Fast-Moving Mural

Philadelphia has more murals than anyplace I've ever seen - 3000 at last count. There are some truly amazing works of art splashed on buildings in every corner of the city. They loom 10 or 15 stories high, some with seriously American stories featuring giant portraits of Franklin and Jefferson, some tell of local history, and some, among the most charming, relate to a specific neighborhood or even the building on which the mural is painted. Now there's a new one in town; I'm not sure it's counted in the mural tally, but it's a great new take on giant wall art. The Comcast building, a jazzy new spike on the landscape (the tallest in the city, built in 2005); I'm not wild about the Robert Stern design - the top looks like a mail slot topped by a wire basket - but the wall art inside is a stroke of genius, a visual feat perfectly suited to our techie moment in time. Entering the giant atrium entrance you think everything is normal upmarket corporate, (except for the cool art overhead - a post for another day) until the wall facing you starts to move. Suddenly the huge space is churning with images - nature, time, creation, love, Philadelphia, invention, art, etc. etc, all punctuated with fast-moving people rollerblading, dancing, running, giggling - they even make getting ready for work look fun. Perspectives change - one minute you're out in space, the next you're underwater or in a meadow or flying over the city. We stood there completely and utterly entertained for the whole show (about 20 minutes) and then asked the attendants at the desk if they ever got tired of it - "no way" was the response. They also said there are regular changes in the content, and that a special Holiday version goes up at the end of November. Here's a link to the designer who created this magic with some clips of the show http://www.nilescreative.com/news.php

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?