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<i>Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder</i>, 1977, by Susanna Lewis (Private collection) Photo by Otto Stupakoff © Julie Schafler Dale — *Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder*, 1977, by Susanna Lewis (Private collection) Photo by Otto Stupakoff © Julie Schafler Dale

Exhibition

Off the Wall: American Art to Wear

November 10, 2019–March 13, 2020

Delight in the astonishing inventiveness and techniques of a generation of mixed-media artists who pioneered a new art form designed around the body. Coming of age during the dramatic cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s, the artists in this distinctively American movement explored nontraditional materials and methods to create adventurous, deeply imaginative works.

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Curators

Dilys Blum, The Jack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles; and Mary Schoeser, independent textile historian and curator

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Check out the variety of events offered by this program, for members and the public alike.

The Large Bathers

This is the largest, the last, and in many ways, the most ambitious work from Cézanne’s lifelong exploration of the time-honored theme of nudes in a landscape. It is also, perhaps, in its unfinished state, the purest and most serene witness to the man whom Paul Gauguin described as spending “entire days on mountaintops reading Virgil,” dreaming of wooded glades populated with beautiful figures who, if not exactly participants in a narrative as such, are full of animation and interaction. Perhaps it is its grand nobility—its authority as something beyond time, “like art in the museums,” as Cézanne said—that made it so attractive to many artists.

Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I)

In 1795 the Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale painted this illusionistic portrait to showcase his artistic skills. At the same time, he wished to represent the roles played by two of his sons at Peale’s Museum, the first American museum created to educate and entertain the public.

Titian Ramsay Peale, who crafted natural science displays, gestures at the top of the stairs as his older brother, Raphaelle, an artist with his palette in hand, strides upward just above a real step attached to the base of the canvas. The life-size portrait is known to have startled and delighted visitors, reputedly even George Washington, before the Peale Museum’s collection was dismantled and finally sold in 1854. Acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945, the picture continues to engage and welcome visitors.

All about the Benjamins Century Vase

Here you will find Benjamin Franklin as you’ve never seen him before. Philadelphia-born artist Roberto Lugo riffs on the traditional representations of Franklin found throughout the city—ones that celebrate him as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. You can see one such stately portrayal of Franklin directly behind you, in gallery 384. Lugo places Franklin within a constellation of songs, symbols, and rappers’ names—ones that shaped his childhood and adult life. The artist also includes his own self-portrait on the other side of the vase, creating an imagined dialogue between himself and Franklin around the themes of money, history, violence, and success.

Fall of the Castle

This painting won the Silver Prize at the 1902 Japan Art Academy exhibition. The woman in the scene is bidding farewell to her two children and preparing to cut off her hair before entering a Buddhist nunnery, as was customary for aristocratic women in medieval Japan after the death of a husband.

Sunflowers

Vincent van Gogh painted this luminous image of sunflowers from memory, in the depths of winter in 1889. Throughout his ten-year career, Van Gogh painted sunflowers repeatedly in different arrangements and settings. The shapes, colors, and cheerfulness of the modest flower appealed to him. He associated its yellow color with sunshine, the south, and Christ, the light of the world. Over a single week in August 1888, Van Gogh painted four pictures of sunflowers, including a bold canvas of twelve sunflowers against a turquoise ground, now in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich. The speed of this work was driven by enthusiasm and necessity since the flowers were destined to wilt and fade. This painting is a variation on the work now in Munich. Far from being a simple copy, it is a new interpretation that gives each flower a pronounced personality.

Goddess Figure (Chalchiuhtlicue)

"Tar Beach 2" Quilt

Ringgold’s Tar Beach 2 quilt communicates the dreams and hopes of a young African American girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot. Her story is based on the artist’s own memories of growing up in Harlem, New York, but is enlivened with fantasy. Flying among the stars on a hot summer night, Cassie becomes a heroic explorer overcoming obstacles. Ringgold’s combination of image and imagination, text and texture puts a unique, contemporary spin on the traditions of both quilting and storytelling.

