SELFIES

SELF PORTRAIT OF ELISABETH LOUISE VIGÉE LE BRUN

DOUBLE DIPPING AT THE MET

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WC News Service]

New York

I doubled dipped at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a visit last week, expanding my afternoon to the museum's new modern and contemporary outpost, housed in the old Whitney building a bit south of the main redoubt on Fifth. The 'new' gallery is still the legendary, five-storey Brutalist concrete slab at 945 Madison. What's different is the gallery's conversion to what is now billed as The Met Breuer (honouring the structure's architect, Marcel Breuer). The rechristening further forms part of a overall institutional rebranding that has also refashioned the main building as The Met Fifth Avenue. (Taking a titling cue from the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, perhaps? The Met's able director, Thomas P. Campbell, is a Brit, after all).

 

The continuing Breuer exhibit I came to see, 'Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible,' is the gallery's first 'blockbuster' show in its new reincarnation, and involves a broad range of pictures from ancient to modern times notable for a single shared attribute: all are 'incomplete' works -- either my circumstance or by intention. Before showing up, I had no great immediate feeling for what, at first, I thought was simply a curatorial contrivance -- all quirky stagecraft, I believed. I was wrong.

PHILLY SECRETLY COMES TO THE RESCUE

Before

After

 Photos: WritersClearinghouse News Service

 

MET II IN WORLD WAR II 

By Richard Carreño Bio Posted: July 5, 2014

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

For two years during World War II, from 1942 to 1944, the Metropolitan Museum of Art went to war -- in Philadelphia.

      Thanks to the Monuments Men, a recent film and a book by the same title, the war-time Met is now best known for its one-time director James J. Rorimer, a principal in organizing the group of GIs who, in their role in hunting down Europe's art treasures stolen by the Nazis, became known in romantic vernacular as the 'Monuments Men.'

      Less known is how another Met director, Francis Henry Taylor, Rorimer's predecessor and a former curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, worked quietly during the early war years to protect America's art patrimony.

      And how, thanks to Taylor, a mansion in the contiguous northwest Philadelphia suburb of Springfield became an auxiliary venue of the venerable New York art institution. In secret. 

Comprehend This

Cleveland Museum Gets it Right

By Richard Carreño

The author and a new friend
Photo: Joan T. Kane/Writers Clearinghouse News Service

Cleveland

[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]

Now, there are two.

I arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art, thinking that its well-respected core collections in Egyptology, Greco-Roman classics, armour--and, you know, the other stuff from the Old Masters to Impressionism and beyond--would reaffirm its status as one of a dwindling, few 'encyclopedic' museums in the United States. Three, in fact, along with Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (The Boston Museum of Fine Arts lost its 'encyclopedic' title when fire ravaged its Egyptian holdings many years ago).

'No,' I was told by my Cleveland guide, Richard. 'We don't call ourselves that (encyclopedic) anymore. We're now what we call "comprehensive."' Why the coy turn in terminology? Something to do with a competition thing, Richard added vaguely. Competition? Surely a losing battle with the Met; even the Philadelphia Museum.'What we're focusing is quality. The best of its kind--that we can acquire and afford .'

Fashion @ the Met

Runs to 19 August
Schiaparelli and Prada Show Begins 10 May

Schiaparelli's outre Lobster Dress, worn by the Duchess of Windsor

Photos: Writers Clearinghouse News Service

New York
'Impossible Conversations' is a presentation of the museum's Costume Institute.

Art Review

Now you see it. Now you don't. The Card Players from Barnes, in photo, at  the Met. Actual painting not on view at Barnes. Photo: Richard Carreno/Writers Clearinghouse

At Met 'Party,'
Barnes Cézanne is No-Show


By Richard Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service] 
Imagine if the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave a party for Paul Cézanne and two celebrity guests, one from Philadelphia, failed to show up.

hat's what happened this week when the Met, in New York, tried to narrate Cézanne's iconic Card Players compositions in a one-all, tell-all installation. The result was well-conceived, ill-executed; two of the five paintings in the thematic series, including the one held by the Barnes Foundation, weren't there.

