Visual Arts

Ari Post • October 23, 2014

The word “terrain” comes to mind a lot at the Hirshhorn’s current exhibit, “Salvatore Scarpitta: Traveler.” Scarpitta (1919–2007), an Italian-American who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1920s, was a unique presence in postwar American art for reasons of both style and subject. As an artist, he negotiated many terrains and bridged many divides: of painting and sculpture, abstraction and realism, elegance and vulgarity, and most whimsically of all, of fine art and competitive sprint car racing.

Scarpitta moved to Rome after high school to study art. When World War II broke out, he served in the United States Navy, ultimately working as a Monuments Man, where he was tasked with safeguarding art and historic monuments from war’s destruction.

Perhaps the first of many fascinating career choices, Scarpitta stayed in Rome after the war and set up his studio on the famous Via Margutta, a narrow street rich with artistic culture, popularized by Gregory Peck in the 1953 film, “Roman Holiday.” This decision in itself alludes to a kind of fixation the young artist may have had with confronting destruction and devastation firsthand, as well as a need to help build things back up.

His work from the mid-to-late 50s directly confronts the destruction of the War, the failure of Fascism and the fall of Mussolini—an event which had forced him and his first wife, an Italian Jew, into hiding in the Apennine Mountains in 1943.

In these dimensional works that are part painting, part sculpture (and later deemed “Extramurals”), layers of fabric are wrapped around stretcher bars or wood panels. Folds of cloth, canvas, medical bandages, gurney straps and swaddling envelop the picture plane, creating precarious but steady surfaces. Scarpitta spattered the surfaces with paint, resin, tea, pencil marks and what seems like any material that was on hand. The result is a surprisingly elegant glaze over a woven landscape of coarse fabric. As a wall panel in the exhibit beautifully points out, they are “mottled, hide-like” surfaces, whose natural, undulating folds and weaves inform the surface with naturally occurring shadows.

It was this breakout work that caught the attention of legendary New York City art dealer Leo Castelli who convinced Scarpitta to move back to New York and exhibit in his gallery. Once there, Scarpitta rekindled his childhood obsession with cars.

As a boy in L.A., Scarpitta had been a regular spectator at the treacherous Legion Ascot Speedway, where he marveled at the feats of the drivers and mourned those who died in crashes. As an adult, he began using car parts—some scavenged from fatal wrecks—in his paintings. Like the Extramurals, the car-part paintings are cut and bruised, bandaged and bound. However, in contrast to his previous works’ muted monochrome, these works employ almost technicolor vibrancy.

This reignited passion for racing eventually led him to abandon abstraction for a radical, flesh-and-bones realism. Adding car parts to his paintings was no longer enough—he needed to make the actual cars. Between 1964 and 1969, Scarpitta created six full-scale vehicles, each in the souped-up, vintage go-kart style of the racers from his childhood.

The last phase of Scarpitta’s career took a different, equally unusual turn. He began building sleds in the 1970s and continued making them for the rest of his life. Made from scavenged objects, these nonfunctional sleds represent a more primitive means of transportation, as well as the solitary nature of art.

While some of the sleds stand upright as sculptures, others are mounted on canvas and hung like paintings. “Snowshoe Sled” (1974) looks like a Rothko collage, the sled hung in the center between color fields of yellow and green. It is oddly detached from anything in this world, the sled floating like a bar of color in the center of the canvas.

While they are obviously sleds, the works are also sculptures in a very natural sense, balancing Scarpitta’s remarkable craftsmanship and sense of structure in delicate harmony. They are his most inspiring creations, where his abstract sensibilities merge with his insistence for form and purpose of function to make works that seem alive. They are objects perhaps meant to traverse unknown landscapes of our unconscious, tantric tools to help guide us to the far reaches of our human condition. And if nothing else, they sure look fun to ride.

Come hear Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu speak at our Cultural Leadership Breakfast, this Thursday, Oct. 9, 8 a.m. at the George Town Club.

To read more on this exhibit, visit Georgetowner.com
[gallery ids="118481,118477" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • September 11, 2014

Increasingly each September, as the summer folds into a weave of warm rainstorms and cool, damp evenings, the anticipation of a fall art season takes on a palpable tangibility. The arts are inspiring and beautiful, often times joyous, sometimes heartbreaking, They stir something deep within us. In keeping with autumnal sentiments, there is a bracing immediacy, a feeling of here and now, exemplified in the visual arts—something transient but everlasting, the way golden, sun-spattered leaves remain with us long after they fall from their branches. Maybe this is why fall art openings are so popular. Nothing satisfies our craving for life like the sensory immersion of both art and nature.

The Georgetown neighborhood has reemerged in recent years as the most promising gallery scene in the city—Mark Jenkin’s recent Washington Post article, “Galleries Gathering Again in Once Arty Georgetown,” is perhaps the most resounding testament.

