Inner Qualities

Probing self-portraits and provocative nudes, along with other Modern artwork, reveal the psyche at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

By: Ilene Dube
   The collector Myron Kunin describes himself as "a good picture-looker." In explaining how he acquired his esteemed collection, he told Orange County Museum of Art curator Elizabeth Armstrong how his art history education was not necessarily from cracking the books.
   Seventy-five or so paintings, works on paper and sculpture from his acquisitions, on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia through Dec. 31, show just how good an eye the former chairman of the Regis Corporation has.
   First exhibited at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Calif., Villa America includes work by Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe and Ben Shahn, among others. Collected over a 30-year span, the works illustrate the stylistic diversity of the first half of the 20th century.
   "Mr. Kunin’s collection is extraordinarily rich because of its high quality and its exciting ability to surprise viewers," says PAFA Curator Robert Cozzolino. "It is a collection that shows an astute and visionary eye, one that often gravitated to powerful pictures by artists few other collectors were buying."
   Mr. Kunin resisted external influences and avoided trends, following his instincts in selecting artwork. Running his father’s business alone did not fulfill him, and he sought further stimulation by studying art. As the business grew and he had more walls to fill, he expanded his collecting.
   "Like all collectors, he has some good tales to tell about finding art in extraordinary places," says Mr. Cozzolino, who has known of Mr. Kunin’s collection for some time; Mr. Kunin had generously lent work to PAFA’s 200-year anniversary show, In Private Hands, last year. One such story: "There was a David Smith tucked under a couch or a chair. He dusted it off and asked how much, not recognizing it at first, but then snatched it up for not much money."
   And, like most collectors, Mr. Kunin has his secrets about buying in the right place at the right time, adds Mr. Cozzolino. "He has his antenna out and uses his gut instinct when the opportunity comes up."
   The title of the show, Villa America, comes from a painting of the same name by Gerald Murphy. It had adorned Mr. Murphy’s home on the French Riviera, and was a symbol of that gathering place for American expatriates and European modernists, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to Pablo Picasso and Man Ray.
   Many of the works in the show are part of American Scene painting. Rejecting the European styles of Cubism, Fauvism and Dadaism, American Scene artists returned to a more realistic style, depicting urban and rural scenes. Grant Wood, most famous for his "American Gothic" — the painting of a pitchfork-holding farmer and his spinster daughter — is included in the show with his painting "Return from Bohemia." He had visited Paris in the ’20s but ultimately rejected the bohemian lifestyle to become a regionalist painter of the Midwest.
   "Return from Bohemia" was to have been the cover for an autobiography by Wood, but the book was never finished. According to the exhibition catalog, he told the New York Herald Tribune "I lived in Paris a couple of years and grew a very spectacular beard that didn’t match my face… and was convinced that the Middle West was inhibited and barren." While his fellow bohemians sat around the Café du Dome nursing brandy, he concluded, "It was then I decided that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa."
   Grant Wood "was a literal painter interested in stories having to do with the actual world," says Mr. Cozzolino. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and traveling abroad, seeing the great artwork of Paris and Germany, Wood "was a sophisticated guy. ‘Return from Bohemia’ was getting down to the serious business of the laborer, and he was identifying with the people of Iowa. He wanted to have the best of both worlds, a sophisticated artist getting his hands dirty. He’s trying to show he’s a worker in some way."
   Mr. Cozzolino continues: "The cast of characters associated with his storytelling don’t have to be real. His eyes are closed in the painting and he’s seeing evocative apparitions. He was familiar with surrealism and visitations in gothic art, so there’s a lot more symbolism here than literalism. He’s framed the scene with rough edges of a barn, like devotional panels in stained-glass windows of Germany, so it’s like a memorial to those who died in World War I. He’s playing with many more layers of meaning than he’s given credit for."
   A strong theme of the collection is figurative works, including provocative nudes and probing self-portraits. Mr. Cozzolino is particularly excited about how the work "tells a broader and more diverse story of what Modern American art was. It shows abstraction simultaneously with cutting-edge psychological portraits, self-portraits and figure paintings… and pushes the envelope in terms of narrative painting of the 20th century.
   "It reflects the culture at the Academy in the ’20s through the ’50s and dovetails appropriately with our collection and educational program," Mr. Cozzolino continues. Four of the artists in the show, including Charles Demuth, studied at PAFA. During the run of the exhibition, the modern art galleries in PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building will feature selections from the permanent collection that relate to the works in Villa America.
   Mr. Cozzolino met Mr. Kunin for the first time when the collector came to the exhibit’s opening. He was curious to see how it fit in at PAFA. "He was down to earth and generous with his time," recounts Mr. Cozzolino. "He seemed to have had a great time looking at our collection and remarked on how he found a lot of surprises and discoveries, people he didn’t know about, such as (magical realist painter) Walter Murch."
   Philip Evergood is one magical realist Mr. Kunin did collect. In the catalog, Mr. Evergood is quoted as saying: "I feel the search of an artist should be for the richest and fullest of human experiences… The more the artist contacts the inner qualities of people, the more he will understand life and where he fits into it."
   Curator Elizabeth Armstrong comments that Mr. Evergood could be speaking for the collector himself.
Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950 is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St., Phila., through Dec. 31. Hours: Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission costs $7, $6 seniors/students, $5 ages 5-18. For information, call (215) 972-7642. On the Web: www.pafa.org