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The Eaton fire’s miracle Rocky
It shows up as a surprising coda to “Rising Up,” Paul Farber’s show on myth and monuments at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; plus: a Neue Galerie-Met “merger” and a Reflecting Pool lawsuit
Christopher Hawthorne
May 15, 2026
An exhibition about the Rocky statue?
For a newsletter called Punch List?
It seemed an ideal combo. As it turned out, an editor at the New York Times had asked me weeks ago to review the show, “Rising Up: Rocky and the Making of Monuments,” for her. (It runs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Aug. 2.) So you’ll find my comprehensive take on the exhibition—spoiler alert: I think it’s remarkably good—over there.
Thomas Schomberg, “Rocky with Missing Arm” (Altadena, California), 2025. Bronze. Courtesy of Mike Silvestri
For this audience, I thought I’d write about one particular piece in “Rising Up,” and in greater detail than the review format typically allows. That artwork appears at the very end of the exhibition, as a kind of coda. And it manages to tie the Rocky statue together with both Hollywood fantasy and real-life Los Angeles—and to suggest something about disaster and decay in both realms.
First, a bit of Rocky Balboa backstory. The statue began life as a prop, albeit an unusually well-made one, commissioned by Sylvester Stallone from sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg for “Rocky III,” which came out in 1982. Stallone modeled for it—there’s a contact sheet of photos from that session in the exhibition—and Schomberg produced three large versions of it, at roughly 120 percent of life size.
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