Philly Art

Killing time before coming home I had enough time to hit the Philadelphia Museum of Art which is such a palace. Some group of industrialists laid down the cash for that bad girl. Looking at art can be sort of melancholy because its so quiet and so much good art comes out of struggle or isolation or other darknesses. I have generally been attracted to modernists and neo-classists and they had a nice representative collection of each. But what I really liked was a new discovery: Cy Twombly. Big scribbly canvasses that looked like the deranged dissertation notes of a Homer scholar having a nervous breakdown. The museum had a whole room dedicated to his work, so i guess he's a big deal. Maybe i'm the last one to know. After that i went up to the third floor, still feeling a little art-blue, and was cheered like a kid by the amazing armament and armor collection. it went on and on and on, from ancient Greece to fussy Napoleonic dueling foils. Someone actually wore this stuff. Speaking of tough guys. A friend told me that they used to have the Rocky statue at the top of the steps of the museum but the fancy people arranged to have it moved because it wasn't really "art." So now it sits on a little pedestal off to the side of the great stairs.