A Philly Art Party/Part two

Sarah Allibone Leavitt, painted by Cecilia Beaux

By the way, if the weather’s nice, you’ll want to waltz down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, French immigrant Paul Philippe Cret’s simulation of the Champs d’Elysee. It begins at the PMA “front door”, where there recently was a great brouhaha over placing a statue of Rocky Balboa atop the steps!

On the left, you’ll want to stop at the Rodin Museum, the gift of Julius Mastbaum, a movie theatre mogul who loved the French sculptor. At the first circle you’ll find the Franklin Institute, for science mavens. And to the right, the Moore School of Design (begun when females weren’t allowed in “real” art schools!) Next to it is the Academy of Natural Sciences, a must for geologists and the like.

At the Second Circle, Logan Square, is a marvelous fountain by Alexander Calder’s father. In Philly we say three generations of Calders is not enough, as we try to persuade the want to get rich quick Calder current generation, to let us build a Calder Museum on the Parkway. Esthetic Thugs are also trying to steal the treasures of the Barnes Museum and move it to Center City under a phony banner of tourism. Bah Humbug. Let me tell you sometime the lovely funky tale of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a nutty hero of mine. He invented Argyrol, that winter menace to generations of American children, and used his fortune and his canny eye to create the grandest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionists ever.

I have three must see’s for you in Center City. Begin at the Atwater Kent (an early radio manufacturer)Museum on the East side of 7th Street between Market and Chestnut. It’s the museum of the City. Its main floor has the biggest map ever of Philadelphia. You can actually walk around on it, physically positioning the various sectors of the city. Notice the number of streets with tree names (Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Spruce, Cherry and so on.) That was founder William Penn’s onomastic solution for his Greene CountrieTowne.

Broad Street is the main North/South thoroughfare; Market, East/West. They cross at that great Victorian monstrosity, our City Hall. Atop it is Alexander Calder’s grandfather’s statue of Willy Penn. For the longest time, no one could build a structure taller than the City Father. When that Cranbrook Academy trained agitator, Edmund Bacon, took over as City Planner, many rules were broken, some good, some bad. But he did prevent Modernoid Architecture freaks from tearing it down, bringing his own Home Town his own Bacon. Yes, that famous movie star is his son.

Now I want you to wander North on Broad Street (that’s the side JFK Boulevard is on) to one of my favorite Philly institutions: The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (founded in 1805, Frank Furness building 1876). I used to tell my Am Lit students that the founder, Charles Wilson Peale, was the George Washington of our visual culture. I love it that he named two of his sons after artists, Raphael and Rubens Peale. Both were decent artists too, one better than his father, the other not so good. I’m going to let you decide which was whose! But the Big Story on Action News (TV Channel 6’s theme song) is the great painter Cecilia Beaux. It was tough for a woman in nineteenth century Philly to be any kind of a professional, especially in a “useless” field like art. But she was a tough lady, which is very paradoxical when you look at the gentleness of her oeuvre.

Now turn East on Arch street until you get to Seventh Street. Eight blocks through the heart of Center City . After you pass the Greyhound Terminal on your right, you will soon seen the African American Museum on your left. Take a look. Half the inhabitants of Philly are black now, and they’ve put up a grand museum, filled with local artists as well as traveling shows.

At the end of Independence Plaza, between Sixth and Fifth, between Chestnut and Arch, you’ll find the new National Constitution Center. Kathy, a gifted black actress, will take you through our Constitutional history, in a half hour gig. You are then ready to relax and enjoy “Baseball: the American Experience”. Cooperstown it ain’t, but it is full of details about what we used to call our National Pastime, until football, basketball, and hockey started flirting with bigger and bigger crowds. For those who flinch at the stiff entry price, there’s a fine National Geographic book for $27.

Time to relax. Walk down further East until you hit the river. A dandy seaport museum down there.

