BGuthrie Photos: PA -- Philadelphia Museum of Art -- Modern and Contemporary Art

PA -- Philadelphia Museum of Art -- Modern and Contemporary Art:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.17.150.89 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] PMACON_100711_001.JPG	[2] PMACON_100711_010.JPG	[3] PMACON_100711_015.JPG
[4] PMACON_100711_024.JPG	[5] PMACON_100711_029.JPG	[6] PMACON_100711_033.JPG
[7] PMACON_100711_036.JPG	[8] PMACON_100711_041.JPG	[9] PMACON_100711_045.JPG
[10] PMACON_100711_058.JPG	[11] PMACON_100711_062.JPG	[12] PMACON_100711_074.JPG
[13] PMACON_100711_082.JPG	[14] PMACON_100711_087.JPG	[15] PMACON_100711_091.JPG
[16] PMACON_100711_096.JPG	[17] PMACON_100711_101.JPG	[18] PMACON_100711_105.JPG
[19] PMACON_100711_112.JPG	[20] PMACON_100711_118.JPG	[21] PMACON_100711_124.JPG
[22] PMACON_100711_129.JPG	[23] PMACON_100711_141.JPG	[24] PMACON_100711_152.JPG
[25] PMACON_100711_155.JPG	[26] PMACON_100711_159.JPG	[27] PMACON_100711_164.JPG
[28] PMACON_100711_168.JPG	[29] PMACON_100711_172.JPG	[30] PMACON_100711_180.JPG
[31] PMACON_100711_186.JPG	[32] PMACON_100711_192.JPG	[33] PMACON_100711_197.JPG
[34] PMACON_100711_208.JPG	[35] PMACON_100711_213.JPG	[36] PMACON_100711_216.JPG
[37] PMACON_100711_219.JPG	[38] PMACON_100711_224.JPG	[39] PMACON_100711_228.JPG
[40] PMACON_100711_231.JPG	[41] PMACON_100711_239.JPG	[42] PMACON_100711_241.JPG
[43] PMACON_100711_248.JPG	[44] PMACON_100711_252.JPG	[45] PMACON_100711_257.JPG
[46] PMACON_100711_260.JPG	[47] PMACON_100711_263.JPG	[48] PMACON_100711_266.JPG
[49] PMACON_100711_270.JPG	[50] PMACON_100711_276.JPG	[51] PMACON_100711_279.JPG
[52] PMACON_100711_285.JPG	[53] PMACON_100711_289.JPG	[54] PMACON_100711_292.JPG
[55] PMACON_100711_298.JPG	[56] PMACON_100711_311.JPG	[57] PMACON_100711_318.JPG
[58] PMACON_100711_325.JPG	[59] PMACON_100711_329.JPG	[60] PMACON_100711_334.JPG
[61] PMACON_100711_340.JPG	[62] PMACON_100711_345.JPG	[63] PMACON_100711_354.JPG
[64] PMACON_100711_357.JPG	[65] PMACON_100711_362.JPG	[66] PMACON_100711_371.JPG
[67] PMACON_100711_375.JPG	[68] PMACON_100711_381.JPG	[69] PMACON_100711_385.JPG
[70] PMACON_100711_389.JPG	[71] PMACON_100711_393.JPG	[72] PMACON_100711_406.JPG
[73] PMACON_100711_409.JPG	[74] PMACON_100711_413.JPG	[75] PMACON_100711_416.JPG
[76] PMACON_100711_422.JPG	[77] PMACON_100711_430.JPG	[78] PMACON_100711_436.JPG
[79] PMACON_100711_437.JPG	[80] PMACON_100711_441.JPG	[81] PMACON_100711_445.JPG
[82] PMACON_100711_452.JPG	[83] PMACON_100711_457.JPG	[84] PMACON_100711_461.JPG
[85] PMACON_100711_465.JPG	[86] PMACON_100711_470.JPG	[87] PMACON_100711_476.JPG
[88] PMACON_100711_481.JPG	[89] PMACON_100711_490.JPG	[90] PMACON_100711_493.JPG
[91] PMACON_100711_498.JPG	[92] PMACON_100711_503.JPG	[93] PMACON_100711_512.JPG
[94] PMACON_100711_516.JPG	[95] PMACON_100711_520.JPG	[96] PMACON_100711_526.JPG
[97] PMACON_100711_532.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. PMACON_100711_001.JPG: Jasper Johns Flag 1983
2. PMACON_100711_015.JPG: Salvador Dali Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) 1936 Dali's gruesome allegory of the Spanish Civil War depicts his homeland as a deformed body tearing itself apart. It was painted shortly before General Franco's nationalist forces revolted against the democratic government of the Spanish Republic. Dali later described the painting as "a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation."
3. PMACON_100711_058.JPG: Rene Magritte The Six Elements 1929 Magritte's title calls to mind the basic elements of the universe -- air, water, fire, and earth -- although the connection between these and the images in the painting remains mysterious. Painted at the end of three-year stay in Paris, during which Magritte became a full-fledged Surrealist, The Six Elements exemplifies the artist's ability to lure viewers into questioning the relationship between language and image, the rational and the irrational.
4. PMACON_100711_074.JPG: Sol LeWitt On a Blue Ceiling Eight Geometric Figures: Circle, Trapezoid, Parallelogram, Rectangle, Square, Triangle, Right Triangle, X (Wall Drawing No. 351) 1981
5. PMACON_100711_129.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) 1912 This landmark painting sparked a storm of controversy when it was exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. The work became the butt of jokes and caricatures, as viewers struggled to find the naked woman coming down the stairs amidst the jumble of jagged lines. When Duchamp learned of the scandal, he was delighted, and the widespread notoriety that the painting brought him encouraged the French artist to move to New York two years later.
6. PMACON_100711_172.JPG: Giorgio de Chirico The Soothsayer's Recompense 1913 This painting is one of a series of melancholic cityscapes that de Chirico painted featuring a lone statue in a deserted Italian piazza. The antique statue represents the sleeping Ariadne, who according to Greek mythology was abandoned by her lover on the desert island of Naxos. The confrontation of the classical world with a modern steam engine in the distance creates an uneasy ambiguity of time and space.
7. PMACON_100711_180.JPG: Pablo Picasso Bullfight 1934
8. PMACON_100711_197.JPG: Cy Twombly Fifty Days at Iliam 1978 Cy Twombly Cy Twombly's Fifty Days of Iliam translates Homer's epic recitation of the fall of Troy into what the artist calls a "painting in ten parts." Elegantly fusing painting and writing, the series evokes the key characters and events recounted in the ancient story of the brutal war fought between the Greeks (Achaeans) and the Trojans (Ilians) after the abduction of the Greek Helen by the Trojan prince Paris. The sequence of the war begins on the left wall and continues around the room through the elegiac Shades of Eternal Night. The artist creates a confrontation between the turbulent character of the Greeks (left wall) and the more cerebral spirit of the Trojans (right wall). The two paintings flanking the doorway chronicle the names of gods and warriors, while the large central painting salutes the war's three fallen heroes. Whirls of paint suggest the passions that rouse men to violence and, at the same time, articulate processes of thought and art-making.
