the things I like to do when visiting an art museum is to select one item and study it carefully. I answer a set of questions from a book I have about writing about art (Looking and Writing by Marilyn Wyman, 2003) and try to look at the piece from different perspectives. Yesterday the museum was open late for their Friday Art-After-5 thing, so rather than listen to the music while noshing on museum food, I hung out in the galleries. I was drawn to Monet's "Marine View with a Sunset" from around 1875, probably because the theme of the day was locus amoenus or "pleasant place" and sunsets over water are very pleasant to me. This painting shows a tranquil scene with sailboats in silhouette on a still lake or river, with silhouetted trees and a cathedral in the distance. All of the silhouetted items are depicted with a purply blue which also shows up in the sky and water. The viewer is not part of the scene, but just peering at it from behind some leaves and grass. About a third of the bottom of the picture is obscured by foreground grasses, and in the same green, leaves provide the left quarter of the painting. The greenery frame draws the viewer in to the tranquil Impressionistic scene. The sun is not visible in this scene, but it is depicted by smears of pink and yellow on the blue of the sky and water.

I had a lot of time to wander the galleries yesterday, so I spent some time in the medieval era. I came across a chest that most likely belonged to Florence's Medici Family. The museum has spent decades researching and restoring the paint on this chest, and the experts have dated it to between 1450 and 1460. They believe it was owned by the Medicis based on the coat of arms and emblems painted on it. To modern eyes, it is an unusual size, about 63 inches wide and 19 inches high and deep, but, there is another similar chest in the medieval section of similar dimensions. Anyway, what drew me to this chest in the first place was the digital slide show mounted on the wall, showing the interested viewer highlights of the research and restoration. As if that wasn't enough for the art geek, there is a number to call with your cell phone, a code to punch in, and then the lead restorer tells you first-hand about the object and its restoration. (Items with cell phone numbers are sprinkled throughout the galleries.)

The point of yesterday's visit, though. was to attend the new special exhibit, "Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia" and to hear Senior Curator Joseph Rishel speak about it. The exhibit is arranged so that the visitor learns first about the concept of Arcadia, the ideal place of glee and carefree living. The Roman poet Virgil wrote of locus amoenus or Arcadia, and many artists besides the Big Three in the exhibit title have been inspired by him since. Many of these are included in this exhibit: Ingres, Corot, Poussin, Pissauro, Signac, Derain, Titian, Picasso, and Rousseau, whose enormous "The Dream" leads into in the main exhibit room. "Giants walk among us" is how Joseph Rishel described this room: the huge Arcadian paintings of Gauguin, Cezanne, and Matisse were brought together so that people (including scholars) can see them all together in their enormity and compare the Arcadian visions. There is Cezanne's "Large Bathers," Gauguin's "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?", and Matisse's "Bathers By a River". The concept of Arcadia changed dramatically over the eight years Matisse worked on this painting: check out the New York Times story. The Arcadian paintings and sculpture rely heavily on eternal topics from mythology and literature. Apollo and Daphne are there, fauns and nymphs, and lots and lots of nude bathers in Tahiti, the South of France and elsewhere. The painting that closes the show in the last room (Arcadia outside France) is German painter Franz Marc's "Deer in the Forest," borrowed here from franzmarc.org. See how the deer are part of the natural landscape--wouldn't that be the best locus amoenus possible?

Franz Marc's "Deer in the Forest" http://www.franzmarc.org/Deer-in-the-Forest.jsp