Art History

Perhaps because she was a woman working in a period dominated by male artists, or perhaps because Hodgkin's disease forced her to stop painting when her talent was in full flower, the late Reva Urban has been overlooked in chronologies of American painting over the last 30 years. The exhibition of her work in the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Urban's reputation deserves to be refurbished. If these works are typical, during the early to mid-1960s she was as innovative as any of her contemporaries, and more so than most.

Contemporary art has always had a home at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, but the gallery's reputation for bringing self-taught artists to art-world attention was clearly the deciding factor behind "Outsiderism," the group exhibition inaugurating the gallery's new quarters on Arch Street in a building next to the Fabric Workshop and Museum. (The show was also unapologetically timed to run concurrently with the Philadephia Museum of Art's "Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.

John Andrew Cederstrom, 63, of Merion Station, an artist and teacher who began his career as a nature artist and ended it restoring and protecting the works of others, died Tuesday at Hahnemann University Hospital. "He was an amazing man," said Roslyn Hahn, co-owner of the Hahn Gallery in Chestnut Hill, where Mr. Cederstrom was chief conservator. "He restored paintings, works on paper and he occasionally worked on frames. And he was very aware about art history and about the artists and the art periods of the art he worked on. " He was a quiet, soft-spoken man who never raised his voice and had a reputation as an intellectual with a vivid sense of humor that made his students remember the lessons he taught.

The steadily growing interest in women's art should be further stimulated by the new exhibit "Lady Artists in Evidence: Four Chester County Women Artists" at the Chester County Historical Society. Until now, historical societies in our area seem to have left this kind of enterprise to commercial art galleries or small museums. This show is often more interesting as social history than for its esthetic revelations. Indeed, it has to be considered a social documentary about four turn-of-the-century women artists from the same locality, rather than an anthology of their highest achievements.

John Singleton Copley's famous painting Watson and the Shark is grounded in historical fact - a man named Brook Watson was, indeed, attacked by a shark while swimming in Havana harbor. But Copley's dramatic interpretation of the incident as a heroic allegory is as much fiction as fact, which is equally true of Thomas Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic. In her show at Temple Gallery, Dotty Attie shows us that pictures such as these aren't always what they appear to be. She does it imaginatively and humorously, for while Attie wishes to cut to the bone of art history, she doesn't want the patient to bleed excessively.

The first reaction of people she meets, when she tells them what she does, is "their eyes glaze over," Marina Pacini observes cheerfully. Pacini, a slim, dark-haired woman born in Colombia 35 years ago, is the one-woman band who, for the last five years, has been coordinating the Philadelphia Arts Documentation Project for the Archives of American Art. Since 1954, when the Archives of American Art launched its initial two-year project -...

Ralph Kuncl, a physician and researcher in the field of neuromuscular diseases who also has a background in education, has been named provost of Bryn Mawr College. Kuncl lives in Baltimore, where he is vice provost for undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University. He will take the post at Bryn Mawr in June, when he will replace Robert Dostal, who plans to return to teaching in the college's philosophy department. Kuncl, the first physician to be named to the position, is also a professor of neurology and pathology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Intrigued by the expressive way artists have portrayed beautiful women and by the talented geisha entertainers in colorful Japanese woodblock prints, Ginger da Costa decided to try her hand at the ancient art form. An art history professor, da Costa drew on her love of vintage photographs, Asian culture and the classical world to create images of the geisha, dancing and playing the traditional musical instruments, as well as of the goddess Aphrodite, heeding Cupid's advice. Da Costa's work, along with the prints created by her West Chester University colleague Belle Hollon, will be exhibited in a two-person show, Beyond Ukiyo-e: Creative Woodblock Prints, at the Chester County Art Association through Dec. 20. "It was 15 years since I made art," confessed da Costa, who has a doctorate in art history.

Wherever Michelle Rein went, Taz, her black Chihuahua, went, too. Taz was trained to nudge her mistress and offer emotional support when bouts of disabling pain washed over her. On Friday, at the Bryn Mawr train station, Rein reacted as one who considers a dog as family. Taz had become agitated and strayed onto the tracks, and Rein stepped off the platform. Before she could cradle the dog and stand up, the train was on her, a witness said. Rein, 44, of Center City, a student of Islamic art and architecture, died instantly of massive injuries, police said.

Rosemont College announced this week that president Ann M. Amore had taken a medical leave of absence for an indefinite period, and will be replaced by acting president Sharon Latchaw Hirsh, a professor of art history at Dickinson College. Citing privacy law, Rosemont spokeswoman Christyn Moran Newman declined to say what was ailing Amore, or how long she expects to be gone. Hirsh's appointment is for six months, Moran Newman said. In a letter this week to students and professors, however, Amore did not sound like an administrator who would be returning anytime soon to the small Catholic liberal arts school on the Main Line.

