| Philadelphia Museum of Art | |
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Location within Pennsylvania
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| Established | 1876 |
| Location | 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia |
| Type | Art Museum |
| Director | Timothy Rub |
| Website | www.philamuseum.org |
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year. Originally called the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, its founding was inspired by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, which grew out of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Museum, at that time housed in the Centennial Exposition's Memorial Hall, opened its doors to the public on May 10, 1877. While this location was adequate, it was remote from the vast majority of the city's inhabitants.[1]
Construction of the current building began in 1919 when Mayor Thomas B. Smith laid the cornerstone in a Masonic ceremony on the former reservoir land of the decommissioned Fairmount Water Works covering 10 acres (40,000 m2) of ground.[2] The first section was completed in early 1928. The quasi-Greek Revival design was produced by Horace Trumbauer and the firm of Zantzinger, Borie and Medary.[1] The facade of the building is of Minnesota dolomite. The pediment facing the parkway is adorned with sculptures by C. Paul Jennewein depicting Greek gods and goddesses. There is also a collection of griffins, which were adopted as the symbol of the museum in the 1970s.[1] The Museum's building is fondly nicknamed the Parthenon on the Parkway.
For the better part of a century the McIlhenny family held an important relationship with the Museum. Henry P. McIlhenny was involved for almost half a century, first as curator from 1939 to 1964, then as chairman of the board in 1976 until his death in 1986, when he left the bulk of his estate to the Museum.
The institution describes itself as "one of the largest museums in the United States",[3] and its collections comprise more than 225,000 objects.[4] Though the Museum houses over 200 galleries spanning 2,000 years,[5] it does not have any galleries devoted to Egyptian, Roman, or Pre-Columbian art. This is because a partnership between the Museum and the University of Pennsylvania had been enacted early in the Museum's history. The University loaned the Museum its collection of Chinese porcelain, and the Museum loaned a majority of its Roman, Pre-Columbian, and Egyptian pieces to the University. However, the Museum keeps a few important pieces for special exhibitions.
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Each year the Museum puts on 15 to 20 special exhibitions and is visited by 800,000 people. Some of the larger and more famous special exhibitions, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of people from every state and around the world, include shows featuring Paul Cézanne (in 1996, attracting 548,000, and 2009, still ongoing) and Salvador Dalí (in 2005, attracting 370,000).
Widely regarded as a world-class art institution, the Philadelphia Museum of Art includes not only its iconic Main Building, but also the Rodin Museum (also on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway), Perelman Building, and several other historic sites. The recently acquired Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building (across the street from the Main Building) opened in 2007 and houses for public display a few of the Museum's more popular collections. It includes five new exhibition spaces, a sky lit galleria, and a cafe overlooking a landscaped terrace.[5]
In the 18th century, Philadelphia was one of the most important cities in North America and was a center of style and culture.[6] The museum is particularly known for its important collections of Pennsylvania German art, 18th- and 19th-century furniture and silver by early Philadelphia and Pennsylvania craftsmen, and works by prominent Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. The museum houses the most important Eakins collection in the world.