In place of the real thing, full-sized photographs of the works figure in the show. Moreover, these MIAs, depicting the largest canvases in the series, are also positioned on featured wall space.



Was the Met's Gary Tinterow, who curated the show in concert with The Courtauld Gallery, in London, trying to tell us something?

Could be. But nuance doesn't come easy to Tinterow, whose personality is as starchy as his title, Englehard chairman of the Department of Nineteeth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. In other words, he's a one-man band.

The show, titled 'Cézanne's Card Players,' is really a mis-nomer, given that the Met and The Courtauld, where the exhibit was first installed through early this year, knew all along that a more appropriate title would have been 'Cezanne's Card Plays -- Minus Two.' The exhibit runs through May 8.

Actually, it gets worse.


As part of the over-all story line, Tinterow had also hoped to include Cézanne's The Smoker in the show. But that canvas, owned by the State Hermitage Museum, is also missing-in-action, caught up in a diplomatic squabble involving government-run Russian museums over a ruling in a American court. At the heart of the dispute is whether a cache of orthodox Jewish documents in Russia should be transferred to a Hasidic sect, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement based in the United States. Until that issue gets resolved, the Russian-owned works are staying put.

Why the five Cézanne pictures, depicting peasants from Aix-en-Provence intently playing their card games, have not been reunited also involves legalities -- as well as a stifling misunderstanding of public service. Yes, the specter of Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), the eponymous founder of the soon-to-be Philadelphia-based museum, again rears his head. The Grinch who won't go away.

'It'd take a court order,' Tinterow told me, when I asked whether he actually had sought the Barnes work. 'It's not going to happen.'

Well, maybe.

The small show, of only about a score of major oils and drawings displayed a foyer and two gallery rooms, is the little engine that could. Despite the contretemps over the missing pictures, Tinterow & Co. were able to enlist other loan-friendly museums in fleshing out Cézanne's exploration in composition, color, and size in the five similar pictures. Two line drawings are on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an institution whose director, Timothy Rub, appreciates the operative maximum, 'If you don't give, you don't get.'

Credit for getting it also goes to the Worcester Art Museum; the Pierpont Morgan Library; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The three Card Players oils are from the Musée d'Orsay (its version, circa 1892-1896), The Courtauld (also circa 1892-1896), and from the Met itself. The Met's version was created by Cézanne (1839-1906) late in his life, sometime between 1890 and 1892.

A fourth in the series is privately held.


The fifth, created about the same time as the version at the Met, is squirreled away at the Barnes, where it remains grounded, quarantined by of Dr. Barnes' injunction that pieces in his collection never be loaned. The work, amazingly enough, is among about 60 works by Cézanne owned by the Barnes.

Bad guys? Dr. Barnes is surely one. Could his will have been over-riden, as was done allowing the museum to move to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway? Probably. But Barnes director Derek Gilmore and foundation trustees are between a rock and hard place. With the controversy surrounding the museum's Center City move still an open wound, it's likely been decided that over-turning Dr. Barnes' mean-spirited, anti-loan policy needs to wait until the dust settles around the relocation issue.

Yet one wonders, if the Cézanne show had been organized by Michael Taylor, the PMA's modern art curator, whether the Barnes picture would have at least been in the exhibit. An example of Taylor's skill in assembling complex exhibitions, highlighted by a complicated web of loans, will be on display next month when his Marc Chagall show is launched. Taylor is a brilliant tactician. And a master schmoozer.

Meantime, if you hope to round out the Met's 'Cézanne Card Players' experience with a side visit to the Barnes, don't plan on an excursion any time soon. The Barnes' Joueurs de cartes is, according to the museum's website, 'not on view.'

Museum Security: Part II

'May I Help You, Sir?!'

