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Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is America’s first school and museum of fine arts. A recipient of the 2005 national Medal of Arts presented by the President of the united States, PAFA is a recognized national leader in fine arts education. nearly every major American artist has taught, studied, or exhibited at the Academy. The institution’s world-class collection of American art continues to grow and provides what only a few other art institutions in the world offer: the rare combination of an outstanding museum and extraordinary faculty known for its commitment to students and for the stature and quality of its artistic work. David R. Brigham, President & Chief Executive Officer John J. Berg, Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration Jeffrey Carr, Dean of the School of Fine Arts Melissa A. DeRuiter, Executive Vice President of Development James Gaddy, Director of Human Resources Harry Philbrick, The Edna S. Tuttleman Director of the Museum Heike Rass, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Communications David Sigman, Acting Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Anne Stassen, Dean of Students Andre S.F. van de Putte, Dean of Enrollment Preview is published three times a year by PAFA for alumni, friends, faculty, staff, and students. Produced by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Marketing Department Designed by Tara Hammond Copy Editor Heike Rass For comments or questions, contact Heike Rass, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Communications, at hrass@pafa.org. Board of Trustees Kevin F. Donohoe, Chair Herbert S. Riband, Jr., Esq., Vice Chair & Secretary Thomas N. Pappas, Vice Chair James C. Biddle, Vice Chair Thomas L. Bennett, CFA, Treasurer Anne E. Mccollum, Assistant Secretary Roger H. Ballou, Assistant Treasurer Gerald P. Barth Sally J. Bellet, Esq. Max N. Berry, Esq.* Karl Bupp Donald R. Caldwell, Chair Emeritus Kenneth Catanella Charles E. Chase Lynn Nowicki Clarke* Jonathan L. Cohen* Monica Duvall Dilella, M.D. Paulett Eberhart John A. Fry Edward T. Harvey Anthony A. Ibargüen Joel M. Koppelman Marguerite Lenfest Francis J. Leto Winston I. Lowe, Esq. Frances M. Maguire* Honorary Dorrance H. Hamilton Emeritus Robert L. Byers, Sr. Barbara L. Greenfield, Chair Of Emeritus Trustees Samuel J. Savitz William A. Slaughter, Esq. Richard E. Woosnam Frank Martucci* Francis P. Newell, Esq. James E. O’Neill, Esq. Steven K. Ritter Gretchen E. Roede Theodore O. Rogers, Jr., Esq.* William L. Rulon-Miller Linda Saligman* Steven L. Sanders William H. Schorling, Esq. Alfred R. Shands, III* Henry B. du P. Smith Martha Mcgeary Snider Julie D. Spahr Barbara A. Sylk Robert M. Turner Richard W. Vague Debora C. Zug *National Trustee Ex officio David R. Brigham, President and CEO Al Gury, Faculty Representative Nancy Bea Miller, President of Alumni Association Alicia A. Sterling, President of Women’s Board Gary Steuer, Chief Cultural Officer of The Office of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy Ahmeenah Young, President & CEO of the Pennsylvania Convention Center Photo: Susan Beard Design Photo: Hinda Schuman letter from the President The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has recently entered into two business relationships that will directly benefit our students. Blick Art Materials, the nation’s largest art supplier, has agreed to operate PAFA’s art supply store on the sixth floor. Blick has been a generous supporter for two years, joining our Business Partners, sponsoring events, and donating hundreds of art supplies and gift cards. In June, they will renovate PAFA’s art supply store and reopen within just a few weeks. The new store will sell a mix of Blick items and other brands, and will vastly expand student and faculty access to materials by shuttling materials from their much larger Chestnut Street store. Blick will also bundle materials at the beginning of each semester at significant discounts to serve the needs of entire courses. lastly, Blick will carry PAFA branded sketchbooks, t-shirts, and literature about PAFA’s programs at their Chestnut Street Store. Anthropologie, the fashion and décor retailer, has recently commissioned designs from six PAFA students and alumnae, whose work will be hand-painted onto denim and muslin skirts and dresses. Congratulations to current students Jana Bailey, Heather McMordie, and Amanda Waguespack, and alumnae Catherine Blinn, lauren garvey, and Aubrey levinthal for being selected. They will be recognized by name on hangtags attached to the garments, along with a few words about PAFA. The design team at Anthropologie is excited about collaborating with fine artists in developing these new garments, and the artists look forward to seeing their work in a new format. PAFA appreciates the many ways that the business community supports its mission. A full list of our Business Partners appears on the back cover. We are much stronger because of your generosity. < David R. Brigham President and CEO From the Desk of the Museum Director While late winter and early spring have been warm in Philadelphia, things have been positively hot at the Museum due to the enthusiastic response to Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit. PAFA curator Anna Marley has crafted an extraordinary exhibition which reveals much about Tanner, the artist, and Tanner, the person, as well as some fascinating insights into how Tanner’s work and life fit into — or didn’t — American culture one hundred years ago. Perhaps even more interestingly, the exhibition reveals some interesting fault lines in contemporary American culture. To me, Tanner’s life story is surprisingly well known in Philadelphia - the story of a young African American artist, the son of a prominent pastor, training