9. PMACON_100711_248.JPG: Constantin Brancusi The work of Constantin Brancusi redefined sculpture for a new century. Born in Romania but living in Paris after 1904, Brancusi thought to develop a sculptural idiom that looked absolutely modern. His work moved beyond the verisimilitude and melodrama exemplified by the vastly popular sculpture of Auguste Rodin. Brancusi sought inspiration in ancient, folk, and exotic traditions of sculpture. This brought the artist to simplified forms, reduction of details, and hand carving of materials. The Kiss, for example, presents a symbolic rendering of a male and female body merging into one. The anatomical forms of the couple are subordinated to the contours of the block of stone. But it is inaccurate to echo the artist in calling his sculptures simple. Nothing could be more complicated that the dramatic contrasts between the rough-hewn wooden bases and the elegant marble or bronze sculptures atop them, the calculated effects of the reflections of light, and the subtle nuances in carving the evoke facial features and other characteristics.
10. PMACON_100711_292.JPG: Piet Mondrian Composition with White and Red 1936
11. PMACON_100711_298.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Sonata 1911
12. PMACON_100711_311.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Portrait (Dulcinea) 1911
13. PMACON_100711_318.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Why Not Sneeze, Rose Selavy? 1921
14. PMACON_100711_334.JPG: Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1950 (replica of 1917 original)
15. PMACON_100711_345.JPG: Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) 1915-23 The Large Glass: Arguably twentieth-century art's greatest iconoclast, Marcel Duchamp devote his entire career to debunking pre-existing ideas about art, which he believed should appeal to the intellect rather than the senses. The most visually and conceptually challenging of Duchamp's works remains The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) of 1915-23. A work of art to be looked both through and at, the artist called this towering glass construction a "hilarious picture," but took it seriously enough to devote over a decade to its making. As described in the meticulous notes that Duchamp began preparing in 1912, the work's elaborate iconography chronicles an allegorical drama of frustrated desire involving the blossoming mechanical bride in the upper panel and her circle of nine uniformed bachelors below. The Large Glass made its debut in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum, after which the two glass panels were shattered in transit. Duchamp laboriously glued them back together ten years later, securing the original glass between new panes and housing the "definitively unfinished" work in a metal frame.
16. PMACON_100711_362.JPG: Marcel Duchamp The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box) 1934 The Green Box, published in 1934 in an edition of 300, presents the notations and diagrams Duchamp made between 1912 and 1917 in preparation for his masterwork The Bridge Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). Duchamp compared the collection of ninety-four meticulous facsimiles houses in a green cardboard box to a "Sears Roebuck" catalogue that would provide an indispensable guide to understanding The Large Glass.
17. PMACON_100711_422.JPG: Pablo Picasso Three Musicians 1921 The three masked musicians in this painting represent comic figures from the tradition of popular theater in Italy. This Cubist concert features Harlequin playing a violin, Pierrot with a recorder, and a Franciscan friar holding an accordion. The painting has been interpreted as a nostalgic elegy to a trio of friends: the recently deceased poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire (Pierrot), the poet Max Jacob (the friar), and Picasso himself as the Harlequin.
18. PMACON_100711_445.JPG: Fernand Leger The City 1919 This painting captures the staccato rhythms of a modern urban environment, and the broad panorama of its buildings, scaffolding, and bridges. These architectural elements are punctuated by such signs of city life as shop window mannequins, rounded plumes of smoke, and a telephone pole, all rendered in bold, vibrant colors. Leger even included his own initials, "F.L.", among the array of stenciled letters, evoking the colorful billboard posters of the time.
19. PMACON_100711_470.JPG: Marc Chagall Half Past Three (The Poet) 1911 This painting provides an ode to the poet's late-night muses: a coffee cup, a feline temptress, and a tipped wine bottle. The Russian poet's colorful notebook also suggests a palette, implying a sly self-portrait. Indeed, in his first years in Paris, Chagall, who was friends with many writers, was criticized for being too "poetic."
20. PMACON_100711_481.JPG: Pablo Picasso Glass of Absinthe 1914 This sculpture is one of six bronze casts, each of which includes an actual absinthe spoon and a uniquely painted surface. Absinthe, a highly addictive alcoholic beverage made from distilled wormwood, was thought to lead to madness, but was nevertheless a popular drink in Parisian cafes. Due to its bitter taste, the green-tinted liquid is usually poured into a glass of water over a sugar cube resting on a slotted spoon.
21. PMACON_100711_503.JPG: Jasper Johns Painted Bronze 1960 As the title states, this object is not in fact a coffee can filled with paint brushes but a sculpture. What interested Johns was "the possibility that one might take the one for the other." Inverting Duchamp's notion of the ready-made, Johns has used traditional artistic processes of casting and painting to recreate ordinary objects in the painter's studio, and takes his place in a long tradition of art about art.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Philadelphia Museum of Art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year and is now among the largest and most important art museums in the United States. Originally the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, its founding was inspired by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London, which grew out of the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is known locally and colloquially as "The Art Museum." The museum opened its doors to the public on May 10, 1877, originally housed in Memorial Hall. While the location was adequate, it was isolated from the bulk of the city.