Does it really have to come to this?

By Richard Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
Museum security is a necessary evil.

True, much of it -- at the public level, at least, like shoe removal at airports -- is just security theatre. How much do public security measures, bag inspection, the watchful eyes of guards, the hidden 'eyes' of CCTV, and the like thwart the bad guys is hard to say. And like the tight-lipped airport personnel of the Transportation Security Administration, those who really know about the inner-workings of a particular museum's security aren't saying much.

What is certain, invasive protective measures are here to stay. In other words, get used to it.

Or, do we? My recent visit to the expanded American Jewish Museum, newly opened on Independence Mall, was an eye-opener -- and jaw-dropper. Never mind the airport-like baggage scanners. What I'm figuring is that guard with an automatic rifle, bullet-proof vest, and military fatigues isn't going to give visitors from Peoria the warm fuzzies this summer when Philly's tourist season gets into high gear.

What we also don't have to get used to is capricious, arbitrary, and, even, mean-spirited security. Something akin to TSA bullying. Worse, the 'up against the wall' approach of some big-city cops.

It's not that I'm not unfamiliar with the security hysteria that professionals in the field share about backpacks, rucksacks, bookbags, well, anything that's strapped to your torso. (In Venice a while back, I had to stuff my bag in a companion's handbag before entering the Basilica on San Marco Square. Of course, the putative bomb I might have had in my bag would just have been transferred to her bag. Never mind).

A more recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago turned up no surprises. Backpack phobia was in full swing. Banned, banished, prohibited, outlawed, shunned, and, for good measure, Verboten.

Some security personnel seem to believe that backpacks are the hand-held carriers of choice for suicide bombers and other lunatics who, er, go to museums. With the horrible exception of the shooter at the Holocaust Museum in Washington a few years ago, I can't recall a single incident of public violence at any major American museum in recent years. Theft, yes. Vandalism, sure. But museum-goers by and large -- and we're talking about millions who patronise museums annually --hardly meet any profile for personal violence, or much less for bombing.

Foreign terrorists, then? Sorry, fine arts museums also don't meet the right profile. No wings.

People, puleeze, some common sense.

My backpack is a small, lightweight black nylon job about the size of small plastic grocery bag. (I carry my 'tools' within, pads, pens, research materials, camera, and the like).

Soon after entering the Art Institute, I sensed that a 'May-I-Help-You-Sir?!' moment was quickly about to be in the offing.

I was lucky. 'You must check that bag, sir!' was a lower-level variant. The order, from a stern-looking security officer, was in robotic voice that's now the lingua franca of the TSA and others in the growing rent-a-cop security busyness. The ominous tone is always a breath away from the truly menacing 'May I help you, Sir?!' That being, of course, a prelude to a Red-Alert Situation, leading ultimately, to handcuffing and arrest.

I suppose I learned my lesson. Instead of stuffing my bag, as I had at the Basilica in Venice in my companion's handbag (this time, by the way, hers was the size of a small duffel bag), I meekly checked my bag with the proper authorities. (Everything else, I transferred to my companion's duffel).

Well, that was that. Or was it?

Most of us, of course, face security issues -- at work, during travel -- almost every day. We have a stake in the process. As I write frequently about museums and their caches, I have a singular interest in museum security. Almost all, undertake some public display of security -- not to catch the odd thief -- but rather to declare the institution's dedication to deterrence.

Most of this visible, obvious security -- at museums, as is the case at airports -- is a feel-good sham. Out of 10,000 persons, there's the odd knucklehead with a penknife. As for the real bad guys, do you think they're still carrying their plastique in shoe heels?

Some museums get it right. Smart museums like the Corcoran in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia and many, many others bow to the need for a public display of alleged security by visually inspecting all bags. This upfront eye-balling is done by the museum's rent-a-cop staff. The pros are in the back of the shop.

