A Tale of Two Shows in Philly for America’s 250th

PAFA’s shines, thanks in part to a dazzling renovation, the PMA’s not so much

B oth the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) are historic, distinguished museums, smack in center city Philadelphia. This past weekend I visited the City of Brotherly Love to see how American art is faring as we near July Fourth.

First, the PMA is still standing. Last November its board, brazenly incompetent, fired its new director, Sasha Suda, a giddily woke Canadian, inexperienced, and clearly a bad pick, and, without a search, hired a new one who has a past I’d call mixed. Lawsuits flew. To add humiliation to malpractice, the PMA spent hundreds of thousands of charitable dollars on a rebrand. The PMA became the Philadelphia Art Museum, or PhArt, for one brief smelly moment, apologies to Camelot. Having emptied air-freshener shelves at every Wawa, the board reverted to tried-and-true PMA. The press, loving high-society mud fights, had a grand old time.

Shouldn’t trustees fall on their swords? “Hey hey, ho ho, trustees Leslie Miller, Ellen Caplan, and Osagie Imasogie, you gotta go.” And everyone else with their fiduciary fingerprints on this mess.

Now, to the business of art. A Nation of Artists is a twofer. It’s a permanent-collection exhibition at both the PMA and PAFA, with more or less the same themes on view until 2027. Each museum displays its marquee art along with lesser-known and -seen things, a total of about a thousand works augmented by the superb Middleton Family Collection, owned by the local baseball czar John Middleton and his wife, Leigh.

I’ll start with PAFA, an institution that’s as distinguished as they come, founded in 1805 as America’s first school of fine arts and art gallery. Its glorious redo of its permanent collection salutes 1776 but also premieres its renovated building, nearly two years in the making. PAFA was founded by Philadelphia’s elites, among them four Declaration of Independence signers, to promote arts education since, they rightly believed, good, native art was a sign of a civilized country.

Frank Furness and George Hewitt designed the building, using a unique recipe of styles from Moorish Revival to Second Empire and much in between, with a palette of cerulean, Venetian red, plum, olive green, ochre, and pink. A Victorian opus of the first order, it now has got to be considered the crown jewel in Philadelphia culture. Its version of A Nation of Artists runs from biggies such as Benjamin West’s massive Death on a Pale Horse, from 1817, to first-rate art from its contemporary collection, so good and surprising that I kept saying “wow” as I saw art that’s mostly new to me. PAFA’s historical art collection is well-known. Winslow Homer’s Fox Hunt is its very high standard, but I didn’t know what wonders it had by artists living today.

Both PAFA and the PMA use similar themes. The PMA does one theme per gallery, but PAFA, with big galleries, creates groupings with five to seven, more or less, works. West’s Christ Rejected, from 1814, and James Brantley’s moody, earthy Brother James, from 1968, are shown together, joined by the theme “Gestures Across Time,” which is very general. The pairing jars for sure, but Brantley was a PAFA art student in the 1960s, and West, one of America’s and PAFA’s Old Masters, would have been part of his curriculum. There are many such moments, old and new, seeming to clash, but they don’t. It’s a permanent-collection display, so it isn’t narrative or linear, and it isn’t exploring a narrow theme. The art doesn’t have to match like a decorator matches objects, and objects don’t have to harmonize. They have to resonate, look compelling together, and one oughtn’t blow everything else out of the water. Davids and Goliaths are fine.

Other themes in the show are more precise, such as “Pensive Portraits,” “Bold Blues”  — and yes, that’s the color blue and not art about manic depression — “Pink Skies,” “The Tropics,” and “Winter.” There’s not a fizzler to be seen.

A section called “PAFA Grows with the Nation” is a well-deserved pat on the back to the art museum. Charles Willson Peale’s The Artist in His Museum, from 1822, is one of many showstoppers. He was among the founders of PAFA and of American museums, along with the artist, inventor, and philosopher William Rush. Both were savants and committed generalists, which means they were good at everything. I’m not sure they’d understand the tyranny of the specialist or the expert or the bubble dweller — all plagues — but they saw America as egalitarian and a place of economic opportunity and intellectual opportunity. They wanted the art-school students to learn from the best of the newest.

