The Experience
Like Philadelphia's own Parthenon, the Philadelphia Museum of Art sits majestically on a rise at the end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The vast collections of this temple of art make it the third-largest art museum in the country, and an absolute must-see on the city's cultural circuit.
Among its impressive holdings in Renaissance, American, Impressionist and Modern art, some standouts include a great Rogier van der Weyden altarpiece, a large Bathers by Cezanne, a room devoted to Philadelphia's own Thomas Eakins, and Marcel Duchamp's notorious mixed-media Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors (The Large Glass), exactly as the dada master installed it.
Upstairs, breathe in other cultures and times through over 80 period rooms, from the medieval cloister to the Indian temple. The Museum has wowed visitors in recent years with shows it helped to organize, from Cezanne and Degas to Brancusi and Barnett Newman.
History
Founded during the nation's first centennial in 1876 as a museum of decorative arts, the Museum soon outgrew its quarters in Fairmount Park's Memorial Hall. Its new building, in the form of three linked Greek temples, opened in 1928. Julian Abele, the chief designer and the first African-American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, was inspired by the temples he saw while traveling in Greece.