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April 21, 2007 - December 9, 2007
This exhibition from the Museum's collections showcases a variety of artists who have created portfolios—boxes containing series of prints—that capture a sense of place.
July 14, 2007 - December 9, 2007
Among the many treasures of the John Frederick Lewis Collection in the Free Library of Philadelphia are 25 elaborately illustrated folios from a single Mughal manuscript, the Razmnama (literally, "Book of War"), dated to 1598–99. This exhibition is the first time since 1923 that all 25 of the Free Library's pages are being shown together, affording a rare opportunity to explore, through the lens of a single manuscript, an exciting moment of artistic experimentation and cultural exchange.
June 2, 2007 - December 9, 2007
This exhibition, built around the Museum's recently conserved Tibetan-Buddhist altar, explores Tibetan art intended for ritual use. It reveals the coded meanings not only of Tibetan ritual implements, but also paintings, sculptures, textiles, prints, and the altar itself.
July 21, 2007 - November 25, 2007
This exhibition explores the ways in which Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, three of the most important European contemporary painters of the postwar period, question the relevance of history painting; examine the relationship between painting and photography; and emphasize the necessity for experimentation to redefine the technical possibilities of painting.
October 7, 2006 - November 11, 2007
In the seventeenth century, in response to the ideas of self-expression traveling from China, the Japanese created their own, highly sophisticated version of the Chinese literati culture. This exhibition explores the works of art that flourished as a result, including collaborative works such as handscrolls, albums, and sets of fans, as well as unique objects created by individual artists.
July 1, 2006 - November 11, 2007
Opulent and exuberant, this focused exhibition explores silk—indisputably fashion's favored fabric in the eighteenth century—with 13 objects from the Museum's collections.
September 19, 2006 - October 21, 2007
This exhibition celebrates the 30th year of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, organized annually by the Women's Committee of the Museum. The outstanding objects on view in this exhibition demonstrate the vitality of the field of contemporary American crafts.
July 8, 2006 - September 23, 2007
Featuring screen paintings, hanging scrolls, furniture, and ceramics, this exhibition examines a decade of Korean art collecting at the Museum, made possible through the support of the Korean Heritage Group.
March 16, 2007 - August 30, 2007
Charles Willson Peale's George Washington at Princeton is on view at the Museum on an extended loan from a private collection. This visually striking and finely executed life-size portrait records Washington's 6-foot-2-inch frame in a pose projecting strength, composure, and elegance.
June 26, 2007 - August 19, 2007
The first retrospective of nineteenth-century narrative painter William Ranney's (1813–1857) work to be held in 40 years, this exhibition brings together over 60 paintings that significantly contributed to the concept of the American character.
May 19, 2007 - August 12, 2007
This exhibition examines, for the first time, the achievements of African American modernist William H. Johnson (1901–1970)—often considered one of the most inventive artists of his generation—as a graphic artist. Eighty works of art on paper provide an overview of the artist's career both in Europe in the 1930s and in New York in the 1940s.
May 1, 2007 - July 22, 2007
This presentation marks the first time an exhibition in the United States has focused on the eighteenth-century Japanese master of ink painting Ike Taiga (1723–1776) and his wife Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727–1784), with 200 exceptional and rarely seen works of art.
April 20, 2007 - July 22, 2007
Marine Hugonnier's Trilogy, the third installment of Live Cinema, engages with what Hugonnier refers to as the "politics of vision": the notion that perception is determined by cultural, political, and actual perspective.
December 9, 2006 - June 30, 2007
This exhibition draws from the Museum's rich collection of "miniature" paintings to explore the many meanings of India's scaly, feathery, and furry inhabitants, both natural and supernatural.
November 24, 2006 - June 24, 2007
Gathering works of art in which words are conceived not only as communicational tools but also as visual and physical things in themselves, this exhibition highlights objects from the Museum's collections that date from the 1960s to the present, and points to the importance of text in contemporary art.
December 9, 2006 - May 27, 2007
This installation displays—for the first time—a newly cleaned Tibetan altar adorned with intricately carved niches and lively paintings. It explores both the conservation of the altar as well as its cultural context, and reveals hidden mysteries of the altar’s construction and decoration.
February 27, 2007 - May 6, 2007
This retrospective exhibition celebrates the life and work of Thomas Chimes, arguably one of the most important artists to emerge on the Philadelphia art scene since World War II. It includes approximately 100 paintings and works on paper, many previously unseen, along with extensive biographical and archival material.
February 9, 2007 - April 22, 2007
Selected from one of the liveliest sectors of the Museum's collection of works of art on paper, this exhibition presents mostly large, contemporary art from the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Many of these objects have only been seen recently by visitors to the department’s study room and several have never before been shown in the galleries.
November 17, 2006 - April 1, 2007
This exhibition focuses on the Danish silversmith Georg Jensen (1866–1935) and the renowned group of designers who helped establish the company he founded as one of the world’s most important silverwares firms.
May 24, 2006 - March 26, 2007
Crouching Spider, a gigantic sculpture of bronze and stainless steel made up of a globular body and long, attenuated legs, is part of a celebrated series of spider sculptures that Louise Bourgeois produced beginning in the early 1990s. Measuring 106½ x 329 x 247 inches, this extraordinary work is at once both threatening and playful.
September 23, 2006 - March 4, 2007
This exhibition, drawn from the Museum collections, is a tribute to Arnold Newman (1918–2006)—one of the great portrait photographers of his time.
It includes a number of photographs that were part of his first solo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945, as well as a selection of portraits by his contemporaries that demonstrate the range of modern portrait photography.
January 5, 2007 - March 4, 2007
This exhibition focuses on Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), an icon of Philadelphia since it was painted in 1875. The masterpiece of the young Thomas Eakins, an artist born and educated in Philadelphia, this is acclaimed as the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century.
November 11, 2006 - February 27, 2007
A new series of film and video programs, Live Cinema explores the diversity of single channel video and film work by local, national, and international artists. The Title Is the Last Thing features a series of eight videos by Mircea Cantor as well as a selection of photographs and objects that offer poignant commentary on the relationship between time and labor, politics, tourism, and history.
October 7, 2006 - February 4, 2007
Between 1948 and 1954, American artist Ellsworth Kelly lived in Paris, where he met a number of artists and developed the distinctive artistic practices for which he is known. The remarkable range of styles in this exhibition, featuring a selection of works by various artists, reveals the impressive reach of Kelly’s artistic practice, particularly his experimentation with color, technique, and composition.
September 29, 2006 - January 31, 2007
This exhibition celebrates the Museum's long-standing interest in the art of the New World with paintings on copper and canvas, ceramics, and textiles.
October 21, 2006 - January 14, 2007
This exhibition presents 125 prints and posters that emerged in post-Revolution Mexico as the ideal means for disseminating political, social, and artistic ideas. It represents the groundbreaking contributions of 50 Mexican and foreign-born artists at a pivotal moment in Mexican art.