at PAFA with the esteemed Thomas Eakins, eventually making his way to France where he finds sustained professional success. He also found love, marrying Jessie Macauley Olssen, whom he painted with great skill, grace, and whom, it is clear to see, he adored. With Jessie he fathered a son, Jesse. And yet the artistic side of the story continues to provoke our sensibilities. First, it must be said that comparing Tanner to Eakins is missing the point. Despite Eakins’ early influence on Tanner’s work, and their long friendship, Tanner’s work moves in a very different direction. To quote Eric Fischl, whose work will be mounted this summer where Tanner’s now hangs, Eakins was a finger painter, while Tanner was a wrist, and even an arm painter. Think of the tiny, controlled marks which make up most Eakins paintings – he was manipulating his brush primarily with his fingers, building relatively thin layers of paint. One of the revelations of the Tanner exhibition is seeing how many ways Tanner manipulates paint, from thin, gauzey washes to thick impastos, even paint seemingly squirted out of the tube directly onto the canvas. In his restless experimentation Tanner seems more akin to Albert Pinkham Ryder or Ralph Blakelock than to Eakins. The other great provocation of Tanner’s work is its overt spirituality. This quality of his work has attracted new audiences, including many church groups, to come to the exhibition. It also reminds us that American art has traditionally been wary of religion. It is one of the great distinguishing characteristics of American art Jannalyn Bailey, Seussly, 2012 that it focuses on what’s real — even if the definition of what’s real keeps changing, from the 19th century focus on landscape to the late 20th century focus on popular culture, American artists have born witness to what is around them. Tanner’s great works bear witness to precisely what you cannot see around you. His great themes of resurrection and annunciation are things we can only imagine, and his greatest theme, light, is not just the light we see, it is The light. I am proud that we have presented, in our secular space, the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose world view was rooted in faith. May the dialogue continue! < Harry Philbrick The Edna S. Tuttleman Director of the Museum Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation, 1898, Oil on canvas, 57 x 71 1/4 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1899, W1899-1-1 PREVIEW // SPRIng/SuMMER 2012 // SEE FOR YOURSELF
upcoming Exhibitions A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre August 4, 2012 - April 2013 Historic Landmark Building A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre tells a fascinating tale about art education, mentorship and practice, and learning from historical art. On view from August 4, 2012 to April 2013, PAFA’s Morse installation will set the artist’s famous painting into an environment that will mirror what is shown in the picture. The Morse painting, on special loan from the Terra Foundation of American Art, will be on one side of the gallery with objects that help provide a broader context for the themes of artistic practice and identity, while the other half of the gallery will be hung salon-style with paintings from PAFA’s collection that highlight the four academic genres taught and exhibited at PAFA in the first half of the nineteenth century. The exhibition will coincide with the demanding copy class taught at PAFA where students will be encouraged to select works installed in the Morse room. not only will visitors encounter a gallery resembling the one depicted by Morse, but they will witness artists copying historical pictures in the gallery as is represented by Morse. By making their copies next to Morse’s painting, PAFA’s students will show audiences how American artists – whether professional and famous, or emerging, or still in school – operate on a continuum of history that traces lessons and knowledge back to the Renaissance and ages beyond. Coordinated jointly by Curator of Historical American Art, Dr. Anna O. Marley, and Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art, Dr. Robert Cozzolino, A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre will bring history to life. This exhibition is underwritten by a grant and loan of artwork by the Terra Foundation for American Art. < Samuel F. B. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre, 1831-33, Oil on canvas, 73 3/4 x 108 in., Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1992.51 Highly-Anticipated Professional Debut of PAFA Students at the 111th Annual Student Exhibition (Continued from page 1) This year, supporters at the Angel or Philanthropist levels will have a new opportunity to support student scholarships by sponsoring a student’s wall. The 4:00 pm Connoisseur level allows guests to arrive first for a champagne reception, providing them with an opportunity to see the exhibition, talk to students and purchase art work prior to the general opening of the Preview Party at 5:00 pm Additional entry times include 6:00 and 7:00 pm with tickets priced accordingly: Philanthropist $1000 (4:00 pm entry), Connoisseur $500 (4:00 pm entry), Angel $500, Collector $300 (5:00 pm entry), Patron $200 (6:00 pm entry), and Friend $100 (7:00 pm entry). guests enjoy cocktails, hors d’ oeuvres and a light dinner buffet, along with the early opportunity to purchase artworks. Valet parking is also provided. For ticket information for the Preview Party, please visit pafa.org, or contact Patty Castner at 215-972-0550 or pcastner@pafa.org. All proceeds, including a percentage of works sold, support student scholarships at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. < PAFA.ORG RECEnT ACQuISITIOn — Murder (1942) by Jared French (1905-1988) By Robert