Contemporary art has always had a home at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, but the gallery's reputation for bringing self-taught artists to art-world attention was clearly the deciding factor behind "Outsiderism," the group exhibition inaugurating the gallery's new quarters on Arch Street in a building next to the Fabric Workshop and Museum. (The show was also unapologetically timed to run concurrently with the Philadephia Museum of Art's "Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has named Matthew Affron, a scholar and curator at the University of Virginia, to the museum's prestigious post of curator of modern art, museum officials announced Friday. Affron succeeds Michael Taylor, who was named head of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in 2011. Timothy Rub, director of the Art Museum, also announced that Dirk H. Breiding, an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been named associate curator of arms and armor in Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has named Matthew Affron, a scholar and curator at the University of Virginia, to the museum's prestigious post of curator of modern art, museum officials announced Friday. Affron succeeds Michael Taylor, who was named head of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in 2011. Timothy Rub, director of the art museum, also announced that Dirk H. Breiding, an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been named associate curator of arms and armor in Philadelphia.

Siduri Beckman, 14, swoons over George Eliot's Silas Marner with a passion many girls her age reserve for, say, One Direction boy-band phenom Harry Styles. "I loooove that book," she said, sitting in the auditorium at her school, Julia R. Masterman. Correction. She loves Eliot's Middlemarch first, then Silas Marner . But Philadelphia's first youth poet laureate - Mayor Nutter announced her title this week - has never read Harry Potter. If her tastes seem a little serious, Beckman herself is not. She explains that her parents, Karen and Michael Beckman of West Philadelphia, named her Siduri after the "bartender to the gods" in the Epic of Gilgamesh . The literary Siduri knows the secret of everlasting life, Beckman says.

When artist, author, and Catholic brother Michael O'Neill McGrath walks around Camden just after dawn, he keeps his eyes wide open - for subjects to sketch. Some of the vivid illustrations inspired by McGrath's early morning walks will be featured in a Stedman Gallery show called "Visions of Camden. " The show will include canvases by the painter William Hoffman; photographs by Camilo Vergara and Ken Hohing; vintage Camden postcards; and artifacts unearthed at a downtown construction site.

Cezanne A Life By Alex Danchev Pantheon Books. 488 pp. $40   Paul Cezanne is a wonderful enigma. Although he was revered by his contemporaries and has been idolized by the art world since his death in 1906, his art can be difficult for laymen to understand and appreciate. Yet his importance in art history is unquestioned. Pablo Picasso famously remarked, "Cezanne is my one and only master . . . [he] was like the father of us all," meaning modern artists.

As his friend and longtime colleague Elizabeth Osborne observed, Murray Dessner was making his strongest paintings when he died of cancer Sept. 22, seven weeks short of his 78th birthday. Two exhibitions that opened this month allow Dessner's admirers and the public at large to judge for themselves. (A third, outside Wilmington, closed Saturday.) Dessner is one of four artists associated with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts showing at the Berman Museum of Ursinus College in Collegeville through Jan. 13. (The others are Osborne, Bruce Samuelson, and Vincent Desiderio.)

Steve Sabol, 69, an art history major and football star in college who combined those two passions to help transform the family business, NFL Films, into a modern mythmaking marvel, died Tuesday, Sept. 18. He had been battling brain cancer since 2011. An inoperable tumor had been discovered just days after his father, Ed, the NFL Films founder, was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. A lifelong Philadelphia-area resident who never lost his accent or his boyish idealism, Mr. Sabol forever changed the way Americans view their sports.

Steve Sabol, an art history major and football star in college who combined those two passions to help transform the family business, NFL Films, into a modern mythmaking marvel, died Tuesday at 69. Mr. Sabol had been battling brain cancer since 2011. An inoperable tumor had been discovered just days after his father, Ed, the NFL Films founder, was elected to Pro Football's Hall of Fame. A lifelong Philadelphia-area resident who never lost his accent or his boyish idealism, Mr. Sabol forever changed the way Americans view their sports.

THERE ARE some new CSAs in town, but the only veggies or fruits that participants are likely to find in their shares will be still lifes or sculpture. "CSA" usually refers to community supported agriculture, in which you pay a fee to receive shares of a farm's seasonal produce. The fees help support the farm, while shareholders get fresh goods at good prices. Now that model is taking root in the art world, but it's called "community supported art" instead. Two Philadelphia programs launched last month: the Philadelphia Folklore Project CSA and a joint CSA by alternative galleries Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Grizzly Grizzly.