Rodger LaPelle displaying David Becker's Redemption, 1993, Etching and Engraving. photo, Mike DelVecchia

Gallery owner Rodger LaPelle likes where he works. "But I wouldn't exactly call where I live to be a center for the arts," he says.

The proprietor, who has operated LaPelle Galleries since 1984 is biding his time until his gallery takes its turn at going the way of the passenger pigeon. "Art has always struggled to survive in Philadelphia," he continues.

A six-foot one-inch, blue-eyed man in his late sixties, LaPelle is paying half-attention to the evening news at his Germantown home. It is August. He is wearing a button-down shirt and khaki slacks. Slim, white-haired, he resembles Charles Dickens' description of the white-haired Mr. Dombey, except that in the place of "heavy marks of care and suffering" is a soft grin that is so predominant among his expressions, that it might as well be a tattoo.

"I've had things good in the art business. There is really no reason to complain on the whole," LaPelle explains.

The television tells him that there is a fire on 122 North 3rd Street. He puts down the artist resumes he had been reviewing, grabs his car keys and prepares to sprint to his gallery. Just then, a picture of the inferno is flashed. He recognizes the building to be on North 2nd Street. The fire has been ignited in a construction project where a ten-foot hole had been bulldozed into the ground during the summer. It resembles a "soup bowl of fire." The LaPelle Galleries is safe.

Last August, the Old City gallery's windows were inundated with hydrofluoric acid poured by a graffiti artist, whom the police later caught. The acid is normally used to etch stained glass windows. It is available at local craft stores.

A Gallery Owner's Gripe List

"I think that kind of vandalism is mostly going out of fashion," says LaPelle, who adds, "The long-lasting destruction is what politicians and voters are continually allowing to happen to art in our city." LaPelle's gripe list includes the closing of the Office of Arts and Culture last July. The laying-off of two hundred employees by the Franklin Mint, "and the fact that the mint is no longer buying original designs by artists, but is selling Princess Di collectibles, is a sign of where we're heading." The shutting down of Seward Johnson's Atelier Foundry and Technical Institute in Princeton during the summer of 2004 that led to the suspension of the institute's apprentice program last September, has also raised LaPelle's dander.

"It's the fault of the one-party rule we've had for a half-century," he says.

Since 1952, all of Philadelphia's mayors have been Democrats. But between 1900 and that time, all of the mayors were Republicans. "When the Republicans were in power during the first half of the last century, we had every conceivable type of business in Philadelphia," he says, adding, "But under the Democrats, companies like Curtis Publishing, National Advertising, textile mills, foundries, breweries, art galleries, big industry, all left the city."

Currently, in Philadelphia there are 449,182 registered Democrats, 100,959 registered Republicans and 11,039 persons who are independents or belong to smaller parties. LaPelle who is registered as a Democrat, says, "I vote only Republican. But I am a registered Democrat in order that I may keep up a fashionable façade."

"Because of the Democrats," he continues, "the population has decreased by 600,000 since the eighties." The exodus has included artists whom LaPelle represents. Peter Grimord, moved to Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Simon Huelsbeck went to Chicago. Donald Benoliel, who is the cousin-in-law of the founder of the Center for Emerging Artists, Felicity R. "Bebe" Benoliel, moved to Maui.

"The only people who remain in Philadelphia don't pay taxes or have special circumstances, or are waiting to cue up to leave," LaPelle says. "Let's just say, they are mostly not art buyers."

Rather than struggle upstream, LaPelle engages, "cruise control." He says, "I've tried everything else over the years, but right now, I'm going about twenty-five miles per hour."

Nick D'Angelo, Turnip Truck IX, 2004, Oil on Canvas.

"I think that sometimes all that Rodger does is come here to turn on and off the lights," said Nick D'Angelo, whose solo show, Paintings Achromatic IV: Return of the Turnip Truck was shown at the gallery during September and October. "He's got the name. He's done it all. But I'm not sure if he cares very much anymore." Twenty-two of D'Angelo's paintings were in the autumn exhibit. A tiny, three-dimensional version of the show's theme (a toy truck carrying turnips) sat in the gallery's window bank. "Either way, Rodger is easy-going, mellow and tries to make things as uncomplicated as he can."

