The Perelman Building

I went to the Perelman Building today, which is a satellite location of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  It was my first time at the Perelman! Probably the best part was seeing Marc Chagall's painting "Paris Through the Window" (indeed there is a special exhibit at the Perelman highlighting Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jean Metzinger, among others).   Today was really the first time that Modigliani struck a strong interest with me.  I like the influence of African art on his paintings, and it seems that he had quite the tragic life.  He died young and poverty stricken, his death influencing his pregnant wife to kill herself shortly thereafter.  Ugly stuff, sounds just as bad as what Arshile Gorky went through (I have got to write about Gorky at a later time).


The Perelman Building has an interesting education room, meant to be used by art teachers as a resource for putting together lesson plans.  The kind ladies in the room there logged me onto a computer, so that I could browse a database of paintings, which featured high resolution images. It was a great way to look at the detail in Hieronymus Bosch paintings!


While I was in Philadelphia, I saw where the new Barnes Foundation will be, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.  I had visited the original Barnes Foundation in Lower Merion some years ago.  It of course featured an impressive collection of Renoir paintings, all jumbled up on the walls in a hardly cared for building.  On the grounds of the new location, they have displayed a copy of a portrait of Albert C. Barnes, painted by none other than Giorgio de Chirico.  I had been previously unaware of this painting (or had forgotten about it)!   Pretty cool anyway.