Philadelphia Museum of Art
Jul. 3rd, 2008 01:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanOn Sunday, my wife and I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For my birthday this year, we went to the Rodin Museum—I fell in love with Rodin as a senior in high school taking AP Art History1—and, unsurprisingly, I loved it. I love art museums. I entered college with some intent to major in art history, thanks to that high school class. (Thanks, Mrs. Carnes!)
So I was not expecting to be so sorely disappointed.
The first problem with the museum is its layout. There's a floor plan on their website, which may give you some idea, but basically: each floor has two L-shaped wings, with both lines of the L consisting of a central corridor with rooms on either side. The effect is that you've got two choices. You can walk down one side of the corridor, turn the corner and proceed down one side, come back the other, and return to the first corridor to walk down the other side. That'll give you, for instance, European Art from 1850 to 1930, then Modern Art from 1930 to now, and then Modern Art from now to 1930, and then European Art from 1930 to 1850. It's not a great way to get a sense of continuity. Your other option is to zigzag through the L as you go, bouncing from one side room to the other side room and back, and then just backtracking to get out. That's also not so great, all the more so because many of the side rooms are set up as displays ("A Pennsylvania Dutch kitchen", "Sitting room, New York, 1930", and so on): a great way to see furniture in place, perhaps, but also a lot of dead ends that make it all the harder to really get a sense of the flow of art history.
Now, I say all this about the layout because it genuinely affected my viewing. (Hey, Parenth, remember when you were visiting and I said something at dinner about being able to evaluate how well a museum is curated? Behold.) Part of the problem may be the completeness of the collection itself: there were a good number of Monets and Pissaros, but one Van Gogh, one or two Gauguins; generally, very scattershot. I feel like I missed the entire Renaissance, to say nothing of the Mannerists, and I'm not really sure if it's because they just didn't have much by Renaissance artists, or if it's because walking through the museum I was going, "OK, so this is 1550, and this next room...oh, this is Spain back in 1480. I see. Fortunately, on the other side...is that 1650? I guess I want the door over there back to the main corridor...." I like the history part of "art history", not just the art, and it was terribly frustrating to feel that I was getting no sense at all of how art movements came and went, how Mannerism gave way to the Baroque period and how Caravaggio was startlingly new in comparison to all the bright colors his contemporaries were using—that kind of thing.
And oh, there were other problems as well. Some of the plaques had commentary, but rarely did the commentary say anything about the artist or the style; typically it would explain the subject matter. ("Cupid, seen in the upper left, and Psyche, behind him, were....") Some of the side rooms were small. Really small. The "Current Exhibitions" guide we were given at the entrance told us that Gallery 271 was displaying "Imagining Cathay: 18th- and Early 19th-Century Chinoiserie Textiles and Embroideries from the Collection". By "textiles", they meant "five", and by "Gallery 271", they meant "a room half the size of your bedroom". The exhibit was smaller than its titl.
Mind you, it wasn't all bad. The Arms and Armor exhibit was pretty good: a little lacking in chain mail as opposed to plate mail, and a few composite suits, but also a lot of interesting single pieces and a good number of complete suits, both ceremonial and practical. More firearms than I needed, but cool firearms all the same, and no shortage of crossbows, swords, daggers, halberds, glaives—someone there has a real thing about polearms.
I can assure you that I never expected to leave a museum saying, "My favorite part was the modern art."2 But it was terrific. I mean, OK, sure, we didn't care for Cy Twombley's ten-piece Fifty Days at Iliam, which looked like it was done in crayon, primarily because it was. But they had a room full of Brancusi sculptures (and in a room bigger than my bathroom, this time). They had an installation called "Black Cloud", as part of Carlos Amorales's Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague; there are a few pictures here. It consists of a ton of black paper butterflies; they cover half the room they're in, spilling into an adjoining stairwell, and delightfully a few have escaped to nearby rooms. And they have a surprisingly good collection of Marcel Duchamp! They actually have Nude Descending a Staircase, and one of his large glass pieces, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). And I got to see Fountain (and a few other pieces from that era)! As with all art, reading about it and seeing photos isn't quite the same as seeing it.