"I've been in business so long that a lot of my customers have died," says LaPelle, who taps his fingers on a framed 1962 picture he took of Marcel DuChamp standing near a skeleton at the Mutter Museum. "People's stock portfolios are in trouble. Bush, who wants to shut down the NEA, is anti-art and Mayor Street is against the arts altogether. I didn't hear a peep from the other candidates regarding where they stand on the arts."

Buttered and Bred in Philly

LaPelle, 68, was born in Hahneman Hospital. He grew up in the Frankford neighborhood of the city and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA). He met his wife Christine at the bygone Dubin Gallery in 1956.

While he was a student, hedging his options as a future entrepreneur, painter and family man, "I worked almost every conceivable job." He was employed at Philco as a photo stylist. He worked as a baby photographer, going door to door, carrying a camera. He was a grave digger at the Knights of Pythias cemetery in Frankford.

The couple began to court when they simultaneously attended PAFA in 1960. Each winning $1,100 scholarships in 1961, they traveled Europe for four months. David Hockney befriended them and gave them a tour of the Royal College of Art. In Europe, they began to collect art. "Christine and I came back with a collection, works by Hockney, Roberto Matta, Francesco Goya and others."

In his mid-twenties, considering painting as a career, LaPelle was presented First Prize by Larry Rivers at the annual, juried Cheltenham Art Show. He purchased a Sidney Goodman painting with the prize money. LaPelle, who still has the painting, said, "Whenever I would win an art prize, I would go out and buy a painting."

During the 1970's, the LaPelle's traveled to galleries around the country, selling art work. "We were Gypsies," said LaPelle, whose own, nascent paintings were shopped by Arnie Extrom at Cordier of New York City (the art dealership whose name had been purchased by the late entrepreneur from the Cordier Gallery in Paris). "I am a profound failure as an artist," says LaPelle, who found that his paintings were harder to sell than the work of other artists.

"We learned that the galleries that stayed in business owned their buildings," he continues. "That's why we began to search for property and adopted the attitude of buy, buy, buy."

	"I didn't want to irritate the buyer," says LaPelle, who adds, "If I irritated Nick [D'Angelo], that's quite another thing." LaPelle in front of D'Angelo's Turnip Truck study. photo, Mike DelVecchia

The couple bought and renovated the building that is currently occupied by the Rittenhouse Fitness Club, on 2002 Rittenhouse Square. The building's two floors had consisted of a basketball court on the first floor and a ballroom with a stage on the second floor. The LaPelle's ran the space for five years and then sold it. "It was a wreck and as a gallery, sitting right behind the Dorchester Condos, it was too hard to find on that tiny street."

In 1984, they bought the current building on North 3rd Street with the proceeds from the sale and invested the rest. "By not having a mortgage or a rent, I don't have to worry about annual real estate taxes," said LaPelle. The new Old City throw-down was a decade away from gentrification. "It was all tumbleweeds down here but the space was fabulous," LaPelle explains.

The upstart "tried everything." He took out ads. He befriended newspaper arts editors and sponsored public art shows. Hundreds of group and solo shows ran through the gallery. He boasts, "This was the beginning of the 2,000-person traffic that still hits the gallery every First Friday."

However, when he became a player in the Philadelphia art world, the notion that the city does not support the arts began to nag at him. "As a gallery owner, you can't help but see how the town in which you live treats your industry."

Naiveté Art Buyer Lost

In 1984, LaPelle organized an exhibit of Huntertwassen works in the City's former flagship Old City civic exhibit space, the Port History Museum. "We had the Austrian Consul-General there, Viennese cheeses, wine, zither-playing and men in lederhosen." His expression suddenly darkened. "Then city gave up that space like it did many others." The Port History Museum used to occupy the building where the Independence Seaport Museum now resides on Penn's Landing.

Then there was the time when he petitioned the City with the Rosenfeld and Fan Galleries in 1997 to convert the abandoned, six-story Wanamaker shirt factory building on the Avenue of the Arts into an exhibit space. "Ed Rendell told us that he was favoring our proposal," LaPelle explains. According to the proposal, one gallery would run the space at a time and each of the galleries would have a branch location there. "But Rendell pigeonholed the proposal and he let the building become demolished," LaPelle concludes.