This year’s annual “Galleries on Book Hill Fall Art Walk,” on Friday, September 12, along Wisconsin Avenue, could very well be the public art event of the season. This is one not to miss.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art

Joan Belmar: Chords

1670 Wisconsin Ave NW

This exhibition features richly layered works on canvas and paper, in artist Joan Belmar’s first solo exhibition at Addison/Ripley. Belmar pulls inspiration from his Uruguayan heritage to create works that are lyrical and heartfelt. www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

Cross Mackenzie Gallery

1675 Wisconsin Ave NW

Drawings by Lyn Horton and ceramics by Maren Kloppmann

Cross Mackenzie Gallery has paired the graphite wall drawings and pen and ink works on paper by Lyn Horton together with elegant black and white porcelain work by Maren Kloppmann. Both artists work chiefly in black and white, and the juxtaposition of the seemingly chaotic and energetic lines of Horton’s drawings with Kloppmann’s quiet, grounded forms creates a harmonious dialogue of form. www.CrossMackenzie.com

Susan Calloway Fine Art

1643 Wisconsin Ave NW

The Light that She Loves: Literary Paintings and Drawings by Maud Taber-Thomaz

Artist Maud Taber-Thomas creates luminous drawings and paintings that embody a loving conversation between different art forms, exploring Victorian and Medieval literature and capturing the vibrant light and color of distant times and places, particularly through the use of portraiture. Trained in classic painting techniques, the artist’s process is tied to past generations, from the Renaissance Tenebrists, to the French Rococo painters, to the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionist portraitists. www.CallowayArt.com

All We Art

1666 33rd St. NW

All We Art is a new, multidisciplinary space dedicated to promote international cultural exchange through exhibitions, cultural programs and related services, specializing in contemporary art and collaborating with an extensive network of Latin American and international artists. Founded by Luisa Elena Vidaurre and Pablo Brito Altamira, this partnership is a welcome member to the rebirth of Georgetown’s gallery scene. www.AllWeArtStudio.com

Artist’s Proof Gallery

1533 Wisconsin Ave NW

Featured Artist: David Kracov

David Kracov is a sculptor, painter and animator, who has worked on landmark movies such as “The Lion King” and “The Swan Princess.” He has long captured the hearts of young and old alike, with work guided by the ever-evolving nature of pop culture, literature and history. www.AProof.net

Maureen Littleton Gallery

1667 Wisconsin Ave NW

Body/Building

The Maurine Littleton Gallery presents Body/Building, a group exhibit of architecture and art. Featuring the work of Erwin Eisch, Warrington Colescott, Nancy Genn, Sergei Isupov, Iliya Isupov, among many others, the show explores human and architectural forms through Vitreographs (prints made from glass plates), ceramics and glass sculpture, each artist conveying structure and relationships in literal, figurative and poetic terms. www.LittletonGallery.com

Neptune Fine Art

1662 33rd Street NW

Raya Bodnarchuk: Bronze Sculpture

Sculptor Raya Bodnarchuk is known for her clean lines and modernist compositions with a contemporary yet sensitive twist. Her works are included in collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the National Institute of Health, with noted commissions throughout the United States. www.NeptuneFuneArt.com

Robert Brown Gallery

1662 33rd Street NW

A South African Sketchbook: Drawings, Photographs, and Etchings

Five of South Africa’s most acclaimed artists respond to their homeland with honesty, passion, directness, even whimsy. Works by Roger Ballen, Deborah Bell, Willem Boshoff, William Kentridge and Diane Victor. Extremely powerful and evocative, images on display in A South African Sketchbook join the struggle for a better nation. Their impact reaches far beyond South Africa. www.RobertBrownGallery.com

Washington Printmakers Gallery

1641 Wisconsin Ave NW

The Painterly Print Exhibition: Linda Rose Larochelle

This exhibit features a series of monotypes by block print artist Linda Rose Larochelle. Monotypes allow the printmaker to achieve a range of tones, subtle gradations of color, and to take advantage of the spontaneous effects of free flowing inks. In this show, the figurative monotypes are large and expressive with bold colors and patterns reminiscent of Matisse. Many have a touch of whimsy that is sure to be appreciated. www.WashingtonPrintmakers.com [gallery ids="101848,138493,138495,138476,138480,138485,138488" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • August 26, 2014

For a number of reasons, the subject of women in art can be a fraught discussion. There is a regrettable tendency to box them in categorically, to define and justify the presence of women artists throughout history in a way that befits the social order of the longstanding gentlemen’s club that is fine art. They are too often woven into the narrative of their male counterparts—try finding mention of Lee Krasner without Jackson Pollock, or Georgia O’Keeffe without Alfred Stieglitz. Or they are remembered for the perceived femininity of their subjects—think Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Lange, whose respective works, though world renowned, far surpass the simplification to which they are occasionally reduced. Sometimes it is simply difficult to view these artists on their own terms.

The most prominently misunderstood woman in art history is probably Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926). In passing, she is remembered as something like the mistress or student of Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917), a woman who painted tender, melancholic scenes of French children and their gingerly attentive mothers. While this could not be further from any realm of accuracy, it seems to be the way that history has distorted Cassatt almost from the beginning of the scholarship surrounding her, specifically regarding her relationship with Degas. Today this erroneous snapshot is all but cemented in the public’s memory.

The truth, however, is far more complicated—and more interesting. When Degas first saw the work of Cassatt, all he saw was a like-minded artist with whom he longed to work. Upon first encountering her work he remarked, “There is someone who feels as I do.”

