Modern Art

'Abstract" may be a kind way to describe some of the art your children produce. Or, just maybe, they're budding Picassos. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will put cubism into the hands of kids Sunday as it celebrates Pablo Picasso's birthday - and shows off some of his 364 works in its collection. During the Picasso Party, performers will bring his paintings to life through mime, puppetry and music. A Cubism for Kids tour will introduce children to modern art, then they can try their hand at drawing in that style, with help from an artist.

Carlos Basualdo, an art historian with broad international experience that includes the Venice Biennale and Documenta XI, the two most prominent exhibitions of current art, has been appointed curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, effective immediately. The hiring of the 41-year-old Basualdo, a native of Argentina, completes the restructuring of the museum department responsible for modern and contemporary art. Basualdo is responsible for art from the 1960s to the present, while colleague Michael Taylor looks after modern art, roughly the first half of the 20th century.

Beginning Aug. 1, visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art will have to dig a little deeper into their pockets at the admissions desk. The museum has announced an increase in fees ranging from 14 percent to 29 percent. Prices were last raised four years ago. General admission increases from $10 to $12, admission for visitors 62 and older from $7 to $9, and for students from $7 to $8. Children up to age 12 are still admitted free. Likewise, the pay-what-you-wish policy on Sundays isn't affected.

The exhibit "Treasures From the La Salle University Art Museum" at the Travis Gallery in Bucks County is an opportunity to see and inspect many of the artworks La Salle has been collecting since the mid-1960s. This first sizable off-campus showcasing of 33 items from the La Salle Art Museum at 19th and Olney in Philadelphia, established in 1976, makes the story of that art-collecting odyssey by a university palpable. Something of that effort and era of the project's prime mover and guiding spirit, Brother Daniel Burke, then the La Salle president and now the museum's director, can be felt here.

Over the last four years, the Museum of Modern Art, the preeminent repository of modern art in the world, spent a staggering amount of money - $425 million in construction and renovation costs alone - to create a new home for its collections in midtown Manhattan. The new MoMA is 60 percent larger than the facility it replaces, although the area devoted to exhibitions grew by only 47 percent. The total bill for the project, including property acquisition, establishing an interim museum in Queens, and building an endowment, is an even more mind-boggling $858 million.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has divided the leadership of its department of modern and contemporary art between two senior curators, an action that director Anne d'Harnoncourt said enhances the museum's ability to manage a growing collection of art made from 1900 to the present. Michael R. Taylor, acting head of the department since November, has been named Muriel and Philip Berman curator of modern art. He will oversee collections and exhibitions of works from the first half of the 20th century.

Though he is among the most honored pianists of the Lang Lang generation, 23-year-old Jonathan Biss isn't one to arrive onstage in a clap of thunder. That doesn't happen with anyone beginning a recital with Alban Berg's inward Piano Sonata (Op. 1). But while Lang Lang strikes a specific interpretive stance and takes it so far you wonder if there's any room for further evolution, Biss delivered soundly conceived readings of Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze and Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 31 (Op. 110)

The Michener Art Museum has just opened its Commonwealth of Pennsylvania gallery, showcasing 20th-century American artists whose work is in the permanent collection. Several of the strongest and most eye-catching works on view bring us back to the time when the late author James A. Michener was a touchstone collector of abstract expressionist painting. We can appreciate now, in retrospect, that the great achievement of some of those featured paintings that he owned by Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Karl Knaths and Kyle Morris wasn't so much their originality as their capacity to absorb and unify various modern movements.

Of the many people that artist Tom McLain has encountered in his life, there are a few he has committed to paint and paper. Joanne Brooker is one of them. Brooker was McLain's high school sweetheart, the first girl he ever dated, the Willow Grove resident said last week as he put the finishing touches on Faces & Places, an exhibit on display through Oct. 4 at The Upstairs Gallery at Peddlers Village in Lahaska. A portrait of Brooker - a pretty young woman with a rose-colored mouth and a gaze more knowing than her years - is one of several dozen works in the show.