"Worse than anything of all," he says, was the permanent closing of the nationally juried annual exhibition of paintings and sculpture at PAFA in 1970. Before that time, the academy had awarded fourteen endowment prizes, among which had been the Mary Russell Smith Prize. It was awarded to female Philadelphia artists in the name of the nineteenth century artist who had lived in Edgehill, Pennsylvania. The show had run for 164 years. The fourteen prizes were cashed-in by PAFA during an abrupt closure.

"[The Academy] always says it's going to restart the [show], but I've been hearing the same thing for twenty years," LaPelle said.

The exhibition had attracted currently legendary artists who were years away from their fame. LaPelle thumbs through a catalogue from the one hundred and forty-second exhibition of the show. It is an "office copy" containing handwritten prices next to the title of nearly all of the works sold in 1947. Jackson Pollack's White Angel is listed for $350. Robert Motherwell's Indian Head is tagged at $300. Horace Pippin's Holy Mountain is priced at $850. Martin Jackson, whose acquaintance LaPelle described the Temple- and Tyler-educated painter to be a "local status symbol in the suburbs, whom I knew at the cocktail parties," listed his The Lost City at $850. "In those days, two Pollacks would buy you one of Marty's paintings," said LaPelle. Another catalogue from 1949, lists an Andrew Wyeth piece, Open House for $550. A collotype of this piece currently sells for $13,000 at most dealerships.

"So, it's not really about art anymore in this city and it never really was," says LaPelle, closing the catalogues, which he returns to a steel file drawer.

The focus now segues into the connection he makes between city-underwritten art and city-underwritten healthcare. "Then Philadelphia goes and demolishes the old Philadelphia General Hospital and suddenly there is no place where an indigent person from the street can go when he has no insurance," he continues. "Old Blockley," which had opened in 1729, had been the country's oldest, continuously-operating hospital. It was both closed and leveled in 1977.

LaPelle will not say which side he supports in the confrontation happening between South Street artist Isaiah Zagar and the Boston-based real estate company planning to dismantle and sell Zagar's South Street Magic Garden (the lot at 1024-26 South Street that the artists transformed from blighted ruin into a mosaic and found-object Elysium). "But let me ask you this-why weren't the owners ever fined for letting weeds grow?" LaPelle asked.

LaPelle exhibited Zagar's works during the 1980's. He becomes comparatively more vocal about the city's plan to tear down the eight-foot by sixty-foot ceramic mural by New York artist Larry Rivers, which has sat in Reading Station since the 1960's. Trashing the forty year-old piece would be a "loss of history and the public funds that had paid for the mural." He continues, "[Rivers] gave me a prize in an art show when I was a student, but the city didn't pay anything for the Zagar garden, while it bought the Rivers' piece through the Percent for Art program."

Carn Sarn It, Philadelphia!

LaPelle's laundry list of objections continues during what he calls, "stream of consciousness thoughts," rifled off with a somber, vocal automatism that would make Max Ernst proud. The ripping-up of 300 buildings and roads to create Independence Mall in 1952, was devilishly boorish, similar to Mussolini's plowing through medieval houses to build the Via della Conciliazione. The insertion of the Interstate 95 thoroughfare and the Market Street ramp into the neighborhood was disruptive to the formerly townie atmosphere. The construction of the mall, which had lasted through the 1970's, he rues, "is why I have to go all the way to North 9th Street to pick up my mail when I could have just walked down the street." The sudden zoning changes prompted by the mall construction had precipitated the shutting down of the North 2nd Street post office. A marine supply store in 1972 and later a trade school moved into the address. The Arden Theatre Company settled there in 1995. "The postman comes at 8am but I open at noontime, which means that I have to pick up my packages seven blocks away because there's nobody here when they come," he concludes, again blaming the democrats who have been incumbent since Mayor Joseph Sill Clark was elected in 1952 for the "bad city planning."

