Philadelphia weekend

PHILADELPHIA, FAMILY WEEKEND
OCTOBER 27-29th 2006

THE purpose of the journey was to visit two extraordinary art exhibits. TESOROS, or treasures of Latin American art, from 1492 to 1820, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the collection at the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, PA.
For both I got the tickets with several weeks in advance, thru the Internet, and I also booked rooms at the Society Hill Bed & Breakfast, recommended by the Lonely Planet guide because of being one of the oldest (1832) boarding houses in the city; its excellent location in the Old City, and budget price. I had two others and they were fully booked for that weekend, so I didn’t want to risk our not finding anything.
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We started Friday evening, at about 6.30pm, by car, under the rain, and didn’t arrive there but three hours later, fairly tired and hungry.
We unloaded the car, and while Brian went to park it, we went into the restaurant-bar of the Society Hill B&B (on the corner of Chestnut and Third Streets, founded in 1832, it’s the oldest in the city). The guy at the bar gave me one key and one credit card receipt to sign. When I asked for the second key, he looked slightly nonplussed, then turned around and got me a second key, with a check-in card to sign.
The building is beautiful, four-stories high, with brick walls and steep stairs. The rooms were not bad: clean walls, pleasant if old furniture; a living room with table, rocking chair, small closet, TV, and sofa-bed, bathroom, and a room with a double bed.
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We didn’t stay for dinner at the restaurant-bar despite the continuous rain outside, because, even though the food looked fine, the noise –young crowd- was unbearable. We went out and found eventually a hole-in-the-wall where we had a decent hamburger and “steak pizza”.
Before going to bed, we dutifully filled the card indicating our desire to have breakfast in the room (the only option offered) at 8am.
“Undutifully”, we never got it, and when we intended to complain, we found the door to the restaurant-bar (where the tables were of the stool-height kind) was locked, and there was not a soul inside a staff member…
We went out again, and were fortunate to find a pretty nice place, where we had a pleasant breakfast. From there, a block up to Market St., where we waited for the bus to take us near the Museum. Luckily for us, instead of the announced rain, we had just some clouds, and warmer temperatures.
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On reaching the top of its famous staircase, we found on the floor, stamped on bronze, the no less famous Rocky’s foot prints, so that today anybody, boy or girl, can step on them and, raising the arms in a defiant gesture, facing the city, have his or her picture taken (one of the curious paradoxes of this country!).
We entered, finally, the Museum, to start our visit, with audio-guide, at 10.30am sharp.
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COMPARED with the “Three thousand years” exhibit, of some time ago, at the Metropolitan in NY and later, the one on Brazilian art, at the Guggenheim, this one, naturally, is more concentrated and defined than the former, larger and nationally more diverse than the latter.
Almost 300 hundred Colonial, religious and secular art pieces, from thirteen countries in Latin America, comprising examples of painting, sculpture, furniture, objects in gold and silver, ceramics and textiles. Three important Mexican cultural institutions collaborated with the PMA in its organization.
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Among the works that most appealed to me, featured, curiously enough, two oil paintings by the Mexican Cristóbal de Villalpando (1649-1714); a relatively small one, dating from 1688, painted on copper: “Adam and Eve in Paradise”, in which the Genesis is depicted: creation of Adam and Eve, disobedience, expulsion from Paradise, with many details like a couple of macaws on top of a palm tree, a small white unicorn in the background, flowers and plants and animals of every sort, like in a Medieval tapestry.
The other, a very large canvas, shows Saint Francis of Assisi inside a dark cave, the lower half of the painting, where the “real” world is barely visible, dreaming of his arrival to Heaven, upper half, full of light, and angelical figures, where the saint himself appears floating, smiling, being received by Jesus Himself. I felt moved, suddenly thinking of my father, and wishing he were “there” -he who in his youth had tried to imitate the Serafico-, in that place full of life, contented.
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There were another two large oils showing the typically Manicheist vision of the Catholic church: Saint Michel Archangel trampling the Devil. Both figures have perfect human bodies; the angel’s is rosy and white, his hair is blond and curly, under the silver helmet; he wears a silver armor, and a white tunic that falls just below the dimpled knee; he’s wearing sandals, and carries a sword. Below him, the Devil, completely naked, in more natural fleshy colors: dark red, brownish, bearded face, disfigured with rage, and blue claws on feet and hands!
Then, the other, by a Colombian artist from the XVII century, depicts Saint Thomas of Aquinas, dressed in black, and seated, trampling an heretic. The descriptive card read: “the turbaned figure could be Averrhoes, whose comments on Aristotle led many unbelievers to doubt the Catholic dogma and doctrine”.

