Visual Arts

Linnea Kristiansson • February 5, 2015

The annual Georgetown Arts show will return next week. Sponsored by the Citizens Association of Georgetown and hosted by the House of Sweden, the visual arts exhibition is a chance to see some favorite local artists — and to discover new ones in Georgetown.

As in previous years, the House of Sweden at 2900 K St. NW has made space available for the CAG show in its embassy building on the Potomac River, next to Washington Harbour.

The opening reception will be 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 12. The show will continue through Feb.15, opening 11 a.m to 5 p.m., daily. During Saturday and Sunday, there will be several Artist Talks. The show is free and open to the public.

Last year, the show set a record with more than 800 attendees. Most works will be for sale; a few were on loan from private collections. The CAG show is chaired by Laura-Anne Tiscornia. For more details, contact CAG at 202-337-7313.

Ari Post • January 29, 2015

In The Georgetowner’s last issue of 2014, I wrote about the National Gallery of Art exhibition “A Subtle Beauty: Platinum Photographs from the Collection,” which closed Jan. 4. One could see how advances in photography in the late 19th and early 20th century opened the door to an entirely new understanding of composition, value and spatial relationships.

The new photographic technology re-energized artists’ methods and creative visions. However, with the ability of the photograph to capture the existing world, painting and drawing were left to find a new direction of visual communication.

That new direction is traced in another exhibition at the National Gallery. “Modern American Prints and Drawings from the Kainen Collection,” on view through Feb. 1, looks at 20th-century developments in drawing and printmaking. This is a notable perspective to take, since many of art’s great evolutions begin at the molecular level of smaller-scale drawings and prints, where the artist has greater freedom to rapidly experiment.

The first room of this two-gallery exhibition covers the period leading up to World War II, in which artists such as Childe Hassam and Stuart Davis departed from strict representation. The second room moves toward pure abstraction in the postwar period, with works by Jackson Pollock, David Smith and Willem de Kooning.

A surprising piece is Max Weber’s “Repose (Peace)” (1928), a lithograph of three women which reads like a rich mash-up of Rubenesque beauty, impressionist line work and Picasso-Romanesque physiques. It is completely fun and lovely.

Stuart Davis’s lithograph “Place Pasdeloup, No. 2” (1929) is a whimsically minimalist scene that could have inspired every quaint caricature of France, from Looney Tunes to Steve Martin’s stage play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” Much less fractured than the other two works of his in the show, this is a lighthearted geometry of pleasant, simple luxury.

Louis Lozowick’s lithograph “Crane” (1929) is of a different ilk, with the stark depiction of the looming industrial machine like an oil rig out of George Stevens’s film “Giant,” echoing the menacing grandeur and architectural fetishism of the Futurists.

In the postwar gallery, there are many works, but none as powerful or enjoyable (to this writer) as those by Arshile Gorky and David Smith. The two drawings by Gorky, simple pen-on-paper from the early ’30s, show the height of the artist’s acumen as an innovator in visual abstraction. As he strived for surrealism and broke boundaries of traditional composition and form, his work would go on to profoundly shape Abstract Expressionism.

David Smith’s “A Letter” (1952) is cryptic and playful, like a Krazy Kat comic strip on hallucinogens. It is strangely intoxicating, occupying a rare arena of something that is both warmly familiar and refreshingly new.

Richard Selden • January 16, 2015

In 1974, the stark exterior of the Sarah Mellon Scaife Galleries became the new gateway to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. Forty years later, it is still bracing to come upon this brutalist addition, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, to the Carnegie Institute’s neoclassical buildings.

It was an inspired notion, then, last fall, to install “TIP,” a chaotic exhibit of wooden poles wrapped in steel mesh and colorful strips of fabric. “TIP” is the work of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow. It runs 131 feet from the Forbes Avenue sidewalk to the museum entrance, welcoming visitors to the 2013 Carnegie International, the world’s second oldest international survey of contemporary art (the oldest, the Venice Biennale, began a year earlier, in 1895).

The 2013 Carnegie International, curated by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski, kicked off last October and continues through Mar. 16. Since the next Carnegie International is at least three years away, it would do well to get yourself to Pittsburgh as soon as you can.

