Richard Selden • March 18, 2016

It happened in Philadelphia: 56 men in breeches created a nation.

Then, 51 years later, it happened again. This time, it was 53 men in trousers. And what they created was … a flower show.

Actually, what they created in 1827 was the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. The first public show, featuring the poinsettia’s American debut, came two years later. (In 1835, the society admitted women as voting members — long before the nation did.)

The descendent of that historic event, the Philadelphia Flower Show, the largest and longest-running indoor show in the world, now attracts more than 200,000 visitors over nine days. The 2016 show, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, ends this Sunday.

A Garden of Eden for plant-lovers — with award-winning specimens, lectures and vendors from around the world — the show is also a floral theme park that seems to grow Disney-er every year. Since this year’s theme is “Explore America: 100 Years of the National Park Service,” expect recreations of Yosemite, simulated Old Faithful eruptions and a Denali sled dog team. You can even “create your own Mount Rushmore floral headpiece.”

For details, and to reserve a garden tea or an early-morning private tour (weekdays only), visit theflowershow.com. Families with children should note that on closing day, Sunday, March 13, there will be a Flower Show Jamboree and a Teddy Bear Tea.

Prior to launching their kisses-and-hugs “With Love, Philadelphia” campaign, Visit Philadelphia’s slogan was “Philly’s More Fun When You Sleep Over.” With the Flower Show meriting a full day and three new museum exhibitions, it makes sense to get a room.

After a controversial legal and financial intervention, the Barnes Foundation galleries relocated from the suburban residence of Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951) to a new museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 2012. The move’s approval hinged in part on the exact reproduction of the unchanging salon-style display found in leafy Merion by the relatively few visitors who made it out there.

Architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien created a large and spacious modern building for the Barnes in which the tiny recreated rooms are encased. In accordance with Barnes’s eccentric theories of art appreciation, African, Native American, Pennsylvania German and other sculpture and artifacts, including miscellaneous wrought-iron objects, share the walls with frame-to-frame masterpieces by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Modigliani (to name a few of Dr. Barnes’s favorites).

It is one of the most astounding museums in the world, now with the additional reason to visit of special exhibitions. Through May 9, the Barnes (which has 22 paintings by Pablo Picasso in its permanent collection) is hosting “Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change.” The show’s focus is the period surrounding and including World War I, during which Picasso — the “High Priest of Cubism” in the words of curator Simonetta Fraquelli — abruptly returned to a naturalistic style, continuing to alternate between Cubism and Neoclassicism.

A video illustrates how during the war Cubism was portrayed as anti-French (though the style’s co-creator, Georges Braque, was as French as could be and served at the front) and associated with the despised Germans.

Several blocks up the parkway from the Barnes, “International Pop” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 15. All the American stars are represented, of course: Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, Ed Ruscha. But what makes the show an eye-opener are the works by what the text calls the “British forbears of Pop,” notably Edinburgh-born Eduardo Paolozzi and London-born Richard Hamilton, whose collages date to the 1950s (earlier, in Paolozzi’s case), and by artists from throughout Europe and from Argentina, Brazil and Japan.

Finally, across the Schuylkill River, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is the exclusive U.S. venue for “The Golden Age of King Midas,” on view through Nov. 27. Of the 100-plus objects on loan from Turkish museums, many were excavated by Penn archaeologists from an eighth-century B.C. royal tomb, believed to be the resting place of Midas’s father Gordios.

Whether you hear the clatter of gold or of your muffler when you think of Midas, this exhibition is another example of the remarkable things to be seen this spring in the City of Brotherly Love.
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Richard Selden • February 18, 2016

In 2000, when Peter Colasante decided to move in, the once-elegant storefront on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and P Street, formerly an Italian men’s shop, was boarded up. The art gallery he was relocating from Connecticut Avenue was named for architect and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant (Colasante didn’t consider the 1960s office complex—L’Enfant Plaza—a fitting tribute to the designer of the District of Columbia).

Colasante, 67, is still pleased with his choice of location, calling Georgetown — outside of New York, which he says is “a different universe” — “the best place in the best city in the country to be.” The gallery’s window displays, meant to be “visual out-of-the-box experiences,” draw in the avenue’s enviable foot traffic. “I find out who they are later,” he says.