Maybe, it's just a Chicago thing, this undue emphasis on backpack security, I thought. After my visit to the Art Institute, I made my way to the Museum of Contemporary Art, where I also read that backpacks were not welcome in galleries. Really? Nah. Not a problem, I was told as I was ushered into the museum with my backpack slung over a shoulder. (That's the same procedure, by the way, that I follow at the PMA and the Met).

The Art Institute, one of the country's great museums, needs to lighten up. So does the Jewish Museum in Philly.

Corrective Surgery

'Gross Clinic' Gets Out of Rehab

By Richard Carreño

Writers Clearinghouse News Service
The Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, better known as The Gross Clinic and as Thomas Eakins' best known painting, has had a long and arduous journey since the artist created the work in his garret at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia, in 1875. And equally to its perch as the acclaimed finest painting of 19th century America by that century's greatest American artist.

'I have just got a new picture blocked in it & it is very far better than anything I have done,' the Eakins wrote, on April 13, 1875, to the then-prominent critic Earl Shinn.

Until then, of course. At 31, Eakins' appraisal of the Clinic could have been judged premature, considering the body of his work would still span four more decades until the artist's death in 1916 at 72.

Eakins' humanistic The Cruxification was just five years away, and that soulful depiction of Everyman's agony, portrayed by the culmination of Christ's Passion on the Cross, is sometimes thrust forward as the finer painting. Picking nits.

The monumental Clinic, now on majestic display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is, by any measure, a singular masterpiece. Eakins created a picture of undeniable, momentous import, capturing -- with the advantage of 21st century hindsight -- a grotesquerie of dark science and the imperiousness of medicine. This at a time in the late 19th century when physicians, in America, at least, were being first put on their legendary 'pedestal' that would only topple 100 years later. If Clinic were a moving picture, it would be 'film noir.'

I first saw the painting -- in my reverence for the work, my viewing was more like an 'audience' -- when it was ensconced at a former hideaway at Thomas Jefferson University, in a free walk-in gallery that was rarely visited and, even more sadly, little known. (The painting itself was a commissioned work. Gross was at the time Jefferson Medical College's 'star' surgeon, and the work was a PR gambit on his and the institution's behalf. If Philadelphia Magazine had been around in those days, Gross would have been billed as a Philly 'best.')

In 135 years, Clinic has seen halcyon days. Even before its paint was dry, it was the artisic centrepiece at the Phladelphia-based 1876 United States Centennial, glorifying the art of medicine. As a much aging debutante, it got a second 'coming out' to great applause at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an Eakins memorial show in 1917. In 2001, it became the crown in the jewel in a 'blockbuster' retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum, later moving to Paris for even more fanfare.

After that, a silent repose fell upon the picture until 2007, when Jefferson, in a back-room fund-raising scheme, dramatically agreed to sell the painting for $68-million to a joint ownership cavil of a Wal-Mart heiress and the National Gallery. That skull-duggery -- whether it was a set-up, or not will probably never be known -- led a local drive to 'save' the picture for Philadelphia.

Thanks to late Anne d'Harnoncourt, at the time the whirlwind director of the Philadelphia Museum, who spearheaded the drive, $68-million in local and worldwide donations kept the painting at home. 'Home' being a joint custodial agreement by the PMA and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Ironically, the painting that the PMA and PAFA purchased was not the picture that Eakins created.

No, not fraud.But simply good intentions.

As is routine, all museum holdings are subject to cleaning and conservation, and the Clinic's last turn at getting a re-do, at the PMA, was about 90 years before. Intuitively, the PMA conservators sought to lighten the painting's dark hues. But, unbeknownst to them, 'brightening' the picture ran counter to the intended chiaroscuro that Eakins endowed the work.

This was not a happy place, Eakins tells us in depicting the operating theatre, seen with today's eyes as a macabre house of horrors. Even the patient's mother, cruelly invited to attend the surgery, for legal reasons that prevailed at the time, must shield her eyes from the hideous spectacle, overseen by the professorial and dispassionate Dr. Gross. (Is his height -- he's centred as the tallest individual in the painting -- elevated by an unseen pedestal?, one wonders).

