Philadelphia!

Thirty years after our last visit to the City of Brotherly Love, we returned for an art visit to the new Barnes Foundation building and the much older Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsvylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). As much as we enjoyed those jewels, we also loved the setting: Philadelphia seemed clean, vibrant, full of public art and interesting new architecture, including intriguing skyscrapers by Robert Stern and Cesar Pelli.
The Barnes, though, is the newest attraction, not least for its remarkable building and garden. It’s hard to complain about the move from Lower Merion; all that has been lost, besides some history, is age and quaintness. The art looks wonderful, and limited admissions keeps the crowd manageable. There is, however, a problem. Barnes’s style of collecting – get as much as you can of certain artists – and manner of display – fill every wall with pictures that have some affinity of line, space or color – worked better in an out-of-the-way building you made a special trip to by appointment. The space on Benjamin Franklin Parkway comes across as a regular museum, and we’re less sympathetic to a lot of similar and frankly mediocre works in a museum setting. One hundred and eighty-one Renoirs is about 175 more than I care to see. Similarly, I want to pick out the two or three best Cezanne landscapes and still lifes, rather than sort through dozens. Not incidentally, the new book on the collection featured in the bookstore is called “Masterpieces of the Barnes,” which is what your mind is dying to see but is antithetical to Barnes’s purpose. Instead of seeking an esthetic experience by figuring out what each painting was saying to the one above or below it, I wanted to edit each wall, highlight a really fine work and eliminate the rest.
To take but one example: I love Maurice Prendergast’s decorative, quilt-like oils of women in a seaside park, but they need space to breathe. One by itself, with room around it and viewable from a distance, can be captivating. But put two together and cram other works by Glackens around them and their beauty is lost. The Barnes’s two greatest works – Cezanne’s Card Players and Seurat’s Models – provide an interesting compare-and-contrast on top of each other, but how much grander each would look given its own wall! The hardware on the walls around the paintings struck me as gimmicky, and there are some truly dreadful works on display, including the first ugly van Gogh I’ve ever seen. In all, I’m glad I went – and we had an excellent docent tour before I retraced the entire collection on my own – but this is no longer on my list of wonderful small museums I’d always want to go back to.
PAFA is deservedly noted for its collection of early American masters: the Peale family, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, et al. Downstairs there is a nice nod to contemporary work, including an Honore Scharrer from my former colleague Adam Zagorin and a chapel devoted to Bill Viola’s Ocean Without a Shore. I know that Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire endlessly, and Monet had his cathedrals and haystacks and poplars, but as I watched Viola’s cast of regulars walk once more through his wall of water I couldn’t help thinking he had gone to the well once too often. Moreover, the actors this time appeared to be mugging as they broke through from black-and-white to color, which further dampened the effect. Viola’s work usually takes the cake for drama, or melodrama, but currently at PAFA that role goes to Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, one of the most powerful paintings I have ever encountered. Seeing it in reproduction in no way prepared me for seeing it in person. Most remarkable is the intent look, the workmanlike attention, of the attending physicians, which contrasts with the magisterial countenance of Dr. Gross, who resembles King Solomon in a Biblical tableau and stands out even more because he alone is painted in high-definition. Then there is the open wound in the thigh and the stockinged feet of the patient and the remarkable decision to paint the audience in the darkness. My only reservation is the overly dramatic reaction of the patient’s mother, whose arm-throwing seems out of place for the deliberate tone elsewhere on the canvas. But if there is an American painting that can stand up to a great Rembrandt or Velazquez, this is it.
I had one hour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday and another six on Saturday and tried to see everything, although I was often not sure where in the building I was. As is my wont, I like to rank museums and came away thinking that other than the Met, there may be no richer collection in America. Maybe it’s safer to place the PMA on a level with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston MFA, with Cleveland not far behind. Anyway, it would be fun to learn what the experts think. My first day’s visit, after photography and prints, was to the special exhibition of Outsider Art from the Bonovitz Collection, a promised gift. I’m still not sure what the line is between outsider art and bad art, and I seriously question why Philadelphia would make such a commitment to this field, and this collection in particular. There may be a place for representative works by Howard Finster, Martin Ramirez, Bill Traylor – just to name three of the ‘best’ – but is there really a need to collect their works in depth? Does a museum famous for its Cezanne, Eakins, Duchamp want to accord equal status to these outsiders, and will their work stand the test of time?
What surprised me most on my second-day’s visit was the large number of period rooms throughout the second floor, from both Europe and Asia. They didn’t seem to be obsessed with authenticity as the MIA’s are, but were often just fitting display spaces for mainly decorative arts of the period. The Japanese tea house, from 1917, and Buddhist altar were especially impressive. I was attracted, of course, to the full room of Eakins paintings. There was no masterwork like the Gross Clinic, but an array of genre scenes and portraits. Looking at the former, I was struck with what activities have changed in the intervening century – boxing, shad fishing, carriage-riding – and which have remained the same – rowing, sailing, oboe-playing.
A corner of five Fantin-Latours confirmed my view that he is an underappreciated artist. They were similar floral arrangements – three roses, one delphinium, one pink – yet each had its own personality and each was gorgeous. Seeing more Renoirs, after the Barnes, confirmed my other view that he is the most overrated artist in the history of art. I would have displayed no more than two of the twenty or so Renoirs on view. When placed next to his, Mary Cassatt’s works seemed solid and authentic. Speaking of Impressionism, there was a large gallery of undistinguished works that all suffered by proximity and quantity. Many museums, including the MIA, would love to have any one of these works, but seen together they gave a flaccid impression. Much better were the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works around the corner in the Resnick Rotunda, all from the Tyson Collection. Another artist who appeared to advantage in the gallery of Salon works was Charles Daubigny, whose 1857 Mill provided a bridge from Corot to Cezanne.
With so much art to comment on, I concentrated on choosing a personal Top Ten, with an emphasis on works that were new to me, excluding the well-known, such as the van der Weyden Crucifixion, de Chirico’s The Soothsayer’s Recompense or Peale’s Staircase Group. In fairness, I also excluded loans, which left out Jasper Johns’ Painting with Two Balls and Clyfford Still’s PH-1033, although both gave me great pleasure. In no order, other than the order I encountered them, here they are:
Daniel Garber, Peonies (1922)
Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool from Wapping (1885)
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-04)
Mary Cassatt, Family Group Reading (c. 1901)
Frantisek Kupka, Disks of Newton (1912)
Sean Scully, Iona (2004-06)
Master of the Procession, Feast of Wine (17th c.)
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Portrait of Mme Du Barry (1781)
Camille Corot, House and Factory of M. Henry (1833)
also, Lake Geneva (1839)
Callisto Piazza, Musical Group (1520s)
If I were to add one sculpture to this painting group, it would be Jean-Antoine Houdon, Benjamin Franklin (1779).
Finally, I would like to compliment the Philadelphia Museum – as well as PAFA and the Barnes – for the almost total absence of glazing on their paintings. Hurrah!