Cassatt was equally taken with Degas. She said that her first experience seeing his work “changed my life.” It was this shared sensibility that drew Degas’ attention and ultimately led to his inviting her to exhibit with the founding Impressionist painters. The two began to work together in a prolific collaboration of styles and ideas that lasted over a decade.

Cassatt became Degas’ most challenging contemporary, and their work informed one another’s throughout the pivotal first years of the Impressionist movement, which Degas is so widely credited in leading. Together they forged a new era of artistic thought.

At the National Gallery of Art through October 5, “Degas/Cassatt” focuses on the Impressionist years from the late 1870s through mid-1880s, when Degas and Cassatt worked most closely together. It is a thoughtful re-examination of the impact Cassatt had on Degas as an artist, which significantly modifies conventional wisdom regarding the “master/apprentice” relationship with which they have been typically associated.

The artists worked so closely during this time—drawing and painting side-by-side, talking and visiting museums together—that there is a deficit of personal correspondence with which to understand their professional partnership. There was no need to write, for they were always together. The most verifiable evidence of their artistic dialogue thus becomes the work itself.

The collection in this exhibit focuses on a number of loose but fascinating groupings, notably their mutual affinity for theater scenes, conspicuously interrelated print series and portraiture affectations, and, intriguingly, selections from their personal collections—for they were each discerning collectors of each others’ work.

It is clear that Degas and Cassatt had different interests in the theater. Long renowned for his paintings of dancers and their alluring backstage culture, Degas’ prints in this exhibit show the untamed carnival atmosphere of the theater in all its burlesque, chimerical splendor. Shadows of distorted figures stretch across the dark walls, disorienting the boundaries of distance, while performers make their way through forests of set-pieces. Intense spotlights pierce the backstage darkness, adumbrating the figures caught suspended in motion. He gives us a bacchanalian revelry that lurks just behind the curtain, intoxicating and exotic as a latent desire at the fringes of our minds.

Cassatt also explored the shadowed nuances of the theater, the distortion of shapes and figures, but from an altogether different position. She turned her attention away from the stage and onto the women in the audience, exploring the deformity of their shapes in their puffed-out dresses and the backlight that washes a ghostly halo around them. With their faces obscured by an enveloping darkness, they become forgotten souls left drifting in the wings.

Focusing her attention on young women in this way, Cassatt’s choice of subject matter is often misinterpreted as a sort of feminine fixation, as if being a woman she was predisposed to paint womanly things. However, these subjects occupy a far more complex arena of social undertones.

As a woman, Cassatt did not have access to the environments of her male contemporaries—she was not allowed backstage, nor could she enter the late-night stomping grounds of Degas and other fellow painters. Therefore, Cassatt chose women and children, a vast and neglected subject area. She imbued them with distortion and complexity both physical and psychological—from stifling social expectation, to ennui and effeteness—that is only now being fully understood. Her children are monstrously contorted. We realize now that when we look at the painting A Woman and a Girl Driving (1881), what we see is not necessarily the warm, benign postcard image of a mother and daughter, but a tense balance of social order, silently observed by both parties.

This was something which evidently interested Degas, who acquired and prominently displayed Cassatt’s Girl Arranging Her Hair (1886) in his home until the end of his life. This portrait of a young girl striving to achieve the grace she earnestly lacks, thick-armed and puffy-faced, fixed with an expression of vacant expectancy, is an unsettling reminder of the role she will inevitably play once she reaches maturity and gets taken up by a husband.

One room in the exhibition is almost entirely composed of Degas’ many studies of Cassatt. The way in which he depicts her shows a clear reverence for her spirit, as she looks out into museum galleries away from the artist while other women around her bury their faces in books to decipher the images on the walls.

Degas only painted one full portrait of Cassatt, the only one that exists. She leans forward on a wooden chair in a parlor, arms resting on her knees, and she holds a set of blurred cards or photographs in her hands. Her face is poised and intelligent, eyebrows raised over focused eyes cast slightly downward and into the distance. From behind her head, a violent explosion of white paint emanates. It could certainly be interpreted as the hazy glare of a gaslight. Or it could be the very expression of obscurity and misunderstanding, of a mind and vision buried by the white noise that kept her from the forefront of historical recognition. Until now.

Degas/Cassatt is on view at the National Gallery of Art through October 5. For more information visit www.nga.gov

Ari Post • August 7, 2014

*A guide to this month’s standout gallery exhibits around the city, for those of us who could use some time gazing at a good painting or piece of sculpture on a warm summer evening.*

**[Adamson Gallery](www.AdamsonGallery.org)**

1515 14th St., NW

In her exhibit “Interconnected: Science, Nature, and Technologies” (through August 31), Yuriko Yamaguchi created a sculptural installation titled Cloud, which balances fantasy and dreams with the overlapping web of common forces that affect the human condition: ancestry, economy, religion, nature, time, technology and place. This mixed-media work reflects its namesake both literally and metaphorically: it is beautiful from a distance, and evermore difficult to see as we get closer, until suddenly we are lost inside of it.

**[Cross Mackenzie Gallery](www.CrossMackenzie.com)**

2026 R Street NW

The painter Mary Armstrong creates ethereal landscapes that shift between the ground, water and air, exploring the symbiotic relationship between the earth and it’s atmosphere, evoking a sense of both serenity and turmoil. Her abstract interpretations of a landscapes are informed by 19th century painting approaches, yet her method of scraping through luscious wax and oils on panel in order to reveal hyped-up colors from underneath lend her work a decidedly contemporary resonance.