Eakins, no Pollyanna, understood life's darker side. Though the picture putatively evinced Gross as the master surgeon, at the top of his game, Eakins didn't blind himself to bloody spectacle. Step forward, thanks to Eakins, a new school of American Realism.

Beginning in 2001, PMA conservators also started to understand how light figured in Eakins' paintings, concluding, contrary to previous interpretations, that darker shades and shadows were meant to be in his work. (A rethink of Between Rounds [1898-99] settled the matter).

And the Clinic?

Mark S. Tucker, the museum's vice chair of conservation, was tasked with the re-habbing. Not surprisingly, given the findings from the previously-conserved works, it was discovered, following X-rays and paint analysis, that Clinic had also been illuminated in a 1920s cleaning.

Tucker and his staff re-tinted the painting, and, despite the well-known findings from the previous restorations, the PMA presented this latest re-do as a modern marvel of investigative science and forensic technology. (With PR spin in full throttle, breathless articles of new discovery found their way to The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times).

Regardless of that hype, what has resulted is a Clinic that surpasses all its previous 20th century showings. Its presentation, in conception, stagecraft, and execution, is a tour de force. With in-door gallery lighting just so, refreshed pigments glisten, twinkling in pools of reflected light. The picture is, in fact, so enhanced that the viewer can't escape an almost-slide show narrative that darts from Gross, mother, patient, scribe, surgical instruments.

The PMA has been modest in titling this latest coming-out of Eakins' grande dame as 'Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew.' Thanks to Tucker and his crew, it's more like a rebirth.

The exhibition, in the PMA's Perelman Building, runs until January 9, when it moves to PAFA.

Museum Mile

Good Financial

Fortnight for PMA
By Richard Carreño
Junto Senior Staff Writer Bio
A Non-Profit Profits
It's been a good fortnight, financially, for the non-profit Philadelphia Museum of Art.


OK. Technically, not for profit. But sort of 'for-profit' too; it charges admission to a building that's owned by the public. And more money keeps flowing to its PMA coffers. Some public. Some private.


Last week, it was $40-million in public funds from the Rendell Admnistration.


This week, the Pew Charitable Trusts, which have had a historically cozy relationship with the museum, announced a grant of more than $2-million in private money to the PMA under is Cultural Leadership Program, which dedicates funding to non-profits that 'demonstrate excellence in operations, fiscal management, and programming.'


The PMA itself received a grant of $1.92-million. Its satellite, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, the PMA's art school in South Philadelphia, was awarded another $96,000.


Happily, the Brandywine River Museum, in suburban Chadds Ford, a brilliant jewel dedicated to American art, also received recognition, $184,000. The Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Centre City, a place I know well, got $30,000.


Lenape Nation to pledge 'friendship' at Penn Museum
From noon through the afternoon, on Saturday, August 21, the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania will join the public in a ritual signing of the 'Treaty of Renewed Friendship' at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.


The occasion, which occurs every four years, commits signatories to work as 'partners' with the Lenape Nation, the principal Native American tribe in eastern Pennsylvania, as 'caretakers of their sacred homeland.'


The museum suggests an admission donation, $10 for adults, $7 for persons 65 or older, $6 for full-time students. Of course, you can donate a free-will offering of your choice. The Penn Museum is actually free.


The Gate: PMA lags way behind the Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has topped the 5 million visitor mark for fiscal 2009, the first time since 2001 that the Met hit that attendance milestone.


The Met's director, Thomas P. Campbell, called the figure a 'landmark' that 'underscores the vibrancy of the Metropolitan Museum's exhibitions and collections for its audiences from around the world....'


In contrast, the Philadelphia Museum of Art reported a fiscal 2009 attendance of 812,479, according to an authoritative listing tallied by the London-based Art Newspaper. Given last-minute adjustments, that figure has likely increased to closer to 1 million.


