Modern Art

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.

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.

Benjamin Eisenstat, 86, a popular Philadelphia painter, illustrator and teacher whose work celebrated Philadelphia, its landmarks and its surroundings, died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif. Mr. Eisenstat, who was a Philadelphia native, had been a resident of Palo Alto since the mid-1980s. When he was living and working in the Philadelphia area, he resided in Moorestown. For many years, Mr. Eisenstat was a professor and administrator at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts.

Peter P. Rosenau, 61, a patron of contemporary art who was known for the modern art that adorned his home and his droll sense of humor, died of cancer Wednesday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. A resident of Bryn Mawr, Mr. Rosenau was president of the Puro Filter Co. of Philadelphia, which installs and services water coolers and filters. The firm was begun by Mr. Rosenau's father, Richard P. Rosenau, 50 years ago. Mr. Rosenau was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Germantown Friends School, where he was a star athlete and earned a place on the all-Philadelphia soccer team.

Robert Storr, distinguished critic and cutting-edge curator, will join the Philadelphia Museum of Art as one in a troika of curators of modern and contemporary art. Museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt is expected to announce his appointment today. An artist who during the 1990s served as curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art - where his retrospectives of Chuck Close and Elizabeth Murray (currently on view) met with international acclaim - Storr also organized The Devil on the Stairs, a landmark 1991 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Storr's title, consulting curator of modern and contemporary art, means that he will share responsibilities with Carlos Basualdo, contemporary art curator, and Michael Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art. (To decode museumspeak: "modern" refers to the 20th century and "contemporary" to the most recent decades.

Coolest Small Towns in America Based on 439,411 votes on an online poll by Budget Travel magazine: 1. Ely , Minn. pop. 3,470; The best backyard in the country . 2. Cloverdale , Calif. pop. 6,716; Wine country without the fuss . 3. Brevard , N.C. pop. 6,716; Blue Ridge views, Appalachian pride . 4. Saugatuck , Mich. pop. 954; A lake town where time stands still. pop. 5,273; Where everyone roots for the home team . 6. Bandon , Ore. pop. 3,295; A farm-to-table coast . 7. Cuero , Texas pop. 6,571; Old West meets modern art . 8. Nyack , N.Y. pop. 6,737; Creativity 9. Medicine Park , Okla.

Seventeen major paintings by Cezanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and other masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been bequeathed to the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven by a prominent New York socialite who died last week. The gifts - valued at more than $300 million - were donated by Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, widow of millionaire businessman John Hay "Jock" Whitney, who died in 1982.

Ann Temkin, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has been appointed curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, effective Oct. 1. Temkin, hired by the Art Museum in 1987 as an assistant curator, became head of the department then called 20th-century art in 1990. Sept. 25 will be her last day in that job. She said yesterday that it would be exciting to help MoMA figure out, "both from a conceptual and practical point of view," how to present the museum's matchless collection of modern art in its new building, now under construction.

The vinyl-coated, U-shaped lock that has become a fixture on so many urban bicycles is more than just a good, jam-proof bike lock. It's also a piece of art and a cultural artifact. The quality of its design has landed the Kryptonite lock in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent design collection. While it's not a Rosenquist or a Braque, the lock is museum-quality design - functional and, at $21.95, affordable to boot. Most people don't think of the products they use every day as worthy of inclusion in a museum collection, yet good design is an art form that is not exclusive.

The life of the French postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin should adapt easily to television, since Gauguin, like his friend Vincent van Gogh, is one of the more colorful characters in the history of modern art. Yet the glimpse one gets of the artist's life and work in Paul Gauguin: The Savage Dream, a documentary scheduled to be broadcast by Channel 12 late tomorrow night, is neither particularly compelling nor edifying. A brief sequel, The Legacy of Paul Gauguin, does supply the insight into his work that one would expect from a documentary, for those who are willing to stay up until nearly 1 a.m. to watch it. It's worth the wait, however, even though Channel 12 has scheduled the whole package to start at midnight, an hour when one presumes only dedicated art mavens would still be awake.