Haunting Narratives: Detours from Philadelphia Realism, 1935 to the Present

For centuries, Philadelphia has been a major center for narrative painting and "realism" in the arts. Haunting Narratives focuses on a twist to that long tradition: the thematically dark, hauntingly strange works of art made by realist painters and print makers of Philadelphia since the 1930s. We may even call the strangely illusionistic but oddly reconstructed realism endemic to Philadelphia a genre in the arts of the city.

The exhibition traces its origins in the "warping" of realism we find… Show more in the works of the second quarter of the twentieth century – including Benton Spruance and Robert Riggs in the 1930s and the "surreal" imagery of Leon Kelly, a Philadelphia painter who, having lived in Paris, brought the ideas of the European avant-garde back to the art community of Philadelphia. Works by Sidney Goodman, Peter Paone, and Ben Kamihira demonstrate the continuities in this form of realism, and the exhibition includes works made by contemporary day artists.

Selected from a broad artistic spectrum, the works in the exhibition underscore the diversity within this vein, including pictorially dark, tenebrist scenes, mysterious figuration, and paradoxically colorful, seemingly lighthearted facades that mask a more unpromising reality.

Show less