A LaPellian Primer

LaPelle believes that the shabby civil engineering is indicative of the overall lousy aesthetic that was laid in stone during the 1600's. The original city was founded by Quakers, after all. They considered the arts to be frivolous. Theirs was the bedrock attitude of the burgeoning city and is the ideological foundation stone. In Philadelphia, he continues, the influence of the Amish, Muslims, Hassidic Jews and other art-hating peoples has always flourished. The Hassidim, for instance, who are now moving out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are finding northeast Philadelphia to be a most amenable place. The Hassidim hate the artists of Williamsburg, who in turn hate them, LaPelle claims. And because northeast Philadelphia is a notorious dead zone for art, the Hassidim are buying up property there like the Canadian geese have been overtaking Montgomery County. The Quakers (who used to dress as if they were Hassidic) never really liked art, either. They had long ago instituted an ordered, subdued place for art, the buying of which was encouraged by the new nation as the practice of a patriotic conspicuous consumption. The Quakers were the first earners in Pennsylvania, whose patronage of the arts was frugal but now reflected their growing buying power. For instance, they celebrated their fortune by purchasing a Millet farm scene for the living room, which was never anything risqué or maudlin. Their expenditures never grew beyond a level at which the Society of Friends would begin to judge the purchasers to be frivolous. In other words, in the absence of passionate themes, wild explorations of the canvas with Fauve colors and huge, dedicated budgets, art in Philadelphia remained blasé and undeveloped.

"This is why Philadelphia has never propelled an artist to international fame and worldly prominence," says LaPelle, "Because even if all the galleries, museums, art centers of Philadelphia got together now, we could not produce the money and spin to get over what was put in place here centuries ago. The city was simply never reinforced to promote artists the way New York, San Francisco and other cities have."

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) he notes, is an organization that overlooks local talent. Just as Zanzibar Blue and the Kimmel Center ignore resident musicians, "Notice that ICA will do a traveling show for a David Salle but not for anybody else." Or ICA will do a show here, after the artist became famous somewhere else. Through December, ICA is showing the Ramp Projects of New York artist Amy Stillman, whose surrealist "Chicago Funk School" style represents the formation of a mannerist discipline, the likes of which LaPelle notes, is missing from Philadelphia.

"The only semblance of a style or school that runs through Philadelphia art is maybe at the Academy, whose students create a very detailed and precisionist realism. But there is really no Philadelphia style," said D'Angelo.
LaPelle adds, "I think it's all about attitude, with the Philadelphia phonetic treatment of the word's second syllable, transforming the word into "att-ee-tood." "I think Philadelphians can only accept an artist as being respectable if the artist has made it big someplace else."

"Me, I am happy to be a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized bowl," says D'Angelo. The painter does not exhibit outside the Philadelphia area.

	Rodger LaPelle, Two Sculptures, Black and Yellow, 2002, Oil on Canvas.

LaPelle exhibits his personal oeuvres rarely. His Two Sculptures, Black and Yellow, 2002, currently priced by LaPelle at $15,000, was exhibited at the Celebration of Arts and Healing Show last summer. The show opened at the Dr. David Flinker Pavilion Art Gallery in the Virtua Memorial Hospital in Burlington County, New Jersey. LaPelle's entry is based on a sculpture LaPelle says he would like to do. "The sales of my works, however," he says, "are negligible now. I sold a small piece in early spring in Washington, DC for $1,500 at the David Lynch and Friends show."

As a writer, he has turned his first buck. Thirty Reasons why People Buy Art, which he sold to Art Matters for $45, is LaPelle's first publishing. "I've been watching the art scene since the 1950's. Everything I learned, I jotted down for that article, one night while sitting here." Number seventeen is "Art as Portable Wealth Transfer Device," describing how people sometimes travel with expensive art work to avoid currency exchange controls, "just to have spending money on their travels."

A Slice of Life of a Gallery Owner

LaPelle sells a large portion of the gallery's art to out-of-towners. A retired controller of a barge company, Robert Bohrer, recently bought ninety-five paintings. Lawyers, who are "my first line buyers," sometimes buy thirty or forty pieces at a time. The next line of buyers are artists, who purchase smaller pieces. "Business is okay enough," he says, adding, "The eighties and nineties were good."