This section displays works such as Alice Neel’s Claudia Bach Pregnant, from 1975, a very cutting-edge nude, Joan Brown’s self-portrait in her studio, from 1977, as well as Diebenkorn, Rothko, and Harnett — abstract, figurative, and representative art that conveys possibilities rather than boundaries.

It wouldn’t be a truly Philadelphia museum without Thomas Eakins, who was the director of PAFA right after the Furness and Hewitt building opened. The Gross Clinic, from 1875, all 6 by 8 feet of it, has science, art, everyday life, blood and gore, experiment and discovery. It’s a frank, high-strung hospital drama and a documentary about learning and doing, and we’re the witness. It’s very American.

Both the PMA and PAFA have sections called “Prosperity, Abundance, and Inequity.” It’s what we’d expect and fine to ignore, but worth a few words since it’s a theme covering most of an entire, big gallery. The curators don’t seem to understand that “equity” means uniform outcomes, an anti-human and certainly anti-American concept. “Slavery underpinned the prosperity of the United States” reads the text for this gallery. This isn’t true. If the curators believe this, they’re suckers. In any event, equity has nothing to do with the wonderful works there by Sargent, Reginald Marsh, Alice Neel, Bo Bartlett, or even portraits by black artists I love like Barkley Hendricks and Beverly McIver. No matter. I’m there for the art.

In nearly every gallery I marveled at the quality of this collection, which means the prescience and good taste of those who built it. PAFA’s acquisitions were artist-driven rather than exclusively the work of degreed curators. It shows. Doron Langberg’s Daniel Reading is from 2019, when he was very much an emerging artist. Alex Lukas, an artist I didn’t know, gets a space of his own for a 6-foot urban landscape, a scene of ratty billboards and trash made beautiful.

There are individual treasures, and then there’s gathered grandeur. One gallery displays Washington Allston’s huge Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, from around 1812. Allston was the subject of my dissertation, and, these days, I think I chair his fan club in the absence of other sensate alternatives. It’s next to Gilbert Stuart’s full-length George Washington, from 1796, and among three Victorian white-marble figure sculptures, jalopies to some, reeking so much of high drama that they border on camp, but they’re central to the American aesthetic. Plunk in the middle is a wild Mickalene Thomas portrait from 2008, acrylic, rhinestones, enamel, and wood panel. A few steps away is The Gross Clinic and Harriet Hosmer’s sculpture of Puck from 1856 — counterintuitive, but all seem happy. I love the energy and surprise.

Of course, amid PAFA’s triumph are a carbuncle or two. The introductory gallery by the front door and the museum greeter’s desk is, as far as I can tell, about the American flag and what it calls “Americanness.” The gallery’s tiny, the art is so-so, and the messaging so muddled that I forgot about it as soon as I walked up the stairs to the main course. There’s a shredded Confederate flag. Yawn. Need I say more? PAFA doesn’t have a decorative arts collection — silver, furniture, textiles, ceramics, and things like that — but it does have good works on paper. There’s a Fred Wilson show from that department on a separate floor. Wilson is a favorite among curators who fancy oppression as a topic. It’s museum art and a snooze. I loved PAFA’s sparkling, uplifting Kati Gegenheimer show about love, luck, and time. The art is from the 2020s. The title, We’ve Only Just Begun, is inspired by the Carpenters tune. What’s not to like?

The Middletons lent 120 works to PAFA and the PMA for A Nation of Artists. At PAFA, there’s also a luscious Jasper Johns Flag from the early 1960s, a pivot-point de Kooning, a Pollock, and a painting by Clyfford Still. They quietly buy the best. For the PMA, they sent a group of sublime Hudson River School sunsets, among them Robert Duncanson’s Waiting for a Shot, from 1869. If Whistler ever tried sunsets, he wouldn’t have topped this one.

What to say about A Nation of Artists at the PMA? It’s a bit of a dud. The curators, most of whom I know and like, seem to have decided to do more or less equal numbers of art by dead white men on the one hand and what they’d call underrepresented artists, mostly women, black, and Native American artists. It seems forced and mechanized. Push them as hard as you want, but Lee Krasner, Meta Fuller, Helen Lundeberg, and Marguerite Zorach just fade when in proximity to the splendid Interior by Edwin Dickinson, the Middleton Collection’s Hopper sailing scene, a Thomas Hart Benton nude, and an early work by Marsden Hartley.

