American Art

Art fairs such as USArtists96, which opens to the public tomorrow at the 33d Street Armory in West Philadelphia, are primarily commercial affairs at which dealers offer their wares. But this fair, organized by the Women's Committee of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also offers a dollop of pure enlightenment. It's a small exhibition of 14 paintings and one sculpture from the academy's permanent collection designed to illuminate the boundary between realism and abstraction in early modern art. Organized by Daniel Rosenfeld, director of the Academy's Museum of American Art, the show, which he describes as a "display," challenges the public perception that the demarcation between abstraction and realism is clearly defined.

Scarcely a week ago, it still looked like a work in progress, this quietly ambitious $3.5 million makeover of the nation's oldest art museum. Outside the Victorian Gothic building north of City Hall, workers noisily toiled on the sidewalk. Inside, some walls lacked their paintings, sculptures remained shrouded in plastic and the new cafe looked like someone's half-renovated kitchen. Today, following five-and-a-half months of construction chaos, the Museum of American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts should be ready to reintroduce itself - with a more accessible visage, a coherent mission and, museum leaders hope, a place in Philadelphia's expanding cultural sense of self.

One of Philadelphia's most famous painters in recent years was Emlen Etting. Born in 1905 and the scion of a family so prominent that city streets bear both his first and his last names, Etting traveled extensively with his mother. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in French literature, he turned to painting and settled in Paris for three years before returning to Philadelphia. There he married Gloria Braggiotti, herself a member of a prominent Italian American family, a renowned photographer in her own right, and the subject of many of his paintings.

Saul Steinberg, who died on Wednesday, was one of America's most brilliant and idiosyncratic artists. Born in Romania in 1914, Mr. Steinberg became a U.S. citizen in 1943, well equipped to look with astonishment, affection, puzzlement and hatred at things American. This he did in art that resists categorization as fine art, cartooning or illustration, even though many of his images found a home in each world. He is one of the few graphic artists who simply created his own thing.

It may not have been apparent from the sparse attendance on opening day, but an extraordinary art exhibition appeared on the London art scene Friday. It's a show of 49 paintings and works on paper by Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia's greatest painter and one of the giants of American art. The exhibition is extraordinary because it's not only the first time his work has been shown in Europe, but it's also the first time that Europeans have been exposed to historical American art in any depth.

The Annenberg Collection is still the biggest news in the Philadelphia art world, but alas! its four-month run ends Sunday and it commences its travels to the other major museums slated to exhibit and enjoy this outstanding show. What's left in its wake at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is not necessarily less interesting than the Annenbergs' masterpieces of impressionism, but certainly not in the same class. Already in place is an exhibition of architectural drawings documenting the planning and building of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Museum of Art. The major fall exhibition, Oct. 22-Jan.

In the new Field-McCormick Galleries of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago becomes the first major American museum to integrate the decorative arts with the fine arts. The galleries survey the 17th through the 19th centuries by showing furniture and silver alongside the paintings and sculpture of the period. The 32 galleries, intimate in scale and all of different sizes, are designed so that objects of domestic proportions can be contemplated, their designs analyzed and their surfaces scrutinized.

The vibrant and colorful paintings of Horace Pippin, on exhibit at the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, have often been characterized as a window into the heritage of black Americans in Chester County. Pippin, the grandson of slaves, captured the warmth and simplicity of everyday life in paintings such as Interior of a Cabin and Domino Players. But the scenes could have taken place anywhere. These folklore paintings, as well as Pippin's still lifes, portraits and landscapes of rural Pennsylvania, made him practically an overnight sensation.

John Walker McCoubrey, 86, an emeritus professor in the department of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, died of kidney failure Tuesday at his home in University City. Dr. McCoubrey was awarded a Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching just four years after joining Penn's faculty in 1964. That same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in London. He had previously studied in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. He was also recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Alfred Jacob Miller was one of a half-dozen American artists, some foreign-born, who introduced the Western frontier, particularly indigenous cultures, to American art. This happened mainly in the 1830s, when Miller and his contemporaries ventured beyond the Mississippi River into the Great Plains, as far as the Rocky Mountains. The first to go, perhaps the most prolific and best-known Indian painter, was George Catlin, a native of Wilkes-Barre, who traveled up the Missouri River for 2,000 miles with an American Fur Co. expedition in 1832.