Modern Art

Talk about provocative art. One New York exhibition has inspired unwanted groping, while another has prompted calls to police about possible rooftop jumpers. The live nudes at the Museum of Modern Art want to be treated like artworks - no touching, please. Except, of course, where they're crowding a doorway, forcing visitors to squeeze between a naked woman and a naked man. But that doesn't mean it's OK to "grab a stranger's junk," to quote a blog at thelmagazine.com. Some patrons have gotten overly friendly, according to performers featured in a Marina Abramovic retrospective.

"I think," said Michael R. Taylor, flashing a bright smile, "I'm going to take a little break now. " It's not that he's haggard from pulling together the Philadelphia Museum of Art's next big exhibition, Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris, which opens tomorrow with more than 200 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. In fact, the Picasso extravaganza has been immensely satisfying, a kaleidoscopic coda to 2009, Taylor's annus mirabilis, during which art and its public presentation and discussion poured out of him in tidal flows.

Three artists have been chosen as finalists in a new competition established by Temple University's Tyler School of Art. They are Sanford Biggers of New York; Michael Rakowitz of Chicago and New York; and Ryan Trecartin of Philadelphia. The first Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts will award the winner $150,000, a prize the organizers call "the world's largest given to a visual artist in a juried competition. " The three artists' work will be on view at Temple Gallery at Tyler Oct. 1-31, with the winner to be announced Oct. 22. Organizers also have revealed the names of the three jurors.

Tall, fair-haired, and patrician, strongly emitting that ineffable thing called presence, Timothy Rub is wandering through the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art late one recent night like a kid let loose in a candy shop. "Isn't that fantastic?" he says, sidling up to Monet's Water Lilies, Japanese Footbridge. "This is a superb painting. " He points out the unusual thickness of paint and the diffuse ochres, tans, and greens that make the piece seem almost more abstract than impressionist.

Three major art sales, including one that will partly benefit the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, are scheduled this weekend and next week. And a fourth sale, scheduled for today, offers furnishings to be sold for a worthy cause. The first of the art sales, a two-day event, will be held next weekend at the Rago Arts & Auction Center in Lambertville, N.J. The first session, beginning at 2 p.m. next Friday, will open with more than 200 lots of 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, notably a pencil-on-paper drawing by Austrian Gustav Klimt done in 1914 and titled in German Liebespaar nach rechts (translated as Lovers in the color-illustrated catalog)

Jubilation erupted in Philadelphia's art community last month when Tyler School of Art announced that retired property developer Jack L. Wolgin had given the institution $3.7 million to endow a $150,000 annual art prize. The competition for this prize, now the largest of its kind, will be international. Besides the cash, the winner will exhibit his or her art at Tyler's new facility on Temple University's North Philadelphia campus. Local art administrators contacted by Inquirer reporter Amy S. Rosenberg rhapsodized about how the prize would enhance the city's stature as an art center and would attract international attention to the city.

Joan Giordano of New York is among "new" artists receiving considerable attention today as one of those who choose to remain outside the mainstream. Her exhibit "Collective Identities: Works on/of Paper" at Rosemont College features colorful sculptural installations from a technique Giordano perfected during a residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Although many of these 13 richly textured works exemplify for her a new type of painting with implied figurative elements called "Personages," she doesn't try to tell a story in them.

In death as in life, she got them to look at art. And to Anne d'Harnoncourt last night, they said thank you and good-bye. About 2,000 friends, colleagues and admirers gathered at the Academy of Music for a warm and polished tribute to d'Harnoncourt, the longtime Philadelphia Museum of Art director whose death from a heart attack June 1 shook the local arts community and the tight-knit international art establishment. The event, held on what would have been her 65th birthday, may not mitigate the kind of grief and dismay that has gripped the Art Museum in the last few months, but it does draw down an unofficial curtain on a summer of mourning.

Lee Rosenbaum is an art commentator and blogs as "CultureGrrl" for ArtsJournal.com If Anne d'Harnoncourt, who died last Sunday, had any enemies, I never heard of them. She had the rare ability to defuse political and cultural controversies with irresistible charm, intelligence and good humor. There were two reasons for her ability to remain largely above the fray. She had a sympathetic appreciation for the sincerity and legitimacy of different viewpoints. And she made her administrative decisions for all the right reasons: to serve the art-driven mission of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the institution she had so ably directed since 1982; and to enhance the cultural life of the city she loved.

Serge, recently taken with modern art, stands bursting with pride by his new acquisition - a canvas that is all white. Well, he sees color in it, sort of. "It's not white!" he protests. "It has a white background!" This essentially blank canvas is Serge's treasure, literally. It cost him 200,000 francs. That's the plot of Art, being given a fresh, animated and thoroughly funny revival by the Delaware Theatre Company. Like Yasmina Reza's play, which won the Tony 10 years ago, the production is a tight, and tightly wound, piece of theater.