With no small child to use as an excuse, I might have missed the Please Touch Museum. Lucky for me, however, an appointment took me to the Museum's intriguing new quarters in Fairmount Park, not far from the Philadelphia Museum. There are two stories here: the fantastic, brilliant, kid-centered museum designed for children under 7, and the remarkable architecture. In 1876 the first World's Fair in the United States was held in Philadelphia, and this beautiful Beaux Arts building, known then as Memorial Hall, was created as the Art pavilion. By some miracle, not only did the building survive when others were demolished (most were never intended to be permanent) but the interior detail is still here in exquisite authenticity. Part of the fun of the interior is the crazy contrast between bright, hip, kid-colored fittings and 19th century ornate grandeur. In the rotunda entry you're surrounded by sculpted swags and caryatids - fresh and tasteful in white, gold, salmon, and mauve - under a finely wrought iron and glass dome, a marvel of engineering of the time. It must once have held people spellbound, but now it goes unnoticed by most visitors, trumped by a more recent marvel - an enormous model of the arm of the Statue of Liberty made entirely of brightly colored toys by local artist Leo Sewell. (His hodgepodge elephant is elsewhere in the Museum.) I watched the kids and parents entering for a while and was struck by how well-designed the museum is for its purpose. Every little face lit up and every little body starting squirming in a dad's or mom's grasp; arms reached out and feet started churning before they even hit the ground. As soon as the parent set them down they were moving, straight for the good stuff. And the good stuff is everywhere; there's a splashy river to play and experiment with, a Wonderland maze, and a city with trucks and buses to explore, and lots more. Lucky kids! The grandeur reasserts itself when you leave, in the form of two heroic statues originally intended for 19th century Vienna - what a great new job they have, standing guard over all this fun.

Gorky in Philadelphia

A major Arshile Gorky retrospective opened this weekend in Philadelphia and, as with the best retrospectives, it was an enveloping, nearly overwhelming experience. Gorky, who is important but whose name is never the first to be rattled off when talking about Modern Art, was an astonishingly proficient artist with an almost uncanny command of line, color, and composition. In the exhibit his career unfolds room by room, phase by phase, allowing you to learn in sequence about his work, his life, his practices, his disappointments, his triumphs, and finally his - I'm afraid so - tragic end. He arrived in the US after the genocide in his native Armenia (a tragic beginning too) and began soaking up wisdom and technique from observing art in museums. His first art god was Cezanne; the earliest examples of Gorky's work are super-copies of Cezanne, shockingly accurate in both spirit and letter. He later moved onto Picasso, again showing such virtuosity that I think he could easily have made a lucrative career as a forger. At one point he did only drawings because he had no money for paint - the large format pencil works in the series "Nighttime, Enigma, Nostalgia" were one of the highlights of the show for me. His individuality emerged as he went on, in subject matter, especially works such as the iconic memory portraits of himself and his mother, and later in looser, more colorful abstract compositions of great complexity. The 1940's was a high point - it was dizzying to stand in the room with his work from that time among so much color and energy. The painting "The Liver is the Cox's Comb" (1944) thought by some to be his masterpiece, is thankfully here, and it is a feast. Leave a comment - do you know Gorky? Have you see the show? What do you think?

Inside the Artist's Studio

No matter what you hear, there's a lot more going on in Philadelphia than baseball (ok, ok - Go Phillies!) The past two weekends were Open Studios in Philadelphia, Oct 3-4 before for those East of Broad Street (AKA Avenue of the Arts) and Oct 10-11 for those West of Broad Street. I'm closer to the eastern side of things, so have to admit that I gotten to know more places in my area, but little by little I'm venturing further afield. As I've been saying, Philadelphia is a place where things are happening - I'm so impressed with the amount and quality of contemporary art going on here. One of the real advantages for artists here is the relative availability and affordability of studio space; there seems to be a good supply of old industrial buildings that are perfect for community artist buildings. One of them, at 915 Spring Garden in the Art Museum district, is a 5 story stack of large and small spaces providing work space for creative, active artists of all types, some of whom, like Chuck Soldano, an interior designer, have have been in the building for 10 years or more. Plenty of the artists took part in the Open Studios; a couple of my favorites were a young painter named Greg Prestegord and the photography team of Shelly Lependorf and Stan Shire. I'd run into Greg at his gallery in Old City a few weeks before I discovered him at 915 Spring Garden so it was a nice chance for me to see more of his robust, colorful, beautifully drawn local scenes. He has a wonderful eye and an ability to make the simplest, most ordinary moment resonate with a kind of joyous depth. Shelly and Stan's photographs are rich and evocative; the landscapes I saw were sensitive compositions full of deep color, or as in one image of a wintry field of leftover hay, delicate strokes of grey against dense white. To see more of these artists's work see their websites: http://gregoryprestegord.com/ http://www.chucksoldano.com/ http://www.lseditions.com/