Painting

Willi Sitte, 92, one of East Germany's most eminent artists and a key representative of Communism's preferred socialist realism painting style, has died in Berlin. The head of the Willi Sitte Foundation, Hans-Hubert Werner, told news agency DPA that Mr. Sitte died Saturday morning after a long illness. Mr. Sitte's paintings depicted factory workers or farmers as glamorized ideals of Communist heroes. Among his famous works are voluptuous, often nude women. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany's unification, Mr. Sitte was seen in a more controversial light because of his closeness to the Communist regime.

Perhaps because she was a woman working in a period dominated by male artists, or perhaps because Hodgkin's disease forced her to stop painting when her talent was in full flower, the late Reva Urban has been overlooked in chronologies of American painting over the last 30 years. The exhibition of her work in the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that Urban's reputation deserves to be refurbished. If these works are typical, during the early to mid-1960s she was as innovative as any of her contemporaries, and more so than most.

In Jane Golden's eyes, Philadelphia is the city of murals - an outdoor canvas to be covered with tributes to hometown heroes, unforgettable victims, and vivid celebrations of the rhythms of urban life. Turn a corner in North Philadelphia and see Jackie Robinson sliding home, the moment frozen on the side of a three-story brick building. Or swing by Broad and Spring Garden Streets for a towering tribute to women. Philadelphia has about 2,000 of these murals. Soon it will have more.

Can there be art outside the art structure? The answer used to be, probably not. Our society is so specialized, it has totally relied on the art structure to identify, communicate and preserve art. Isota Tucker Epes (Bryn Mawr College Class of '40), a Virginia Woolf scholar and former English teacher at Shipley School, now living in Virginia, ventured farther afield when she took up painting in retirement eight years ago. She approaches her painting series, "An Essay: Virginia Woolf," at Bryn Mawr College, with a highly sophisticated set of ideas and an almost primitive paint-handling, attempting to stretch definitions in a provocative way, and hoping to force us to reconsider our own relationships to objects, to meaning and to literature.

Of all African American artists, Henry Ossawa Tanner is probably the best known. His work hangs in the White House as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But paintings by Tanner (1859-1937), who grew up here, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, and then emigrated to Paris, do not often come on the market - not major ones, anyway. That is why widespread attention is being paid to Bill Bunch's auction of more than 200 paintings, which begins at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the Concordville Inn. Midway in that sale, Bunch will offer a previously unknown painting by Tanner.

The fabric panels that Maine artists Gayle Fraas and Duncan Slade are exhibiting at Works Gallery are described as "quilts," but they're really quilted paintings. They're executed in dyes thickened with seaweed extract on cotton broadcloths that have been finished like quilts - backing, binding, etc. - and embellished with decorative stitching. That said, it's hard to think of the pieces as quilts, because they're easel-scale and framed like paintings or prints. Yet their fiber-art character ultimately prevails.

It was suggested in this space two weeks ago that museums of American art might have outlived their usefulness. After seeing "Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition," at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, we are pleased to report that this is emphatically not the case. For without a museum like the academy, an exhibition like this would not be possible. The academy is admirably equipped to mount such a historical re- creation, so much so that it's difficult to tell when the permanent collection ends and the exhibition begins.

Michael Manzavrakos' cast-iron sculptures and mixed-media works on paper at Dolan/Maxwell Gallery are on easy terms with expressionism. These pieces epitomize the gestural quality of the work of this artist, who is well-known in the Midwest but is making his solo debut here on the East Coast. The works illustrate the close connection between sculpture and painting in Manzavrakos' artistry. Moreover, the patinated surfaces of these abstract sculptures include zones of color, demonstrating that Manzavrakos believes sculptural expression doesn't need to restrict itself to purely sculptural means.

Highlighted by furnishings from the exclusive Rittenhouse Club in Center City and by an unusual painting by Arthur B. Carles of a man who may be Leopold Stokowski, Freeman/Fine Arts of Philadelphia next week will hold a three-day, 1,100-lot catalogue sale rich in Philadelphia tradition. The Carles is expected to sell for between $15,000 and $20,000 when it is offered at the auction's third session at 10 a.m. next Saturday. According to the $20 catalogue, it is similar - and probably relates - to a drawing in the Phillip Jamison collection in West Chester that is identified as Stokowski.

Steve Riedell didn't invent the shaped painting, but he has given it an unusual twist. He creates the painting and its support separately, then combines them. The method is demanding, but the result is an object that, paradoxically, accentuates its "painted" quality. Riedell's exhibition at Larry Becker Contemporary Art contains 12 such paintings made over the last several years. Some are essentially flat, while others project from the wall like sculptures. Each piece is a wood construction derived from an architectural source covered with painted canvas.

