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View the Annual Student Exhibition >
View Complete Exhibition List > |
 |  | Astrid Bowlby Leaves of Grass Ended November 10, 2002 In her most ambitious project to date, Leaves of Grass, Philadelphia artist Astrid Bowlby will create a new site-specific installation using paper cut-out drawings applied to the walls, floor, and ceiling of the Morris Gallery. |
 | | American Sublime: Epic Landscapes of Our Nation 1820 - 1880 Ended August 25, 2002 The plunging Niagara... the unbounded Great Plains... the soaring peaks of the Rocky Mountains. The Hudson River School painters surveyed our American wilderness, seeing in it the manifestations of personal liberty and pioneering spirit. In their awe-inspiring canvases can be seen the ultimate expressions of the 18th-century aesthetic concept of the Sublime. Organized by the Tate Britain in London to illustrate the link between these American artist-philosophers and their European counterparts. American Sublime explores topics from the exquisite beauty of the untamed wild to the heartbreaking realities of Industrialization. The exhibition celebrates the inspired vision of Bierstadt, Church, Cole, Cropsey, Durand, Heade, Kensett, Gifford and others with more than sixty astounding grand-scale oil paintings, mixed with smaller works and oil sketches. |
 | | Andy Warhol Andy Warhol: Social Observer examines an aspect of Warhol's work and career that is often discussed, but has yet to be fully explored in either a museum setting or the scholarly literature: the depth and variety of Warhol's critical observations of American society and the ways in which his artistic strategies changed over the course of his career. The exhibition focuses on what the artist looked at, how he looked at those subjects and, in certain situations, how he himself was perceived by the society so inclined to keep its media trained on him. It will be divided into seven thematic sections: Disguise; Disaster; Politics; Advertising; Cover Stories; Celebrity; and Symbolism. These sections highlight Warhol's engagement with what he perceived to be socially relevant in art and life. The exhibition will consider the relationships between Warhol's interest in contemporary life as conveyed through the mass-media and the documentary strain of American social realism that has its roots in the early twentieth century. |
 | | Barry Goldberg December 10, 1999 - February 6, 2000 Location: Galleries 6 & 7 Recent work by the Philadelphia-based painter Barry Goldberg (b. 1952), a 1976 graduate of PAFA's Certificate Program, was featured in the Museum's Morris Gallery program-the ongoing exhibition series dedicated to contemporary regional talent. Goldberg's signature work in oil and encaustic gives his painted surfaces a velvety, oftentimes confectionery glaze that tends to soften the hard edges of his geometric arrangements. More modish than minimalist, the spare compositions, with their muted hues and matte tones, are both reminiscent of sixties- and seventies-era abstraction and strikingly contemporary. What draws us in, however, is the mysteriousness that belies the clarity of their design. Like protagonists in a good psychological thriller, Goldberg's rectangles, triangles, circles, and ellipses sometimes commingle and other times antagonize each other. Ultimately, they are distractions from the real action, which takes place in the background and beneath the painterly skin where complex underlayers of pigment-seen through fissures and abrasions in the surface-seem to shift and jostle uncomfortably for position, one on top of the other. Despite the seeming stability of these highly calculated and articulate compositions, there is an unmistakable and deep-seated precariousness that excites and challenges. |
 | | Impressionists at PAFA: From Beaux to Benson October 16, 1999 - January 2, 2000 In conjunction with the John Twachtman: An American Impressionist exhibition - the central feature of the Pennsylvania Academy's Impressionism in an American Light thematic offerings in the fall of 1999 - selected paintings from the Museum's permanent collection, as well as outside lenders, were highlighted in Impressionists at PAFA: From Beaux to Benson beginning October 16, 1999 and running through January 2, 2000. This installation examined the Academy's critical role in the development and promotion of the experimental style in this country through the works of Twachtman's contemporaries and successors, including Cecilia Beaux, Childe Hassam, Frank Benson, and Daniel Garber. As a special feature of this display, a major work by the much beloved French impressionist Claude Monet - Spring in Giverny (1890) - was on loan to the Academy from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Monet, of all the French painters, exerted the greatest influence on the American impressionists, teaching and befriending many of them during their time abroad. Twachtman's work and approach, in particular, are highly suggestive of Monet's, from the serial imagery of his Greenwich, Connecticut, farm- which paralleled the French painter's views of Giverny - to the more technically sophisticated, nearly abstract work of his later years. Significantly, the two artists exhibited together at New York's American Art Galleries, in 1893, and Twachtman's work was often compared to Monet's by American critics. The generous loan of Spring in Giverny, thus, provides both a critical context and an important example