By now, the gallery has an international network of clients, a “nuclear family.” Dealers look to L’Enfant Gallery for Chinese art and Asian ceramics, and the Civil War is a focus (Colasante lent items to a major Lincoln exhibition recently), but the overall mix is eclectic in genre, origin and price.

Stepping inside, visitors face a red wall of paintings hung salon-style, assorted chandeliers above. That sense of rich surprise extends throughout the gallery’s four levels.

In November, after a volunteer archivist went through what was in storage, Colasante opened the gallery’s basement to the public. It is now set up to resemble a Victorian viewing parlor, complete with a carved chief’s throne from Borneo.

Having decamped for Vienna, Virginia, Colasante no longer gets up at 3 in the morning to move paintings around. But he and his business partner (and former spouse) Maureen Taylor rearrange the display and host special exhibitions every few months. From total holdings of roughly 4,000 objects, he says they sell 200 to 300 per year.

Colasante’s eyes twinkle behind stylish frames when he recalls starting out with a much smaller inventory. In December of 1973, he opened Calvert Gallery in an English basement on Connecticut Avenue, putting four things purchased at apartment sales in the window. The gallery grew as it moved from one location to another in the vicinity of Connecticut and Calvert, becoming L’Enfant Gallery in 1990.

Raised in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, Colasante attended Catholic University, where he failed to shine, as he tells it, either as an actor or a philosopher. He learned about art working in Oxon Hill, Maryland, as an eccentric collector’s cataloguer, then curator. His boss’s advice: Never specialize.

Colasante can remember three recessions, but calls the last five years “the worst it’s ever been.” The threshold for bread-and-butter purchases, formerly $10,000, has dropped to $3,000, he says. The good news is that he owns his building, having finally been able to purchase it from a trust in 2012. He also does appraisal work and counsels owners of art and antiques (he advises those wishing to hang on to treasured possessions to avoid the three Ds: death, divorce and downsizing).

In the end, Colasante explains, the business is about matchmaking. You can have the finest example of something in the world, but “unless the right person comes to buy it, it doesn’t matter.”

Richard Selden • January 11, 2016

East of Tuscany, in the Apennine Mountains, Umbria is known as il cuore verde d’Italia: the green heart of Italy. Since the fall of 2014, when the Via Umbria store first appeared in Georgetown as a pop-up, that green heart has been beating at 1525 Wisconsin Avenue.

Owners Bill and Suzy Menard (who met while working on Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign) recently launched the store’s galleria, a renovated second-floor space equipped with a professional kitchen, where they hold events to complement the other facets of their Umbria-obsessive business.
On the first floor, the emporio offers a carefully curated selection of Italian wine, olive oil, pasta, specialty foods (including chocolate), kitchen items, linens, glassware, jewelry and — notably — the hand-painted ceramics known as maiolica from Deruta in Umbria, a ceramics center since Etruscan times.
Examples of food and kitchen items are: Verrigni spaghetti with squid ink ($8), Il Boschetto Grigliata sea salt ($12), Mancino flavored olive oil ($16), a pasta slicer ($22.50), bread cutting boards ($50 and $90) and copper two-handled pots ($110, $140 and $165).

For those what want to try living like an Umbrian in Umbria, the Menards rent La Fattoria del Gelso, their eight-bedroom, 18th-century farmhouse in Cannara, a village near Assisi famous for its onion festival. Saturday-to-Saturday rentals go for 3,000 euros in low season and 4,000 in high season.
The Menards, who maintain a kind of cultural dual-citizenship, first bonded with Italy after spending a summer in Fiesole when Bill was a student at Georgetown Law School. They started the shop Bella Italia in Bethesda in 2003, running it for 10 years and purchasing their Cannara farmhouse in 2008.