The museum's world largest gate is held by the Louvre, with a steady 8.5 million annual visitors, the Art Newspaper reported.


LA gets a shot at Eakins too
While the Philadelphia Museum of Art is celebrating the restored The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins' masterwork, museum-goers in Los Angeles are also getting a taste of the artist, as well.


In Philadelphia, Eakins is revealed as the genre realist, depicting the raw life of medicine and surgery.


In LA, the genre is Eakins' life-long interest in sports, principally rowing and boxing.


The show, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, titled 'Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Art of Thomas Eakins,' runs to October 17.


No word whether the show includes Eakins' lesser known sporting interest, equestrianism.


A First for Princeton Museum
The Princeton University Museum of Art, one of my favourite hinterland art venues, has appointed Kelly Baum as its first curator of modern and contemporary art, museum director James Steward announced.


Since 2007, Baum has served as a felow for contemporary art. Since that time, according to Steward, Baum has 'greatly invigorated the museum's contemporary art department, expanded and diversified the contemporary collection, and developed an international artist-in-residency program.'

Museum Mile

Tate Liverpool, right

Is it a Worldwide
Fad? Picasso Seems to be Everywhere
By Richard Carreno
Junto Senior Staff Writer Bio

Tired of Pablo? The Philadelphia Museum of Art might be -- at least, for the time being. On the heels of the museum's last show, 'Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris, the PMA now just concentrating on its newly rolled-out big show, 'Late Renoir.'

Of course, that doesn't mean that the rest of us need to give up our Picasso fix. In fact, from Liverpool to New York and to, yes, even to Philadelphia, art lovers can still get up close and personal with even more works by the Spanish master. Like the PMA's show, the current worldwide Picasso exhibits, for the most part, attempt to frame the artist to a theme.

At the Tate Liverpool, the concept is 'peace and freedom,' highlighting works that demonstrate Picasso's commitment to those causes. Though Picasso's iconic Guernica is not at the show, other well-known pieces, Dove of Peace and The Rape of the Sabine Women, are. On loan from the Museum of Modern is The Charnel House. (The exhibit runs to August 30).

In London, at the Gagosian Gallery, the theme is the 'Mediterranean Years.' (August 28 is the concluding date).

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled its show, running to August 15, simply enough 'Picasso.' There's concept catch, though. All the works in the Met show are from its own collection. So the exhibit is limited to that context. Still with 300 pieces on view, that's nothing to sneeze at.

The Picasso theme at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is 'Picasso Looks @ Degas.' It gets complicated. The show has a run to September 12.

Philadelphia? Of course, a return visit to PMA's modern art collection could be a local treat. For the more intrepid and hardy, a trek to the Barnes Foundation might be in order, as well. (I suppose this is just as good a time as any to say, personally, can't wait until the Barnes opens on Museum Mile).

Revolutionary Art
The PMA has kicked off a show, from its own collection and with loans from the Library Company of Philadelphia, that features artistry, including many hand-crafted furnishings, from Revolutionary Philadelphia. The museum notes that many of the pieces, at least, those once owned by Loyalists, fell into the public domain at auction after this Tory property was confiscated. 'Art in Revolutionary Philadelphia' is presented in the gallery adjacent to the Powel House Drawing Room.

Cultural Alliance Announces New Head
Tom Kaiden, a long-time officer of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, has been named its president. Kaiden joined the non-profit cultural advocacy group in 2001, and was its chief operating officer. He succeeds the late Peggy Amsterdam.

Moore College to Honor Three in September
Moore College of Art & Design will confer a 2010 Visionary Woman Award to photographer Wendy Ewald. handbag designer Judith Leiber, and museum curator Ann Temkin. An award ceremony will be held September 30 at the college. (Septa station: 19th and Market streets).