As the Barlow piece suggests, this Carnegie International is serious about play.

One of the largest sections of the show, filling the museum’s Heinz Architectural Center, is called “The Playground Project.” An immersive environment by Tezuka Architects, it combines projects by students in the museum’s summer camps with documentation of innovative 20th-century playgrounds from the United States, Europe and Japan. There is also a playground-themed “sci-fi road movie” by Ei Arakawa and Henning Bohl and – what else? – an actual playground.

Though there is plenty to see, with 35 artists from 19 countries represented, the show is more manageable than most survey exhibitions. However, with the decision to disperse the pieces throughout the museum – even in the attached Carnegie Museum of Natural History, past the dinosaur bones – visitors have to do some navigating. Wear comfortable shoes.

In some cases, the pieces are site-specific. But more generally this approach enables the curators to provide art-historical context and show off the permanent collection, including works from earlier Carnegie Internationals. It also adds a DIY sense of involvement and discovery.

Two of the most captivating installations are in the Hall of Sculpture, viewable both from “ground level” and a perimeter balcony. “The Bidoun Library,” by Negar Azimi, Nelson Harst, Babak Radboy and Ghazaal Vojdani, is an extensive, mobile display of books, magazines, comics and posters, most in Arabic, dealing with “that vast, vexed, nefarious construct known as ‘the Middle East.’”

On the other side of the court is “Disarm” by Pedro Reyes: seven bizarre, self-playing musical instruments making an oval around a sort of drum set, all of which he assembled using 6,700 weapons repurposed from the Mexican drug wars. As visitors wander among them, they go off (so to speak), sounding like electric bagpipes, a xylophone, a rock bass and temple blocks.
The Carnegie Museum of Art is open daily except Tuesdays, with extended evening hours on Thursdays.

Ari Post •

A groundbreaking era in the history of human innovation, the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century were marked by the achievements of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, along with medical breakthroughs from insulin and cardiology to blood transfusions and x-rays.

As a natural response to the rapid development of science and technology, the arena of fine art underwent many distinct mutations toward the end of the 19th century. The most clear and immediate of these was the advancement of photography, which made owning and taking photographs available to a broad audience of artists and visual thinkers.

Photography opened the door to an entirely new understanding of composition, value and spatial relationships, re-energizing artists’ methods and creative visions. However, with the ability of the photograph to capture the existing world, painting and drawing were left to find a new direction of visual communication.

“A Subtle Beauty: Platinum Photographs from the Collection,” an exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art closing Jan. 4, gives visitors a close look at some of the finest photographic images from the turn of the century.

Revered for their luminous, textured surfaces, from a velvety matte to a lustrous sheen, platinum prints played an important role in establishing photography as a fine art.

The photographs are also prized for their extraordinary tonal range: from creamy shades of white to delicate gray midtones and from warm, sepia browns to the deepest blacks. These qualities made platinum prints a preferred choice among the pictorialists, an international group of turn-of-the-century photographers who championed the medium as a means for artistic expression.
There is something of a 19th-century romanticism about many of the photographs – particularly the portraits – which makes the occasional drama of a subject’s pose seem perhaps silly to the contemporary viewer. But at their best, they capture an almost literary transience, with the subject’s eyes imparting a depth of intellect and emotion in the moment that it is materializing. Heinrich Kühn’s portrait of his brother Walther (1911) has this tremendous affect, as does Alfred Stieglitz’s mesmerizing and balanced portrait of his elevator operator, Hodge Kirnon (1917).

The effects of those portraits are brought together with a hallowed, atmospheric brilliance in Edward Steichen’s portrait of August Rodin (1907), positioned in a contemplative pose reminiscent of the sculptor’s most recognized work, “The Thinker.” Perhaps given the famous subject, the portrait takes on a decidedly eternal quality, which was probably not mere chance.
Maybe the most beautiful photograph in this intimate exhibition is Frederick H. Evans’s “York Minster” (1902). Evans captured without equal the cavernous, grand and reverberating awe of a cathedral. The way the soft light washes over the relief ornament and suspends itself palpably in the vaulted space between the high windows and the crowns of the arches is a true source of bleary-eyed, skip-a-heartbeat beauty.

