Reading this week:

• Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman (not very weird at all)

I alluded to it in the last post but the gaping hole in my super amazing wife’s previous encounter with the City of Brotherly Love was a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We had gotten close the previous day with our visit to the Rodin Museum but made a point of not going all the way over. We wanted to start the day there and savor it, and so on our second day in Philly we arose and sampled the hotel breakfast fare and started to make our way on up the museum.

There was a Pride festival that day which complicated our approach somewhat. The festival was still in the early stages of setting up so we were still able to navigate around the various fences being put in place. This brought us first to the Washington Monument which is placed there in front of the museum, and whoo boy I can’t believe that sucker is still standing without some explanatory signs. Lots of George Washington lording over Native Americans sorta stuff. Plus like, they got a guy who killed an alligator with a trident, which is just not very nice. Though the animal sculptures are very graceful, especially the cows.

From there and less vigorously than Rocky we clambered on up the steps to the museum itself. The single most impressive thing about the Philadelphia Museum of Art is just how monumental it is. It is quite a building. I think some of the effect comes from it wrapping around you as you ascend into the expansive courtyard and then eventually find the door. But then you go into the entrance hall and it is in fact just as big on the inside as the outside. It is so big that the massive Calder mobile slowly spinning above right in the center of the towering space is barely noticeable (though also it is white on a marble background in dim lighting, which really doesn’t do the mobile justice).

Then came the task of choosing what art to see. We swung by a special exhibit they had on with two sunflower paintings by van Gogh that aren’t normally next to each other, which was neat, but we chose our first destination as the Asia wing to see the teahouse. The museum has a whole teahouse inside, you see, and that’s not the least of it. Hiking on up through the southwest wing they have all sorts of other faraway architectural bits. Turns out they do the Met Cloisters thing of buying up bits of old-world architecture and then incorporating it into the fabric of the museum itself, to dazzling effect. Oh, to have been alive and rich at the time when you could just go around Europe and buy it.

We passed through the Portal from the Abbey Church of Saint-Laurent and then marveled at the woodwork in the Reception Hall from the Palace of Duke Zhao. The Portal was a solid 500 years older than the Reception Hall, but the hall was much more intricately painted. Breezing past other ancient art we made it to the far end of the building and thus finally to the teahouse. Quite the space! The teahouse itself is a whole teahouse, acquired from the architect Ōgi Rodō and plucked from Tokyo back in 1928, it now sits in a space designed with such lighting that it does feel like you are somehow outside, a sort of intimate infinite that also has a teahouse. That was very interesting to walk around and peer into at the other art they have scattered on it. All in all trippy and worth a visit.

We had been unknowingly heading forward in time as we perused this wing, but now consciously approached the 19^th and 20^th century items. We did this as we were waiting for our friend to arrive and meet up with us. Through this stuff I liked the stuff I usually like, paintings with nautical themes, or bright landscapes set in a mysterious orient, or showy Art Nouveau. The single most brilliant thing I think I saw though was Memory Piece by Frank O’Hara, which has a model of a footprint and drawers of sand. Preserving footprints in sand! What a metaphor. I loved it.

After our friend arrived what we had left to view were the Duchamps, which normally the museum has a grander collection of but at the moment most, we assessed, were actually in New York. The art-iest experience we had in this section was trying to figure out what a dark and empty room was for. We were wandering off when a woman arrived and announced that her friend had told her she had to see what was there. Turns out the mysterious door on the other side of the room was Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Frankly it didn’t move me but good on Duchamp to have pulled off such a piece.

Having done our savoring we slowly wound down our visit, exiting via the sculpture garden which had fewer sculptures than our friend remembered. I liked the giant plug though, that was good, and perched loftily. The sculpture garden brought us to the Schuylkill River and an idyllic walk back downtown to an art festival where we nearly almost bought something. And then finally back on a bus and back on home, having sated our Philadelphia desires for, I assume, another decade or so.