Tomorrow, I want you to invade the University of Pennsylvania. You’ll be astonished at the range of its offerings. They also feature a Loop bus called LUCY. Do I ever love Lucy. Its Green and Gold loops (pick up a schedule when you board) at 30thStreet Station, Amtrak’s main station. Head for campus where you will find the Ross Gallery in the Fine Arts Library. Currently they feature an astonishing achievement. An inspired Army chaplain collected chards of stained glass from bombed European cathedrals, brought them home to America and arranged to give them to artists for creating their own images. It is sui generis. A splendid catalog and DVD are available to take this Good News home with you.

Then it’s time to visit the Institute of Contemporary Art at 46th and Sansom, right behind a Hilton Inn at Penn which might meet your budget. ICA was started during the Bicentennial year 1976, to fight the image of Penn art as esthetically too old fashioned . Their original anthropological Museum, at Spruce and 34th, remains one of the world’s great repositories of antiquities, most of which their scholars have personally found and brought home.

Meanwhile, there’s now there a slightly funky take on Puppets. They proudly declare that Philly was the first place in America to promote this demotic genre—in 1743, of all centuries! Two young female guards were astonishingly eager to confirm whether or not if I really understood what was going on in one filmed sequence: yes, I assured them, I saw that it was penis that was the puppet. Geesh. I’ve seen better. Hell, I have better. Most examples were less salacious! In fact, I came away with a new respect for the astonishing diversity of puppetry.

May I make a luncheon suggestions. On Sansom Street, between 44th and 45th is the White Dog Café. It is notorious for having been the place where Madame Blavatsky began her theosophical adventures. Its current owner is a Eco-nut of great celebrity, Judy Wick. Be warned. I flinched when I saw that the 4 glasses of a very ordinary rouge I had imbibed in a two and half hour lunch (with an old Penn colleague, the distinguished drama critic Gerald Weales) cost $8.80 a pop! I’ve never had a lunch in my life that lasted more than a half hour. But old geezers lose track of time. Nostalgia, I’ve come to believe, is geriatric SEX. Next door, Ms.Eco sells semi-political Tschotchkes. At the Black Cat Café.

As a retired American Lit professor, I wouldn’t be faithful to my craft if I didn’tell you what to read.There are three free weeklies in the honor boxes on campus, the Philadelphia Weekly on Wednesdays (it began as The Welcomat, where I had a weekly column tagged “HAZARD AT LARGE” for ten years, so I’m fond of it for sedimental reasons), The City Paper on Thursdays (where in 1982 I started shedding my academic life as a freelance Art Critic, with a column called EYE 95—when I suddenly moved to San Francisco, I called it EYE 5 in the SF Independent, Interstates being where they are!)

I also wrote a few pieces for The University Review back then, when I found it a rather stodgy rag with opinions too conservative for my leftie soul. Yikes, twenty years later I found it easily the best free sheet in Philly with a long piece this week on an IWW meeting in Philly about the Iraq War. Hell, I didn’t know the Wobblies were still business(IWW stands for Industrial workers of the World!)

Bless Robert Christian for universalizing his sheet! Its advertising section is not fouled like the other two with sex ads. And then there’s The Daily Pennsylvanian, since the 80’s an independent medium free of faculty and administrative control. Given that freedom, it’s not as good as it should be. (Old professors never die; they just go grading everyone!)

Philly’s two dailies, the Inky and the Daily News, have just upped their price to 75 cents. The Sunday Inky to $1.50. Both have superb cartoonists, Tony Auth for the Inky, and Signe Wilkinson for the Noose. The Inky literary critic, Carlin Romano, is the best such in America, with even more interesting and complex essays of his in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Ed Sozanski, their art critic, is a dependable guide. Architecture critic Inge Saffron is as good as any I’ve read anywhere in the world.

One other suggestion: Get a SEPTA travel pass for as many days as you plan to be in Philly. You’ll need one on LUCY. I always ride the front seat on the subway: but then I majored in Yellow at University, with a minor in Timidity. The engineer rides beside you, with his hot phone to the Police. Same with buses.

Good luck, and don’t be misled by snooty folks from New York and Washington. Nor by uninformed Europeans! Philly is a nonstop festival of the arts. I've got fifty one years of pleasant memories to prove it. Pick up the free monthly ART MATTERS if you have any lingering doubts. (I used to write for it too in the good old daze.) It will guide you to galleries galore.