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If I am gonna tell you that, there is a place in Earth where 240,000 objects, showing over 200 galleries spanning 2000 years, highlighting creative achievements of western world, are you gonna believe on such a Statement !!!
Let me tell you, it is a legend and it do exist and this place is named as Philadelphia Museum of Art. Let Crawl together and get to know about the creativity lies underneath.
This is an art museum chartered on the year 1876 and the main building was completed in the year 1928. The Gallery Comprises of various classes of artwork including paintings, Prints, Photographs, sculpture, armor & decorative arts, of ,mostly European, American And Asian Origin.
The City Council of Philadelphia funded a competition in 1895 to design a new museum building, but it was not until 1907 that plans were first made to construct it on Fairmount, a rocky hill topped by the city's main reservoir, but after lots of conflicts and hurdles the final design is mostly credited to two architects in Trumbauer's firm: Howell Lewis Shay for the building's plan and massing, and Julian Abele for the detail work and perspective drawings.
In 1902, Abele had become the first African-American student to be graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Architecture, which is presently known as Penn's School of Design. Abele adapted classical Greek temple columns for the design of the museum entrances, and was responsible for the colors of both the building stone and the figures added to one of the pediments.
The museum's collections of Egyptian and Roman art, as well as many of its Pre-Columbian works, were relocated to the Penn Museum after an exchange agreement was made whereby the museum houses the university's collection of Chinese porcelain.
But as said earlier still it contains almost 240,000 number of creative achievement on the origin of Asian collections, furniture and decorative arts, including major collections of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ceramics; a large and distinguished group of Persian and Turkish carpets; and rare and authentic architectural assemblages such as a Chinese palace hall, a Japanese teahouse, and a sixteenth-century Indian temple hall with prints and sculptures.
Francis Picabia, The Dance at the Spring, 1912
Pablo Picasso, Old Woman (Woman with Gloves), 1901
Albert Gleizes, l'Homme au Balcon, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), 1912
Joan Miró, 1920, Horse, Pipe and Red Flower
Claude Monet, Japanese Bridge and Water Lilies, c.1899
The European collections, dating from the medieval era to the present, encompass Italian and Flemish early-Renaissance masterworks; strong representations of later European paintings, including French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; sculpture, with a special concentration in the works of Auguste Rodin; decorative arts; tapestries; furniture; the second-largest collection of arms and armor in the United States; and period rooms and architectural settings ranging from the facade of a medieval church in Burgundy to a superbly decorated English drawing room by Robert Adam.
The museum's American collections, surveying more than three centuries of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts, are among the finest in the United States, with outstanding strengths in 18th- and 19th-century Philadelphia furniture and silver, Pennsylvania German art, rural Pennsylvania furniture and ceramics, and the paintings of Thomas Eakins. The museum houses the most important Eakins collection in the world.
Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion Diptych, c.1460
Alfred Stevens, Will you go out with me, Fido?, 1859
Édouard Manet, The Departure of Steam Folkestone, 1869
Thomas Eakins, The Concert Singer, 1890–1892
Paul Cézanne, The Bathers, 1898-1905
Modern artwork includes works by Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Antonio Rotta, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí and Constantin Brâncu?i, as well as American modernists. The expanding collection of contemporary art includes major works by Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Sol LeWitt, among many others.
The museum houses encyclopedic holdings of costume and textiles, as well as prints, drawings, and photographs that are displayed in rotation for reasons of preservation.
The Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch Collection
The Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch is another beauty of the museum. The Von Kienbusch collection was bequeathed by the celebrated collector to the museum in 1976, the Bicentennial Anniversary of the American Revolution.
On May 30, 2000, the museum and the State Art Collections in Dresden, Germany announced an agreement for the return of five pieces of armor stolen from Dresden during World War II. In 1953, Von Kienbusch had unsuspectingly purchased the armor, which was part of his 1976 bequest. Von Kienbusch published catalogs of his collection, which eventually led Dresden authorities to bring the matter up with the museum.
Besides being known for its architecture and collections, Visitors to the museum are often seen mimicking Rocky Balboa's (portrayed by Sylvester Stallone) famous run up the east entrance stairs, informally nicknamed the Rocky Steps. Because of the series of movies,the Rocky films—Rocky (1976) and five of its six sequels, II, III, V, Rocky Balboa and Creed.
An 8.5 ft (2.6 m) tall bronze statue of the Rocky Balboa character was commissioned in 1980 and placed at the top of the stairs in 1982 for the filming of Rocky III. After filming was complete, Stallone donated the statue to the city of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Art Commission eventually decided to relocate the statue to the now-defunct Spectrum sports arena due to controversy over its prominent placement at the top of the museum's front stairs and questions about its artistic merit. The statue was placed briefly on top of the stairs again for the film Rocky V and then returned to the Spectrum. In 2006, the statue was relocated to a new display area on the north side of the base of the stairs.
