Most Philadelphia artists yearn to conquer New York. Sidney Goodman accomplished that a month shy of his 26th birthday, with his first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery.
When he was 27, Time magazine described him as ``one of the most respected and sought-after of the new figure painters.'' By the time he was 30, Goodman had appeared in an important show of figurative art at the Museum of Modern Art, two Whitney Museum annuals and a Corcoran Gallery Biennial.
Yet, he realized at the time that his fame would be fleeting. ``I was new on the scene,'' the 60-year-old artist recalled during a recent conversation. ``Sometimes I was almost a little embarrassed by the recognition, because even then I knew that today it might be me but tomorrow it was going to be somebody else.''
Goodman was talking about a brief period in the early 1960s when, as he noted, abstract expressionism had run its course and young artists were testing alternatives. Some critics were extolling a ``new realism'' and the Philadelphia-born Goodman, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was touted as one of its leaders.
He proved to be wise beyond his years. The emergence of a number of vanguard movements in quick succession, such as pop art, minimalism and conceptualism, meant that few artists outside of Andy Warhol could hold the spotlight for very long.
Goodman has been showing continuously in New York with Dintenfass since his success, but he never lived there. He finds Philadelphia a more reasonable place to live for an artist who isn't a millionaire.
His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums all over the country. It also has been shown in various places around Philadelphia, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he has taught since 1978, and the More Gallery, his local dealer. But until now, he has never been given a major museum exhibition in his hometown.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has filled that gap in his resume with a show of 29 paintings and 21 drawings that opened Sunday and will run through March 31. The museum describes the show as a retrospective, although curator John B. Ravenal, who organized it, explains that it focuses more on Goodman's work since 1980 than on the years previous.
