Last week Sara and I went to Philly together for a few days! Our original intention was to hit the Princeton Art Museum on our way down. It just reopened after a major expansion and reinstallation, and now that our much more modest new building campaign is officially underway, seeing what everyone else is doing with their spaces is of increased interest. Unfortunately, it turned out that the day we were headed south was also Princeton's commencement, which would make the town, and parking, a zoo, so we decided to skip. Carey suggested that she and I might go later this summer, perhaps combining with a trip to a donor's house nearby.
Since I moved back to CT in 2012, I've been back to Philly a bunch of times, but since Covid I think only once, in 2023, when Carey and I went down for the opening of the Maguire Museum at St. Joseph's, which took over the former Barnes Museum building. I also really didn't spend that much time in Center City, which is where we stayed and mostly ate; Mt. Airy was a suburban neighborhood 20 outside the city on the SEPTA trains, and Temple was in North Philly. It was also kind of ironic the number of times Sara asked if I had done this or that during my four years in Philadelphia and the answer was generally "no" unless it was an art museum. I guess I really was focused on being a student back then, damn!
The first place we went was the Penn Museum. I could not tell you the last time I visited, though I have memories of bringing Temple undergraduates as a baby TA for Arts of the Western World. They've done a partial expansion/reconstruction, so some galleries, including Egypt, are still closed, but others are brand new and beautifully installed. I did find it interesting that Greek, Roman, and Etruscan were exactly the same as 20 years ago -- right now to the display of Greek pottery that included a Geometric vessel with a swastika, which I used to enjoy watching my students notice with concern before explaining its history. It was both nostalgic to see as well as a little disappointed to find it not updated at all (even the smell seemed to be...stale).
The only "miss" of our cultural events was a place called the Magic Garden, which was a multi-building, multi-level folk art and mosaic project, done in the 1970s and 1980s by a man who really enjoyed depicted himself as a three-armed figure in the nude (eye roll). Worthy of note: our Gen-Z tour guide, in describing the artist's life, mentioned a time when his mental health was so poor that he "attempted to un-alive himself." I couldn't believe that someone actually used TikTok self-censoring phrases in real life, which after the tour was over I learned Sara couldn't either. Are we old? NO. It is the children who are wrong!
On Thursday we did a heavy one-two punch of the PMA and the Barnes Foundation. I was so delighted to visit the PMA again. It too has a "scent" that was familiar to me from 20 years ago, but without the arid feeling of being stuck in time that I felt at the Penn Museum. Some old friends were still in place, like Alma-Tadema's A Reading From Homer, or nearby where I expected to see them, although it was a little sad that the room of Abstract Expressionists, where I used to stare at Klein and Motherwell and Newmann and try to "get them," was totally different. I think the Duchamp material must be mostly on loan -- no fountain or bicycle wheel, no Nude Descending the Staircase, only The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (yawn) and Étant donnés (which I gleefully led Sara to look at in disturbance, remembering lining up my Temple students to do the same, with one kid asking if Duchamp was a serial killer).
I felt a sense of casually re-encountering a friend, without what I sometimes feel in a museum: a drive to see deeply, to absorb everything, to take lots of pictures, which then makes me exhausted. I think I was conscious that we were going to be seeing a lot of art that day, so I needed to pace myself, and it wound up feeling chill and relaxed, instead. After we had lunch in the cafe, I wanted to find Eakins -- alas, The Gross Clinic was on loan to PAFA, but I stared at The Agnew Clinic instead, and showed Sara one of my favorite works, H. O. Tanner's Annunciation. Mary is convincingly a frightened Palestinian teenager, and the angel is a glowing slit of light appearing in her convincingly poor MENA interior!
I was also delighted to see or notice new things. In the Penn Museum, Sara was intently studying jewelry, no matter the type of gallery we were in, and in the PMA, she was pointing out a lot of porcelain and other decorative objects that I often would have paid less attention to. That's one of the joys of going to a museum with another person! Another new discovery was Daniel Garber's portrait of his daughter, Tanis -- incredibly luminous, with a palette of cool blues, greens, and yellows that struck me as a perfect complement to the warmth of the Tanner painting I had just been admiring in a gallery nearby.
Next we hit the Barnes, which Sara absolutely loved. I was happy to re-discover that Barnes collected a few Venetian Renaissance paintings, including a lovely Veronese Baptism. In both museums Sara was drawn to the pastel palette of Puvis de Chavannes, who Wikipedia informs me is considered a Symbolist painter. (Oh, and in the PMA, of course I looked for the painting called The Source of Life, aka the river of babies, aka what Sean once called the "goyim"). Later we chilled on the patio at the Barnes as I enjoyed the most expensive tiny plastic cup of wine ($15!) known to man. Then we backtracked to the PMA, as we had forgotten to visit the gift shop to satisfy Sara's desire for postcards (and she kindly got me one of Tanner!)
On Friday, on our way out of Philadelphia, we stopped in Chestnut Hill. I had forgotten how beautiful the drive is from Center City, along Kelly Drive to Lincoln Drive. We didn't stop in my actual old neighborhood, because Chestnut Hill is the fancier adjacent one! Killian's Hardware, where Phyllis had to buy fuses for her ancient wiring, the Weavers Way Co-op - I can't say it was nostalgia I felt, because I didn't feel any desire to return, either to the place itself or to the time of my life where I lived there. It was just a peaceful enjoyment of the moment and seeing it with Sara.
We ate well and Sara chased down many a bougie coffee, but the outstanding meal, hands down, was the French restaurant, Parc. Massive and sprawling, right on Rittenhouse Square, and incredibly loud inside, but the food was fantastic. They're apparently famous for this overflowing bread basket with four or five different types, plus herb butter, but we were slightly stymied by the additional bread that accompanied the cheese plate (which also had honey, raspberry, and some crunchy nuts, so good). We held ourselves back from going all-in on the bread out of concern for displacing our entrees, and the table was so small that they had to whisk our overflowing basket away to serve them (sniff). I got beef bourguignon, which so good I could have wept, velvety mashed potatoes, the pearl onions I can never find when I make it myself, and Sara got lamb shank Moroccan style.
I don't think I'll be in a rush to go back to Philly. Truly I am a suburban girl, because streets that smell like urine, and a panhandler who threw water on Sara when she declined to give him money, are enough to remind me that I'd like to visit, briefly, and never stay. But it was awesome to experience with Sara! Somehow despite our decades of friendship, I don't think we've ever actually traveled just the two of us. There is, of course, the much-mourned Florence/Rome 2022 voyage that she didn't get to take, so one day...one day! :-)