Even while going intersectional, side-by-side displays flop. Chuckie Williams’s Ray Charles, a vault dweller and a clunker from 1985 to 1999 that not even glitter can save, looks silly and shrill next to Florine Stettheimer’s brilliant Spring Sale at Bendel’s, from 1921. Stettheimer shows us why the Roaring Twenties roared. Two pictures down is Ben Shahn’s Miners’ Wives, from 1948. I’m not a Shahn fan — too New Deal sappy and soggy — but who wouldn’t rather be at Bendel’s? The juxtapositions at PAFA jar and shock, but there’s frisson. At the PMA, they just seem awkward.

I’ve never seen so much Horace Pippin and so much Andrew Wyeth, both what I call one-is-enough artists. There’s a lovely antebellum gallery — that’s its “Prosperity, Abundance, and Equity” room — with dazzling patterned red wallpaper; a florid but fun marble fireplace mantle; pretty still life paintings; and coy, frilly furniture. Overall, it’s the kind of room where you’d find Aunt March from Little Women. Right in the middle of the room is a supersized David Drake earthenware pot. It’s fine, but, here, it’s an excretion. Whoever owned the finery lived well, Drake was a slave, life’s a bitch for some, a bonanza for others, so boring and formulaic, and the art is a prop. The PMA’s Eakins and Philadelphia Centennial galleries are fantastic, as is its big gallery of panoramic landscapes. I loved seeing the PMA’s Modernist ceramics, silver, and furniture get the spotlight.

Part of A Nation of Artists was installed a few years ago. What’s new are galleries of mostly Modernist art well balanced between paintings and decorative arts, with raids into older art like the antebellum room. All of this unfolds on the PMA’s second floor. The museum’s 18th- and 19th-century American art is on the first floor running from colonial days to the Civil War. It’s an early 2020s arrangement. There are the museum’s Peales, its top-notch colonial silver and furniture, and its collection of White House china, one of my favorite rooms. The Hayes china from the late 1870s, weird and flamboyant, was well worth whatever shenanigans it took to get him in office.

The wing ends with an 1808 Grecian Style Philadelphia room mixing curvy chairs that mimic those shown on ancient Greek pots and Pompeiian-style wallpaper. It’s theatrical and Federal style at its extreme.

Also in this gallery at the PMA is an introductory wall panel telling us up front, in bold type, that “nearly all the works of art in the American galleries bear connections to slavery.” Following are three paragraphs of predictable waterworks. A panel outside the gallery assures us that the museum’s staff has turned flagellate over the Lenape.

First of all, what galleries? Over two floors, A Nation of Artists seems to absorb American art from the colonials through Eakins and Modernism. De Kooning? Connected to slavery? Whistler was a Confederate sympathizer like his mother but Sargent? Eakins? Mary Cassatt? Even if this one-line whopper of a lie applies only to the dozen or so colonial, Federal, and antebellum galleries, how so? There’s the Grecian room. The family made money from the opium trade, we’re told, but what’s the slavery angle? How about the Quaker art? What about those rows of old chairs, meant, I thought to teach the evolution of style? The Christ Church silver? Rutherford Hayes’s flounder-shaped fish platter? Not a word. “Nearly all the works of art in the American galleries bear connections to slavery.” That’s the curators’ theme. It’s incendiary and can’t just be dropped.

The slavery-explains-everything wall panel followed the Black Lives Matter riots and hysteria in 2020 and the reckonings that race pimps demanded. Naïveté, ignorance, and white guilt bred outrage. In 2026, this wall text and the ideology behind it seem shopworn and well-rebuked. Possibly it’s still there from simple laziness, but America’s 250th is upon us. In a spirit of gratitude and clear-headedness, I’d ship that wall panel to the nearest hazardous-waste site. There’s an asbestos dump in Ambler, a metal pit on Delaware Avenue, and there’s always the Franklin slag pile.