Among the upcoming events in the galleria are wine dinners on Dec. 7, 8 (Tabarrini vineyards) and 12 (medieval wine dinner with guest chef Robert Van Rens). On Dec. 9, there will be both a cooking class with Dorrie Gleason focusing on crostatas, tarts and fruit pies and a culinary mystery program, “Pasta, Passion, and Poison.” A book club next meets on Dec. 17 to discuss “Hunting Truffles” by Dick Rosano. Italian chef Simone Proietti-Pesci will be in D.C. from Jan. 8 to Jan. 24.

Details, online ordering of emporio items and the Dolce Vita blog are available at viaumbria.com. [gallery ids="102173,132315,132276,132284,132292,132304,132309,132299" nav="thumbs"]

Richard Selden •

The Freer Gallery of Art, the oldest of the Smithsonian Institution’s art museums, will be closed for renovations from Jan. 4 through the spring or summer of 2017. The Sackler Gallery, to which it is linked underground — forming a bicameral museum of Asian art — will remain open.

Along with its extraordinary Asian holdings, the Freer is the home of a major collection of works by American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, of “Whistler’s Mother” fame (that painting, formally known as “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” is owned by Paris’s Musée d’Orsay), including his stunning Peacock Room.

On the third Thursday of the month at noon, the Peacock Room shutters are opened, allowing its flamboyantly colored and decorated walls and ceramics-packed shelves to be bathed in natural light. The last opportunity to experience this for a year and a half is this Thursday, Dec. 17.

Jan. 2-3 is “Say Goodbye to the Freer” weekend, with many family-friendly activities from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Julian Raby, director of the Freer-Sackler since 2002, was the speaker at Georgetown Media Group’s Nov. 5 Cultural Leadership Breakfast at the George Town Club. In his remarks, Raby brought to life the beginnings of the Freer Gallery of Art, dedicated in 1923 and spawned by the ideals of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, a full-cloth American self-made man.

“There was no silver spoon in the mouth of Charles Lang Freer,” he said, noting his beginnings as a maker and developer of railroad cars, which made him nearly a billionaire and allowed him to retire at age 47. He also had the good fortune, spurred by an interest in art collecting, to meet and be associated with Whistler, from whom he at first bought just a modest etching.

“The relationship was an extraordinary match,” Raby said. “Whistler was choleric, quixotic, and Freer was an extremely thoughtful man. It was a match that would lead to the acquisition of 1,300 works which formed the foundation of the collection and started a passion in Freer, and even obsession, with Asian art and culture, prints and screens and with China.”

“Imagine,” Raby said, “a relationship somewhat like what Velázquez might have had with the hidalgos” (a phrase you won’t hear every day). The complex history of the Peacock Room, created for British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland and setting off a bitter feud between patron and artist, is currently the subject of a special Sackler Gallery exhibition, “Peacock Room REMIX.” The show’s centerpiece is “Filthy Lucre,” a recreation of the room in ruins by painter Darren Waterston.
Regarding the original Peacock Room, says Raby, “when we open the windows and let the light in, it’s still spectacular.”

Richard Selden • November 5, 2015

Portraitist of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and other figures of the American Revolution, Charles Willson Peale raised a family of painters in Philadelphia, naming his sons Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Titian and Rubens and his daughters Angelica and Sophonisba (not a complete list).

One of the major works in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s new exhibition, “Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life” (on view through Jan. 10) is Peale’s group portrait of his family: nine peaches-and-cream-faced Peales, including himself; the children’s nanny; and his dog Argus. On the green tablecloth is a still life — a tray of fruit next to a paring knife and a curled apple peel (pun no doubt intended).

On each side of this canvas, nearly seven and a half feet wide, are two small still-life paintings by Peale family members; nearby are classic still lifes by Raphaelle, one of the first American artists to specialize in the genre. His father, like many artists before and since, considered flowers, fruit, cheese, cutlery, serving ware, wine bottles, dead fish and the like more a subject for artistic training than for finished works, despite the still-life obsessions of Dutch Golden Age painters (excluding Rembrandt and Hals).

Grouping outstanding examples, many unfamiliar, in roughly chronological order under the thematic headings of Describing, Indulging, Discerning and Animating, the exhibition — the first of its kind in three decades — aims to make the case that, in the words of curator Mark D. Mitchell, “the story of American still life is the story of American life.”

