Notice Anything Missing on the Parkway? Philly's Loss is Seagram Building's Gain

I knew something out of the Ordinary was missing last week when I walked through the Calder Sculpture Garden on the Ben Franklin Parkway, but I couldn't immediately put my finger on it. Then it hit me. Ordinary - Alexander Calder's black-and-primary-colored, kinetic sculpture - was gone. How could that happen when it was guarded nightly by a ghostly SpectraGuard van? But sure enough, dear Watson, all that was left was a bare patch of grass on the corner of 22nd Street (see above). It turns out that Ordinary was shipped off May 22 to the plaza in front of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park Avenue (below). Philadelphia didn't even get to say goodbye.
It's all very strange - and worrisome. Ordinary was loaned to Philadelphia in 2002 by the Calder Foundation as a good will gesture while it negotiated with the city over the plans for a museum devoted to the work of the great sculptor Alexander Calder and his artist father and grandfather, Philadelphians all. The 19-foot-high, triangular Ordinary, with its little red, blue and yellow triangles dangling from its arm, looked so good on the Parkway in lieu of the museum, that in 2004 the Pew Charitable Trusts paid $5 million to rent 10 more Calder sculptures, a variety of related black pieces from the '70s with swiss cheese holes, for the site. Laurie Olin's office was hired to landscape the two-acre corner, and it produced a magically serene oasis - a miniature, urbanized version of the Storm King grounds for sculpture. The Calder sculptures, which circled Ordinary as if it were the queen bee, looked so much at home amid the ornamental grasses and black-eyed Susans that you almost didn't care whether the museum got built.
Now, there's no chance of that. Negotiations with the Calder Foundation fell apart last September. Nothing seemed amiss at first. Norman Keyes, a spokesman for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which manages the garden, insists that Ordinary was removed in May as part of a planned rotation. He says the museum is in the process of negotiating a replacement. Gee, if the museum knew back before May 22 - say, in March or April - that Ordinary was going, why didn't it start negotiating for a replacement then? Will the 10 charming Calders end up following Ordinary, to be lined up along Park Avenue instead of nestled amid the Parkway?
Keyes says there is no such plan. The landscaping in the sculpture garden were just replanted, he noted, and Pew's original contract with the Calder Foundation is supposed to run through 2012. Philadelphia has relinquished and replaced two large Calders before: First it had to give up Eagle from its perfect perch on the art museum plaza to Seattle's Art Museum. Then, a piece that had been lent by the Calder Foundation was returned after spending time in the Rodin Museum courtyard. Keyes notes that Ordinary took the place of that sculpture. Its home moved across the parkway after the museum site was designated.
Still, when Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski reported the break down in the Calder Museum negotiations last September, he noted that the city was now in danger of losing the 10 smaller sculptures. We hope not. Philadelphia - not New York - has an unbreakable umbilical tie to the Calder family and their work. Even if the museum is not to be, the sculpture garden is a reminder that one of the 20th Century's greatest artists has a home waiting in Philadelphia.