**[Jane Haslem Gallery](www.JaneHaslemGallery.com)**

2025 Hillyer Place NW

The renowned landscape artist Billy Morrow Jackson is on view through the end of September in “A Clear Eyed Poet of the Prairie.” Jackson is best known for his paintings of rural buildings and their environs, in which nearly all the canvas can be devoted to dramatically lighted sky. For those with a love of the American Midwest, this is truly an exhibit not to be missed.

**[All We Art Studio](www.AllWeArtStudio.com)**

1666 33rd Street NW

All We Art is a new, multidisciplinary space dedicated to promote international cultural exchange between Venezuela, other Latin American countries, and the United States, through exhibitions and cultural programs. The inaugural exhibit, “Tierra de Gracia/Land of Grace,” celebrates the exuberance of the artistic production in Venezuelan contemporary art (through September 14). Through painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, jewelry and handcraft, the group exhibition features Venezuelan artists that together highlight the complexity of Venezuelan contemporary art.

**[Hamiltonian Gallery](www.HamiltonianGallery.com)**

1353 U St NW

Washington based artist Billy Friebele translates the bustle of the U Street corridor into abstract images and sound in “U Street Chromatic (for Duke),” on view through August 23. Paying homage to Duke Ellington’s early piano composition, Soda Fountain Rag, he has created an interactive drawing and sound-making machine. Planted in locations along the U Street Corridor that were important to Ellington’s artistic evolution, Friebele’s playful machine translates the motion of passersby into sound and abstract images using sonar sensors.

**[Project 4 Gallery](www.Project4Gallery.com)**

1353 U St NW

Through August 16, Project 4 Gallery will present “Everyware,” a show dedicated to exploring handheld digital art by a group of three artists connected and sharing their work and ideas through social media. The works of Aaron Cahill, William Deegan and Lynette Jackson explore context with mobile technologies and reflect on these new, contemporary conditions. For instance, Cahill’s geometric, design-like work is created entirely on his mobile device, utilizing multiple photo-sharing and fine art apps.

**[Susan Calloway Fine Art](www.CallowayArt.com)**

1643 Wisconsin Ave NW

Mix egg yolk with powdered pigment and you have egg tempera, a painting medium that has been used for over 1,000 years. A successful Kickstarter campaign provided the funding for Washington artist Caroline Adams’s project to make 50 paintings in egg tempera, combining 21st century crowdsourcing with ancient artistic traditions. Throughout the year, Caroline has documented her progress, building layers of color slowly and sharing her struggles and successes through her Kickstarter site. The project has culminated in a wonderful, intimate exhibition of these fifty small landscapes, on view through August 30. [gallery ids="116121,116127,116125" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • July 16, 2014

Painting en plein air is a simple artistic ideal, a French expression which means “in the open air.” It calls to mind the sweeping, billowy landscapes of an endless aesthetic tradition.

Artists have long painted outdoors, but the roots of plein air painting took form in the mid-19th century, during an accumulation of technical and conceptual breakthroughs in fine art. First, the Barbizon school and the Impressionists became fixated on capturing natural light in their work, which drove artists to focus more discerningly on the realism of the natural world. Monet’s haystack paintings, for instance, painted during particular times of day, capture the specific effects of atmosphere and light on the environment, a far cry from the generalizing, emotionally driven mountain scenes of Romantic era paintings.

The second factor is the invention around this same time of box easels. Portable, collapsible briefcase-like easels with retractable legs and built-in paint boxes and palettes made the hauling of painting supplies into the wilderness considerably less arduous and cumbersome. Vital to the teachings of art and widely adored by artists, patrons and audiences alike, the tradition of plein air painting remains popular to this day.

The contemporary artist Mark Tribe has taken this art form to a new, strikingly relevant plateau. He brings the tradition of plein air, unapologetically, into the digital age.

Tribe explores the aesthetics and representation of aerial views in landscape photography through the virtual lens of computer simulation in his exhibit, Mark Tribe: Plein Air, which opens to the public on July 19 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Displaying all new work commissioned specifically by the Corcoran, this new exhibit includes nine large-scale images in which Tribe uses geospatial data and fractal algorithms to create digital simulations of real landscapes. Tribe’s shaped prints were made using a UV inkjet printing process on Dibond, a durable aluminum composite material, so that the effect appears to hover over the gallery wall.

The tradition of plein air altered viewers’ perceptions and taught them to see the natural world in new and exciting ways, presenting landscapes with a new eye for composition, light and darkness, the bluish haze of a shadow, for instance, or the rich, monochrome color-muddling of dawn light piercing the sky. Tribe elevates our perception even further, presenting outdoor landscapes from a “drone’s eye view,” a sort of calculated satellite perspective, an intricately pixelated topography that plays an increasingly important and subconsciously familiar role in contemporary culture.

Tribe’s large-scale photographs show a computer-generated world in which familiar environments appear distant, almost foreign. Unlike traditional depictions of landscapes in art, these aerial views shift our perspective. They do not reproduce our “natural” terrestrial viewpoint. There is no ground underfoot, no place to stand, and often no visible horizon. Tribe’s landscapes are idealized and pristine, what he calls “fantastic projections.”

