E x p a n d i n g the arts
is colorful

By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

The last time the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened a new major gallery, Rocky Balboa was still an uncrowned bum from the neighborhood.
And the last time the museum opened a new building at the head of the nation’s largest municipal park, Andy Warhol was still the infant son of a Pittsburgh coal miner and his wife.
Physical evolution of the museum has always been a slow process, just like in nature itself. It’s been measured not in years but in generations.
That’s why museum officials are understandably euphoric over Saturday’s long-awaited grand opening of the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building across Pennsylvania Avenue from the venerable museum’s familiar neoclassical main building — sometimes referred to as the "temple on the hill," and always a popular local tourist destination.
The new museum space is a renovated and expanded former office building originally occupied by the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Co., and later by the Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co. Completed in 1927 in the modern and ornate art-deco style of the time, it actually pre-dates the museum’s main building by a year.
But as the same architects designed both structures, which were then cut out of the same Indiana limestone, the neighboring buildings have long shared a common spirit.
"The buildings even shared the same stone quarry, so this union was meant to be," said Gail Harrity, the museum’s chief operating officer, during advance tours of the new space last week.
The museum spent nine years and $90 million in private and public funding to make that union a reality, as much out of necessity as any other reason.
"The museum’s (main) building across the street ran out of space," said Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the museum. "It’s hard to believe, but it ran out of space about thirty years ago while our collections continued to expand."
The Perelman Building, named for the museum’s board of trustees chairman emeritus and his wife, includes 125,000 square feet of original interior space, to which the museum added 59,000 square feet in a recently completed addition.
The original section of the building, designed by the Zantzinger, Borie and Medary firm, is listed on both the national and Philadelphia registers of historic places. The addition, designed by Gluckman Mayner Architects of New York, reflects the old building with a modernized style emphasizing its functionality.
The Perelman Building is the new home for the museum’s Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs, and its Center for Costume and Textiles.
Both of those museum departments will benefit from dedicated new gallery space, as will its Modern and Contemporary Design branch.
Four new major exhibitions have been installed to christen the building.
The Julien Levy Gallery will feature Alfred Stieglitz and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Jan. 31. The exhibition presents a selection of works by the pioneering early 20th-century photographer that were donated to the museum by his wife, painter Georgia O’Keefe.
Meanwhile, Designing Modern, in the Collab Gallery through Feb. 29, presents decorative objects, furniture and textiles emphasizing major design movements of the last century, including art deco and Bauhaus, American and Scandinavian Modernism, postwar Italian Design and Postmodernism.
The Joan Spain Gallery will house A Passion for Perfection through March 9, celebrating the haute-couture inspired, ready-to-wear apparel created in the last half century by Philadelphia-born designers, including James Galanos, Gustave Tassell and Ralph Rucci.
Also, the Perelman Building’s main first-floor Exhibition Gallery will feature A Conversation in Three Dimensions: Sculpture from the Collections through next spring, with works dated from the 1960s to the present.
Admission to all four exhibitions, as well as to the Perelman Building’s other public resources, is free through Dec. 31.
At 12,000 square feet, the new museum library, with more than 200,000 books and periodicals, is four times the size of the one in the main museum building.
Wachovia Bank sponsored the Education Resource Center on the second floor, designed to serve more than 75,000 Delaware Valley students who visit the museum each year.
The Perelman Building provides the museum with modern new conservation labs, enabling staff to exam, preserve and restore paintings, prints, drawings, photos and textiles with state-of-the-art equipment.
While the modern facilities in the Perelman Building are fitting of an institution of international prominence, museum officials view the building acquisition and expansion as a way of reaching out to a vast local audience.
Throughout the project, the museum consulted with civic groups in the immediate neighborhood, particularly the Fairmount Civic Association, because the Perelman Building tract abuts residential zones of 25th and Olive streets.
"We wanted this building to mediate between the large-scale institutions of the (Ben Franklin) Parkway and the small-scale homes of the neighborhood," said Richard Gluckman, the principal architect. "Exterior influences helped determine the shape of the building. The intent was to scale down this large masonry structure."
Also, with interior space largely dedicated to contemporary art forms like fashion design and modern design, officials hope to attract new audiences to the museum.
"(The building) will serve both the collections and the public in a way that they deserve," d’Harnoncourt said. ••
For more information about the Philadelphia Museum of Art, visit www.philamuseum.org or call 215-684-7860.
Reporter William Kenny can be reached at 215-354-3031 or bkenny@phillynews.com