I made another visit to the past yesterday. It was a pretty day, with lots of fluffy clouds, and on an impulse I visited the museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. I haven’t been there for a very long time.
As always when I’m visiting the past, there were some jolts of recognition, and some odd moments of sadness. I came up the stairs and went into a gallery, and there was a painting by Elizabeth Osborne. A little further on, I came across a painting by Barkley Hendricks. I knew them both; they taught at the Academy’s school in the early 1970s.
The Academy has a very small school. I enrolled there because I had dropped out of my first (very respectable) college after two years, at the age of 18, and because my grandmother wouldn’t let me avoid college entirely.
Deeper in the galleries, I suddenly encountered a painting of a sunny meadow, and in the center of the canvas a slender dark man in a white undershirt stood holding a big bouquet as if he was gathering wildflowers where he stood. It was a self-portrait by Louis Sloan. Lou was one of my teachers, and I also worked with him at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the Conservation Department, after I graduated. Lou was mostly a landscape artist, but at PMA, for extra money, Lou was an in-painter, meaning that he spent his part-time days at an easel next to a window, wearing magnifying goggles, carefully filling in paint losses with an inconspicuous color so the viewer’s eye passed across the hole in the paint without interruption. He was also the first African-American full professor at the Academy, and one of the nicest people I have ever known. I have a photo of him at my wedding reception, where he was sitting with his arms around his knees, like a child. He gave me a little painting of wind-whipped trees as a wedding gift, and it is a few feet away from me right now, as I write. Lou died in 2008. It is not possible that he is dead, but he is dead. He was two years older than I am now when he had a heart attack. That does not seem fair.
Deeper in the Academy galleries, which have recently been restored, I had another jolt. Over there, I realized, was my “wall.” Graduating students got to “hang a wall” for the student show, as their culminating project. I managed to produce enough paintings to fit my space, even though my career at the Academy was distinguished mostly by the fact that I lived through it. Funny that I could recognize a corner of a room with that much certainty.
Most of the paintings that are hanging in those galleries now are famous. They appeared in full color in the textbook I had to buy for my American Art class. Cecilia Beaux, Thomas Eakins, William Glackens, Winslow Homer, Benjamin West, all the famous names, all their glorious paintings. The conservator at the Academy did a nice job on some of them, cleaning them up and refreshing their varnish. His name was Joe Amarotico, and he taught at the Academy as well, but he was not nearly as nice as Lou. Joe drank a lot, as I recall, and he died a lot younger than Louis did.
I recognized other paintings simply because they were there, often in the same place, when I attended the school. The Academy isn’t just a museum, it’s also the oldest art school in the country, and I usually didn’t come in through the galleries, but by the back way, on Cherry Street. Where I spent most of my time was in the back of the building, in big shabby rooms with high ceilings and a lot of gray light, cluttered with stained easels, furnished with platforms for the nude models.
The Academy building itself is an extraordinary monster, designed by Frank Furness and George Hewitt, and it is a glorious example of late 19th century exuberance. All you have to do to describe it is say that it’s a Furness building. The school where I went for high school and the school where I went to graduate school both have Furness buildings, too, which is something I never realized before now.
As a third and fourth-year student, I was entitled to my own studio at the Academy. It was in a building that had once been a hotel, where I shared a suite with another student. The other guy was almost never there, nor was I, but we had a big bathroom in between our studios with a deep tub. I used to take hot baths there sometimes. Mostly, I painted in a room in the battered house I was renting; that house doesn’t exist any more, and was on a street that also doesn’t exist any more. The place where I had my Academy studio is now an apartment building.
The Academy didn’t offer bachelor’s degrees, just a four-year certificate, so while I attended I also went to the Philadelphia College of Art, which was acquired by the University of the Arts, which went bankrupt and shut down a couple of years ago.
Everything is gone or changed, except for the museum building, the paintings, and the history.
After I walked the galleries, feeling as if I was hallucinating because of all the layers of the past I was walking through, I went to the gift shop and bought a t-shirt. I might as well admit that I went there, after all; I even graduated in January of 1974. But I went to very few classes in my four years there, the first two years because I was making my final descent into alcoholism, the second two because I had stopped drinking and was trying to recover. I only briefly worked as an artist after graduation, partly because it’s a terrible way to make money and partly because I am interested in too many other things.
Recently someone was chatting with me and asked me if I knew a specific person who had been at the Academy when I was there, and I said, “I didn’t really know anyone.” None of that past really exists any more. But I’ve been to the place, and now I have the t-shirt, so I guess that’s good enough.