12/19/2023 0 Comments Philadelphia art museum architecture![]() ![]() These men-some of them also powerful Fairmount Park commissioners with vested interests in the museum already- officially bequeathed their collections to the city and the Park Commission, but the museum then cared for and exhibited them. Johnson (1841-1917), a lawyer for corporations like Standard Oil, Baldwin Locomotive, and United States Steel. Elkins (1858-1919) John Howard McFadden (1850–1921), a wealthy cotton merchant and John G. Elkins (1832-1903), an oil and transportation magnate, and his son George W. Other valuable collections of Western art followed in the early twentieth century, including those of William L. The temple fragments came to the museum from the Madana Gopala Swamy Temple in the south Indian city of Madurai in 1919, after a wealthy Philadelphian purchased them while on her honeymoon. Prominent Philadelphia Donors These life-sized figures carved into the pillars of the Pillared Temple Hall represent deities and characters from important Hindu texts the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Over time, the bequest led to nearly one thousand acquisitions including innovative masterpieces by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906 ) and Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937 ), an African American. The paintings she donated were valuable, but the $500,000 discretionary fund she left for purchases had even more dramatic impact. Wilstach (1822-92 ) to the Fairmount Park Commission and to the museum began the institution’s move toward fine art. However, over the next few decades, the collections began to change. Large glass cases in Memorial Hall displayed arrays of artifacts according to function and material, progressing through time. Much like the Academy of Natural Sciences (founded in 1812) and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (founded in 1877), the Museum and School of Industrial Art organized its collections scientifically and systematically. At the Museum and School of Industrial Art, however, the decorative objects retained from the Centennial were also a teaching collection viewed by working people-factory laborers, artisans, and industrial designers-who might be inspired to make and consume better, more beautiful industrial goods. ![]() During this period, elites generally designed museums as sites for the middle and upper classes to cultivate or prove their good taste. However, when Americans compared themselves to their European counterparts in science, industry, or art, they often feared they were lacking. The Centennial Exhibition, while celebrating the history of American independence, also promoted the country and the city of Philadelphia as progressive, post-Civil War societies at the forefront of modernity and the Industrial Revolution. The Museum and School of Industrial Art arrived at a moment of change both in American history and in the history of museums. ![]() A combination of the Park Commission, the City, and museum trustees continued to make decisions-and to complicate decision-making-about the institution throughout its history. The Centennial brought the museum idea to fruition as members of the semiautonomous Park Commission, other city officials, and appointees to the federally authorized Centennial Commission worked together to stage the Exhibition. The Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art was founded in 1876 and opened to the public in Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall in 1877, but members of the Fairmount Park Commission had discussed the idea even earlier. Architects designed the Greek Revival building as a shell in which the museum could gradually build galleries for new collections. Originally located in Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall, the museum moved into its current location on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1928. With 90 percent of its collection acquired from donors but also a longstanding, if declining, financial relationship with Philadelphia’s city government and the Fairmount Park Commission, the museum negotiated a tension familiar to most art museums between the aesthetic values of high-society collectors and a charitable mission to enhance public life through art. By the 1920s, however, the museum shifted its emphasis toward cultivating elite taste as it constructed a monumental new building, acquired landmark collections, and courted wealthy patrons. Modeled on the South Kensington Museum in London, the new institution sought through both collections and classes to teach design so that goods produced in Philadelphia would be more competitive with those made in Europe. The Philadelphia Museum of Art-originally known as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art-developed from collections exhibited in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park.
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