Mr. Lynch’s drive to make a “moving painting” resulted in “Six Men Getting Sick,” a multimedia installation for which he shared first prize in the school’s experimental painting competition that spring. He cast a large-scale screen from resin, with three impressions of his own head protruding. On this sculpted surface, he projected a one-minute, hand-painted loop animating six heads in various stages of distress. As a siren wails and their faces distort, their stomachs fill with fluid that rushes to their mouths and erupts.

“It was a painting, it was an animation, it was a kinetic sculpture,” said Mr. Samuelson, who saw it unveiled. “Everybody went nuts.” Mr. Cozzolino is restaging the installation in the exhibition for the first time since 1967.

“He was trying to work on what is the most intense feeling you can have, of his body repelling,” said Rodger LaPelle, a 1961 graduate of the academy who came to the competition. He hired Mr. Lynch — broke, just married to a fellow student, Peggy Lentz, and expecting a baby — to work for him and his wife, Christine McGinnis, another academy alum, in their printing business. The older couple became crucial benefactors over the next three years, employing Mr. Lynch as an engraver and giving him space on the weekends to make paintings, which they bought for $25 apiece. The exhibition includes more than a half-dozen of these canvases, weird hybrids of humans, animals and plants that were informed by the primal emotion of Francis Bacon’s paintings, which Mr. Lynch saw in New York in 1968. In September, Rodger LaPelle Galleries in Philadelphia will exhibit several early paintings and more recent photogravures with nude figures by Mr. Lynch.

The Pennsylvania Academy show also displays his continuing experiments in film, combining animation and live action: “The Alphabet” (1968) and “The Grandmother” (1970), which starred Ms. McGinnis’s mother as a doting nana birthed from a pod planted by a love-starved boy. The film won Mr. Lynch a fellowship at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he moved with his family in 1970. For much of the next decade, he was consumed with realizing “Eraserhead,” his first feature-length film, which Mr. Lynch said “was born out of Philadelphia.” It is set in an industrial world where a young father slips between hallucinatory episodes as he is left to fend for a needy creature that looks like a cross of a human baby, a reptilian alien and a gourd.

Image The screen for “Six Men Getting Sick,” (1967). Credit... Rodger LaPelle and Christine McGinnis

Mr. Cozzolino sees “Eraserhead” as an artwork — “a filmed installation,” he said. As Mr. Lynch became successful after 1980 in the mainstream film world — “The Elephant Man,” another story of deformity, received eight Academy Award nominations that year — he continued to chase the idea of a “moving painting.”