Attention Alice Walton: Philadelphia Museum Eakins Likely to Be in Play

Philadelphia Museum's Perelman Building

"Hello, SalaryGrrl!" Anne d'Harnoncourt cheerfully greeted me at the Philadelphia Museum's New York press lunch yesterday. (No word on whether she's gotten her pay raise yet.)

I took the occasion of sitting next to the director to ask if her museum was indeed going to deaccession a work or works by Eakins to help pay for "The Gross Clinic," as had been publicly hinted recently by Alice Beamesderfer, associate director of collections.

D'Harnoncourt conceded that donations towards the $68-million purchase price had "tapered off" and that an Eakins deaccession was likely. A final decision, she said, has yet to be made. (The joint purchaser of "The Gross Clinic," the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has already sacrificed one of its Eakinses, "The Cello Player.")

The director and her staff had lured us away early from the Metropolitan Museum's two exhibition press previews ("The Clark Brothers Collect" and Neo Rauch) to feed us chicken, a smorgasbord of upcoming exhibitions and, especially, a preview of the Sept. 15 opening of the Perelman Building across the street from the main building.

Renovated and expanded by Gluckman Mayner (Richard Gluckman's architectural firm), the Art Deco building will become an outpost for modern and contemporary design, costume and textiles, photographs and changing installations in a large multi-purpose gallery (first up: sculpture from the collection). D'Harnoncourt seemed particularly excited by the building's new library---four times the size of the former one.

The exhibition schedule is an eclectic mix of potential blockbusters---"Renoir Landscapes" and Frida Kahlo---and lesser knowns: William Johnson, William Ranney, Antonio Mancini.

Not a word was uttered about the plans for Frank Gehry to renovate and expand the flagship building. (Right now, he's got some other problems.) Maybe they felt there was just so much that we scribes could digest at one meal.