Displaying items by tag: Philadelphia Museum of Art

The exhibition “The Wrath of the Gods” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is made up of masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens and the 16th-century artists who inspired him, including Michelangelo and Titian. But alongside those works of art is the most surprising element in the show: an original comic book, commissioned by the museum.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is reassembling, restoring and scrutinizing parlor furniture that scandalized some Philadelphians when it was new.

The suite of gilded chairs, tables and couches was produced in 1808 for the Philadelphia drawing rooms of the merchant William Waln and his wife, Mary Wilcocks Waln, who made fortunes partly in the Chinese opium trade. On the neo-Classical pieces, designed by the British émigré architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a fellow British immigrant, the artist George Bridport, painted petals and griffins.

In the almost 70 years since the term was first coined, “outsider art” — a somewhat dismissive designation for the work of self-taught artists — has been steadily finding its way inside the mainstream art world. These days, it is no longer unusual to see pieces by artists with no formal training displayed in even the most prestigious venues; just the past two years have seen such works included in exhibitions mounted by the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

For much of the past half-century, though, the significance of self-taught art was largely recognized only by a few enthusiasts.

The New Britain Museum of American Art announces the new permanent Shaker Gallery, one of only three found in U.S. art museums, alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The brainchild of Trustee and Shaker authority Steve Miller, the permanent gallery will rotate pieces from the Miller Collection in addition to gifts and loans on a regular basis, as each exhibition will “focus on” a different Shaker theme.

Sotheby’s announced that Edgar Degas’ "Petite danseuse de quatorze ans," estimated to fetch £10 – 15 million, will feature in the forthcoming Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on June 24, 2015. "Petite danseuse de quatorze ans" is the most ambitious and iconic of Degas’ works and one of only a handful of bronze casts that remain in private hands - the majority are housed in major international museum collections, including Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museé d’Orsay, Paris.

Part of the “Exhibition on Screen” series, the film “The Impressionists and the Man Who Made Them,” directed and produced by Phil Grabsky, is a behind-the-scenes look at the sole supporter of the Impressionist group during the turn of the 19th century: the Parisian art dealer and connoisseur Paul Durand-Ruel. Produced in conjunction with the traveling show “Inventing Impressionism” — which has already been on view at the Musée d’Orsay and London’s National Gallery, and will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on June 18 — the film provides viewers with the opportunity to learn about Durand-Ruel’s career and his role in establishing the pillars of the modern art market.

Though “Dance: Movement, Rhythm, Spectacle” occupies just one large room (arranged to feel like three) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it seems to open windows in many directions. Its exhibits range from the 1890s to the 1980s, vividly demonstrating how radically that century brought change to social dance, dance theater and ideas of dance in art. Diversely diverse, the show, which opened this month, offers a panoply of artistic media (photographs, paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, etchings, graphite drawings, lithographs and film), dancers of various races and a huge assortment of dance costumes.

Fraktur—decorated Germanic manuscripts and printed documents—have long been admired as an extraordinarily vibrant and creative art form (Fig. 1). A European tradition brought to America by German-speaking immigrants, who began settling in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1683, fraktur are among the most distinctive and iconic forms of American folk art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was one of the first major institutions to collect Pennsylvania German fraktur and decorative arts. In 1897, then-curator Edwin Atlee Barber acquired the museum’s first fraktur and, in 1929, the museum opened to the public the first period rooms of Pennsylvania German art. Many of the furnishings were donated by J. Stogdell Stokes, with additional furniture, ironwork, textiles, redware, and other objects acquired from Titus C. Geesey. The museum’s fraktur were never on par with the rest of the collection, but with the recent promised gift of nearly 250 fraktur from the collection of Joan and Victor Johnson (Fig. 2), the museum’s fraktur collection is now one of the finest in the country.

The Johnsons, Philadelphia natives, began collecting fraktur nearly sixty years ago, initially to help fill the walls of a historic farmhouse they bought and restored after their marriage in 1955. Joan, who studied contemporary art at Goucher College, loved the Bauhaus and planned to collect accordingly—but Victor, who worked in the computer industry, didn’t want to live with modern art.

Visit InCollect.com to read more about Pennsylvania German Fraktur.

It’s a small work of art — precisely the size of an old Savarin coffee can jammed with artist’s paintbrushes — but in the history of postwar art and in the career of Jasper Johns, one of the most important artists of the last half century, it looms large.

Created in 1960, “Painted Bronze” has been a fixture for more than three decades at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it has been on long-term loan from Mr. Johns’s personal collection. But now it will migrate north to a permanent home at the Museum of Modern Art, which will receive the sculpture as a promised gift from the collectors Henry R. Kravis and his wife, Marie-Josée Kravis, the Museum of Modern Art’s president, who recently bought it.

No Japanese school of painting was more ambitious, more accomplished, and more durable than the Kano school, which dominated Japanese art from the late 15th century to the mid-19th. Indeed, in Japanese art history, Kano and canon are virtually synonymous.

A new show called “Ink and Gold: Art of the Kano” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is devoted to those four centuries of achievement. It’s a splendid show, probably the greatest exhibition of Japanese art anywhere in the world this year, and the finest ever devoted to Kano painters. It’s full of (mostly) large-scale art that is stamped with a sense of its own authority, and yet still surprisingly fresh.

Of course, in the West, modern art made the idea of any kind of aesthetic canon seem boring. After Manet, it seems, art couldn’t be interesting unless it was seen to be flogging canonical (substitute “official,” or “academic”) art to death.