Art comes down to earth

To many, for a very long time the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been an institutional manifestation of everything its classical architecture was meant to convey. August. Stalwart. Serious. Sitting a bit aloof on Fairmount above the rest of the city, the museum has always required you to make the first approach.

Nothing about the opening this month of the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building - the first public addition since the opening of the neoclassical temple in the 1920s - makes the mission less serious. But the 173,000-square-foot expansion represents the museum's only suggestion in decades that its art is not necessarily tied to a building, and that it is ready to come down off its pedestal, literally and figuratively, to become part of a city neighborhood.

Most dramatically, the opening of the Perelman is the museum's first step in a much larger process to substantially capitalize on the many points of entry that art offers its public.

"People are going to invent their own ways of using the building," says museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt.

If Robert Montgomery Scott, the museum's late president, once telegraphed with his Fairmount Park bike tours the idea that the museum was a place both friendly and erudite, the current marketing campaign sends the message that it's friendly, erudite and contemporary, ready and eager to have you no matter who you are. That young man standing before the Jacques Lipchitz sculpture in Art Museum ads - is he black, white, Latino or Asian, straight or gay, 18 or 35? No matter; art is for Everyman (and if you're young and chic, so much the better).

With impending projects totaling $590 million and counting, the Art Museum is gambling that there is a wider audience to be had. The Perelman annex at 2525 Pennsylvania Ave. - né the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Co. building, which cost $90 million to acquire and renovate - will make it easier for teachers to access the museum's educational programs; scholars can visit the archives without feeling as if they are hiding in a fallout shelter; art students can examine costume and textiles up close.

The Perelman is a place for the typical visitor to see prints, drawings, photographs, sculpture, costume, and modern and contemporary design in several new, light-filled galleries.