The works grew out of concepts that the artist first examined in his 2012 project, Rare Earth. There, he manipulated landscapes as a symbolic setting for paramilitary fantasy, particularly as used in combat video games (an increasingly rich source of socio-political tension between older and younger generations). This exhibit thus provides an aerial view of such idealized, virtual worlds, which are often depicted as verdant and unspoiled. Collectively, the images collapse the boundaries between the actual and the virtual, the abstract and the representational. They do so in ways that challenge the basic premise of photography and the technological boundaries of image making, while also connecting Tribe’s innovative practices to the historical conventions of landscape painting and photography.

Aside from the plein air tradition, this work also pays homage to the early days of aerial photography, largely developed using balloons for gathering information during the First World War. In 1968, orbiting astronauts first photographed an iconic view of Earth rising over a barren moon—an image that forever changed our notion of landscape as a subject. Since then, military applications of aerial imaging technology has expanded exponentially, from spy planes to satellites and, most recently, to drones.

With this exhibit, Tribe presents a catalog of virtual landscapes that appears to have been shot by drones, interrogating, framing, and critiquing the ways in which landscape images are used to expand territories and defend geopolitical interests. By using software to generate his uncanny panoramas from data, Tribe suggests that the hovering lenses of unmanned devices produce images that can be as powerfully seductive as they are artificial. It is an unsettling prospect, but an oddly beautiful one.

Gary Tischler •

When audience members arrive at the Wolf Trap Filene Center for the July 25 Wolf Trap Opera Company’s production of Bizet’s quintessential “Carmen,” they’ll be settling in for something special that’s at the core of opera, and at the core of the WTOC, an experience that’s both expansive and essential. This production, sung in French with English supertitles, features custom video projection design, providing attendees a multi-media opera experience.

Kim Pensinger Witman, the senior director of the WTOC, says that “’Carmen’ is the kind of opera where you draw a lot of people who normally might not go to the opera, or it’s on a list of something they might want to do, or it’s a reason for coming out here.” In short, like a few other standards of the opera repertoire (think “La Boheme” or “Madame Butterfly”), it’s an opera for people who may not even like opera, but want to see ‘Carmen.’ “Somewhere in people’s lives they’ve heard strands of music or arias from the opera, it’s comfortable and familiar in a way.”

“But it wasn’t always like that,” she added. “When it debuted, it created a bit of a firestorm, because it was very non-traditional. Plus there was controversy about the plot because it involved a heroine who was a gypsy as opposed to an aristocrat or royalty. In addition, the opera was an example of the new form “opera comique,” which used spoken dialogue along with the music, which wasn’t like classical opera.”

Now, it’s one of those operas that expands the audience because of its familiarity. But that’s not all that’s expanding the audience at Wolf Trap, where opera has been performed since 1971. The WTOC is one of the most highly regarded residency programs in the world.

It’s tiered into two groups–the Filene Young Artists and the Studio Artists. The Filene Young Artist singers (some 15-20) are drawn from candidates who already have completed advanced degrees and performed in apprenticeships. The Studio Artists (some 12-16) are drawn from candidates who have undergraduate degrees, but are still undecided on a career path for opera.

“One of the things that’s unique about the program is that we basically select and choose the operas we perform based on the roster of singers that we have, their particular talents and voices,” Witman says. “I don’t think anybody else does that.”

“Carmen” is not the beginning and end of what the Wolf Trap Opera Company has to offer during the summer’s season. There has been a consistently adventuresome aspect to the WTOC offerings, enriched by guest artists, top-notch conductors and designers. They also offer special programs, recitals and pre-performance talks. It’s a full-service season presented by a full-service company.

The company’s first offering of the season was a rarely performed production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” conducted by Antony Walker. The popular “Aria Jukebox,” which features Filene Young Artists singing arias selected by the audience, performed its annual show earlier this month. This year’s concert featured Artist in Residence Eric Owens and Director Witman at the piano.

“I started out as a pianist,” Witman said. “When I came here, I continued to play but took on other tasks, and now I’m senior director. Basically, I do the hiring. I’m involved in much of the production work. I coordinate all things classical music at Wolf Trap, which includes working with the National Symphony Orchestra partnership, which has their own Wolf Trap program and season.”

“We’re all trying to widen our audiences, all the venues big and small, and find ways to get the audience to come but to be a part of something—the talks, the recitals and of course the setting all lead up to the idea of opera at Wolf Trap being an experience. It’s a unique place, a unique company.”

For “Carmen,” Grant Gershon will conduct the National Symphony Orchestra. Mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani stars as Carmen, with tenor Kevin Ray as Don Juan. Directing is Tara Faircloth. [gallery ids="101810,139907,139905" nav="thumbs"]

Nancy Nesvet • July 2, 2014

Happy 100th birthday, Ralph Fasanella. A self-taught artist who painted for 30 years before his greatness was recognized, Fasanella (1914-1997) is being celebrated this year with exhibitions that illustrate his dedication to working people and the America he loved.

Here in Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition “Lest We Forget” features paintings of strikes, laborers, political events including the Rosenberg trial and the Kennedy assassination and members of Fasanella’s Italian American family, such as his father, who delivered ice in the Bronx (“Iceman Crucified #4).