A week and a half before his show ended, D'Angelo entered the gallery and noticed that one of his paintings was missing from the wall. LaPelle had just sold Split Pepper, a 13 x 13 painting, to a local buyer for $375. "He's done this twice to me before," said D'Angelo, "taking down a painting before my show ends. "None of the other Philadelphia-or-elsewhere galleries ever do this and I have asked [LaPelle] not to do it again unless there is an emergency or the buyer has to go back to China or something.

"Of course the customer had come from a great distance," LaPelle says about the "regular customer" who purchased the painting. "He had to run back to Jersey, and it was only a few days before the closing of the show."

"It was like a week and half," said D'Angelo. "I've told him that I will ship the painting to the customer or will deliver it myself." D'Angelo insists that conventionally a gallery will wait until the artist's show ends before removing a sold work from the exhibit.

"I didn't want to irritate the buyer," says LaPelle, who adds, "If I irritated Nick, that's quite another thing."

"A gallery is like a stage," LaPelle says. "People make their entrances and say their lines and then make their exits. I look at gallery-owning as if I am in the front seat of a performance."

Last summer, a "quiet and reserved" woman from Washington, DC, visited the gallery and was approached by LaPelle, who struck up a conversation. "It turns out she counseled political torture victims. Before we spoke, I could see the solemnity in this person, telling me that this is what she does," says LaPelle. During a recent First Friday, the curator met a fellow traveler who ingests the alpha lipoic acid that LaPelle takes to reduce the effects of aging. The antioxidant enhances insulin-stimulated glucose metabolism in insulin-resistant rat skeletal muscle. "I am taking alpha lipoic acid because I read a researcher's report that it makes rats live forty percent longer, so, I think this might translate to humans if it is taken in the right dosage."

D'Angelo says, "If you ever talk with any other artist who has ever dealt with Rodger, they will tell you that he is the oddest creature they have ever met in their lives. He's a card. He's quite a character. He's survived in the business longer than most-so, anyway, how can you knock him?"

"I've been watching the whole art scene since the 1950's," LaPelle says, "I'd have to say the best thing about running a space is still the people I meet while I'm here."

Terry Gilliam, while filming Twelve Monkeys bought several of Christine LaPelle's renderings of owls. "Some of my rich collectors are various mafiosi," LaPelle says, adding, "some are in jail, but I don't want to into that or give names."

David Becker, Redemption, 1993, Etching and Engraving.

He brings out a 22-inch by 34-inch etching/engraving by Milwaukee artist David Becker, entitled, Redemption, explaining that the artist's work is something he "feels for." The meticulously detailed print displays the same merging of grounds, contrasts and denigrations of the nonplussed human form that Becker shares in common with Pieter Breugel and Hieronymus Bosch. LaPelle, attempting to sell the piece to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), in August, received momentary interest from a curator, based on the gallery owner's heartfelt description. "He was supposed to come down to look at the print but ended up telling me that all of the 2004 budget money had become allocated." LaPelle ended up selling one of the prints to a walk-in customer. Becker, whose hands are crippled from arthritis, has recently switched from etching to painting. LaPelle is selling the painting for $1,200.

Nick D'Angelo, an Art Dealer's Best Friend

D'Angelo grew up in Roxborough, the north west Philadelphia neighborhood where he currently lives. He decided to become an artist when he worked at a hardware during his teens. A painting was delivered to the loading dock of the building by mistake. Impressed with the piece, he bought tubes and brushes. He remained almost completely self-taught receiving no formal training outside of his college major of graphic design. "And I will not name the college I attended, because I would not like to advertise a lousy school that was never worth my attendance." D'Angelo has studied with Fred Danziger, John Thornton and Robert Koffler. This year, he won $500 for Etch a Sketch, at the Woodmere Art Museum annual juried exhibition.

D'Angelo, who also won the Tobeleah-Wechsler Award and the Allentown Art Museum Award last year, has created the "first and only Rejection Resume." On the wall near the gallery's basement entrance hung a sheet of white paper, containing the institutions that have rejected D'Angelo's submissions. They include the Wayne Gallery, the Berman Museum, Ursinus University the Artist Equity Group and others.

