Modern Art

A pedestrian puts his head down as he runs a gauntlet of giant faces painted on the wall of a parking garage at 12th and Market streets yesterday.

In three short scenes of Artist Descending a Staircase, Tom Stoppard demolishes the pretensions of modern art with fine dispatch. But the rest of his freaky little play is a letdown. It opened last night at the Helen Hayes Theater. Adapting his title from that of Marcel Duchamp's revolutionary nude, Stoppard focuses on the lives of three artists who have taken part in all the fads of the 20th century. They are seen in their old age, played by one set of actors, and in their romantic youth, portrayed by three others.

Degenerate Art, on Channel 12 at 9 tonight, opens with a view of the historic Altes Museum in Berlin that's as visually arresting as it is supremely ironic. Between the columns of the grand neoclassical facade, banners bearing the portraits of the most talented German artists of this century hang majestically. These are the artists Adolf Hitler tried to destroy by renouncing as "degenerate. " Last summer, the persecuted artists were back in Berlin in symbolic triumph, represented by some of the paintings and sculptures that Hitler banned more than 55 years ago. The exhibition of their work finally closed the book on Hitler's determined campaign to destroy modern art and to remake German culture in his own image.

In celebrating the completion of its new Lila Acheson Wallace wing for 20th-century art, which opens to the public Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has assiduously pointed out that, from the day of its founding in 1870, the museum has been firmly committed to contemporary art. If that really were true, the Metropolitan wouldn't feel obliged to belabor the point. The inaugural installation drawn from the 20th-century collection, a curious melange of peaks and valleys, confirms what we have suspected all along - that the Metropolitan really hasn't been in close touch with modern art all these years.

If you have a choice of seeing Museum, the current production of the Hedgerow Theater, or visiting the real thing, you'd probably be better off going to the museum. There is certainly more substance, artfulness and - if you are at all inclined toward the visual arts - entertainment to be found in the works hanging on museum walls than in Tina Howe's obvious, frequently strained comedy spoofing modern art and museumgoers. The play is set in the gallery of a museum on the last day of an exhibit titled "The Broken Silence.

Today's brain-teaser is this: Did Jonathan Waxman, the reigning filthy-rich darling of American modern art, drop in on his old shiksa girlfriend expressly to shake loose the nude portrait he had painted of her early in his career, which he needs to complete the retrospective exhibition of his work that is about to open in London? It looks suspiciously as though that is the reason he has descended upon the lady and her archaeologist husband at their drafty farmhouse in the English sticks.

Great museum collections often have their roots in great personal collections assembled by individuals of exceptional taste and discernment. For example, two major bequests in the early 1950s gave the Philadelphia Museum of Art a strong position in early modern art. One is the Louise and Walter Arensberg collection. The Arensbergs were not only pioneering collectors of artists such as Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp, they presided over a cultural salon in their Manhattan apartment that included writers and musicians as well as artists.

Precisely a century ago, when nationalistic pride prompted grand, international expositions, the king and queen of Italy marked their silver wedding anniversary by founding a biennial art exhibition in Venice. What would those monarchs make of the acres of art that constitute the 45th Venice Biennale, the world's best-known exhibition of contemporary art? As if in opposition to the founders' chauvinistic motives, Biennale curator Achille Bonito Oliva chose "cultural nomadism" as his theme, calling attention to "the 'nomadic' posture of the artist, and his disdain for territorial limitations.

Michael R. Taylor, the highly regarded curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has been named director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. He will assume his new position in August, succeeding Brian Kennedy, who moved to the Toledo Museum of Art in September. Taylor, who was named the Art Museum's first modern art curator in 2004, said in a statement that he was "absolutely delighted" with his new position. The Hood's collection, he said, offered "exciting possibilities," particularly in the area of "student-driven exhibitions, which I believe hold the key to the museum's future success.

For most of this century, painting has been dominated and defined by the accomplishments of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, so much so that it's difficult to think of one without thinking of the other. Each has been enormously influential, even to this day, and each has been touted by devoted partisans as the greatest artist of modern times. As painters and as individuals, they were polar opposites. Picasso was a mercurial bohemian whose tempestuous art corresponds closely to his public persona.

