Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Soon after they had moved to Philadelphia in 1973, Robert Kohler and Frances Coulborn Kohler went to Boston\u2019s Pucker Safrai Gallery and saw Jane Lund\u2019s Party for Myself (1974\u201375) hanging by the doorway. <\/p>\n
Four self-portraits of the artist born in 1939 \u2014 with shoulder-length hair \u2014 sitting at a table. One of the women in blue looks at the viewer and invites us in with a smile. Another wears a flower crown and sits with a plate of fish. Another is topless except for a blue beaded necklace and a hat with pointy horns. The last one has her hair slicked back and mouth wide open. Her skin is a ghastly blue.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hated it! How could anyone choose to live with such a thing, we asked ourselves,\u201d Robert Kohler writes in a recent essay.<\/p>\n
Once the Kohlers got to their home in West Philadelphia<\/a>, they called the gallery. They wanted the painting. <\/p>\n The Lund painting was the first of many the Kohlers would go on to acquire \u2014 all featuring human figures. Hundreds from that collection are part of the \u201cBodies and Souls\u201d exhibition on view at Woodmere and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. <\/p>\n \u201cIt stuck in our minds,\u201d Kohler writes of the Lund painting in the same essay, featured in the show\u2019s catalog, \u201cand we independently realized that our strong feelings were a good sign.\u201d<\/p>\n The show\u2019s curator, Robert Cozzolino, who was a senior curator at PAFA from 2004 to 2016, first met the couple when working on another PAFA show in 2006. <\/p>\n \u201cThen I went to visit their house and was blown away by how they collected by their own gut feelings and personal taste,\u201d Cozzolino said. \u201cThey weren\u2019t following any trends. They were not paying attention to what the market told them, or collectors. They were using their own eyes and their hearts, and that\u2019s the thing that I think really amazed me.\u201d <\/p>\n Over the years, the Kohlers developed a deep friendship with Cozzolino and, through him, PAFA. <\/p>\n \u201cRob would, occasionally, bring to my attention art he was thinking of acquiring with Frances, and we would talk about it. They also acquired some things for PAFA,\u201d said Cozzolino. <\/p>\n By the time Cozzolino left PAFA, the Kohlers had already decided to bequeath their collection to the museum.<\/p>\n The Kohlers\u2019 rules of buying<\/p>\n \u201cWe had been collectors since the late 1960s, not of fine art, but of art crafts: artisanal objects made or viewed as art,\u201d writes Robert Kohler, who was a historian of science and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania<\/a>. His wife, Frances, was a science editor. She died in 2021. <\/p>\n (Though related to the family of plumbing fixture giant Herbert V. Kohler Jr., the Kohlers are not part of the foundation that is a major donor to the Brandywine Museum<\/a>.) <\/p>\n It was a PAFA show \u2014 1981\u2019s \u201cContemporary American Realism Since 1960,\u201d curated by Frank Goodyear \u2014 that pushed the Kohlers to more serious and informed art collecting. That show, along with 1983\u2019s \u201cBodies and Souls,\u201d organized by New York\u2019s Artists\u2019 Choice Museum, opened the Kohlers to the endless possibilities of contemporary American Realism. <\/p>\n It was \u201cexpressionist, fantastic, raunchy, or all-out weird \u2014 a visual cornucopia,\u201d Kohler writes. <\/p>\n That\u2019s the style they stuck to acquiring. <\/p>\n The Kohlers mostly bought from galleries. They favored the art of living artists, and when they liked an artist, they\u2019d take a deep dive into their oeuvre to pick their most significant works. <\/p>\n Driven by Chicago gallerist Allan Frumkin\u2019s advice \u2014 \u201cBuy the toughest work you can stand\u201d \u2014 the Kohlers collected a wide range of artists, from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Massachusetts, and, of course, Philadelphia. <\/p>\n \u201cWe favored art that insinuates itself assertively but nonviolently into our lives,\u201d Robert Kohler writes.<\/p>\n The Kohlers at PAFA<\/p>\n If PAFA sets out to tell the length and breadth of the story of American art, the Kohlers\u2019 collection allows it to tell \u201ca much more expansive story,\u201d said Judith M. Thomas, PAFA\u2019s deputy director of American art. <\/p>\n Their deep collection of regional artists includes the Chicago imagists, the Bay Area figurative movement, and, Thomas said, \u201cthen someone like Gregory Gillespie,\u201d who was born in New Jersey, studied in New York and San Francisco, and put down roots in western Massachusetts.<\/p>\n The through line that defines their collection, both Cozzolino and Thomas agreed, is the deep, supportive community that artists form among themselves and with their art. <\/p>\n Names like Chicago\u2019s Gladys Nilsson (b. 1940) appear alongside Philadelphia\u2019s Anne Minich (b. 1934) and former PAFA and now Rutgers professor Didier William (b. 1983), who was born in Haiti. <\/p>\n When put into the brackets of their artistic movements, artists may often seem like people creating only in conjunction with other artists around them, but \u201cBodies and Souls\u201d and the Kohlers\u2019 collection bring forth networks of cross-regional kinships, said Michelle Donnelly, PAFA\u2019s curator of 20th century art and the John Rhoden Collection. <\/p>\n Nilsson is best known for her work in Chicago, but she lived in Sacramento for a brief period of time. There she met artist Robert Arneson (b. 1930) and became good friends with Roy De Forest (b. 1930) \u2014 all artists in the Kohlers\u2019 collection bequeathed to PAFA. <\/p>\n The Kohlers\u2019 gift of Evelyn Statsinger, said Thomas, fills a gap in PAFA\u2019s collection of Chicago artists, and while the museum had Joan Brown\u2019s art, the Kohlers\u2019 collection makes PAFA\u2019s collection \u201cfuller and deeper.