And there was a stunning piece, also by Duchamp, in a room by itself: Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. It's confusing: it's a narrow, bare room with a door at the end. We went in. We looked at the door. We said, "Huh", and I was a little confused that the plaque had mentioned such a wide variety of media, including a motor. I almost stepped away, but I considered the eyehole-sized holes in the door, and peeked in... And through the holes, there was this, well, this scene. The background was painted in a perfect 19th century landscape kind of way, though there was a moving waterfall (ah, yes, the motor) in the "distance". In this idyllic room was a sculpture of a woman, naked and sprawled on the ground. Her head wasn't visible. My wife was disturbed. I was delighted—well, disturbed, but delighted by that. Duchamp had turned the art viewer into a voyeur, peeping through holes to see a naked woman...but one in such a classical scene that it suggests that looking at a Renoir painting of a naked woman might be just as voyeuristic. Her lack of a face...did that make it better or worse, more or less voyeuristic? Was she dead? She wasn't moving...but neither are Renoir's paintings or Rodin's sculptures. The overall effect was, to be honest, profound.
Anyway, that was our Sunday. Perhaps the Franklin Institute'll be better, once we get there.
1A class that fit into the schedules of exactly three of us. I entered the school a year ahead in math, so I didn't have a math course to take senior year. The other two were juniors who'd just transferred and therefore had some similar free slot based on them having already taken something. My high school wasn't really big on "electives".
2Second favorite part: sitting on a bench not far from "Sunflowers" and having a man in his 60s with a midwestern accent walk past me, calling back to his wife, "Hey, I think this one's by Van Gogh!"
So I was not expecting to be so sorely disappointed.
The first problem with the museum is its layout. There's a floor plan on their website, which may give you some idea, but basically: each floor has two L-shaped wings, with both lines of the L consisting of a central corridor with rooms on either side. The effect is that you've got two choices. You can walk down one side of the corridor, turn the corner and proceed down one side, come back the other, and return to the first corridor to walk down the other side. That'll give you, for instance, European Art from 1850 to 1930, then Modern Art from 1930 to now, and then Modern Art from now to 1930, and then European Art from 1930 to 1850. It's not a great way to get a sense of continuity. Your other option is to zigzag through the L as you go, bouncing from one side room to the other side room and back, and then just backtracking to get out. That's also not so great, all the more so because many of the side rooms are set up as displays ("A Pennsylvania Dutch kitchen", "Sitting room, New York, 1930", and so on): a great way to see furniture in place, perhaps, but also a lot of dead ends that make it all the harder to really get a sense of the flow of art history.
Now, I say all this about the layout because it genuinely affected my viewing. (Hey, Parenth, remember when you were visiting and I said something at dinner about being able to evaluate how well a museum is curated? Behold.) Part of the problem may be the completeness of the collection itself: there were a good number of Monets and Pissaros, but one Van Gogh, one or two Gauguins; generally, very scattershot. I feel like I missed the entire Renaissance, to say nothing of the Mannerists, and I'm not really sure if it's because they just didn't have much by Renaissance artists, or if it's because walking through the museum I was going, "OK, so this is 1550, and this next room...oh, this is Spain back in 1480. I see. Fortunately, on the other side...is that 1650? I guess I want the door over there back to the main corridor...." I like the history part of "art history", not just the art, and it was terribly frustrating to feel that I was getting no sense at all of how art movements came and went, how Mannerism gave way to the Baroque period and how Caravaggio was startlingly new in comparison to all the bright colors his contemporaries were using—that kind of thing.
And oh, there were other problems as well. Some of the plaques had commentary, but rarely did the commentary say anything about the artist or the style; typically it would explain the subject matter. ("Cupid, seen in the upper left, and Psyche, behind him, were....") Some of the side rooms were small. Really small. The "Current Exhibitions" guide we were given at the entrance told us that Gallery 271 was displaying "Imagining Cathay: 18th- and Early 19th-Century Chinoiserie Textiles and Embroideries from the Collection". By "textiles", they meant "five", and by "Gallery 271", they meant "a room half the size of your bedroom". The exhibit was smaller than its titl.
Mind you, it wasn't all bad. The Arms and Armor exhibit was pretty good: a little lacking in chain mail as opposed to plate mail, and a few composite suits, but also a lot of interesting single pieces and a good number of complete suits, both ceremonial and practical. More firearms than I needed, but cool firearms all the same, and no shortage of crossbows, swords, daggers, halberds, glaives—someone there has a real thing about polearms.