At several points, context is provided in inventive ways. Plate 26 from John James Audubon’s “Birds of America,” depicting now-extinct Carolina parakeets, is accompanied not only by several of the huge folio volumes but by four specimens collected in 1843 and owned by Audubon, their colors — orange, yellow and turquoise — still bright.

In the Indulging section, visitors can explore the language of flowers at “You In Flowers” interactive stations, which generate personalized (sort of) on-screen bouquets from self-submitted adjectives.

Velvet curtains evoke the Gilded Age setting of William Harnett’s largest trompe-l’oeil (trick the eye) painting, “After the Hunt” of 1885, painted for the Paris Salon but purchased for Theodore Stewart’s extravagant New York saloon. Trained in Munich, Harnett was a genius at depicting feathers (dead game birds), fur (a dead rabbit), metal (two firearms and a hunting horn) and the life-size green door — with rusty ornamental hinges, a keyhole escutcheon and a dangling key — on which these and other precisely rendered objects appear to hang.

The superb selection of trompe-l’oeil works in the Discerning section includes “Reminiscences of 1865,” the movingly subliminal tribute to Lincoln painted in 1904 by Harnett’s contemporary John Frederick Peto, which shows a black-and-white portrait of the president and various forgotten scraps of paper tacked to a wooden panel in which ABE and his birth and death dates are carved.

The later works under the theme of Indulging (which overlaps with Discerning) show the influence of Japanese art, both directly — as in Robert Blum’s virtuosic “Flower Market, Tokyo,” of 1891–92 — and indirectly, by way of the French Impressionists.

Finally, the galleries featuring 20th-century art give example after example of modernism’s embrace of the genre. By including works by modern masters with distinctive personal styles — Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keefe, Stuart Davis, Paul Cadmus, Andrew Wyeth, Jasper Johns — the curatorial team compels us to ask “How does this work fit into the American still-life tradition and what does it add to it?”

Several of these works are sculptures, such as Andy Warhol’s seemingly trompe-l’oeil “Brillo Boxes” of 1964. Screen-printed on three wooden cubes, the piece actually proclaims its artifice through the imperfections of its handmade process.

One of the most beautiful works in the show is by an artist, like Peale, with Philadelphia connections: Alexander Calder. “The Water Lily,” c. 1945, constructed from sheet metal and wire, is black with a gray base, as far as could be from the colorful flower canvases in the preceding galleries. The flat piece of metal representing the lily’s seed pod, punched with holes, would never trick the eye, yet it is instantly recognizable, a triumph of observation to rival Audubon’s.

Richard Selden • October 22, 2015

Olga Hirshhorn, 95, fourth wife of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden founder Joseph Hirshhorn, died Oct. 3 in Naples, Florida.

After their marriage, in 1964, she received an education in art from her husband and from the artists with whom they socialized: Calder, Chagall, Giacometti, Man Ray, Miró, O’Keeffe and Picasso, to name a few. She began to acquire art herself, stepping up her collecting after Joe Hirshhorn died in 1981.

In 1995, Olga Hirshhorn donated more than 600 works not to the museum with her name on it but to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Though she pledged the rest of her collection and one-third of her estate to the Corcoran, this promised gift was withdrawn after the 2005 departure of then-director David C. Levy and the cancellation of the museum’s Frank Gehry-designed wing.

A five-foot dynamo well into her 80s, Olga Zatorsky was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a chauffeur/gardener and a cook. Twenty-one years younger than Joe Hirshhorn, she first attracted his attention over the phone. Having married and separated from her English teacher at Greenwich High, she was running an employment agency and he was looking for domestic help at his Greenwich estate.

The gift of 6,000 works and an endowment that created the Smithsonian’s museum of modern and contemporary art came two years after they married. The Hirshhorn Museum opened in 1974.

Olga Hirshhorn served on the boards of the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran and the Baker Museum in Naples, which hosted the exhibition “The Mouse House: Works from the Olga Hirshhorn Collection” in 2009 (the show also traveled to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich). That collection of some 200 works was later donated to the Baker Museum.