Ceremonial Teahouse: Sunkaraku (Evanescent Joys)

This ceremonial teahouse was built in about 1917 by the Japanese architect Ögi Rodö. Designed in the rustic tradition or "artless style" of the fifteenth-century artist Oguri Sotan, it also incorporates eighteenth-century elements. The Sunkaraku teahouse originally stood on the grounds of Rodö's private residence in Tokyo. He sold it to the Museum in 1928, and in 1957 it was installed at the Museum, making it the only work by Rodö outside Japan. The garden setting you see now was planned by one of Japan's foremost contemporary garden designers, Matsunosuke Tatsui.

The apparent artlessness of the teahouse in fact conceals acute attention to detail and to aesthetic pleasure. The architecture of both the waiting room and the tearoom reveals a special delight in natural materials such as cypress shingles (for the roof) and bamboo. Proximity to nature is also emphasized by the garden, visible from both buildings. Everything inside the tearoom has been planned to stimulate the mind and to delight the eye. Rough, unfinished vertical posts remind guests of their imperfections and their oneness with nature, and the tea utensils enhance their sensitivity to natural textures and artistic creativity.

The tea ceremony offers a temporary respite from the complexities of daily life. This mood perhaps inspired a famous devotee of the tea cult, Lord Fumai Matsudaira (1750-1818), when he autographed the tablet over the teahouse with the inscription "Sun Ka Raku," or Evanescent Joys.

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The Large Bathers

Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I)

All about the Benjamins Century Vase

Fall of the Castle

Sunflowers

Goddess Figure (Chalchiuhtlicue)

"Tar Beach 2" Quilt

Ceremonial Teahouse: Sunkaraku (Evanescent Joys)

Single-Handed Keyboard (right hand)

Grace Kelly's Wedding Dress and Accessories

From the crownlike wreath topping the headpiece to the bows down the back of the graceful train, Grace Kelly's wedding ensemble is simple but exquisitely detailed. Delicate rose point lace, a type of nineteenth-century Brussels needle lace that features elaborate floral motifs, forms the bodice, which appears seamless because the lace motifs were detached from their original ground and pieced together to follow the shaping of the dress. Touches of the lace, accented with lustrous seed pearls, unify the gown and accessories. The dress itself is constructed in four complex parts: the lace bodice with an attached underbodice, skirt support, and slip; a heavily pleated silk faille skirt that incorporates a smoothing petticoat, ruffled petticoat, and foundation petticoat; a triangular tulle and lace train insert; and a pleated silk faille cummerbund.

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)

Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) peels away the traditional beauty of the nude in art, its carnality, even its identifiable sex. Instead, the painting aims to expand our perception of the human body in motion, a topic of fascination for Duchamp around this time. Though the work exemplifies his extremely original engagement with Cubism, it also precipitated his break with the Cubists. When Duchamp presented it for exhibition in Paris in 1912, fellow Cubists on the hanging committee tried to exclude it. They may have objected to the idea of painting dynamic movement, or the unfamiliar subject of a nude on a flight of stairs, or the title written in block letters at the lower margin. When the work was finally presented at the Armory Show, which made the case for modern art to large audiences in New York in 1913, it met with a hostile public reaction—and cemented Duchamp’s reputation as an artistic provocateur.

Untitled No. 89

Howardena Pindell created this work from thousands of small circular bits of paper—pieces left behind after using a hole punch. Pindell’s work with paper dots is deeply labor intensive: she carefully and patiently punched, collected, and painted these small dots, and then affixed them to a board with thread embellished with glitter. The colorful circles protrude as they interact with the flecks of glitter to create a luminous effect, reminiscent of Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings, which Pindell studied closely while working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Off the Wall: American Art to Wear

November 10, 2019–March 13, 2020

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