The show opens with a nine-foot-long triptych of New York City that began as a single canvas, with Broadway at its center, and grew to include the Queensboro bridge and the uptown neighborhoods bordering it in Manhattan. The canvas extends to the waterways bordering the city, the sightlines forming an outline of the borough of Manhattan from its tip at Battery Park up through Harlem to its northern edge. Its complexity begs us to inspect each neighborhood and each group of New Yorkers as we follow them across the horizontal canvas.

A homegrown social realist, Fasanella worked as a union organizer and was involved with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade protesting fascism in Spain. He painted the possibilities of Americans, telling them where they had gone wrong and showing them the way to achieve an America that provided justice for all.

Politics is at the forefront in works such as “McCarthy Era Garden Party,” depicting what Fasanella believed was the wrongful execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In “Garden Party,” he shows the enveloping ring of protesters and the Disneyesque and perhaps Colonial-referencing palm trees, in pots clearly held by a photographer and other observers. The Rosenbergs face the crowd of protesters, not the House Un-American Activities Committee – on a raised stage in the painting – who indicted them.

“McCarthy Press” and “American Tragedy” use color and content to let the public know Fasanella’s view of McCarthyism and the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a tragic period in American history, dominated by the iconic “A” form, representing the shadow of the atomic bomb.

Farther into the exhibition, “The Great Strike” depicts what became known as the Bread and Roses Strike, which took place in 1912 in Lawrence, Mass. Here, we see people of varied ethnicities protesting together to bring about just wages, much as the protesters seen in “Garden Party” protest. This recurring theme of people demonstrating their beliefs is also seen in “Modern Times,” in which 1960s-era youth protest American involvement in the Vietnam War, showing the strength of common people, real Americans, to effect change.

These paintings showing the involvement of many people protesting unjust policies and leaders express Fasanella’s faith that justice can prevail if the people do not give up. Indeed, for thirty years, until he achieved the recognition of the art and wider world, he kept painting, revealing historical events that needed to be witnessed and talked and learned about, “lest we forget.”

“Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget” is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 3. A complementary exhibition, “Ralph Fasanella: The Art of Social Engagement,” is on view in the lobby of the AFL-CIO Headquarters through Aug. 1. [gallery ids="101794,140749" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • June 30, 2014

Since the end of the Revolutionary War, England and the United States have shared a peculiar affinity. During the 19th century, England was (perhaps bitterly) aware of America’s nascent industrial, commercial and trading potential, and the United States continued longing for England’s cultural inheritance with childlike dependency.

This eager and mutual fondness might help explain why so many of America’s aristocratic and liberal elite made second homes of London over the past two hundred years. From the impenetrability of its social order and its literary heritage, to its European bustle and gleam, the aura of “Englishness” pervades American sensibilities to this day.

This is particularly important when considering the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), perhaps America’s most renowned painter of the 19th century, who not surprisingly spent his most productive years in London, living on the River Thames and capturing its hazy, mechanical majesty.

Whistler’s fascinating evolution is on full display in “An American In London: Whistler and the Thames,” at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, exhibiting the thoughtfulness of the artist’s professional growth within and surrounding the unfolding international scene. Not only did Whistler bridge a gap between the Old World and the New, but he also occupied a pivotal position between artistic traditions of East and West when he spearheaded the Western artistic revolution of Japanese aesthetic influence following the opening of treaty ports with Japan in the 1850s.

Born in Massachusetts, Whistler was the son of a prominent engineer, who moved his family between the U.S., England and Russia throughout the young artist’s childhood. After studying in Paris, he settled in London in his mid-twenties, where he aimed to attract patrons among the growing number of wealthy merchants and shipping magnates in the city. He focused his attentions on the docks of the Thames, the industrial and commercial center of his new city that provided him a myriad of swarthy and energetic subjects in its decaying old wharves, splintering wooden bridges, and the clippers and characters that inhabited them.

In “Limehouse,” an etching from 1859, he seems to seat the viewer on the deck of a ship, looking over the bow onto a crooked forest of masts and rotting wooden beams with towering rows of storefronts crowding the edge of the dock. Here is a knowledge and spirit of place that demands acknowledgement, as if Whistler were trying to prove beyond doubt the degree to which he had adapted to his surroundings.

Sailors go on about their day in the distance, surveying the water and readying their vessels, as oblivious to the artist as birds might be to an ornithologist. Characters often litter these scenes, as with the men conversing in “Rotherhithe” (1860) and the lone fisherman in “Black Lion Wharf” (1859), the latter of which even details the signboards of several surrounding wharves.

Among his earlier works, Whistler’s etchings are perhaps more indicative of a fledgling tendency toward atmospheric richness than his thickly lain oil paintings. Canvases like “Wapping” and “The Last of Old Westminster,” while impressive, are weighed down with minutiae, which serve to illuminate the profound influence of Japonisme that so enlightened his later work.

In the fourth room of the gallery, viewers are met with woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, the renowned masters of the Japanese ukiyo-e style that transfixed Western culture when it came about in the 1850s and 60s. These two artists, with their unique variations on river and bridge scenes, had a profound impact on Whistler. The exotic language of Japanese art, with its limited color palates, flattened forms, and vast geometric compositions, provided him with a novel lens through which to interpret a changing world.

