PHILADELPHIA — From the American Dream to unnerving realities, Woodmere Art Museum’s bold spring exhibitions showcase a wide variety of paintings and works on paper from 20th- and 21st-century artists with strong connections to Philadelphia. Salvatore Pinto: A Retrospective Celebrating the Barnes Legacy looks back on the career of one of Philadelphia’s great 20th-century artists, who studied at the Barnes Foundation. Concurrently, Haunting Narratives: Detours from Philadelphia Realism, 1935 to the Present showcases the work of nearly 60 artists from the mid-1900s to the present who abandoned traditional modes of realism in favor of darker, more “haunting” narratives, a genre that has been at the center of Philadelphia art for centuries. Woodmere Art Museum (9201 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia) presents both exhibitions, May 12–July 15.
Salvatore Pinto (1905-1966). River Beach. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Estate of Salvatore Pinto
Part of a family of artists who moved to Philadelphia from Italy in 1909, Salvatore Pinto (1905-1966) was a prized student of Albert Barnes and a teacher at the Barnes Foundation, transmitting ideas of European modernism to generations of American art students. Pinto, who attended the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, absorbed the latest trends of avant-garde painting from mentors like Henri Matisse, with whom Pinto studied in the South of France on a Barnes Foundation Travelling Scholarship. Working in media ranging from painting and printmaking to photography and furniture design, Pinto embraced what he learned from his travels abroad and developed a distinctly American repertoire of subjects, including a series inspired by Long Beach Island shorelines. Coinciding with the opening of the Barnes Foundation on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Salvatore Pinto: A Retrospective Celebrating the Barnes Legacy offers a comprehensive view of Pinto’s oeuvre, offering with examples of works by his brothers Angelo and Biagio, to honor an essential transatlantic link between Philadelphia and European modernism.
Haunting Narratives: Detours from Philadelphia Realism focuses on the thematically dark, often hauntingly strange works of art made by painters and printmakers of Philadelphia since the 1930s. Benton Spruance, Robert Riggs and Leon Kelly set the stage in the 1930s for this unique thread of narrative art, a tradition that continued in the work of Sidney Goodman, Peter Paone and Ben Kamihira. The exhibition is rounded out by the many contemporary twists on the genre from artists like Daniel Heyman, Hiro Sakaguchi, Judith Schaecter and Lisa Yuskavage, among many other artists with Philadelphia ties. Selected from a broad artistic spectrum, the works in Haunting Narratives are diverse, ranging from pictorially dark, murky scenes to paradoxically colorful, seemingly lighthearted facades that mask a more unpromising reality.
“Both exhibitions,” says Woodmere Art Museum curator Matthew Palczynski, “underscore the major contributions Philadelphia’s artists have made in 20th- and 21st-century art, an impact that we’re continually unpacking.”
These exhibitions are accompanied by a series of discussions, lectures and tours, as well as the student exhibition Dream Explore Discover, on view May 13 to July 1 in the Helen Millard Children’s Gallery. [A full calendar of events follows below.]
Woodmere Art Museum is located at 9201 Germantown Ave. Admission to special exhibitions is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, and FREE for students, children and Museum members; exhibitions in the Founder’s Gallery and Helen Millard Children’s Gallery are FREE. Museum hours are: Tuesday through Thursday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; and Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. For more information, visit www.woodmereartmuseum.org or call 215-247-0476.