Richard Selden • December 17, 2014

Virgin Most Prudent, Mirror of Justice, Ark of the Covenant, Queen of the Confessors. These are a few of the 50 titles of Mary in the Litany of Loreto, stenciled on a wall in the exhibition “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea.”

One of the most ambitious projects in the 27-year history of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Picturing Mary” arranges in six thematic sections more than 60 paintings, sculptures and works in other media. Curated by Monsignor Timothy Verdon, director of Florence’s Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the show is on view through April 12.

It is largely an Old Masters show, with household names such as Botticelli (the captivating “Madonna of the Book”), Dürer (six etchings), Michelangelo (two drawings, one arriving in late January) and Rembrandt (an etching).

Perhaps the most compelling work by a famous artist is Caravaggio’s “Rest on the Flight into Egypt” of 1594-96, from the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. A big, beautiful puzzle of a painting, it depicts, on its right half, Mary cradling baby Jesus in an arcadian setting and, on its left half, St. Joseph and a brown ox in a barren clearing. Dividing the canvas nearly from top to bottom is a mostly naked angel, back and wings to the viewer, playing a Marian motet on the violin from music that Joseph holds up, every note clearly shown.

This being the National Museum of Women in the Arts, there are works by four women artists: Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1532-1625), Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), Orsola Maddalena Caccia (1596-1676) and Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665).

The museum has exhibited Anguissola’s “Self-Portrait at the Easel” of 1556, from Lancut Castle in Poland, once before, but it is an ideal choice for this show, with the artist gazing out as she finishes a painting of Mary nose-to-nose with a young, standing Jesus, Mary’s fingers tenderly touching his cheek and the back of his blond-haired head.

Six paintings by Caccia, an Ursuline nun from Moncalvo (about 30 miles east of Turin) whose father Guglielmo was a painter, are displayed, three of them nine feet in height. The first the visitor encounters, “St. Luke the Evangelist in the Studio” of c. 1625, is probably the finest and most interesting. Modeled on her father, the Evangelist – said to have been an icon painter – is shown working on a sculpture of the Madonna and Child, a painting of them on an easel nearby. The complex composition also includes putti, books, a high window, an ox (Luke’s symbol), a little dog and roses (the symbol of the Virgin) on the floor.

In the gallery titled Mother of the Crucified is a passage from the Gospel of Luke in which Simeon tells Mary that “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The stenciled excerpt is between a polychromed terracotta, “Madonna and Child” of c. 1430 by Luca della Robbia, and a stained-glass window, “Deposition and Entombment” of 1526 by Guillaume de Marcillat. In the two works, a resigned woman stares out or away, not at her son.

Ari Post • November 19, 2014

National Portrait Gallery

“Out of Many, One” by Jorge
Rodriquez-Gerada
Through Oct. 31, 2015
A grand landscape portrait by Cuban American artist Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada will be placed on the National Mall from Oct. 1 through Oct. 31. “Out of Many, One,” the English translation of “E pluribus unum,” will stretch across six acres of land midway between the World War II and Lincoln memorials along the south side of the Reflecting Pool. The work, built out of dirt and sand, is a composite portrait of several people photographed in Washington. The portrait is an interactive walk-through experience, and is also viewable from the top of the newly reopened Washington Monument.

Time Covers the 1960s
Through Aug. 9, 2015
Time magazine covers from the 1960s were created by some of the foremost artists of the day. This exhibition of original cover art from the museum’s collection will explore the major newsmakers and trends that defined that era, from Kennedy’s inauguration and the civil rights movement, to “one giant leap for mankind.”

American Art Museum

Untitled: The Art of James Castle
Sept. 26, 2014 – Feb. 1, 2015
Since Castle’s work first came to light in the 1950s, attention has focused on his unusual life: Castle was born deaf, remained illiterate, and never acquired a conventional mode of communicating with others. “Untitled” seeks to appreciate the remarkable quality of Castle’s vision as an artist, with subjects that range from farms and family portraits, to snippets of popular culture, and even invented words and symbols, fantastical calendars, and books with cryptic pictorial narratives.