of artistic cross-fertilization for the Academy's impressionist displays. The 1892 appointment of Harrison Morris as managing director of the Academy signaled a new direction for the institution. A great promoter of impressionism in this country, Morris was responsible for appointing many of the leading American practitioners to the school's faculty and for including them in the museum's juried annual exhibitions, which grew in national prestige throughout the 1890s. Hailed as the "Dawn of a New American Art," the 1892 annual introduced impressionism to the Philadelphia area vis-a-vis the work of leading American artists. To further excite public interest, the Academy borrowed from local collections four paintings by Monet. This exhibition, heavily-promoted by Morris, marked a transformation of the Academy's aesthetic practice in both the school and the museum. No longer associated merely with the realistic study of the human form, the institution embraced the introduction of more painterly techniques, plein-air (or outdoor) landscapes, and an overall concern for "light, air, and color." That American painters and viewers were more attracted to the subject matter and bright palette than to the experimental brushwork of the avant-garde French style explains the Academy's enthusiastic reception. Despite dismissive critical reactions to the style as a mere fad, impressionism lingered for decades as one of the most popular offerings at the Academy's annual exhibitions. Between 1890 and 1930, all of America's most revered impressionist painters - including Hassam and Twachtman - received awards in these annuals, and many impressionist works entered the museum's collection. Moreover, the growing passion for landscape painting led to the 1917 establishment of a summer sketching program at Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, a program the Academy maintains today. |
 | | John Twachtman: An American Impressionist October 16, 1999 - January 2, 2000 This major traveling exhibition for which the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts served as the only East Coast venue, surveyed the career of John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902). One of the most sophisticated and influential of the American Impressionists, Twachtman was closely linked to the French Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, to whom his work was often compared. Poetic, imaginative, and experimental, Twachtman's shimmering waterside views and wintry landscapes are highly regarded for their advanced design and brilliant color. This retrospective, the first in more than thirty years, explored Twachtman's artistic development through some fifty oils and pastels. Organized chronologically and thematically by the High Museum of Art, the exhibition was divided into four sections: the early Venice and New York years; Twachtman's time of study in France and Holland; his mature years in Connecticut; and the late Gloucester, Massachusetts, period. Early in his career, the Cincinnati, Ohio-born Twachtman employed the dark palette and "exotic" subject matter associated with the Munich Academy, where he had studied under the direction of the expatriate American artist Frank Duveneck in the late 1870s. (A masterful example of Duveneck's cosmopolitan approach, The Turkish Page, is a centerpiece of the Pennsylvania Academy's permanent collection.) By the early eighties, however, Twachtman had lightened his palette and turned to landscape subjects. This shift was largely in response to the tonalist work of James McNeill Whistler and the plein-air approach of the French Impressionists, which Twachtman had encountered in Paris. In the late 1880s, rural domestic life served as Twachtman's primary subject matter. And by the mid-1890s, his career was fully identified with the Impressionist movement in this country. In 1897, he became a founding member of "The Ten American Painters" (or "The Ten"), a group of artists who seceded from New York's prestigious Society of American Artists and exhibited together for the next twenty years. Of "The Ten," J. Alden Weir, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, and Twachtman were united in their rejection of descriptive art for more subjective, innovative interpretations of nature. Twachtman created some of his boldest works for inclusion in this group's landmark exhibitions. Significantly, the artist's role as one of the leading practitioners of the avant-garde style was acknowledged early on by the Pennsylvania Academy: in 1895 he was awarded a Temple Gold Medal for the best painting in the annual exhibition. Twachtman's works were regularly featured in the institution's annuals from 1893 to 1909, seven years after his premature death. On this occasion, the artist's "Ten" colleague Thomas Wilmer Dewing noted Twachtman's significance by describing him as the "most modern spirit...too modern, probably, to be fully recognized or appreciated at present; but his place will be recognized in the future." The exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, providing the first in-depth, scholarly assessment of Twachtman's career. It was organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The exhibition and catalogue were made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation. Generous support was also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. In Philadelphia, this exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Women's Committee of PAFA. |