Aftershocks of the $68 million sale of Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic rippled across the city’s cultural landscape yesterday as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts disclosed that it had sold one of its most recognizable paintings – Eakins’ The Cello Player – to help finance the deal. “We gave it long and careful and agonizing consideration,” said Herbert Riband, the academy board vice chairman. “Our board did not undertake this lightly.” Riband would not disclose – and said he did not know – the identity of the buyer nor the price paid for the large 1896 oil portrait […]
AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE OUT
PHAWKER RADIO: Yo La Tengo‘s AND THEN NOTHING TURNED ITSELF INSIDE OUT Gregory Crewdson’s eerie photographs of suburbia at dusk require set-ups as elaborate as a film shoot. “My photographs are about the moment of transition between before and after,” he explains. “Twilight is evocative of that. There’s something magical about the condition.” The eerie effect of twilight crossed with strong artificial light — street lights, house lights, lights from the sky — is exaggerated by Crewdson’s choice of backdrop, which is almost always nondescript suburban America. He is not the first photographer to be drawn to twilight — “nature […]
ARTSY: Nice Cock!
Eric Fausnacht’s chickens and roosters at Muse Gallery are birds of a different feather. In a way, his paintings and prints that seem to be reproductions of his paintings, make the case for chickens as dandies and grandees. Their plumage is spectacular, at least as Fausnacht paints feathers. And the cockscombs are baroque, looking more like the velvety flower of the same name than like my personal image of a cockscomb. ARTBLOG: Taking Fartsy Out Of Artsy Since At Least 10 Minutes Ago
ARTSY: Grand Dame Of 60s Op-Art Still Hip at 90
BY AMY S. ROSENBERG INQUIRER STAFF WRITER In the ’60s, she was making art that was part of the psychedelic fabric of its day, mind-blowing optical trickery, paintings that vibrated and moved, art that anticipated a digital medium few had imagined. But Edna Andrade was no hippie, no part of the like-wow drug culture that embraced the op art movement of the 1960s. She was middle-aged, living on her own on Carlisle Street in Center City, her architect husband having left her, isolated from the New York or European art scene, no starving waitress thing for her, no East Village […]
LOCAL GIRL MAKES GOOD: Former Fixture Of Area Poetry Slams Voted Into Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame
BY AMY Z. QUINN She’s hardly the most famous performer to ever come out of Jersey — The Boss and The Chairman Of The Board still hold those titles — but without a doubt, Patti Smith, the High Poetess of Punk, remains the greatest communicator of the kind of nameless electric angst that drives Kids In Search Of Something to head north on the Jersey Turnpike and never look back. When Patti beat it out of Gloucester County, fleeing a factory job and a year short of her degree at then-Glassboro State Teacher’s College, she was armed with a book […]
EAKINS STAYS HOME! HOORAY! OUR RICH PEOPLE ARE RICHER THAN THEIR RICH PEOPLE! HOORAY!
As announced yesterday, a consortium of the local moneyed class has pulled out their checkbooks and stopped the Wicked Witch of Walmart from getting her flying monkey paws on our Eakins masterpiece. Maybe next time we can rally $60 million in a coupla weeks to, say, build a new school or put some new books in the Public Library or something. Still, let us applaud the following: Leonore Annenberg ($10 million to the Gross Clinic effort) is the widow of Walter Annenberg, the publisher and U.S. ambassador to Britain. She is the president, chairman, and sole director of the Annenberg […]
Twinkle-Toed Footloose Dude Challenges Eakins Buyers To A Dance-Off, ‘For Pink Slips, Bitches!’
PHILADELPHIA – Kevin Bacon has joined a group fighting to keep Thomas Eakins’ 1875 masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic,” in its hometown. The Committee to Keep Eakins’ Masterpiece in Philadelphia will work to raise awareness about the social and artistic importance of the work, which was painted in Philadelphia and hangs in Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Bacon, 48, is a Philadelphia native. He has starred in films including “Mystic River,” “Apollo 13” and “Footloose.” “This masterpiece and this artist are so intertwined and connected to this city that it should and must remain where it was created,” Bacon said in a […]
EARLY WORD: Requiem For Palookaville
PW: “His paintings are of bagmen and boxers, ninth street peddlers and mobsters, broken women, beautiful women, celebrities, historical figures, Philly icons, loan sharks, and so on. They are honest and raw and moving and tell a little bit about what its meant to be alive today.”
ARTSY: I Often Dream Of Trains
By SIMONE SECCI ROME CORRESPONDENT Who was Giorgio de Chirico and why should you care? You bet. Almost certainly, the ’50s American school of Abstract Expressionism wouldn’t even existed without him. Considering that this Italian artist whose career was extremely long but so shortly relevant to art history probably seriously influenced the most important surrealist artists of the day, people such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. And so it followed that surrealism created a birth place for the upcoming American Abstract Expressionism, people like Jackson Pollack and William De Kooning. But his influence doesn’t just end in the American […]
It Was 50 Years Ago Today, Allen Ginsberg Taught The Sheep To Stray, He’s Been Going In And Out Of Style But He’s Guaranteed To Raise A SMILE
THE BEAT PAGE: Howl CITY LIGHTS: 50 Years Ago They Wanted To Send Bookstore Owners To Jail On Obscenity Charges For Selling A Book We Now Celebrate On Public Radio, It’s Called Progress RADIO TIMES: We celebrate the 50th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” We talk with ANNE WALDMAN, a friend and colleague of Allen Ginsberg and JASON SHINDER editor of “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later.”
EARLY WORD: The Fiddler Now Steps To The Road, He Writes ‘Everything Was Returned Which Was Owed, On The Back Of A Fish Truck Which Loads, While My Conscience Explodes’ *
EBAY SHOW BLACK FLOOR GALLERY 319 N. 11th ST. OPENS THIS FRIDAY DECEMBER 1ST 7-11 *”Visions Of Johanna”
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t
Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane Wednesday, November 22nd Hour 1 Aside from Thomas Eakins’ painting “The Gross Clinic” at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, what other important works are in hospitals, schools, and non-museum institutions in Philadelphia? We talk with MICHAEL LEJA, Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania and PENNY BALKIN BACH, Executive Director of the Fairmount Park Art Association. Hour 2 Being on your best behavior during the holidays. We talk manners with Johns Hopkins professor PM FORNI, author of “Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct.” Then, New York Times ethicist RANDY COHEN helps us […]
IMMODEST PROPOSAL: Get Your Wallet Out, Bitches!
Leaders in the city’s art, business and political communities are scrambling to raise $68 million in six weeks so a treasured Thomas Eakins masterwork will not be removed from its only home. Officials acknowledge that matching the record-setting sum for the lifelong Philadelphian’s 1875 painting, “The Gross Clinic,” will be a challenge. However, they said they have to believe that they can prevent the departure of an irreplaceable part of the city’s cultural history. Let’s get out the old abacus and figure out how much each of us has to pony up to keep “The Gross Clinic” within the gates […]