Temkin, in particular, is well known to PMA aficionados. From 1990 to 2003, Temkin was the PMA's Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art before going to the Museum of Modern Art as its chief curator of painting and sculpture. (The PMA's modern art position is now held by Michael Taylor).

Business leader to Head Academy of Natural Sciences
George W. Gephart Jr. must be doing something right. Just today, in the mail, I received a fund-raising letter from the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Gephart, a local businessman and a leader in the non-profit sector, was recently named the academy's president and chief executive officer. And it looks like he's coming out of his corner fighting.

Gephart will have his hands full. The 200-year-old academy, the oldest such museum in the country, is showing every wrinkle of those many years. Gephart, 57, until his appointment, board chairman of Main Line Health System, wants to raise the museum's profile -- and money. The academy has been hurting financially for many years.

Like the Franklin Institute, its neighbor on Museum Mile -- and, for that matter, the American Museum of Natural History, the mother of all such museums -- the academy faces a generational game change. One core constituency of natural history museums has always been youngsters. Getting these hyper/inter-active, 21st century thumb twitchers into 19th-century, Victorian-conceived museums isn't easy.

The Franklin Institute tried dumbing down, even changing its name to the hipster-sounding 'The Franklin.' The idea was drop the dead-beat 'institute' association. What do kids know from institutes? That effort didn't last long. Still, despite some crowd pleasing exhibits (the current one, 'Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt'), the Franklin, er, the Franklin Institute is still burdened by its behemoth building, a white elephant if I've ever seen one.

Actually, try two. I recently visited the Museum of Natural History. It's full-block edifice on Central Park West is another early 20th-century disaster. (Even the Natural History Museum in London, another generational architectural nightmare, works better than its New York counterpart, which houses dinosaurs and happens to be one, as well).

The problem is not what these museums do; it's how they do.

Why are stuffed animals in glass enclosed dioramas? Hard to see, uninviting, and off-putting perspectives. Moreover, old glass is reflective. Not great for picture taking, either.

How about an open habitat? I saw how this was very effectively done recently at Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Of course, the Raleigh museum is also housed in modern, 21st-century, purpose-built building. No dumbing down. No kiddie-land. By the way, the place was packed.

The academy's current exhibit, 'Creatures of the Abyss,' concludes September 6.

Picasso Breaks Out All Over

Bits and bobs:
Philadelphia Museum at a glance


Claire Howard, right
By Richard Carreno
Junto Staff Writer Bio 

From Philly to New York, Picasso is breaking out all over.

On the heels of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's wildly successful in-house show of works by Pablo Picasso, 'Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris,' the Metropolitan Museum of Art will also showcase its permanent collection of works by the Spanish artist (1881-1973) in a retrospective that begins 27 April, running to 1 August.

Actually, the Philly and New York exhibits will overlap for a few day as the Philadelphia Museum's show has been extended to 2 May.

Interestingly, both shows also coincides with a show of Picasso prints, now on exhibit through 1 May at the Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, New York.

In its current on-line newsletter, the Philadelphia Museum warns, 'Now or never -- don't miss your opportunity to experience this outstanding exhibition!'

The museum also billboards a 'sound bite' from The Wall Street Journal, calling the show, curated by Michael Taylor, as 'smart, informative, witty.' (No mention is made of a New York Times review that was considerably less impressed).

Like the Philly exhibit, the Met's show will also feature pieces from its permanent collection. However, the show will not be limited to a particular timeline, as is the case with the Philly exhibit and the current exhibit at the Marlborough Gallery, titled 'Celebrating the Muse: Women in Picasso's Prints From 1905-1968.'

In a statement, the Met said, 'The exhibition encompasses the key subjects foir which Picasso is so well known....'

Includes will be 300 works, featuring 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics, and an extensive selection of prints.

The Met show also differs from the Philadelphia Museum exhibit in that it will not skimp by not offering a show catalog. (This was a major flaw in the Philly show in that it undermined scholarship). The Met catalog is funded by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.

