Alexandra A. Kirtley, the decorative arts curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, first gleaned the identity of the secretive collector she called “Mr. Big” when she overheard his name at a bar. Mr. Big, who began his collecting with furniture, had been snapping up “the best of the best” American pieces, she said, like a rare Bombé desk and bookcase by Nathaniel Gould, a revered 18th-century cabinetmaker.
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Mr. Big is John S. Middleton, a long-anonymous billionaire collector who is now the principal owner of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team. He and his wife, Leigh, have assembled what is regarded as one of the finest collections of American art in private hands, ranking near the one Alice Walton put together for her nonprofit Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in northwest Arkansas.
Some 120 of the Middleton family’s sculptures, furniture, artifacts and paintings — including the Bierstadt and the Peale — make their public debut with the Middleton name attached in “A Nation of Artists,” a pair of exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts timed to the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding in Philadelphia.
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The exhibitions take an expansive view of American art, trying to dismantle categories like “folk” “fine” and “self-taught.” The curators took deep pleasure in playing yenta. At the Academy, Mary Cassatt’s “Mother and Sara Admiring the Baby’’ (1901) communes with Gisela McDaniel’s nurturing presence in “Auntie Susan a Yo’åmte” (2023), a portrait of a traditional healer of the Indigenous Chamoru of Guam. Jackson Pollock’s “Number 4” (1951), a fever dream of black lines, aluminum paint and other pigments, resides beside Dyani White Hawk’s “She Gives (Quiet Strength VII)” (2020), which echoes Lakota quill work and beadwork in tiny marks of paint. Pollock drew inspiration from Indigenous iconography, including sand painting. White Hawk’s work is “an implied critique of the appropriation of Indigenous motifs by non-Indigenous artists,” said Leah Triplett, the Academy’s curator of contemporary art.