We saw the Chinese and Japanese influence in Latinamerican art, and learned that the Spanish Word “biombo” comes from the Japanese “biobu”: shade or screen. We admired textiles from Peru and Bolivia, of Inca influence , and huge gilded wood statues of saints and martyrs, and wonderful Mexican silver objects, as well as ceramic and lacquered wood, from the Hispanic Society collection.
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This museum seemed to us much more harmonious and user-friendly than the Met, which is rather labyrinthine. On top of the interior beautiful staircase, presides the monumental beauty of the huntress Diana –in bronze?- by Augustus St Gaudens; Lonely Planet writes: “it was brought here from New York in 1932, rescued from the demolition of Madison Square Garden”. A copy, of natural size and in gilded bronze, stands graciously almost in the middle of the pretty yard in the Met American Wing. Diana is a naked virgin, an Antiquity Goddess of the Moon, the open fields, patroness of hunters and of women in childbirth. Her attributes are the bow and arrow. Below, on the main hall, as part of the Treasures exhibit, stands a gigantic “retablo” from a church in Brezil, devoted to Our Lady of Sorrows, another virgin, all dressed in mourning violet, tears on her eyes. Her sorrows come from her Son’s Passion; her attributes, seven daggers, or a sword thrust in her breast. She’s patroness of million of suffering men and women all over the world.
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As we came out, after a restful and light lunch in the cafeteria, and the visit to a few of the other galleries in the Museum, the sun was shining over the fall foliage on Benjamín Franklin Parkway. We agreed to walk to the Mütter Museum of the Medical Collage of Philadelphia, ten blocks away, to see the “disturbingly informative” collection of human skeletons, diseases, deformities. Indeed, informative and on occasion, nauseating…
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SUNDAY morning, the alarm clock wakes me up at 7.29. That was our agreement, so we could bathe and dress, have breakfast and be at the Barnes Foundation by 9.30am.
I don’t need to say that the second B in the B&B never appeared. So, by the time all of us were ready, dropped our keys in the office box, and packed the car, it was too late to have breakfast, and so we headed to Merion, PA, five miles northwest of the city, where Dr. Barnes had his residence and Gallery built in the mid-1920’s.
Nice area, charming houses, with gardens. We arrive to the gate, and the guardian tells us it’s too early. They don’t open before 9am. Looking at the car clock, I express my confusion. He clarifies: early this morning the clocks went back an hour, to the light savings-time!
So, in fact, today Sunday 29th October, it’s only 8.14 in the morning.
As one should find the positive in everything, we celebrate the fact that, after all, we’ll be able to have breakfast!!
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Finally, at 9.29 we find ourselves waiting at the threshold of the famous Barnes Gallery, decorated with Greek, Native American Indian and African art motives, and built by a French architect, who finished it in 1925.
Doctor Albert C. Barnes (his picture by Giorgio de Chirico can be seen in the Gallery)’ story, his fortune and his collection are doubtlessly interesting, but I’ll say first the profound aesthetic emotion produced by these halls where like a miracle there appeared, and multiplied, wonderful Renoirs, Cezzanes, Degas, Matisses; also a few Van Goghs, Monets, Courbets.
Doctor Barnes had very particular ideas about how he wanted to see and have seen and appreciated his acquisitions (over the years, directly or thru a middle-man, with the fortune he made by the patent he got in 1902 of a silver compound, to be known as Argyrol, an antiseptic as popular in its day as is now Tylenol). So, on a wall, the paintings follow an order not necessarily chronological or even by author, but rather because of their subject matter, or color tones… For instance, the pretty peach rose of Renoirs’ bathers, or the bright green of Rousseau’s jungles. One of us discovered Chirico; another, his unknown love for Matisse; I marveled at the five or six Modigliani: a young boy with blue eyes, a beautiful nude, in bright flesh color, a seated woman.
There is a large painting by Georges Seurat I had never seen, “Models”, where three naked women inside a large, light room: two are standing, one seated, and their clothes are lying around, in heaps of chemises, petticoats, skirts, blouses, umbrellas and hats. On the left, covering the wall, larger than life, another Seurat’s painting: “Sunday in the park La Grande Jatte”, where women, among the other Sunday strollers, appear fully clothed, with corset and hoop skirt under their formal, elegant clothes; they wear large hats and carry open umbrellas. And therefore, they have an altogether different silhouette from that of the naked bodies, in blue and yellow pointillisme, standing in the middle of the room!
Asides from painting, the Gallery exhibits also beautiful furniture, Greek, Japanese and African sculptures. There are, actually, two whole rooms devoted to Western African sculpture in stone and wood, pieces that had a powerful influence on many of the Impressionist, from Modigliani to Picasso.
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As is true of most “guardians” of art estates, those of the Barnes Foundation, feel proud imposing a series of strict rules of admission. One has to book at least three weeks in advance; once there, not only heavy coats and jackets have to be checked, but also backpacks and simple purses have to be put in lockers. It’s forbidden to draw or sketch and to take photos.
Outside, though, it’s allowed to stroll thru the beautiful arboretum and take pictures there. We pass a locked Tea House, and come to a Japanese pond with red and golden carps; on the grounds, besides the herb and lilac (all gone by now!) garden, we see fascinating trees, brought from the Orient…
We leave, fully satisfied with our weekend art feast! -- During the Thanksgiving weekend in the Castkills, in one of the second hand bookstores we found and bought the Barnes Foundation Catalogue, for a third of the normal price!

ps. Add to this the current exhibit a the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY: “From Cezanne to Picasso”, which comprise the paintings bought and sold by the French art dealer Vollard, among whose clients were Gertrude and Leo Stein and Albert C. Barnes…
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2nd. Ps (December)—Upon our return, we got our Xmas present! Having received our American Express bill, we tried to contact the hotel to question the full charge. As we couldn’t get through anybody, the credit card company investigated, and a month later it reported to us that “not being satisfied with the Merchant’s explanation” , if ever there was any, decided to give us credit for the whole stay!

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