Art Museum's "Collecting for Philadelphia' (1st review)

Art exhibitions normally focus on a single artist, or perhaps a group or a genre. The Art Museum's new exhibit violates that rule. Oddly, its diversity endows it with a special appeal.

The breadth and variety of this show proves, more than ever, that beauty is in the eye of each beholder. I was intrigued to discover my personal favorite works bore no resemblance to each other.

The exhibit displays a hundred examples chosen from the more than 8,000 objects that the Art Museum has acquired over the past five years, either by purchase or gift. They illustrate areas in which the museum has pioneered, such as African-American and Latin American art. They also include pottery, craft, furniture, calligraphy and Asian art. The materials on display incorporate bamboo, stone, gelatin, porcelain, silver, bronze, copper, rattan, even dyed corrugated cardboard used by Frank Gehry for an easy chair.

The young Cézanne

One painting each by Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne are on display. What are they doing here? Didn't the Art Museum already own plenty of works by those masters?

The Fisherman's Village at L'Estaque is the earliest Cézanne piece to come to Philadelphia, having been painted around 1870, when the great post-Impressionist was only 31. For that reason it adds to the full arc of Cézanne's career. It's an aerial view of the village, apparently from a cliff, with muted colors that provide only a hint of where Cézanne was headed.

Hanging next to it is Monet's Path On the Island of Saint Martin, Vétheuil. This lovely painting shows Monet developing a lacy, delicate technique as he worked in Vétheuil, a small village on the Seine River northwest of Paris. That's one of the pieces I'll return to see again.

Chair for Miss Blanche

I was also blown away by a stunning Japanese armchair designed by Shiro Kuramata shortly before his death at age 57 in 1991. Kuramata named it his "Miss Blanche" chair, after the dreamlike illusions of the central figure in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. It's constructed of sturdy blocks of clear acrylic with embedded polyester (yet natural-looking) roses, and its legs are aluminum pipe coated with lavender epoxy.

Another of my favorites is an oil on mahogany by the 18th-Century Puerto Rican artist José Campeche. Religious paintings by the Spanish Catholic settlers in the New World usually pictured Christ. Campeche innovated by featuring the Virgin Mother, but he did so in a most unusual way. He made her a shepherdess in elegant European attire, looking much like Marie Antoinette. La Divina Pastora (The Divine Shepherdess) is a peculiar, anachronistic creation.

Weegee's darkroom

Also on display are a self-portrait by Rembrandt Peale and a winter landscape by Mary Robertson, better known as Grandma Moses. An interesting oddity is the blue silk skirt designed and worn by Lydia Delectorskaya, the model who wears it in Matisse's painting, Woman in Blue, which has been in the museum for decades. After this show closes in September, the painting and skirt will be displayed together.

To focus attention on the procedures of acquiring new works, two prospects for acquisition are on loan and hang next to each other at the end of the hall. They are two photographs by the New York photojournalist known as Weegee (real name: Ascher Fellig). He worked at night and competed with police to be first at the scene of a crime. Weegee kept a darkroom in the trunk of his car and sold his work to tabloids. Visitors to this exhibit can cast votes and the Art Museum will purchase the winner. A donor already has pledged the money.♦


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