VENICE, Italy - The Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday won the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion award for best national pavilion - the first by a commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion since 1990.

In a ceremony at the pavilion attended by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, the museum accepted honors for "Bruce Nauman: Topological Garden," echoing the capture of a similar top award two decades ago for its Jasper Johns show.

"We're all so happy," Art Museum chairman H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest said. "What it represents to me is what a great loss it was when Anne d'Harnoncourt died a year ago, and the museum has not lost a step despite that. This to me is a great achievement . . . and nobody would have been more excited than Anne d'Harnoncourt."

Through his spokesman, Mayor Nutter called the prize "a tremendous achievement for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and for the city of Philadelphia. Recognition like this shows that Philadelphia continues to be a world-class city."

Tobias Rehberger of Germany won the Golden Lion for best artist in the venerable contemporary-art exposition, this year titled "Fare Mondi/Making Worlds." Nauman won a Golden Lion in 1999 for lifetime achievement.

The award for Philadelphia, bestowed by a five-member international committee, confers welcome prestige and came after a week of steadily building critical praise.

At a Thursday reception at the glamorous Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal, the chic art establishment was chatting long into the jasmine-perfumed night - moving pale-green mojito ice pops and cigarettes slowly from hand to mouth - about the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Bruce Nauman show at the 53d Venice Biennale.

The exhibit spans three venues, and "the word I've heard is that you really must see all of it," said Adam D. Weinberg, director of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Having viewed the third in the U.S. Pavilion, he said, "It still seems really edgy."

"It looks more avant garde than ever," ARTnews deputy editor Barbara MacAdam said at the Thursday bash, the major American social event of the Biennale. "The videos are unbelievably spellbinding."

Early visitors to the Nauman show, or at least parts of it, have included Mick Jagger and Naomi Campbell, and reviews have been affirming.

"Nauman emerges as the big art-historical figure in this Biennale," wrote a critic for Bloomberg. "He's tremendously inventive, with a bleak Samuel Beckett-like vision of existence."

"That mad man Bruce Nauman brings his own particular brand of wackily serious gusto to the usually rather staid-looking American pavilion," said the Independent of London.

The economy of the show's scale - 33 items at the U.S. Pavilion and two local universities - perhaps allows viewers to spend more time with each piece.

"It's not a lot of work, but it's core work," noted Sueyun Locks of Philadelphia's Locks Gallery.

A substantial hometown contingent - members of the Art Museum's board and chairman's council of donors - met the larger art world at the Guggenheim party. New York dealer Sean Kelly attended, as did art writer Peter Plagens, artists, curators, and museum directors.

"It's old-home week," said the Art Museum's chief operating officer, Gail M. Harrity.

Michael Conforti, director of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., walked over as a reporter and Harrity were talking about Japanese architect Tadao Ando, whose retrofitting of a Venice marine warehouse into a new home for French billionaire Francois Pinault's contemporary-art collection has just opened.

What is going on with a new Ando building in Philadelphia for a Calder museum? Conforti asked. "I wish it could happen," he added. "The art would look terrific in it."

Then he volunteered that the rumors that he was one of three finalists for the Art Museum's director job were not true. He hasn't even spoken to the search firm, he said.

Conforti expressed hope, however, that realistic expectations would arrive with the new director, whoever that might be, pointing out that d'Harnoncourt died three months before the bottom fell out of the market and that even she could not have shielded the museum from the financial stresses.