'Gross Clinic' post-mortem

Gross Clinic post-mortem:
Patricians, philistines, vultures and snobs

PATRICK D. HAZARD

With the exception of a few upper-middle-class oases, Philadelphia is a war zone, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their heart. And we get exercised over one painting that Jefferson Medical College alums originally purchased in 1878 to console Thomas Eakins over the insult that the Centennial Art Committee gave him in 1876 by hiding his great canvas in a side exhibit of medical equipment. (It was too “gory” for those Culture Vultures.) And then they piously canned him from PAFA for having the balls to show a nude male model to a “mixed” audience. Had they no common sense, those Fig Leafers? Have we none yet?

Perhaps we should examine the grossly perverted values that led to Philadelphia’s recent Gross Clinic “crisis.” For more than five generations, no local culture vulture, large or small, peeped about the hidden scandal that as few as 500 people a year had contemplated “the greatest painting ever made in Philadelphia.” And that’s not vetting those gross numbers for “dupes,” which is to say those Jefferson University workers who passed it every day, semi-comatose to its putative value.

But those aren’t the kind of “dupes” I want to discuss. Growing up in Detroit, I had been taught that art cultivated you. Refined you, so to speak. But all I have seen in this gross affair has been the Grossest Hustle. Even Broad Street Review’s Professor Robert Zaller, whose every trope I usually grope, descends to a certain snootiness about Ozark Robber Baronesses. (Before he dismisses Arkansas as a cultural swamp, he should look at the architecture that earned the late E. Fay Jones of Fayetteville an AIA Gold Medal.) Zaller describes the Wal-Mart heiress as an airhead “who proposes to decamp with it to Arkansas to delight the local booboisie.” Shame on the BSR’s strongest intellectual heavyweight for going so fecklessly ad hominem.

And now the many-honored Gresham Riley— a professor of philosophy no less, specializing in his final days with the problem of evil— makes fancy sillygisms over the differences between saving the Gross from Ozarks bandits and moving the Barnes closer to the people whom Dr. Barnes wanted to educate. Man, this whole affair is bringing out the worst in all of us.

Zaller succinctly summarizes the fancy financial shenanigans the Parthenon Pretties devised to “steal” the good Argyrol Doc’s estimated $30 billion trove. Wouldn’t their planned Barnes give the PP’s a quick leg up on their $500 million Frank O. Gehry Fantasy re-design? Their penniless FOG lifts!

The sneers of Sozanski

And the Inquirer’s Ed Sozanski should be ashamed of the scurrilous way he has demeaned Alice Walton. The Wal-Mart heiress is “transplanting high culture to her beloved Ozarks.” She is using her $18 billion inheritance to “vacuum up high-profile masterpieces whenever opportunities arise.” “Bringing the National Gallery into the picture makes her seem less like a contemporary robber baron.” Her ability to pay premium prices reminds Ed of how “19th-Century robber barons such as J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick built their fabulous collections.” But Walton (uppity old Ozark cracker that she is?) isn’t in “their league,” according to Ed.

Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum, Sozanski sneers, “promises to supplant the Wal-Mart 5 & 10 Museum as Bentonville’s premier cultural attraction.” Ha ha ha. Walton’s architect, Moshe Safdie, is no Cracker: His National Gallery in Ottawa is one of the great museums of our time. Sozanski even mocks Walton's taste: In addition to the minor league Asher B. Durand canvas, Kindred Spirits, she’s amassed two George Washington portraits— one by Charles Willson Peale and another by Gilbert Stuart— one of Martin Johnson Heade’s South American landscape with orchids, a Winslow Homer genre scene, “and—wait for it—a classic Norman Rockwell, a boy comforting a sick puppy.” End of Sneer .

The Peale family's ideal

Heh, why doesn’t Ed pick on someone his own intellectual size (or bigger)— namely, John Wilmerding, Alice Walton’s advisor?

That Charles Willson Peale snoot reminds me that I always used to begin my American literature classes with a tribute to the Peale family, who deeply believed in helping create a cultural democracy in Philly, beginning with PAFA. And are we to mock Alice in her New Wonderland because she thinks Rockwell deserves a place in her parade of Americana. It was the Saturday Evening Post, a great Philly institution, that gave Norman his first national audience.

Sozanski’s snottiness is a greater critical debacle than the Jefferson sellout. And corny as well— something art criticism must not be. “Jefferson deserves all the obloquy for agreeing, in effect, to sell grandmother’s wedding ring or the Medal of Honor that grandfather won at Anzio.” Ed, my eyes are watering.

One bright shining light (on a major civic problem)

Through all this murkiness, Stephan Salisbury, the Inquirer’s cultural reporter, has shone a clear light on its myriad messy details. When Steve Wynn “folded his bad hand” to strip the Old Curtis Building of its Dream Garden mosaic marvel, then-Mayor Ed Rendell quickly designated the work our first certified “historic object.” There was talk of a register of historic objects. A group met to discuss this in 2005 but never met again. Mayor Street just flexed his oral muscles over legislation to keep us from other Gross surprises.

I still remember vividly the joy of my Beaver colleague Benton Spruance when the 1% rule of the Redevelopment Authority in 1959 enabled him to grace the chapel of the City Detention Center with a mural. Salisbury reports that many of those RDA works of art have been moved, damaged or disappeared. Sandy Calder devised a set of giant banners for the Centre Square’s interior atrium that disappeared 15 or 20 years ago. They were feared lost. Luckily they’ve been discovered in storage, and Susan Davis, head of the RDA art program, is searching for a suitable site for them.

There are 450 RDA works and more than 300 other works financed by an analogous city program. The city owns about a thousand works of sculpture, according to Margot Berg, director of that city art program. There are 2,830 paintings in the city’s collection, if you count all the mayoral and aldermanic portraits, (not all of which are at either an Eakins or vendible level). Penn owns a slew of art, and President Amy Gutmann is busy devising a new deaccessions program to retrieve “abandoned” minor pieces and find them a safe museological home (see the Inquirer, December 19, 2006).

In short, the Gross brouhaha has forced us to confront the irresponsible ways we’ve been trashing our art heritage since the idealism of the Dilworth era cooled. The gross finagling around the Barnes exhumation (Orphans Court, indeed!) and the quick fix of the Gross selloff should force us to call a moratorium on all art moves until we have a long-range plan to protect what we have-- before we start multiplying museums on the Parkway like lusty rabbits. Losing an Eakins is not nearly as devastating as losing one’s soul.




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