Art History

By the early 1920s, the American art world had lived through the convulsions of cubism and dadaism and was beginning to experience the metaphysical rumblings of surrealism. Yet in the studio of Willard Leroy Metcalf on West 68th Street in Manhattan, the 19th century was making a determined stand against the avant- garde. Metcalf was a landscape painter who rejoiced in the beauty of the unspoiled countryside and who conveyed his feelings through a direct, genteel realism alloyed with impressionism.

Francis X. Gildea, 69, formerly of Radnor, a Vietnam War veteran and shopping mall manager, died Saturday, March 10, of complications from cancer at Waverly Heights, a retirement community in Gladwyne. A native of Lackawanna County, Mr. Gildea graduated from Scranton Preparatory School and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Scranton. From 1966 to 1968, he served in the Army and completed a tour of duty, including jungle operations in Vietnam. After his discharge, he was an analyst for the National Security Agency in Washington, where he met his future wife, Joyce Asher.

This decade had no sooner begun than art historians, who are no less enamored of instant replay than the rest of us, set briskly to work trying to figure out what the last decade was all about. So eager were they to make sense of the turbulent '80s that they didn't even wait for the '90s to begin before setting to their task. How do we know? Because just one month into 1990, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington gave us this decade's first review of its predecessor, an exhibition called "Culture and Commentary.

A new scholarship this fall at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts honors the late Selma Burke, a Bucks County sculptor whose work is familiar if you've ever studied your change. That picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the dime? It bears an uncanny resemblance to a bas-relief that Burke formed of FDR. Until her death 16 years ago at age 94, Burke would tell visitors to her Solebury Township studio of the presidential commission she won over 11 other sculptors. Lewis Tanner Moore, the Warrington collector of African American art, said Burke often recalled the day in 1944 when she unrolled a sheet of butcher paper across the Oval Office and sketched Roosevelt for 45 minutes in charcoal, while reminding him to sit still.

Consider James Rosenquist, the half-hour documentary that airs tonight at 10:30 on Channel 12, as a small celebration: In a neat coincidence, this expansively witty artist was elected Wednesday to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Early on in his career, Rosenquist was tagged a practitioner of pop art, and the label stuck. But as Rosenquist says in this WHYY-produced film, that classification isn't really fair. Where other popsters such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein appropriated popular imagery - advertisements, the faces of movie and rock stars - to satirize the consumer culture, Rosenquist made his living from that culture: He painted billboards professionally, and in James Rosenquist gives a funny account of the difficulties in executing a massive Hebrew National Salami billboard in Brooklyn during the early '60s.

The daughter of a retired Philadelphia judge has been chosen to replace scandal-plagued Bess Myerson as New York City's cultural affairs commissioner. Mary Schmidt Campbell, 39, daughter of former Common Pleas Judge Harvey N. Schmidt, said she hopes to "bring my own style" to the $83,000-a-year job and make culture more accessible to all New Yorkers. "I'd like to see this city more proudful of its institutions," she said at a press conference yesterday following her appointment by New York Mayor Edward Koch.

Temple University administrators are considering moving the Tyler School of Art from Elkins Park to Temple's main campus in North Philadelphia as part of a plan to consolidate several college arts programs in one building. Temple vice president James Hilty said Thursday that as part of the university's plan to develop the eastern portion of the main campus - a section that stretches east of Broad Street - administrators have considered combining Tyler's program with others offered at the main campus.

The daughter of a retired Philadelphia judge has been chosen to replace scandal-plagued Bess Myerson as New York City's cultural affairs commissioner. Mary Schmidt Campbell, 39, daughter of former Common Pleas Judge Harvey N. Schmidt, said she hopes to "bring my own style" to the $83,000-a-year job and make culture more accessible to all New Yorkers. "I'd like to see this city more proudful of its institutions," she said at a press conference yesterday following her appointment by New York Mayor Edward Koch.

Amy Austin Lukens, 94, formerly of Lafayette Hill, a World War II veteran and volunteer, died Saturday, June 9, at Cathedral Village, a retirement community in Roxborough. Mrs. Lukens graduated from Germantown Friends School and was pleased that two of her granddaughters were fourth-generation students there. In 1939, she earned a bachelor's degree in art history from Smith College. She then worked at Princeton University in the president's office and remembered seeing visiting professor Albert Einstein strolling the campus, her daughter Margo said.

NESSA R. FORMAN had such drive that she could take hold of the editors of the often stodgy old Evening Bulletin and give them a good shake. "When she covered the art scene for the Bulletin, she was a reporter with the same intensity expected of the police and political beats," said Don Harrison, an editor at the Bulletin and the Daily News. "With guts and tenacity, she dug out real news where it was often ignored, then 'sold' it to skeptical editors. " She carried that same passion to get the job done right when she joined WHYY after the Bulletin closed in 1982, and retired in 2007 as vice president of corporate communications and public affairs.