Philadelphia Museum's New Perelman Building: An Irreverent Photo Essay (Part I)
Well, it's not so new any more, but my Wall Street Journal article on the Philadelphia Museum's new Perelman Building finally hits the stands today (on the "Leisure & Arts" page of the "Personal Journal" section), so I can now show you and comment about what I saw.
No other U.S. museum boasts an entrance quite as embellished as this (from the original 1927 Art Deco building):

...or an elevator as glitzy as this:

...or a real estate office with such an off-putting name, located right across the street:

To get to the Perelman from the Philadelphia Museum's main building, you'll have to dodge some daunting traffic:

...or else arrive from the main building on an old-fashioned tram:

What you see of the flagship museum from the Perelman annex is not too spiffy:

That's two city benches, urgently in need of repair, in front of the rubble from the excavation for a new museum garage (to be topped, eventually, by a sculpture garden), now under construction:

All right, I know: What you really want to see is Richard Gluckman's new architecture and the art installations therein. COMING SOON.
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Photo © by Jill Krementz
CULTUREGRRL SPEAKS on museum issues and ethics, arts journalism.
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LEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.
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