Over the last decade, Susan Hagen has been coaxing contemporary art from one of the world's oldest art practices - carving small, wood sculptures of living people of all ages, from almost every walk of life. Expressively modeled, painted with oil or bleached or charred, Hagen's small linden wood figures have a poignancy that emanates from the size and familiar postures and ordinariness of her subjects. The individuality of each of Hagen's sitters has not always been obvious in her gallery exhibitions, however, mainly because they've been shown together as types.

Life amid the Irish Troubles. On Movies, H2.

Willi Sitte, 92, one of East Germany's most eminent artists and a key representative of Communism's preferred socialist realism painting style, has died in Berlin. The head of the Willi Sitte Foundation, Hans-Hubert Werner, told news agency DPA that Mr. Sitte died Saturday morning after a long illness. Mr. Sitte's paintings depicted factory workers or farmers as glamorized ideals of Communist heroes. Among his famous works are voluptuous, often nude women. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany's unification, Mr. Sitte was seen in a more controversial light because of his closeness to the Communist regime.

Apartment dwellers, do you feel trapped by the beige? Beige-colored walls, beige-hued ceilings - because your lease says no hint of a tint can replace the ecru? Could it be even your carpet is beige? Life in a lease doesn't have to be boring. With planning, Internet surfing, maybe a couple of hours worth of help from an interior designer (yes, some will consult by the hour), a bit of labor, and a dash of cash, you can have digs that are anything but. Even if you're going to live in this space for only 12 months, aesthetics can have a big impact.

Joan Fineman Jaffe, 74, a longtime resident of Huntingdon Valley, died of cancer Sunday, May 12, at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. For the last 15 years, she and her husband, Marvin, had lived in Skillman, N.J., and Naples, Fla. Mrs. Jaffe was known within her family for her oil portraits of her children and grandchildren, a skill that had been nurtured early in life. Her father's uncle was Samuel Noah Kramer, a Russian immigrant and Philadelphia public-school teacher who became the University of Pennsylvania's Clark research professor of Assyriology, the study of a civilization that flourished in present-day Iraq 4,000 years ago. "Joan would spend weekends there, visiting," in a home rich in culture, Marvin Jaffe said in an interview Wednesday.

If the doomsday budget being floated by the nearly broke Philadelphia School District comes to pass, this is what school will look like in September: "No books, no paper, no clubs, no counselors, no librarian," Masterman teacher Elizabeth Taylor grimly told City Council last week. There would be bigger classes, but no aides to help manage them. Schools would lack sports, support staff to monitor lunchrooms and playgrounds, and secretaries. Some would lose security officers. Thousands of musical instruments would sit unplayed because there would be no music teachers to give lessons.

METRO METEOR lived a hard, fast life as an athlete, earning around $300,000 in his time, but when he was forced to hang up his horseshoes due to an injury, this racehorse embarked on a second career as an abstract artist. Since his paintings went up for sale in December, Metro has earned $32,000 - more than van Gogh made in his entire lifetime - and he still has both of his ears. Metro is altruistic, too. He and his owners, Ron and Wendy Krajewski of Gettysburg, Pa., are donating half of the proceeds from his work to a racehorse adoption program.

Ain Gordon and Nadine Patterson have walked the ground in Philadelphia. They've been to the spot, on North Sixth Street, where Pennsylvania Hall stood until it was burned to ground, three days after opening in 1838, by a mob worked to a frenzy by the very idea of women speaking out in public. New York's Gordon - actor, writer, director - and Philadelphia-based Patterson - filmmaker and photographer - have visited the city's historic graveyards, searched through records at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company.

Question: Our house was fitted with white aluminum siding by the prior owners decades ago. We've been in it about 16 years now. The siding has held up OK except in the front above the porch, which gets the morning sun. It is losing its paint. Is there a preferred method of dealing with this? Answer: Yes there is. And for advice about anything paint, I turn to the experts at the Paint Quality Institute in Spring House. First, how should you prepare old aluminum siding before painting?

Joyce Robins' painted ceramic works are as much painting and sculpture as they are ceramics. One of a group that art critic John Perreault dubbed the New York School of Ceramics - artists who for any number of reasons happened to be working in clay but considered themselves accidental ceramists - Robins was a painter who initially used clay to make foliage for her paintings of abstracted landscapes. At a time when the hard-and-fast rules about what constituted painting and sculpture were being bent and broken by artists like Richard Tuttle, turning clay into sculptural support for paint seemed a natural to Robins.