A Philly Art Party/Part one

For ten years now, I’ve been living in Weimar, Thuringia (population 60,000, when the university and conservatory students are on holiday) in the so-called Green Heart of Germany. I love its peacefulness, and its rep as the country’s “spiritual center” because the great writers Goethe and Schiller lived here at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a retired professor of American literature, though, I wish more locals read G and S than brag about their literary exploits. And I’m getting mighty tired of their assumption that my hometown for the past half century, Philadelphia, is only a pathetic pitstop between DC and NYC when it comes to the arts.

I moved to Philadelphia in 1957 when the University of Pennsylvania gave me a Carnegie postdoctoral fellowship to create a new course on “The Mass Society” for their department of American Civilization. Two years later I wrote the first curriculum for the new Annenberg School of Communication. We were lucky enough to get the last available house in Greenbelt Knoll, a cluster of 19 houses set in Pennypack Park, through whose trees ran a creek emptying into the Delaware River.

It was the first experiment in racial integration in Northeast Philly, and replete with fascinating neighbors such as the founder Morris Milgrim, Robert N.C.Nix, the first black congressman from the area, and the Reverend Leon (The Lion from Zion Baptist Church) Sullivan, better known world wide as the man who negotiated the so-called Sullivan Principles of economic and political justice in South Africa. And the settlement won an AIA Award for siting when it opened in 1956, set in a rolling park of one hundred fifty foot Oak, Poplar, and Black Ash trees. And imagine our delight last year, during our Golden Jubilee, when we discovered that the great architect Louie Kahn had designed them, a genius to whom major commissions came very late in life.

But I come not to praise Greenbelt Knoll, but to bury the canard that Philly is culturally boring. Let me begin with the Frida Kahlo show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the city’s greatest art attraction. Frida is especially meaningful to me because as a working class boy growing up in Detroit the first art experience I ever had was gawking in astonishment at the then new murals of River Rouge at the Detroit Institute of Art that Edsel Ford had commissioned to Diego Rivera, Frida’s on again, off again husband, the Oddest Couple in twentieth century “American” art.

DIA then had an immigrant German director, William Valentiner, who knew how to bring patron and artist together. Out East, another zillionaire, Nelson Rockefeller, commissioned Diego to do murals for the new Rockefeller Center his family had financed to kick start his New York economy out of the Depression. But to his eternal shame, his spinelessness led to obliterating those murals because they contained an image of Lenin!

Meanwhile out West in San Francisco, another German immigrant, the architect Timothy Pflueger, chairman of the Art Commission for the Transpacific Exposition which exulted and exalted in the completion of the Panama Canal, commissioned the leftie muralist to decorate the lunch room of the Pacific Stock Exchange, thereby giving generations of stock brokers unexplainable stomach aches. Frida mostly followed Diego around at these gigs, trying to deal with her gravely harmed body gracefully, and turning her visible suffering into a glorious victory of the spirit. But that’s all Old Hat.

What is new in this exhibition is the most comprehensive photo collection illuminating her human relations that I have seen in a museum. That, and a veritable Frida MegaMall of Arty Facts as well as unique (and sometimes expensive—I saw a sculpture I was fixing to buy until its $900 price tag quickly brought me back to fiscal earth!) I found out that PMA had an aesthetic detective roaming the world looking for authentic art to spice up the changing exits of his museum. If you don’t leave, grabbed by some Kahlo, you’re a stronger consumer than I am.

But that’s not all, by a long shot. There are two series of shots by two photographic masters, actually a Mistress and a Master. The man is Ansel Adams, who can make a sand dune look like the Parlors of Heaven. Oddly, for me who retired from teaching early, to live in San Francisco for three years, the swatch of AA photos shown at PMA puts to shame the collection of the AA Museum in SF Plan at least an hour, savoring AA.

The lady is Lee Miller, who taught her contemporary Edward Steichen that in fashion shoots, a woman could be on both sides of the camera. Her “album” of her friends in Paris, both famous and infamous, is a painfully exhilarating experience for someone like me born so late in that Jazzy Decade (1927, in case anybody asks you, coincidentally the same year PMA opened to the public.)

That same year, kitty korner across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company built its new Beaux Deco HQ. PMA, with an eye to its expanding horizons, bought it recently, lock, stock, and barrel hoops, and made there an adjunct gallery plus offices plus a teachers auxiliary to help more young students get into the Art Act.

All the current shows are tasty, but the one on Industrial Design especially quickened my heart rate, inasmuch as I’ve spent the last ten years in Weimar, writing a book on Walter Gropius and his ambitions to use technology to bring good design to the working classes. I have just finished “Bauhaus: Myths and Realities” in time for the 90th anniversary next year of its founding in 1919.Thus I can attest to the display’s authenticity, with illustrative examples from its own collection 1920-80.

I especially relished its Marimekko fabrics, since I became a friend of the great Finnish designer, Armi Rahtia, in 1972, when I filmed their hand making her fabrics for Time-Life Films. My only gripe is the absence of the design genius of Viktor Schreckengost, a Cleveland artist who just died at age 102. His reputational problem derives from another Cleveland parvenu, the architect Philip C. Johnson, who was so insecure of his own talents that all his life he mocked artists who worked for the lowly. Viktor designed children’s toys for Sears Roebuck, and had a mock up with a plasticene seat that he paid people to sit on so he could conclude which shape would fit the most butts the best. That is known (by me at least) as “a posteriori reasoning”. Most Bauhaus seating is a priori, which means it’s a pain in the you know where.

Viktor also had the bright idea for Mack Trucks of putting the cab over the motor, a standard practice in the industry ever since. Viktor also made a fabulous “American Jazz” glass vase for Eleanor Roosevelt that Alessi should buy the mass production rights to. Strangely, as I was standing on the corner of 24th and Pennsylvania for the 32 bus back to Center City, I fell into conversation with the very curator of that design show, and he volunteered the American Jazz critique, wondering where he could get $23,000 to buy an American Jazz glass off of E-Bay. Any donors out there?

Incidentally, and this is a larger and badly neglected aspect of American art history and patronage, Viktor was a potter’s son. He learned to love clay as a boy. Johnson was the nouveau riche son of a steel company lawyer, where status meant more than authenticity. And Viktor was uncorrupted by the bourgeosity of the Bauhaus—he went to school in Vienna in 1929, where he rubbed tools with the likes of Josef Hoffmann and Johannes Maria Olbrich, those titans of the Austrian Secession. By the way, that 32 bus on JFK Boulevard, across from City Hall, is the same one that drops you off at the back door of PMA. You see, Frank Gehry is causing all that hassle around the old structure, digging into his underground expansion.