Etcher Joseph Pennell called it "that Greek garage." But the sun-colored classic shell of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is big enough to house the Parthenon in part of one wing. For 20 years, on its rock above the Schuylkill, it has been abuilding. Less than half of its seven-acre floor space is finished and open to the public. Even so, it is a notable museum. This week it became still more notable with the opening of a whole new Oriental wing.
On display went a 4th-Century Sasanian palace hall, the like of which does not exist even in its native Persia; a mandapam (pillared hall) from a Vishnu temple which Philadelphia Socialite Adeline Pepper Gibson spirited out of India by junk in 1912; a lofty Ming hall from Peking, "the finest single architectural unit ever to leave China"; a dozen other galleries. All 15 were crowded with a superb collection of Oriental art that ranged from Persian rugs to Japanese prints.
Unlike almost every other big city in the U. S., Philadelphia had no real art museum until after World War I. In 1919 hardboiled, gimlet-eyed Quaker Lawyer Eli Kirk Price started pulling political strings, got a modest $200,000 appropriation "to build a museum of art at Fairmount," then strung the city fathers along year by year until he had a $12,000,000 building. "He knew if we did the ends first, we'd have to finish the middle sometime," says bulky, bustling Fiske Kimball, who in 1925 left his job as head of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts to become its director. Quiet, canny Manufacturer J. Stogdell Stokes has been president of the museum since his fellow Quaker Eli Price died in 1933, has been a mighty fundraiser.
With city aid slashed to $80,000 a year and only slender endowments of its own, the Philadelphia Museum scrapes along on an operating budget of around $150,000, one-tenth the budget of Manhattan's Metropolitan, which alone among U. S. museums rivals it in size. But it has kept up its building program, now has no galleries open.
No small part of Kimball's success (and a potent budget-balancing aid) is his ability to find eager, knowing young assistants who work hard for small pay. Several of his curators—Henry Plumer Mcllhenny, Henry Clifford, Boies Penrose —are so well off that Kimball affectionately calls them "my millionaires." Down into their pockets dig these three for many of the museum's top-flight special exhibitions. Even more significant is a growing list of "my young men" who now head important U. S. museums and got their first museum training under Kimball at Philadelphia. Some of them: Director-elect Francis Taylor of the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn Museum's Lauranee Roberts. Richard Foster Howard at the Dallas Museum.
The Philadelphia Museum is a great central hall with two wide, L-shaped wings. The late, great Dr. Wilhelm von Bode, director of Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum, devised the scheme of composite galleries or period rooms to display collections of "the finest things from all the arts and all periods."