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in one way or another, exempli¤es the way in which Philadelphia’s museums were not simply built as repositories for the vast accumulations made by acquisitive collectors. Rather, Penn tried to create institutional space for the new and emerging ¤elds of anthropology and archaeology (and it thus reinforced the deep connection between the two). In most other cities, notably New York, Chicago, and Washington, such collections were never liberated from their institutional homes in natural history museums. Penn’s museum, along with the Philadelphia Museum of Art (originally the Pennsylvania Museum), the Commercial Museum, Henry Mercer’s museum, and the venerable museum at the academy, stood as volumes in a veritable encyclopedia set of museums. That set attempted to give institutional form to different bodies of knowledge—natural science, American history, art, anthropology , economics—and to put that knowledge on display for the public. In the world of arts and letters, Philadelphia is seen as entering a long, sleepy twilight after the Civil War. The state of its cultural life merely re-®ected a larger sense of the city itself—complacent and staid according to some observers, content and corrupt according, famously, to one. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York had become the center of “modern” life, the heart of the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. This is so obviously true that it hardly needs recounting. And yet here too I think this truth is incomplete. As some scholars are now beginning to explore, whatever constitutes the phenomenon of American “modernism” must really be understood as various and polyphonous. The narrative of modernism that leads to New York, therefore, however signi¤cant it may be, is only one of several stories to be told. That American modernism and New York are seen almost synonymously re®ects the slant and predispositions of certain critics and historians as much as it re®ects the ebb and ®ow of cultural currents. As much as the Gotham narrative includes, it ignores the realist writers and painters of Chicago ; scienti¤c developments in a host of institutions; and even Frank Lloyd Wright, whose antiurban sentiments have made him hard to place in the context of New York modernism. So too, I believe, there is a Philadelphia modern, different to be sure from that of New York, that has gone incompletely reported. Elizabeth Johns (1983) has demonstrated powerfully how Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins linked his art to the “heroism of modern life” in Philadelphia. Whether in his two magni¤cent medical portraits, The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic, or in his scenes of rowers on the Schyulkill, Eakins’s works are records of Philadelphia’s role in shaping the modern world. The Pennsylvania 176 Steven Conn Academy, where Eakins taught, also produced John Sloan, the foremost member of New York’s “Ashcan School,” which came to prominence in the early twentieth century, and which constituted brie®y the American avantgarde . Charles Sheeler, for my money the most interesting American modernist painter, also trained at the academy and, as I have argued elsewhere (Conn 1998), his particular modernist vision was shaped by a formative friendship with none other than Henry Mercer. Thomas, Lewis, and Cohen (1996) have forced us to reconsider the development of twentieth-century American architecture by tracing its line back through Will Price to Frank Furness, perhaps the most inventive architect of “modernity” America produced. Any history of American architecture that relegates Philadelphia to provincial and conservative status, as most do, fails to explain how the PSFS (Philadelphia Saving Fund Society) Building, considered by many the ¤rst international modern-style building to go up in the United States and arguably still among the ¤nest, got built in 1932 at Twelfth and Market, not in Chicago or Manhattan (Kostoff 1995:716, Conn 1998:182–86). Nor can it explain the line of architects that grew through the twentieth century to include Louis Kahn, and the “Philadelphia School” that grew up around him, and more recently Robert Venturi. Indeed, it can be argued that, just as the international modern style made its debut in Philadelphia , postmodernism was born in Philadelphia when Venturi (1966; Venturi , Brown, and Izenour 1977) published his vastly in®uential books, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas. I don’t mean to be making a parochial, booster’s argument here, though it may sound a bit like that. My point is to suggest that much of the story of Philadelphia’s intellectual and...

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