'Embracing the Contemporary' a glimpse into PMA's ambitious expansion plan

O ne of the works you are most likely to remember from the Art Museum's new show, "Embracing the Contemporary: the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection," is a really big sculpture of a little boy.

Boy with Frog (2008) by Charles Ray is a pristine white nude eight feet high, holding a frog aloft by its back legs. The face is intent, curious, casually cruel in the way children are. You can see him as a kind of collector, trying to understand the life around him by capturing it and holding it up for scrutiny.

The combination of his immaturity and larger-than-life stature make the figure into a kind of monster. There's no telling what he might do. He is perhaps a fitting symbol for the contemporary art market, which is large and full of eager spenders and enthusiastic spectators, but the participants can't really know what they are doing.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, like other encyclopedic museums, including New York's Metropolitan, is seeking to embrace the contemporary in a big way. Indeed, the desire for large galleries in which to show relatively recent art is a major impetus for the museum's ambitious expansion program, which is expected to be moving into a new, more aggressive phase shortly.

"What are they going to fill it with?" is the question I'm asked most often about the project. This show provides at least a partial answer. Nearly all the 103 or so paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and videos are either promised gifts to the Art Museum from the Rydal couple, or works that have already been donated. The two met as Penn students in 1967, and they have collected art ever since, though their collecting took a more serious turn in the mid-1980s, when they decided to concentrate on larger works by younger artists.

Mark Rosenthal, who was then the museum's curator of modern art, helped them develop a wish list, and others from the Art Museum have been involved in the development of the collection. (Katherine Sachs has worked with the museum's curators on shows about Cézanne and others.) In the show's catalogue, the Sachses say they have always seen the Art Museum as the future home for their collection.

Thus, this show, curated by Carlos Basualdo, the museum's senior curator of contemporary art, gives us the opportunity to look this gift horse in the mouth, and perhaps get a glimpse of the museum's future.

Obviously, this collection represents only one of many ways to embrace the contemporary. So much art of so many different kinds is being produced today that no group of 100 works will evoke, let alone document, the activity. Thus, it seems churlish to complain about what's not here - yet even though female artists are a key part of the contemporary scene, only Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith are on display here.

Except for the video works, which were not yet operational when I saw the show, the collection emphasizes artists already well established more than three decades ago, when the Sachses began to collect seriously. Many of the newest pieces in the collection are the work of artists who are almost old masters, such as Jasper Johns, who has long been well represented at the Art Museum and who gets a gallery of his own in this show. His three-part drawing Voice 2 (1982) is one of his most energetic works, baroque, yet delicate in its draftsmanship. The Sachses spent 15 years trying to get Johns to sell it to them.

Brice Marden also gets an excellent gallery of his own, filled mostly with monumental pieces like Red Ground Letter (2007-2010). Most of these works are tangles of layered lines and shapes that trap first the eye and then the mind, and even the spirit.

Ellsworth Kelly gets a gallery, too, but one of his most memorable works is installed outside of the special exhibition area in the museum's permanent modern and contemporary galleries. This is a small early mounted relief, Cutout in Wood (1950), which encourages us to shift our attention back and forth between the key-like space it frames, and the vaguely anthropomorphic and confrontational look of the object itself.

An adjacent gallery in the permanent collection offers a bravura display of one of the collection's strengths: late- 20th-century German art. One outstanding example is Refugee Camp (1994) by Sigmar Polke, an enormous painting that appears to be based on an overenlarged newspaper photo. Its lacquer and resin surface seems to radiate a golden glow that up close looks more like a toxic fog.

On an adjacent wall is Anselm Keifer's Saturn Time (1986), another huge canvas whose dark, apocalyptic look is countered with a tree at its center. Nearby, on the floor, is Gerhard Richter's Sphere 3 (Piz Boval) (1992), a slightly more than six-inch diameter steel sphere whose shiny surface reflects all these huge German works and all the people looking at them.

Collecting is a matter of relationships with dealers and with artists. One of the more endearing parts of the show documents the Sachses' relationships with artists. We see Richard Serra's drawings for a massive, two-piece steel work that stands in their front yard in Rydal, along with photos of his installing it.

The deepest friendships, though, seem to be with the English artists Richard Hamilton and Howard Hodgkin. The latter's work is particularly intimate, since it contains a not entirely representational portrait of the couple, and another of Katherine Sachs as a sweep of blond-haired energy. Hodgkin paints in broad strokes. His housepainter brushes color the frame as well as the center of the panel. The work is strong, and not widely on view in the United States.

These might not be the most coveted works in the collection, but they help give character and quirkiness to a collection that otherwise hews a little too closely to that wish list the Sachses made three decades ago. The museum needs to find some more contemporary ways of embracing the contemporary. But this is a very good start.

"Embracing the Contemporary:

The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection." Tuesday to September. Art Museum of Philadelphia, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Main building open until 8:45 p.m. Wednesday & Friday. Closed Mondays except for some holidays. Closed July 4. Admission: adults $20, seniors $18, students and youth 13-18 $14, children free. Information: 215-763-8100, www.philamuseum.org.