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Many thanks!

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Let's stay in touch! Go the FB as often as you to follow updates at Examiner.com and The Philadelphia Junto -- and news bites not published here -- that exclusively target the Philadelphia Museum, our city's most important cultural resource. Hope to hear from you.

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Golden Girl

A celebration of the return of the statue of Jeanne D'Arc, the golden girl of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, will begin at 2 pm Thursday, 22 April, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Kicking off the event will be a tour of the museum's Arms and Armor Collection, followed at 3 pm by a bus ride to the Perelman Building, where champagne and cakes will be served. At 4 pm, the restored, newly-bronzed sculpture of of Joan of Arc, created by Eugene Fremiet, will be unveiled.

Speaking at this ceremony will be Mayor Michael Nutter; Margot Berg, Philadelphia Public Art Director; and Julia Ward and Valerie de Conde, both of French Heritage Philadelphia.

Philly's Jeanne D'Arc statue is one of three that I know of. Another in New Orleans. And one in Paris.

See you at the ceremony. Look me up!

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Picasso blog

The museum has created a dedicated blog to the Picasso show. Earlier this month, Claire Howard (see featured photo) was showcased as curatorial research assistant to modern art curator Michael Taylor.

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Powerful Philadelphia Museum Trustee....

... Gets Scrutiny

from New York's
AG Office 
  Harvey S. Shipley Miller, right

By Richard Carreno Bio

Junto Staff Reporter
A powerful, suave Philadelphia Museum of Art trustee, whose stewardship of a prominent New York- and Philadelphia-based arts foundation is now reportedly under 'review' by the New York state attorney general for a recalcitrant dispersal of funds, has had a long and beneficial relationship with Philadelphia Museum, including a donation of between $50,000 and $99,000 in 2009, the year that has been reputedly been called into question by New York authorities.

The long-time trustee, Harvey S. Shipley Miller of New York, has also contributed a personal gift of an unspecified dollar amount in 2009, according to the PMA's financial accounting for that year.

Despite these apparent local disbursements, The New York Times reported today that office New York state Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo is reviewing the over-all grant-making activities of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, whose granter, the late artist Judith Rothschild, also had strong ties to the Philadelphia Museum as a former executive committee person. The PMA also owns some of her work.

Miller, 62, a lawyer and a renowned print collector and curator, is the Rothschild Foundation's sole trustee. At the time of Rothschild's death in 1993, at 71, her newly created foundation was valued at $34 million and included works by Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian.

The Times stressed that no wrong-doing has been intimated in the attorney general's review or by other parties.

Miller has been a PMA trustee since 1985, and has been an ongoing member of the museum's collections committee and its prints, drawings, and photographs committee, an area of expertise in which Miller is known to specialize. He has equally strong ties with the nation's most influential arts community in New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Despite the PMA's published statements regarding the foundation's and Miller's personal donations, Miller himself seemingly acknowledged to The Times that the foundation delayed 2009 payments, though these promised donations have now been disbursed. In an interview with The Times, Miller attributed the delay to the consequence of an accident, in which in suffered a broken neck.

Attempts to reach Miller at his New York residence, the foundation's New York office, and at its Philadelphia office were unsuccessful. The residence number is unlisted; the New York number, disconnected; and the Philadelphia number, switched to voice mail.

Miller's association with the Philadelphia Museum has involved, over the years, an interlocking relationship with PMA personnel and the Rothschild Foundation. In 1999, Ann Temkin, the PMA's former curator of modern and contemporary art, served on the foundation's grants review committee, according to foundation's published records. For two years running, in 1995 and in 1996, the Philadelphia Museum's late director, Anne d'Harnoncourt, also served on the committee.

D'Harnoncourt was also a principal speaker at Rothschild's 1993 memorial service.

Gail Harrity, the PMA's president and chief operating officer, told The Times that Miller 'is smart, articulate, and very charming.'