"My phrase for how I make a living in art is running to stand still. You do a lot of work and sometimes don't get anywhere."

The work of D'Angelo who is showing for the third time at LaPelle Galleries, had appeared in several of the gallery's group shows before his first solo exhibition in 1998.

D'Angelo met LaPelle when the dealer's gallery was located on Rittenhouse Square. In 1998, because an artist dropped out of a solo show, D'Angelo was hired by LaPelle as a replacement. All of the paintings sold. At the painter's second solo show, despite its occurrence immediately after 9/11, he sold nine paintings. LaPelle, instead of lauding D'Angelo's talent, explains cheerfully that U.S. Airways, which had purchased four of D'Angelo's paintings for its airport lounge last year, "paid on time, even though that company had just gone bankrupt." He explains that a theme of the paintings hanging in the lounge was "a rooster grabbing an alarm clock."

"I don't know what Rodger's taste in art is. Nobody does," says D'Angelo. "He doesn't let anybody know what he's thinking and he doesn't even have nice comments for his artists. He's all business, I guess."

D'Angelo's show includes variations on bleached rear- and middle-grounds containing a central character or object appearing in brilliant color. The laws of physics and the depiction of likelihood are sometimes compromised. For instance, in Turnip Truck IX, the rear of the stark white vehicle is slightly elevated from the achromatic landscape, whle it descends the hill of an albino country road. The front wheels of the truck, which is several feet past the precipice, would not yet have touched the ground if the vehicle were still so close to the peek that it has just scaled. The vehicle's suspension in mid-air is an impression of super-naturalism. The road is an incredibly steep parabola that a civil engineer would be insane to design. The style is a mixture of illustration and surrealism, "but I'll accept the term, 'Magic Realism'," D'Angelo says. "The idea is when the truck goes by, you become less intelligent." The vehicles, barns and landscapes in the paintings are rendered after toys, which are painted white.

"I support myself through my art, if you could call it that," D'Angelo says, "but I wouldn't say I'm in the lap of luxury or anything."

His painting A Few Bricks Shy is based on the folk saying that describes dim-witted people.

D'Angelo brought his canvasses and photographs of his paintings to LaPelle who does not accept slide submissions. "He's got the name, which helped me, but I had to be persistent with him," D'Angelo explains. The paintings were not pre-purchased. A consignment is signed. LaPelle's commission is fifty percent. "That's a pretty standard arrangement in Philadelphia," D'Angelo says.

D'Angelo had been approached several times to join the Third Street and Vox Populi artist cooperatives before meeting LaPelle. "I don't mind the idea of helping to run a gallery, but having to wait my turn while all of the other artists exhibit just wasn't the thing for me."

Sharp LaPelle

"We learned that the galleries that stayed in business owned their buildings." photo, Mike DelVecchia

Another criticism that D'Angelo has of the LaPelle Galleries regards its slow, outdated website. "Rodger and Christine have told me time and again 'you don't know how much time and money goes into building a good website' when I've told them often that they could get an art school student to create a website to spec for little money." The website, which does not have a domain name, does not name D'Angelo or feature his work. D'Angelo does not have a personal website.

"I am having to learn web-building from the ground up," says LaPelle, who is currently negotiating with ArtNet.com to host his site. "[Art Net] is the world's largest art web page, you know," he adds.

"I also think that Rodger could do more advertising for the shows, but I don't know how much money he would have to put into that," said D'Angelo.

"Excuse me, but I get behind the art at the gallery," LaPelle says. "I got Nick's show reviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and Kennett Square News."

Dressed in a navy blue sports jacket and donning a cream-colored tie dotted with a pattern of tiny black stars, LaPelle and Christine served the huddled masses a choice of Chardonnay and Burgundy during the November First Friday. He jokes, "This wine was made at Chateau Luzerne Winery of Philly."

Although the LaPelle's have been married for 43 years, "we have been blessed with no children."

The Rodger LaPelle Galleries is located at 122 North 3rd Street. Additional information can be obtained at www.netreach.net/~lapelle or by calling the gallery at (215) 592-0232.

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