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.

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.

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.

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.

Barbara Chase-Riboud, the internationally acclaimed sculptor, poet, and author who lives and works in Paris and Rome, was back this weekend where it all began - Philadelphia. Chase-Riboud was here to help mark the 40th anniversary of the Brandywine Workshop, founded by predominantly African American artists and educators. And she was also here on business: In September, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will hold an exhibit of her work. Outside art circles, Chase-Riboud, 74, may be best known for her historical novels.

Sidney Goodman, 77, one of the most acclaimed, influential, and respected artists Philadelphia has produced since the end of World War II, died Thursday, April 11. He suffered for the better part of a year from Parkinson's disease. A Philadelphia native, Mr. Goodman graduated from Philadelphia College of Art, now University of the Arts, in 1958. By the early 1960s, his boldly imaginative style of figurative painting had brought him national attention. When he was 27, Time magazine described him as "one of the most respected and sought-after of the new figure painters.

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.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and three other U.S. institutions have joined to offer a sweeping survey of historical American art for exhibition in South Korea. Museum officials describe the show, which includes more than 100 works drawn from three centuries of American art making, as the first such major survey in Korea. "Many Koreans are aware of American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, and familiar with post-1960s American art, but not with the work of artists of earlier periods, such as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins," Seung-ik Kim, the National Museum of Korea's lead curator for the exhibition and a specialist in Korean modern art and visual culture, said on Wednesday.

For Albert Barnes, the French impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a magnificent obsession on a scale that defies both reason and understanding. Between 1912, when he acquired his first nine Renoirs, and 1942, when he bought his last two, the founder of the Barnes Foundation gathered under his roof 178 Renoir oils of various sizes and subjects (as well as a pastel drawing, a lithograph, and a sculpture). Perhaps the best explanation of this amazing prodigality comes from the collector himself, as quoted on page 33 of the foundation's new comprehensive catalog of its Renoirs: "I have never experienced from Renoir's work the ennui or disgust with the platitudinous emptiness and general damn rot that I have found in the work of practically every other man represented in my collection from Delacroix to Picasso.

An exhibition like the current "Dancing Around the Bride" had to happen eventually at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds the largest and most important collection anywhere of art by Marcel Duchamp. Its premise is simple, and hardly a surprise encounter, given that its essential truth has been known for decades. Duchamp was one of the most influential artists of the last 100 years. Among those he influenced directly were two important visual artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; a dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham; and a composer, John Cage.

Any art museum that desires to attract adolescent males (that is, males up to the age of about 25) might follow the lead of the Allentown Art Museum and stage an exhibition like "At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic. " In a catalog statement, the museum's president and chief executive officer, J. Brooks Joyner, calls this extensive display of fantasy art "the first of its kind and scale to be undertaken by a museum of fine arts in America. " I can believe it, because art museums traditionally consider art of this kind to be beyond the pale - overtly commercial, lurid, and devoid of serious aesthetic character.

Arcadia is both a region in the middle of the Greek Peloponnese and a mythical state of mind — a land where simple people lead virtuous lives marked by carefree tranquility, sensual pleasure, and harmony with nature.   The Arcadian dream comes to life in spectacular fashion at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in an exhibition built around a cluster of monumental paintings created just before and shortly after the turn of the last century. Curator Joseph J. Rishel conceived "Visions of Arcadia" to demonstrate how masters of early modernism, particularly Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse, responded to and extended one of the more traditional, popular themes in European art. In doing so, Rishel has pulled off an amazing coup.

DESPITE A DOWN economy, a time when spending money on luxuries like arts and culture is first on the budget chopping block, Kensington-based artist Marble Slinger is having one of his best years.   Probably because you can smoke weed out of Slinger's art. Slinger is a glassblower who creates intricate pipes. But he also recently put his Ithaca College film degree to work to make the documentary " Degenerate Art: The Art and Culture of Glass Pipes ," which will have its Philly premiere Tuesday night at the Trocadero Theatre as part of the Awesome Fest.