The “mouse house” was her name for a converted, art-filled carriage house she owned on Embassy Row in Washington. She also owned houses in Naples and on Martha’s Vineyard.

She is survived by her sons John and Denis from her first marriage, to John Cunningham

Richard Selden • October 15, 2015

Having surpassed its original fundraising goal of $125 million by nearly $10 million, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has set a new goal of $175 million to fund its campus expansion. The project is the first new construction since the 1971 opening of the massive, multi-genre center, designed by Edward Durell Stone.

With the expansion plans approved by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, demolition is set to begin this month. The new facilities are expected to open in the fall of 2018.

No federal monies will go toward the project. Kennedy Center Chairman David M. Rubenstein, co-chair of the “Building the Future” campaign with treasurer Michael F. Neidorff, made a $50-million lead gift in 2013 and Boeing later gave $20 million. The center recently announced additional gifts, including $10-million donations from Jacqueline Badger Mars and Stephen and Christine Schwarzman.

With the planned floating pavilion relocated to dry land and the enhancement of a pedestrian bridge connecting the project to the Rock Creek Park Trail, the estimated design and construction costs have gone from $100 million to about $120 million. The three new pavilions, with high ceilings and river views, will contain flexible, intimate spaces filled with natural light. There will also be an outdoor wall for simulcasting performances.

The remainder of the budget will go toward exhibits in the new public spaces and technology and systems upgrades to the entire campus, meant to support a new level of engagement and “create a more inspiring dialogue between patrons and artists,” according to a press release.

The architects for the expansion are Steven Holl and Chris McVoy of Steven Holl Associates in New York, in partnership with BNIM Architects of Kansas City.

Richard Selden • June 11, 2015

Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Don Quixote. Who are your heroes in real life? Those who serve over in Afghanistan, or six months underwater in nuclear subs.

So answered Pulitzer Prize-winning author Herman Wouk, then 97, in the October 2012 Vanity Fair. The writer of “The Caine Mutiny,” “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” – the first made into a classic Humphrey Bogart film, the others into television miniseries – turned 100 years old May 27.

Almost half a century ago, a profile in the Nov. 26, 1971, issue of Life magazine reported, “Wouk lives in chandeliered elegance in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., in an 1815 townhouse.” He and his wife Betty along with their sons moved to 3255 N St. NW in 1964.

When the house was renovated about five years ago, architect Simon Jacobsen discovered a small, secret room along with an interesting movie memento: steel balls used as stress-relievers by the cross-examined Commander Queeg, played by actor Humphrey Bogart, in “The Caine Mutiny,” made from Wouk’s novel. There was also a note, which read, “To Herman from Bogie.”

The house, on the corner of N and Potomac Streets, is now owned by dermatologist Tina Alster, M.D., and her husband and political consultant, Ambassador Paul Frazer, who put it on the market several months ago.

The son of immigrants from Minsk, Wouk, the future hewer of bulky wartime narratives graduated from Columbia University and wrote comedy sketches for Fred Allen’s radio show. His World War II service in the Navy inspired “The Caine Mutiny,” which was published in 1951. He moved to Washington, partly to be near the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

In 2000, the Library of Congress gave him its Living Legend medal and, eight years later, the first Library of Congress Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Fiction. At that time, he donated his journals, more than 100 volumes, to the library, retaining a copy for his own research.

Wouk’s wife, Betty, who had served on the board of directors of the Georgetowner Newspaper, died in 2011.

Wouk now lives in Palm Springs, Calif. His new memoir, “Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author,” will appear in December.

Richard Selden • May 7, 2015

Wrapping up Georgetown Media Group’s spring round of Cultural Leadership breakfasts, Dr. Steven Knapp, president of the George Washington University since 2007, will speak the morning of May 7 at the George Town Club about the university’s expanding activity in the arts, exemplified by the bringing of the Textile Museum and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design into the GW fold. Until recently, the District’s largest institution of higher education had not positioned itself as a leader in the arts.

Dr. Knapp will speak at 8:30 a.m. and a light breakfast will be served. Admission costs $15. For more details and to RSVP, contact Richard Selden at richard@georgetowner.com.