American Art

There was a buoyancy in the step of Daniel J. Terra, a kind of subdued avian bounce, as he picked his way through thickets of boxes and electrical gadgets adorning his new museum. Every few feet, he spotted a painting on the wall or floor, homed in and began to talk. "That has quite a story behind it," he clucked last week while moving into position in front of Charles Courtney Curran's Lotus Lilies, a shimmering 1888 oil. "I acquired that about 1973. I went to see this chap on a Sunday morning with the intention of buying it. People told me they would never part with it. As soon as I entered the house, I saw it over the davenport with marvelous light on it. His wife says, 'Don't look at that painting.

Art Museums & Institutions African American Heritage Museum 661 Jackson Rd., Newtonville; 609-704-5495. www.aahmsnj.org . Tue.-Fri. 10 am-3 pm. The Barnes Foundation - Philadelphia 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.; 215-278-7000. www.barnesfoundation.org . $18; $15 seniors 65 and over; $10 students and children 17 and under. Sat.-Mon., Wed.-Thu. 9:30 am-6 pm; Fri. 9:30 am-10 pm. Brandywine River Museum Rte. 1 & Rte. 100, Chadds Ford; 610-388-2700. www.brandywinemuseum.org . Andrew Wyeth's Ides of March: The Making of a Masterpiece.

Elaine Kurtz came to William R. Valerio's attention about a year ago when he saw one of her paintings in the home of Nancy Posel, a longtime friend of the artist's and a supporter of Woodmere Art Museum. The recently appointed Woodmere director was so intrigued by the work that he decided that Kurtz, who died in 2003 at 75, was an artist deserving of a major exhibition. Although represented in the collections of four Washington museums (Corcoran, Hirshhorn, National Gallery, National Museum of American Art)

  The twin catalogs for next weekend's sale of modern and contemporary arts and crafts at the Rago Arts and Auction Center present a history of the movements and creators of the last 110 years, from the well-established to the up-and-coming. Just as remarkable is the sale itself. The more than 1,300 lots of furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and decorative art for sale at the two-day event in Lambertville include works by many of the best-known names in an abundance seldom seen.

In the 1920s, black artists and intellectuals in Washington often gathered at the home of Lillian Evans Tibbs, an opera singer known professionally as Madame Lillian Evanti. Besides presiding over her informal salon, Madame Evanti, who died in 1967, collected art by African Americans. Her Victorian row house just off Logan Circle now houses the Evans-Tibbs Collection, a public gallery administered by her grandson, Thurlow E. Tibbs Jr. The gallery organizes exhibitions and maintains a reference archive on African American art of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Aside from being the author of a kiss-and-tell memoir about his years as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas P.F. Hoving is a 1953 graduate of Princeton University. Hoving has called on his skills as a former curator to put together a small exhibition of American art selected from the collections of some of his college classmates. It continues at Princeton's art museum through July 3. The show, which celebrates the 40th reunion of Hoving's class, was proposed by Leonard L. Milberg, one of the more prominent collectors among the lenders.

Daniel J. Terra, who has agreed to bestow a whopping $22 million on the University of the Arts over the next two years, is a bouncy 84-year-old with drifts of white hair, flurries of energy and a full-blown passion for American art. He was born in Philadelphia and attended Roman Catholic High School, on North Broad, just up the street from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation's oldest museum and art school. As a young man, however, Terra was more interested in the practical than the aesthetic, although he sold sheet music and performed as a singer on WCAU radio.

Meyer P. "Pat" Potamkin, a pioneering collector of American art and a widely respected businessman and civic leader, died late Sunday at his home in Center City. He was 91. Over six decades, Mr. Potamkin and his wife, Vivian, assembled one of the country's most important private collections of American art. At a time in the mid-1950s when American art was still underappreciated, they were among the first collectors to recognize its aesthetic value. Beginning in 1940, with a $10 lithograph they bought on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, the Potamkins always collected as a team.

American artists of the 19th-century produced a lot of paintings and sculptures that haven't been looked at very much in the decades since they were made, and with good reason. Compared with the best European art of the same period, a lot of American art seems naive, superficial, pedantic and even silly - in other words, clearly second-rate. In recent years, though, a number of scholars have been trying to prove a case for 19th-century American art - to at least explain its context, which was very different from that of Europe and its motives, with an eye to establishing its legitimacy.

After hanging for nearly a month at the National Portrait Gallery just off Trafalgar Square, Thomas Eakins' London debut has - by American standards - barely gotten off the ground, despite strong support from the city's major art critics. Through Oct. 31, the Eakins exhibition - his first ever in Europe - had attracted about 10,000 visitors, an average of 400 a day (the gallery is open every day). This is something less than overwhelming for one of America's greatest painters. By comparison, an exhibition of 20th-century American art at the nearby Royal Academy of Arts has been drawing between 7,500 and 8,000 visitors weekly since it opened in mid-September.