I can assure you that I never expected to leave a museum saying, "My favorite part was the modern art."2 But it was terrific. I mean, OK, sure, we didn't care for Cy Twombley's ten-piece Fifty Days at Iliam, which looked like it was done in crayon, primarily because it was. But they had a room full of Brancusi sculptures (and in a room bigger than my bathroom, this time). They had an installation called "Black Cloud", as part of Carlos Amorales's Four Animations, Five Drawings, and a Plague; there are a few pictures here. It consists of a ton of black paper butterflies; they cover half the room they're in, spilling into an adjoining stairwell, and delightfully a few have escaped to nearby rooms. And they have a surprisingly good collection of Marcel Duchamp! They actually have Nude Descending a Staircase, and one of his large glass pieces, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). And I got to see Fountain (and a few other pieces from that era)! As with all art, reading about it and seeing photos isn't quite the same as seeing it.
And there was a stunning piece, also by Duchamp, in a room by itself: Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. It's confusing: it's a narrow, bare room with a door at the end. We went in. We looked at the door. We said, "Huh", and I was a little confused that the plaque had mentioned such a wide variety of media, including a motor. I almost stepped away, but I considered the eyehole-sized holes in the door, and peeked in... And through the holes, there was this, well, this scene. The background was painted in a perfect 19th century landscape kind of way, though there was a moving waterfall (ah, yes, the motor) in the "distance". In this idyllic room was a sculpture of a woman, naked and sprawled on the ground. Her head wasn't visible. My wife was disturbed. I was delighted—well, disturbed, but delighted by that. Duchamp had turned the art viewer into a voyeur, peeping through holes to see a naked woman...but one in such a classical scene that it suggests that looking at a Renoir painting of a naked woman might be just as voyeuristic. Her lack of a face...did that make it better or worse, more or less voyeuristic? Was she dead? She wasn't moving...but neither are Renoir's paintings or Rodin's sculptures. The overall effect was, to be honest, profound.
Anyway, that was our Sunday. Perhaps the Franklin Institute'll be better, once we get there.
1A class that fit into the schedules of exactly three of us. I entered the school a year ahead in math, so I didn't have a math course to take senior year. The other two were juniors who'd just transferred and therefore had some similar free slot based on them having already taken something. My high school wasn't really big on "electives".
2Second favorite part: sitting on a bench not far from "Sunflowers" and having a man in his 60s with a midwestern accent walk past me, calling back to his wife, "Hey, I think this one's by Van Gogh!"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 05:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-04 02:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 12:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 12:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 03:04 pm (UTC)I've actually never really thought about going through a museum 'in order' though, I tend to spot graze.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 03:30 pm (UTC)Word. In fact, I like the history part way more than I like the art. I tend to avoid traditional art museums, and I think this is why -- the exhibits are almost always set up so you can gaze worshipfully at the art, with virtually no text. Who made it, when they made it, what they made it out of, a phrase about what it depicts... that's about it. What about the context? Why should I care? Because it just looks like another pale naked chick or creepy-ass bleeding Jesus to me.
The Franklin Institute, on the other hand, has pirates! I forget who told me they went, but whoever it was said it was awesome.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 04:46 pm (UTC)All this is important and really hard to get a grasp of. I sometimes think I should build a giant database of classical music geared towards showing all of these relationships. (If one already exists, I don't know of it, but I haven't really gone looking.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 04:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 05:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 04:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-03 10:41 pm (UTC)Too bad you didn't enjoy it more, I've always liked it, but I don't know much about art. I always liked the arms and armor exhibit and the Japanese tea house.
The Franklin Institute is awesome, I practically lived there as a kid. It really fostered my interest in science. Check out the Fels Planetarium and the IMAX show. Don't miss the Academy of Natural Sciences, either, it's right down the street on Logan Circle. It's another great museum with an excellent dinosaur exhibit. Not nearly as big as the Museum of Natural History in NYC, but very nice nonetheless.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-04 01:21 am (UTC):o)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-04 01:22 am (UTC)I especially like the Asian art section.
The only gripe I have with it is that it is nowhere near the subway.
I like the descriptions of what is going on in the pictues. I can tell what most of the stuff in Christian paintings is, but not so much other tales of antiquity.
One Asian drawing in a special exhibit had a caption we loved, explaining that the person in the foreground had just created some kind of powerfully protective defensive magic and that the humanoid creature coming round the house in the background (he was hunched over a little, and sort of smirking but with his mouth open) was "an unsuspecting demon."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-07 05:41 pm (UTC)