As one of the nation's great artistic and historic resources, the Museum houses more than 225,000 objects highlighting the creative achievements of the Western world since the first century A.D. and those of Asia since the third millennium B.C.[4]
Highlights of the Asian collections include paintings and sculpture from China, Japan, and India; furniture and decorative arts, including major collections of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics; a large and distinguished group of Persian and Turkish carpets; and rare and authentic architectural assemblages such as a Chinese palace hall, a Japanese teahouse, and a sixteenth-century Indian temple hall.[4]
The European collections, dating from the medieval era to the present, encompass Italian and Flemish early-Renaissance masterworks; strong representations of later European paintings, including French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; sculpture, with a special concentration in the works of Auguste Rodin; decorative arts; tapestries; furniture; the second-largest collection of arms and armor in the United States; and period rooms and architectural settings ranging from the facade of a medieval church in Burgundy to a superbly decorated English drawing room by Robert Adam.[4]
The museum's American collections, surveying three centuries of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, are among the finest in the United States, with outstanding strengths in 18th- and 19th-century Philadelphia furniture and silver, rural Pennsylvania furniture and ceramics, and the paintings of Thomas Eakins.[4]
Modern artwork includes extraordinary concentrations of work by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brâncuşi, as well as American modernists, making the museum one of the best in the world in which to see modern art. The expanding collection of contemporary art includes major works by Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Sol LeWitt, among many others.[4]
In addition to these collections, the museum houses encyclopedic holdings of costume and textiles, as well as prints, drawings, and photographs that are displayed in rotation for reasons of preservation.[4]
The museum also houses the armor collection of Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch. The Von Kienbusch collection was bequeathed by the celebrated collector to the museum in 1976, the Bicentennial Anniversary of the American Revolution. The Von Kienbusch holdings are comprehensive and include European arms and armor spanning several centuries.[7]
On May 30, 2000, the museum and the State Art Collections in Dresden, Germany (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden), announced an agreement for the return of five pieces of armor stolen from Dresden during World War II.[8] In 1953, Von Kienbusch had unsuspectingly purchased the armor, which was part of his 1976 bequeathal. Von Kienbusch published catalogs of his collection, which eventually led Dresden authorities to bring the matter up with the museum.[9][10]
Due to overwhelming popularity and overflowing collections, it was announced in October 2006 that Frank Gehry would be designing an expansion to the museum. The 80,000-square-foot (7,400 m2) gallery will be built entirely underground behind the "Rocky Steps" and will not alter any of the museum's existing Greek revival facade. Though the date for construction to begin has not been announced, the construction is projected to last a decade and cost $500 million. It will increase the museum's available display space by sixty percent and house mostly contemporary sculpture, Asian art, and special exhibitions.[11] Uncertainty was cast on the plans after the sudden death of Anne d'Harnoncourt, but new director Timothy Rub, who had initiated a 350-million dollar expansion at the Cleveland Museum of Art, will be carrying out the plans as scheduled.
While the museum itself is expanding, some 200,000 books and periodicals and 1.6 million other documents are moving from the Main Building to the art deco former headquarters of the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company across the street at Fairmount and Pennsylvania avenues.[12] It has been renamed the Perelman Building.[13] The Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company Building was constructed in 1927 by Philadelphia-based architects Zantzinger, Borie and Medary and was adorned by sculptors Lee Lawrie and Samuel Yellin. In 1982 it was restored and later acquired by the Reliance Standard Life Insurance Company.[14]
Besides being known for its architecture and collections, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has in recent decades become an icon of American culture, thanks to the symbolic role it has played in the Rocky films--Rocky (1976) and four of its five sequels, II, III, V and Rocky Balboa. Visitors to the museum can frequently be seen mimicking Rocky's famous run up the front steps, now known widely as the "Rocky Steps".[15]
A bronze statue of Rocky was briefly placed at the top of the steps for the filming of Rocky III. The statue was later moved to the Spectrum due to a furious debate over the meaning of "art". The statue was returned to the steps for the filming of Rocky V, and also appears there in the movies Philadelphia and Mannequin. On September 8, 2006, a ceremony celebrated its relocation to a base at the foot of the steps in the gardens adjacent to Eakins Oval, the terminus of the Ben Franklin Parkway, as the Spectrum was due to be demolished starting in late 2010.[16]
Because of its location at the end of the Parkway, the museum also provides the backdrop for many public events, including concerts and parades. On July 2, 2005, the steps of the museum played host to the Philadelphia venue of Live 8, where artists such as Dave Matthews Band, Linkin Park and Maroon 5 performed. The museum closed for Live 8, but reopened at regular hours the following day. The Philadelphia Freedom Concert was held two days later, with a Ball beforehand at the museum.
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective was shown at the Dorrance Special Exhibition Galleries, October 21, 2009 through January 10, 2010, followed by Tate Modern, London and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.[17]
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