The evidence is palpable in Whistler’s work. “Chelsea On Ice” (1864) depicts a cold February dusk from the window of the artist’s home, looking across the Thames to the Battersea factories in the distance. In contrast to the clutter of his previous river scenes, there is now but a single boat in the water, defined by a precise handful of monotone brushstrokes. Some faint architectural gestures on the far bank faintly reveal the factories through the clouds, and a few brittle trees in the foreground hover above two sparse clusters of silhouettes walking along the street.

But the real subject here is the field of ice on the water and the blanket of fog engulfing every corner of the canvas. This is the atmospheric transcendence that became Whistler’s signature style: the washed out, muted tonality with which he wove together Japanese aesthetics and the singular character of the murky English skies.

Then there are the Nocturns. Such odes to solitude, fog and shadows captured by Whistler in paint that exist otherwise only in dreams. To stand before “Nocturn: Silver and Opal—Chelsea” (1880s) is as pulsing and silent as staring off into a hazy shipping port in the dead of night. Unclaimed lights flicker and fade in the distance. The beams of a suspension bridge grow and recede before your eyes.

Ultimately, Whistler sought to document the industrial center of England’s great port in all its dirty, tumultuous fervor. He sought to convey the essence of an ebbing and flowing lifeline of people, ideas and struggles. The turn of the 20th century was marked by advanced industrialization and globalization, two factors that forever altered the course of human history. In this light, Whistler’s lifelong portrait of a river offers a window into our modern evolution. It is a foggy, endless and often beautiful view.

*“An American In London: Whistler and the Thames” will be on view at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery through Aug. 17. For more information visit [www.Asia.si.edu](http://asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/american-in-london/)*

Ari Post • June 27, 2014

“Speculative Forms” at the Hirshhorn

Speculative realism is a philosophical notion that emphasizes equal relationships among subject, object and space. In the realm of visual art, it highlights the importance of installation and the viewer’s eye in relation to the object.

For instance, the iron sculpture “Okame” (1956), by Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), is a vaguely organic form, rust-colored with a single, slanted eye and what may be four ears and a mouth. The title means “bystander” in Japanese, and as one moves around the small work there is a prevailing sense that the audience is not the only participating viewer; it is a work that looks back. Noguchi is manipulating the notion of the work itself observing, even as it is observed by the viewer.

Drawn from the Hirshhorn’s private collection, “Speculative Forms” reconsiders the historical development of sculpture since the early twentieth century and the ongoing critique of the autonomy of the object. Ranging from the well known to the rarely exhibited, the selected works challenge the modernist notion that sculptures exist in isolation from their surroundings.

Including more than fifty works, this two-floor exhibition – while proceeding through Surrealism, Constructivism, Assemblage, Op and Kinetic Art, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism – collapses conventional art historical divisions such as figurative versus abstract, still versus kinetic, representational versus simplified geometric, interior versus exterior. The works oscillate between these dichotomies, turning one’s preconceived notions of sculpture inside out and raising intriguing questions about the potential and limits of the perception of objects and the larger world.

“Modern American Realism” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Sara Roby (1907-1986) was a beloved art collector who established a foundation in the 1950s to encourage figurative artists when Abstract Expressionism was at peak popularity. Through her foundation, she collected over 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures by the country’s leading figurative artists, including Edward Hopper, Will Barnet, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Arthur Dove, Nancy Grossman, Wolf Kahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn and Honoré Sharrer.

Acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984 from the American Federation of Arts (formerly administered by the Whitney Museum), the collection has been one of Washington’s hidden gems of the visual arts for thirty years.

“Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection,” currently on view at the museum, presents some of the most treasured artworks from this now permanent collection, featuring seventy paintings and sculptures from the 1910s to the 1980s. Selected by chief curator Virginia Mecklenburg, the works encompass a range of what can broadly be called modern realism, from sociopolitical to psychological, from satirical to surrealist. The resulting exhibition captures both the optimism and the apprehension of the years following the Second World War, from the poignantly human to the whimsical to the complex and enigmatic.

Roby gave essential support to realism at a time when critics celebrated abstraction that bore little resemblance to the natural world. She recognized that modern life allowed for many kinds of realism. This collection ensures that her legacy, as well as the legacies of the many great artists she championed, will not be forgotten.

“Speculative Forms” opened June 16 at the Hirshhorn Museum (the closing date will be announced). “Modern American Realism” will be on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 17. [gallery ids="101776,141120" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • May 27, 2014

American art before 1950 is all but omitted from the Western canon. Frequently perceived as an obscure assortment of simple colonial landscape painters, would-be impressionist yokels and winsome expatriates of voracious appetite and meager consequence, there was little recognition for American artists until after the migration of European progressives fleeing the Second World War. It reads in the history books as if one day a roiling storm of artistic breakthroughs blew across the Atlantic Ocean and began raining artistic innovation along the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Undergirding the breakout of Abstract Expressionism and America’s ensuing artistic prominence is a clear debt to centuries of European progress. However, frequently misunderstood and typically neglected are the regional artists and styles that helped mould and prepare the American artistic landscape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of the major champions of America’s early artistic identity was Duncan Phillips (1886 – 1966), founder of the eponymous Phillips Collection in Dupont Circle. When he opened his museum in 1921 in the old family mansion, it was the country’s first institution dedicated to modern art, and from the outset Phillips intended it as a bastion for the country’s artists. Over the course of 50 years he made it his legacy to find, foster, and preserve works by living American artists, ultimately amassing some 1,400 paintings and sculptures that have helped define the cultural landscape of 20th century America.

