Rittenhouse Square's fall art show

The Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show dates back to 1932, when a group of art students pinned their work to clotheslines strung between trees. It's been held every June since, and in 2005 the organizers added a September installment as well.

Over the years, the show's professionalism has increased while the number of students showing has decreased. This year the dozen or so student artists were quarantined in the center of the park, while the professionals occupied booths arrayed around the entire perimeter of the square.

At the fifth annual September show this past weekend, art lovers, art students and self-appointed art critics were joined by those who picked the show as a spur-of-the-moment destination on a glorious late summer weekend. The mix yielded outstanding people-watching opportunities: The pierced and tattooed mingled with the surgically enhanced, and the hip were hip-to-hip with the square. Natty middle-aged couples dodged young families steering the latest in stroller technology through the crowd, while 20somethings on dates did their best not to step on the lapdogs being led in and out of the Square.

"'Name that influence'

All this traffic flowed past 143 booths offering an array of what the organizing committee considers fine art (photography, as well as computer-generated art, is excluded, as are pottery and jewelry). Naturally, popular styles and subjects predominate. Surely my friend and I weren't the only ones playing "Name that influence" as we browsed. Emulators of Manet and Monet were well represented, of course, but Thomas Hart Benton and Thomas Eakins, Klimt and Klee, Hogarth and Twombly also had their admirers.

Not all the influences were unadulterated: Imagine Magrittean surrealism rendered with a Maxfield Parrish palette. I found a couple of photo-realists and a half-dozen self-conscious folk art naivists.

No shortage of poppy fields

If you were looking for original art portraying Philadelphia, you were in luck: At least eight artists offered recognizable local scenes. The second most popular subject was koi (five artists, including one who offered both koi and Philly scenes— in separate pieces, thanks be). Fields of red poppies ranked a surprising third, with four artists.

Not all the artists were easily pigeonholed, though. David Oleski of West Chester paints stripped-down still lifes of simplified images, meticulously placed; the thick layers of paint on his oversized canvases belie his careful observation of the objects.

Another local artist, Michael Wommack of Langhorne, reflects on his Levittown boyhood in a series of unexpectedly sinister pastels. Wommack's boxy, anonymous houses interlock with patterns of swimming pools and fences to eerie effect.

An addictive sensual process

One of the show's six permitted categories of "fine art" is "mixed media," and some of the most interesting art in the show fell in this group. September Heart (not, presumably, her birth name) works with encaustic, a technique of painting with pigmented wax. Her earth-toned abstracts are simultaneously modern and archaic; the layers of wax give her work both a visual and an actual depth. She calls the process "sensual and addictive," two characteristics that are hinted at in these images.

Marjolyn van der Hart starts by layering various tissue and paper elements (dressmaking patterns, sheet music, pages from books in various languages) to create her surface, then responds to that surface in the painting. "My subject is memory," she says, and her figurative paintings simultaneously evoke that which is specific and that which is blurred in our memories.

The ancient battle between art and commerce won't be settled in an afternoon or even a weekend. But the organizers of the Rittenhouse show have found a workable balance between the two. Anyone who attended could have found a fair amount that appealed to him or her, and could stroll past the rest. With or without the art, there's no better place to stroll on the last weekend of summer.