Rendell Bashing Powell at the Eakins Bash
Saturday’s “Gross Clinic” festivities at the Philadelphia Museum drew political heavy hitters U.S. Senator Arlen Specter and Governor Ed Rendell, but Mayor John Street was not on hand, nor was the museum told why his plans had changed.
No matter. The burly Governor made matters sufficiently interesting with his impolitic remarks about the Eakins campaign: First he conceded that he hadn’t set eyes on “The Gross Clinic” until he was enlisted to help with the rescue effort. Then he recounted for the assembled throng of Eakins acolytes his private conversation with Earl (Rusty) Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, which (in league Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton) with had offered to buy the painting from Thomas Jefferson University for $68 million:
I was so irate that they would take this painting out of town that I called the head of the National Gallery and said, ‘How can the National Gallery be party to the hijacking of something that is so uniquely Philadelphian?’ I made a mistake. The head of the National Gallery couldn’t care less about a governor. I should have asked Senator Specter to call.
As CultureGrrl more temperately observed a month ago, “snapping up cultural treasures from sister cities does not befit [the National Gallery’s] leadership role” as a “quasi-federal art museum.”
Maybe this bit of Philadelphia-Washington bad blood helps explain why the National Gallery and Crystal Bridges (Walton’s planned Arkansas museum) made their snippy joint statement expressing pique that “the nation’s capital” and “America’s heartland” would now be deprived of this major acquisition.
What’s Philadelphia—cheesesteak?
Once the Philadelphia Museum finishes raising the remaining $31 million still needed to pay for the Eakins, it will have to come up with $500 million more—for its planned Frank Gehry-designed expansion and renovation. “A total of 80,000 square feet of new public space–a 60% increase–is anticipated,” according to the museum’s announcement. The project is expected to take some 10 to 12 years to complete.
And in September, it opens the Perelman Building, across the street from the museum’s main building. Renovated by Gluckman Mayner Architects, it will include galleries for prints, drawings, photographs, costumes, textiles and modern and contemporary design, as well as a library and café. The cost (already raised): $90 million.