Rocky ran up the steps to the museum entrance as he trained to defeat the Russian boxer during the height of the Cold War. Tourists line up at his statue to take a photo with young Sylvester Stallone and leap at the top step. I’m not sure how many of them are actually there to visit the museum.
The third floor does an excellent job in displaying medieval, renaissance, and baroque European art. The collection is almost on par with central European museums. It’s just missing elaborate Rococo pieces and Eastern European art.
The second and first floors on modern and American art are a little lacking. The collection of American art, while adequate, fails to stand out among the great American art museums of Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit. The modern art section mentions that Renoir grew up in Paris during its 19th century transformation but misses the context by failing to also display the architecture of the uniform buildings from Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s use of Second Empire style.
I am impressed by the museum’s inclusion of Kandinsky and Klee, artists often overlooked by Americans for their relevant obscurity compared to, say, impressionist and post-impressionist Picasso and Seurat, who lived during the same time.
The first floor is not to be missed. It has local Pennsylvania art and furniture from the colonial period with visible Dutch and British influences. There is also a small collection of presidential China used in the White House. Each administration had a new design.
