{"id":1369,"date":"2011-11-10T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T16:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=1369"},"modified":"2011-11-10T17:04:08","modified_gmt":"2011-11-10T22:04:08","slug":"yo-alice-we-still-have-the-one-that-got-away-its-around-here-somewhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2011\/11\/yo-alice-we-still-have-the-one-that-got-away-its-around-here-somewhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Yo, Alice: We still have the one that got away. (It’s around here somewhere.)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"Purchase <\/a> \"View <\/a>The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, 1925.<\/span><\/div>\n

It\u2019s not every day, or even every decade, that a major museum of American art opens for business. In big cities, it\u2019s a once-or-twice-a-century kind of thing. This week, Alice Walton\u2019s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art<\/a> opens in Bentonville Arkansas \u201cto celebrate the American spirit.\u201d Even though the place, built on the Wal-Mart fortune, is more than 1,200 miles away from Philadelphia, we can hear the hoopla. And it might have stung our ears, had things turned out a bit differently.<\/p>\n

By coincidence, five years ago today was the start of the most recent Thomas Eakins\u2019 Gross Clinic<\/em> saga. What might<\/em> have been the beginning of the end of Philadelphia\u2019s stewardship of a painting long considered \u201cthe holy grail of American painting\u201d started with an announcement<\/a> that Thomas Jefferson University would sell the painting to Crystal Bridges and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC for the record-breaking price of $68 million. “This is the most important sale of a 19th-century American painting ever,” boasted<\/a> the president of Christie’s Americas, which crafted the deal. Washingtonians considered landing this picture inside the Beltway on Bentonville\u2019s dime as a big win-win.<\/p>\n

But Philadelphians saw the situation differently. And the agreement of sale contained a small clause that, as it turned out, became a potent loophole. If locals wanted the painting they had forty-five days to match the price. Raising $1,511,111 a day, day after day for a month and a half? Sounds impossible for these recessionary times, but in the flush holiday shopping season of 2006, 3,400 Philadelphians reached deeply into their pockets and, with significant help of major philanthropy, a humongous bank loan and at least one case of controversial deaccessioning<\/a>, the Eakins was ours to keep. Alice Walton would just have to make do with less.<\/p>\n

So when they cut the ribbon in Arkansas this <\/em>Veterans Day, Dr. Gross (who Eakins depicted<\/a> teaching the surgical technique he innovated to save lives and limbs of thousands of Civil War soldiers) will not be in attendance. So where is<\/em> the painting this Veteran\u2019s Day, this fifth year anniversary of its near departure?<\/p>\n

Searching for Dr. Gross, we look to the Philadelphia Museum of Art website, and see one page<\/a> that steers us to \u201cColket Gallery 151.\u201d But he\u2019s not there.\u00a0 Another PMA webpage <\/a>tells us he\u2019s \u201ccurrently not on view.\u201d Hmmm, really<\/em>? Not on view? The Academy\u2019s website <\/a>doesn\u2019t give us a location, either.<\/p>\n

But visitors to the museum at Broad and Cherry will <\/em>find the painting hanging in Frank Furness\u2019 central rotunda<\/a>, which as it happens, was completed about the same time Eakins was painting his masterpiece.\u00a0 After sixty eight million dollars and five years, you\u2019d think we\u2019d be more inclined to coordinate, communicate and, especially this <\/em>week, to celebrate.<\/p>\n

Could it be that we\u2019ve begun to slip back into that old, familiar, Philadelphia complacency?\u00a0 Now that\u2019s<\/em> a scary thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, 1925. It\u2019s not every day, or even every decade, that a major museum of American art opens for business. In big cities, it\u2019s a once-or-twice-a-century kind of thing. This week, Alice Walton\u2019s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opens in Bentonville Arkansas \u201cto celebrate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}