Philadelphia Goes Modern

The annual exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is the oldest U.S. show, put on by the nation's oldest art school*--and more often than not it is the stiffest, stuffiest major art show in the U.S. Its Temple Medal (no cash) is the second most important U.S. art prize (first: Carnegie Institute's annual $1,000 award).

Last week, Philadelphia gallery-goers found the ranks of the Academy's 140th annual show suitably stiffened with such veterans of the U.S. Old Guard as John Sloan, Alexander Brook, Charles Burchfield, Thomas Benton. They also found some of the most unacademic art now being done in the U.S. The Pennsylvania Academy itself shucked tradition by giving its coveted Temple Medal to an out-&-out esthetic experimentalist: 51-year-old Abraham Rattner, a Paris-trained New Yorker.

Painter Rattner's prizewinner was Kiosk, a near-abstraction in greens, yellows and a touch of purple. A Philadelphia reporter, struggling to find the metropolitan newsdealer peering from his booth window, framed by magazines and newspapers, called Kiosk a "what-is-it." Sniffed the New York Times's assured Edward Alden Jewell: "unqualifiedly the poorest thing by Abraham Rattner that I have ever seen."

For gallery-goers with an eye for details, there were other items of interest

P: Illinois' ghoulish-minded Brothers Albright were represented by Maine landscapes with as moldy-looking surfaces as the worm's-eye views of decomposing human flesh which made them famous (TIME, July 6, 1942).

P: The prizewinning sculpture, Jose de Creeft's huge head of Serge Rachmaninoff, masklike, with an opening at the back, had already been used by some artlover as an ashtray.

* Founded in 1805, after more than a dozen years of urgent petitions and civic meetings engineered by Charles Willson Peale, most popular American portrait painter of his time (post-Copley, pre-Stuart and Trumbull). An insatiable art lover, Philadelphia's Peale gave his children such names as Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian. He painted portraits of most of the Founding Fathers, including some 60 studies of Washington. At his avocation as jeweler, Peale also fashioned for General Washington the wooden false teeth which caused the well-known shrunken cheeks of the Stuart portraits.

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