\u201d <\/p>\n Figurative art is essentially an insertion of one\u2019s self, a decision to put one\u2019s body (however artistically) in the center of a piece. Queer bodies, aging bodies, people of color, immigrant bodies, bodies pushed away to margins often find a home in this style. <\/p>\n \u201cEmpathy and vulnerability is at the center of the Kohlers\u2019 collecting practice,\u201d said Donnelly. \u201cAnd they were really interested in artists who were turning to themselves and their personal relationships to generate empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately, I think it\u2019s about humanity,\u201d said Thomas. \u201cIt\u2019s giving space for people, for artists, to represent humanity and compassion on many levels, and to be vulnerable, but also confident enough to make that statement in your artwork, and that\u2019s inspiring. It\u2019s courageous and it\u2019s very human.\u201d<\/p>\n The Kohlers at Woodmere<\/p>\n The Woodmere Museum is a museum of art by artists from and of Philadelphia. <\/p>\n \u201cRob and Frances\u2019 engagement with the arts is really an interest in communities of artists and regional communities of artists across the country. And living in Philadelphia, of course, they were engaged with the artists of their city, of their community,\u201d said William Valerio, the director and CEO of the museum.<\/p>\n While the PAFA show gives viewers the national scope of the Kohlers\u2019 collection, the Woodmere show, Valerio said, \u201ctells the local story.\u201d The Kohlers, he said, \u201care looking at American art as a whole, and they\u2019re looking at Philadelphia\u2019s contribution to the overall narrative and the multifaceted conversations around American art.\u201d<\/p>\n Artist Twins Seven Seven (1944-2011) was born in Nigeria but lived and worked in Philadelphia. His work, therefore, stands at an intersection of Philadelphia and America when drawing out the scope of America\u2019s art and the story it tells about itself.<\/p>\n \u201cWoodmere has collected Twins Seven Seven aggressively,\u201d said Valerio. \u201cAnd Rob [Kohler] decided there were two works of art that were kind of a pair [Village Life Under the Cocoa Tree (2007) and the undated Village Life Under Palm Tree]. Rob said, \u2018You know, PAFA should have a piece by Twins Seven Seven.\u2019 So both pieces were purchased. One came to Woodmere [Palm Tree], one went to PAFA [Cocoa Tree],\u201d said Valerio.<\/p>\n Puerto Rico-born artist Rafael Ferrer (b. 1933), who came to Philadelphia in the 1960s to teach at UArts, also belongs in Kohlers\u2019 gifts to both PAFA and Woodmere. As does Minich.<\/p>\n While the Kohlers\u2019 collection is bequeathed to PAFA, the couple has also gifted art from their collection to Woodmere. But, Valerio said, \u201cto a great extent, they\u2019ve underwritten our ability to acquire works by living artists of Philadelphia. They have almost collected together [with Woodmere] to build the collection of living artists of Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n The Kohlers\u2019 background in science, he said, made them \u201cdeeply intellectual people interested in the transformations that they\u2019re seeing in their city daily. And that shows up in the works they collected.\u201d<\/p>\n It also \u201cled them to gravitate toward work that is visually detailed and grapples with natural life cycles with questions of decay,\u201d said Donnelly. <\/p>\n What emerges, thereafter, is a world of artwork that creates a space for everyone \u2014 the San Francisco trans artist Craig Calderwood (b. 1987), Minich drawing her aging body, Irene Olivieri (b. 1951) exploring kinship and connection through a human-animal hybrid in Papachongo (2024), and so on.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat stands out to me, again and again, are artists really unafraid to explore identity\u2026 artists really asking, \u2018Who am I? How do I relate to the world?\u2019\u201d said Cozzolino speaking from Minneapolis days after President Donald Trump pulled 700 immigration officers from the city<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not overtly political but it\u2019s about the politics of seeing one another, and seeing yourself and really being able to articulate what matters about identity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBodies and Souls\u201d runs through July 12 at PAFA\u2019s Fisher Brooks Gallery, Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building, PAFA, 128 N. Broad St., pafa.org<\/a>; and through July 6 at Charles Knox Smith Hall, Woodmere Museum, 9201 Germantown<\/a> Ave., woodmereartmuseum.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min Soon after they had moved to Philadelphia in 1973, Robert Kohler and Frances…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,218866],"class_list":["post-568780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-robert-frances-kohler-bodies-and-souls-pafa-woodmere"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}