A signature campaign honoring museum legend

On the walls of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, starting today, near the usual first-person flourishes saying "Degas" or "G. Braque," astute visitors will begin noticing the appearance of a new signature.

It says:

Anne d'Harnoncourt.

All around the museum - in Gallery 119 with the Wyeths, at the Japanese Temple and Teahouse, in the Perelman annex - museum staff spent the week putting up evidence that Anne Was Here.

Blue labels with the d'Harnoncourt signature have been placed next to works acquired during her era, which ran as curator of 20th-century art from 1972 to 1982 and as director from 1982 until her death in June.

According to the museum's accounting, about 80,000 objects came in (including, in one shot, the 45,000 Old Masters prints and drawings of the Berman collection) under d'Harnoncourt's discerning eye - a third of the collection.

Now on display are 1,133 of these items, organized into a museumwide show of sorts. "A Director's Vision: The Legacy of Anne d'Harnoncourt" runs through July 19.

"If you look through the blue labels that are up, it's amazing," said Michael R. Taylor, curator of modern art. "In my galleries alone, it's staggering. . . . The collection was transformed under her leadership. It's a sea of blue right now, and it's wonderful to see."

The show was timed to arrive with 5,500 museum professionals' coming to Philadelphia for the American Association of Museums' annual meeting, starting Thursday.

"I think we all say amongst ourselves, you can sense Anne in the galleries and see her hand that touched so much of the collection," said museum interim chief executive Gail M. Harrity. "This is a great way for museum people from around the world to feel her presence."

Part memorial and part treasure hunt, the labeling project puts a loving note of attribution on these acquisitions, giving visitors a chance to peer into d'Harnoncourt's vision.

"You will see that not every single work of art is a blockbuster masterpiece," said Alice Beamesderfer, interim curatorial chief. "In the silver gallery, for instance, something may be there because it's from a maker we didn't have, or because it shows a subtle distinction in engraving. Hopefully, visitors will be able to see that building a collection is a thoughtful process, filling gaps, adding strength to strength. And buying the occasional masterpiece - but it's not all about that."

At a time when the museum is searching for a chief curatorial voice as coaxing and authoritative as d'Harnoncourt's, the labeling project also serves as a physical manifestation of the job description of director.

There is no successor yet, though sources say that, after an international search, the museum is arriving at a short list.

Curators are on the acquisition front lines, but several of the curatorial staff preferred to credit d'Harnoncourt on this occasion, saying - often in still-emotional voices - that her rare combination of characteristics would be hard to duplicate.

That's because, in a museum like Philadelphia's, where the majority of acquisitions are donations, it's not just about knowing where to buy or when to say yes to a gift. It's about cultivating relationships.

"Funding has always been limited for the whole museum, and she was very astute in being able to figure out which funds could be spread out further, or which item might appeal to a particular donor so we could get funding for that item without going into the general museum funds," said Felice Fischer, curator of Japanese art and East Asian art.

If d'Harnoncourt could foresee opportunity, she also anticipated potential disaster.

Kathleen Foster, senior curator of American art and director of the museum's Center for American Art, says that, when she took the job in 2002, d'Harnoncourt told her to be ready for the day Eakins' The Gross Clinic would threaten to slip out of town.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened. And when it did, in 2006, d'Harnoncourt already had a plan in place. That painting, as well a marble relief similarly threatened (Saint-Gaudens' The Angel of Purity), now sit facing each other - footnoted with blue labels.

"She picked up the phone and called the mayor and the governor and Arlen Specter. Raising $68 million was not something anyone thought we could do," Foster said of the national save-the-Gross Clinic campaign.

"She lived for art and carried with her that experience, so that when an object did come on the market," modern art curator Taylor said, "she was able to move faster than her colleagues."

More quietly than big rescues, d'Harnoncourt ardently cultivated collectors such as former trustee Robert L. McNeil Jr., who has donated a cache of important American paintings and decorative arts, as well as an endowment.

Or members of the family of the artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, with whom the museum has developed a relationship that has yielded, first, a retrospective show and then acquisition of Portrait of the Artist's Mother.

"That kind of friendship-building is key to opportunity, so that they come to you instead of somebody else," said Foster.

It's also clear that when it came to developing relationships with artists, d'Harnoncourt's inner divining rod paid off handsomely.

"She had a friendship with Jasper Johns that went back to the '60s," Taylor said, in describing how Johns' Catenary (I Call to the Grave) found its way to the museum. "She saw it in the studio and realized it could be a future Large Bathers," the enigmatic masterpiece by Cézanne. "That, for her, I think, was an icon."

As a 25-year-old curator, it was d'Harnoncourt who, with others, became aware of and fetched Duchamp's Etant donnés from the late artist's studio and had it installed at the museum, cementing its primacy in Duchamp and strengthening its lead in conceptual art.

"She knew that, in some cases, we would never own a large group of works by a certain artist," said Taylor, "and so it was true with Bruce Nauman."

D'Harnoncourt went after an early neon Nauman that Taylor said had a message that spoke powerfully to her.

The title of the work: The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.

Now, nearly a year and 1,133 blue labels after her death, a show reveals a thing or two about museum directors and the mystic truth for one of them.

What does the museum experience mean to you? About 80 Philadelphians give their answers in a video produced by Glenn Holsten for the American Association of Museums' annual meeting in Philadelphia. See it here .