Eighty-nine years ago this month, Albert Coombs Barnes and his ideas about art were rejected by the city of Philadelphia more rudely and forcefully than he deserved, or could have reasonably expected. That rejection contributed significantly to the collector's estrangement from the city's cultural and educational community, and also to the public perception of Barnes as a crotchety, egotistical, and vindictive misanthrope. The catalyst for this rupture, which persisted until Barnes died in a highway accident 28 years later, was an exhibition of a small portion of his art collection at, of all places, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

A year ago, when Tyler School of Art professor Gerard Brown was asked to curate a 25-year retrospective of the Wood Turning Center, which was soon to be renamed the Center for Art in Wood, he headed for the basement of what was then the center's home, on a dead-end street at Fifth and Vine, to check out the collection. He found a lot more than the "10,000 bowls" the center's old image and origins might have suggested. "There are issues of gender and identity, pieces that have a kind of incredible sense of humor, work that has wit and charm about it, work that ties into the history of furniture and into contemporary aesthetics.

THE WINTER BLUES can sneak up on you. Some people find themselves stuck in a rut, while others dream of an exotic getaway. Animus - Philadelphia's Belly Dance Spectacular provides the perfect antidote for both. In the United States, belly dancing is usually free entertainment at an ethnic restaurant or something you'll see Shakira do (because her hips don't lie). But Animus brings the authentic dance and its traditional Middle Eastern culture and music to World Cafe Live on Sunday.

AMONG the paintings in the recent "Karmic Abstraction" show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery was a large piece by Ryan McGinness. An art-world star - the New York Times says so - his work hangs in respected institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and Spain's MUSAC. He's kind of a big deal. McGinness had other works in the show, but let's focus on one: "Untitled (Black Hole, Black 72.1). " On a black background, neon squiggles race in and out of each other as if created by some cosmic Spirograph.

By Seymour I. "Spence" Toll Born in 1874 in what is now part of Pittsburgh, Gertrude Stein was one of five children raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Oakland, Calif. She did not practice her faith after childhood, and her view of the afterlife was, "When a Jew dies, he's dead. " Physiologically speaking, she's been dead for 65 years as of today, but she remains a distinct and lively presence in our culture. This summer, for example, Stein (as played by Kathy Bates)

Michael R. Taylor, the highly regarded curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has been named director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. He will assume his new position Aug. 15, succeeding Brian Kennedy, who moved to the Toledo Museum of Art in September. Taylor, who was named the Art Museum's first modern art curator in 2004, said in a statement that he was "absolutely delighted" with his new position. The Hood's collection, he said, offered "exciting possibilities," particularly in the area of "student-driven exhibitions, which I believe hold the key to the museum's future success.

Michael R. Taylor, the highly regarded curator of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has been named director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. He will assume his new position in August, succeeding Brian Kennedy, who moved to the Toledo Museum of Art in September. Taylor, who was named the Art Museum's first modern art curator in 2004, said in a statement that he was "absolutely delighted" with his new position. The Hood's collection, he said, offered "exciting possibilities," particularly in the area of "student-driven exhibitions, which I believe hold the key to the museum's future success.

Collage looks easy, doesn't it? Just collect bits of colored paper and printed detritus, arrange them on a sturdy ground, apply paste, and quicker than you can say "recycling" you have art. Well, not always. Banal collages, like junk sculpture, are quite easy to make, as many artists continue to demonstrate. Yet when you encounter a master of collage, you realize how wide is the gap between the mundane and the masterly, and how infrequently the sublime is achieved. Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Sheila Hicks is one of a small group of artists who, in our time, ennobled fiber as a high-art medium. They demonstrated that the aesthetic virtues associated with media such as painting and sculpture, and even emotion, could be expressed through objects made of fiber. Even though the 76-year-old Hicks has been working for more than a half-century and is internationally renowned, you might not have heard of her. That's probably because, though born and educated in the United States, she has lived mostly in France since 1964.

Lars Vilks, a conceptual artist from Sweden with a $100,000 bounty on his head, could be found secreted away in a room at the Rittenhouse Hotel Thursday morning, receiving carefully screened visitors from the media. Vilks is on a weeklong tour of the United States and Canada, speaking about freedom of expression. He had been scheduled to hold forth at the Union League Thursday, but late Wednesday, the event was abruptly called off. Craig Snider, a Union League member who was hosting the speaker, said that after he realized the visit would require extraordinary security measures to protect Vilks, his associates, and anyone in attendance, "I voluntarily canceled it. I was not prepared to ask the league to take that kind of risk.