Construction of the current building began in 1919 with Mayor Thomas B. Smith laying the corner stone in a Masonic ceremony on the former reservoir land of the decommissioned Fairmount Water Works covering ten acres of ground. The first section was completed in the spring of 1928. The quasi-Greek Revival design was produced by Horace Trumbauer and the firm of Zantzinger, Borie and Medary. The fa�ade of the building is made of Minnesota dolomite. The side facing the parkway is adorned with sculptures depicting Greek gods and goddesses. There is also a collection of griffins, which were adopted as the symbol of the museum in the 1970s.

For the better part of a century the McIlhenny family held an important relationship with the museum. Henry P. McIlhenny was involved for almost half a century, first as curator from 1939 - 1964, then as chairman of the board in 1976 until his death in 1986, when he left the bulk of his estate to the museum.

The institution describes itself as being "one of the largest museums in the United States", and its collections include more than 225,000 objects, although the institution has no galleries devoted to Greek, Roman or Egyptian art.

Collections:

Each year the Museum puts on 15 to 20 special exhibitions and is visited by 800,000 people. Some of the larger and most famous special exhibitions, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of people from every state and around the world, include shows featuring Paul C�zanne (in 1996, attracting 548,000) and Salvador Dal� (in 2005, attracting 370,000).

Widely regarded as a world-class art institution, the Philadelphia Museum of Art includes not only its iconic Main Building, but also the Rodin Museum (also on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway) and several other historic sites. The recently acquired Perelman Building (across the street from the Main Building) is projected to open in 2007 and will house for public display a few of the Museum's more popular collections.

In the 18th century, Philadelphia was one of the most important cities both before and after the American Revolution and was a center of style and culture. The museum is particularly known for its important collections of Pennsylvania German art, 18th century and 19th century furniture and silver by early Philadelphia and Pennsylvania craftsmen, and works by prominent Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. The museum houses the most important Eakins collection in the world.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].