Currents

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Franz Kline At PAFA The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia is presenting the only East Coast showing of the exhibition of “The Vital Ges­ture: Franz Kline in Retro­spect” through September 28 [1986]. The exhibition consists of seventy-five paintings and twenty-five works on paper and is the first major retro­spective of the native Pennsyl­vanian since 1968....
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents In the Vale of the Wyoming Since the eighteenth century, the Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsyl­vania – roughly encompassing the region from Nanticoke in the southwest to Pittston in the northeast – has been extensively cited and depicted as an area of extraordinary, if not awe-inspiring, natural beauty. The last glacial age formed the picturesque bluffs and narrows that now mark...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Chester County Photographs Sixty thousand photo­graphs are currently being catalogued and preserved at the Chester County Historical Society’s photography archives through a one hundred thou­sand dollar grant provided by the J.N. Pew, Jr., Charitable Trust. The collection includes examples of almost every pho­tographic format, including the daguerreotype, a photo­graph on a light-sensitive...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents The Larder Invaded Butter, buckwheat cakes, cream cheese, the legendary Fish House Punch, lemon meringue pie, pepper hash, pigeon, scrapple (billed now as Philadelphia paté), seckel pears and terrapin are culinary delights made famous by Phil­adelphia. When Benjamin Franklin alighted in the bus­tling eighteenth century city, he landed at the chaotic wharf at Market Street, overflowing with fish,...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Eckley Miners’ Village Two major summer pro­grams will be held at Eckley Miners’ Village in Luzerne County, a living history mu­seum complex dedicated to the lives and contributions of the generations of immigrants who toiled assiduously at the height of the anthracite boom in northeastern Pennsylvania. On Saturday, June 27 [1987], the village will present a day-long program,...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Wonderful Wildflowers Andrey Avinoff was born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1884 and raised on a large estate in the Ukraine. By the age of nine, he was making accurate paintings of butter­flies, and as a young man he traveled through Asia, collect­ing eighty thousand central Asian specimens. Avinoff left his homeland in 1917, and supported himself in New York City by portrait...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Armenian American Heritage Survivors of centuries of persecution, Armenians have developed an unbreakable will to maintain the culture of their ancestors. Even as foreign rulers forced Armenians to flee their homeland and scatter across the Near East, Europe and the United States, their culture, remarkably, survived. Today, Armenian Americans carry on a rich and full ethnic life. Through...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Garden Treasures Located midway between New York and Washington, D.C., in what is known as the historic Brandywine Valley, are some of the finest gardens in the United States, the most famous of which is Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square. Longwood Gardens, recall­ing the ambience of the grand pleasure gardens of Europe, was the country home of Pierre S. du Pont (1870-1954), industrial genius,...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Victorian Gardens In 1887, brother and sister John T. and Lydia T. Morris began acquiring land north­west of Philadelphia in Chest­nut Hill. Not long afterwards, they engaged Theophilus Parsons Chandler, an architect popular with the city’s affluent families, to prepare drawings for a grand baronial structure which they christened Comp­ton. The grey stone mansion was carefully sited to...
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Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents A Collector Collects Henry Plumer McIlhenny (1910-1986), world-renowned art collector, respected mu­seum curator, philanthropist and active Philadelphian, devoted more than a half-century of service to the Phila­delphia Museum of Art as curator, trustee and chairman. Scion of one of Philadelphia’s leading families, he was the son of John D. McIlhenny, president of the Philadelphia Museum...
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