Cozzolino, Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art late last year PAFA acquired Murder (1942) by Jared French (1905-1988), a masterwork of American Magic Realism. Scholars have long considered Murder to be one of French’s finest paintings and among the most important mid-century modern figurative paintings. Although he is remembered as an enigmatic artist, French’s early career followed that of many modernists whether they worked with the figure or tended towards abstraction. He associated with more gregarious and publicly oriented artists for much of his career, though he avoided the spotlight in favor of a private life. French attended Amherst College where he studied with Robert Frost and cultivated a life-long interest in literature. In the 1920s French studied at The Art Students league of new york where his teachers included Thomas Hart Benton and Boardman Robinson. There he met Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) in an etching class and the two became friends and lovers for many years, traveling to Europe together in 1926-27 and 1931-33. In the 1930s French worked for Federal Art Projects and executed a mural for the Plymouth, PA post office. In 1937 he married the painter Margaret Hoening and with Cadmus engaged in an ongoing surrealist-inspired photographic series now known under the collective name PAJAMA. In 1940, French’s work took on a more intensely symbolic character that contrasted with his earlier style that emulated American Scene painting. Murder epitomizes this shift and is among the first paintings in a series called “Aspects of Man” in which the artists shifted focus from the physical nature of humanity to a concentration on its inner life. In several paintings from this series, French painted the human body in a variety of ways that suggest stages of consciousness, stages of moral development, and connections to the Jungian “collective unconscious” that binds humanity together. Although Surrealism plays a part as a contemporary influence on the series, another strong visual reference for French’s figures is the Archaic greek “kouros” sculpture type representing youthful boys. Venturing an interpretation of French’s work is always speculative since the artist left few written clues or interviews about the subject. However, Murder, painted in one of the most difficult years of World War II has distinctive details that make a reading of the painting more powerfully direct than usual. The figures in the foreground – one lying on his back, arms stretched out and mouth frozen in a scream, the other standing over him, hands and wrists red with firey blood – call to mind Cain and Abel and suggests the dual nature of humanity. Within us we each have the capacity for good and evil, creation and destruction, peace and war. Behind the figures rises an earthen platform on which rows of men stand saluting with one arm raised on the left, and PAFA Recognizes Painter and Sculptor Audrey Flack at Commencement (Continued from page 1) artist of the Photorealist movement, painting hyper real canvases from projected photographs. Her subjects ranged from press photographs to portraits, still lifes, and the epic trilogy she called the Vanitas series. After achieving critical and commercial success, Flack turned from painting to sculpture in the early 1980s. This highly unusual mid-career shift required that she learn new processes, dramatically changing her studio practice, as well as her professional work. She draws inspiration from sources as diverse as Bernini, French and English nineteenth-century sculptors such as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Alfred gilbert, and Philadelphia sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder. Flack has earned major commissions for public works in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Tampa, Florida, and the Schemerhorn Symphony Center in nashville, Tennessee, to name a few. In her sculpture, Flack strives to create modern-day allegories, using ideas drawn from classical mythology, Jungian psychology, and art history to create archetypes for a turbulent world. When Flack’s commission for a major sculpture of Queen Catherine of Braganza for the Borough of Queens was undermined by political inter- Jared French, Murder, 1942, Egg tempera on gessoed panel, 17 x 14 1/2 in., John D. Phillips Fund, 2011.24 Within us we each have the capacity for good and evil, creation and destruction, peace and war. look away on the right. The allusion here to a Fascist salute makes Murder the rare American surrealist painting that examined the collective unconsciousness and the overt world crisis of war raging at the time. Murder is the second of French’s works to enter PAFA’s collection. Earlier in 2011 george Tooker (1920-2011) gave a gorgeous silverpoint drawing that French made of him to the collection. Murder will be on view in the Historic landmark Building beginning in July 2012. < ests, she successfully fought a legal case under the federal Visual Artists Rights Act, setting a precedent that will support future artists. Flack is currently working with PAFA’s Printmaking Department to collaboratively produce a print with our faculty and students, and to launch a new PAFA Press. This endeavor will result in small editions that bring our students into contact with important artists and produce prints to support the activities of the program. We are pleased to inaugurate this new program with such a distinguished and generous artist as Audrey Flack.
Page 1: In This Issue: 3 Recent Acquisition
Page 5 and 6: AluMnI SAlES gAllERy On Sunday, Feb
Page 7 and 8: William Penn Foundation awards PAFA
Page 9 and 10: Photo: courtesy of PAFA ADMISSIOnS
Page 11 and 12: May 6 // Flipbook Flip-out Flip boo
Page 13: DO nOT PRInT THIS PAgE

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