After touring the world for the past four years, the full breadth of Phillips’ American collection is back on display with Made in the USA, the most comprehensive installation of these works in the museum’s history. Consuming the main building’s three floors, the history of American art billows to life. It begins with the unsung masters of the late 19th century whose work set the course for modernism in the United States, and it evolves into the new visual language of Abstract Expressionism, which catapulted American art onto the center of the international stage. The collection uncovers a breadth and diversity of American artistic heritage unbeknownst to most audiences and welcomes home some of our city’s most beloved masterworks.

“Phillips was determined to lift American art out of obscurity,” says Sue Frank, associate curator of The Phillips Collection and editor of the exhibit catalog.

“And how did he get to this diverse view of American art? As he also collected European art, he believed artists in this country were connected to continuing identities and traditions that reach back into the 19th century. He was interested in how the present is connected to the past. He was interested in finding man’s place in nature and the cosmos, color and light, that you can trace from the end of the 19th century through to the 20th.”

From the offset, Phillips’ evolution as a collector is determinedly progressive. (Be advised: Now would be a good time to have Google at hand). The first floor exhibits his early acquisitions from around 1920, American Impressionist and regionalist painters such as Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast and John Henry Twachtman, as well as the revered early American masters William Merrit Chase, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler.

These works, while quite fine, reflect more typically fashionable American tastes of the time: atmospheric landscapes and impressive portraiture, provincial city scenes and windswept Americana.

However even among these early acquisitions, Phillips foreshadowed his keenly developing interest in experimental and conceptually challenging artworks. In Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Moonlit Cove (ca. 1880) and Rockwell Kent’s Burial of a Young Man (ca. 1910), a taste for transcendent mysticism pervades his sensibilities.

The most astonishing works in this part of the exhibit are perhaps two landscape paintings: Marsden Hartley’s “Mountain Lake—Autumn” (ca. 1910), and John Marin’s “Weehawken Sequence, No. 30” (ca. 1916). These wild terrains of explosive shape and color border on pure abstraction, each exuding a euphoric wildness of environment that give themselves almost entirely to the arena of paint.

On the second floor, all proverbial hell breaks loose in the form of a seismic shift into early American abstraction. Consuming a number of walls are the expansive, crackling landscapes of Augustus Vincent Tack, who Phillips saw as the first American to incorporate Far Eastern artistic influence. Sunset and floral paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe accompany explosive watercolors by Marin and the proto-Surrealist forest scenes of Charles Burchfield, which all reveal a sheer creative force beyond any straight-lined observational painting. There are even a handful of obscured, sun-flecked photographs by Alfred Stieglitz.

The artist who dominates this floor, however, is Arthur Dove. Increasingly revered today as an Artist’s artist, it is clear that Phillips anticipated something in Dove ahead of his time.

“For the first few years from World War I through the early 20s, Phillips was still struggling to educate himself about contemporary painting,” says Frank. “He’d initially set out to be an art critic, and he always said it was the work of Arthur Dove that really flung open the doors for him. He could understand, looking at Dove’s work, how paintings didn’t need narrative or metaphor to be successful.”

Dove’s weightless, unhinged landscapes and glowing skies defy previous notions of representation. The paintings “Golden Storm” (1925) and “Me and the Moon” (1937) are as haunting and ethereal of any 20th century masterpieces one could hope to see in a single exhibit.

On the third floor, this parade of artistic development fulminates. From Pollock and Mark Rothko to Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning, from a rare Philip Guston to a pair of remarkable Richard Diebenkorns, the congregation of jaw-dropping masterworks is dizzying. Here one can glimpse how Phillips’ vision of a great American artistic legacy was vaulted into the cultural stratosphere.

Yet balanced among the works of these international heavy-hitters, the visitor still finds in the surrounding galleries the triumphs of those who are usually overlooked: paintings by minority and immigrant artists such as Bernard Karfiol, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Jacob Lawrence – accomplished painters who underscore our country’s vexing cultural heritage of racial, ancestral and social tension.

What emerges from all of this is a renewed sense of the value of a truly American regionalism, boasting a long and storied lineage.

Even up until his death, Phillips pursued this mission. “In 1954,” says Frank, “Phillips wrote that he was still excited about what was happening in contemporary art, that he still had enthusiasm for going to New York galleries. He was in his mid-seventies, and that’s when he decides to build the first addition to this museum to house his ever-growing collection. He remained engaged until the very end.”

This is simply one of the great collections of American art, and Made in America is simply an exhibition that revels in its grandeur. Washington has its prized collection back within its borders. What more could we ask for? Go see the work and reclaim it as our own.

*“Made in the USA” is on view at the Phillips Collection through Aug. 31. For more information, visit [www.PhillipsCollection.org](http://www.phillipscollection.org/).*