Richard Estes’ Realism
Through Feb. 8, 2015
Richard Estes has long been considered the leading painter of the photorealist movement of the 1960s and 70s, and he has been celebrated for more than forty-five years as the premier painter of American cityscapes. “Richard Estes’ Realism” is the most comprehensive exhibition of Estes’ paintings ever organized, tracing his career from the late 60s to 2013. The exhibition features forty-six paintings spanning a fifty-year career.

The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art
Oct. 31, 2014 – Feb. 22, 2015
Since the dawn of humanity, birds have been a source of cultural, religious, and even political symbolism. “The Singing and the Silence” examines mankind’s relationship to birds through the eyes of twelve contemporary American artists. The opening of the exhibit dovetails with two significant environmental anniversaries—the extinction of the passenger pigeon in 1914 and the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964.

The Kreeger Museum

Emilie Brzezinski: The Lure of the Forest
Through Dec. 27, 2014
The Lure of the Forest is an exhibition of monumental wood sculptures by Emilie Brzezinski, which highlights the artist’s fascination with trees and adoration for the environment. The museum pays homage to this masterful sculptor, who for over thirty years has used chainsaws and hand chisels to carve discarded tree trunks into majestic forms.

Freer and Sackler Galleries

Unearthing Arabia: The Archaeological Adventures of Wendell Phillips
Through June 7, 2015
In 1949, Wendell Phillips, a young paleontologist and geologist, headed one of the largest archaeological expeditions to remote South Arabia (present-day Yemen) on a quest to uncover the ancient cities of Timna, the capital of the Qataban kingdom, and Marib, the reputed home of the legendary Queen of Sheba. Through a selection of artifacts, film and photography shot by the expedition team, this exhibit recreates his adventures and conveys the thrill of discovery on this great archaeological frontier.

Fine Impressions: Whistler, Freer, and Venice
In 1887, museum founder Charles Lang Freer purchased twenty-six atmospheric etchings of Venice by the artist James McNeill Whistler, marking the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership between collector and artist. “Fine Impressions” shows how this acquisition came to shape Freer’s legacy as a connoisseur and collector.

Style in Chinese Landscape Painting: The Yuan Legacy
Nov. 22, 2014 – May 31, 2015
Landscape painting is one of the most outstanding achievements of Chinese culture. Key styles in this genre emerged during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) and are still followed today. This exhibition includes the earliest work in the Freer|Sackler collections together with later examples tracing the characteristics and evolution of six styles.

The Phillips Collection

Neo-Impressionism and the Dream of Realities: Painting, Poetry, Music
Through Jan. 11, 2015
Famed pointillist painter Georges Seurat and his friends presented Neo-Impressionism, their new style of painting, for the first time in 1886 in Paris, where it drew immediate attention. That same year, a group of writers published a definition of “Symbolism” in literature that called for a focus on the inner world of the mind rather than external reality. This exhibit presents more than 70 works by 15 artists, including Seurat and Camille Pissarro, that reflect the Neo-Impressionist’s preoccupation with the idea, emotion, or synergy of the senses.

Art Museum of the Americas

Modern and Contemporary Art in the Dominican Republic
Through Feb. 1, 2015
“Modern and Contemporary Art in the Dominican Republic: Works from the Customs Office Collection” showcases the consistency, quality and diversity of the Collection of the Directorate General of Customs, which sets the Office apart as an unlikely and important creative space. These works reiterate that the Caribbean is not vernacular, helping illuminate the deeper cultural and social resonance of the islands and its art.

National Gallery of Art

A Subtle Beauty: Platinum Photographs from the Collection
Oct. 5, 2014 – Jan. 4, 2015
With a velvety surface and extraordinary tonal depth, the platinum print played an important role in establishing photography as a fine art during the late 19th century. This exhibition showcases outstanding platinum prints from the 1880s to the 1920s, including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn.

El Greco: A 400th Anniversary Celebration
November 2, 2014 – February 16, 2015
On the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the National Gallery of Art presents a commemorative exhibition of the artist’s paintings. A selection of devotional works illustrates El Greco’s role as artist of the Counter-Reformation, while others shed light on his commercial practices.

Hirshhorn

At the Hub of Things: New Views of the Collection
In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the Hirshhorn recently completed the first comprehensive renovation of their third level galleries, returning the sweeping spaces to architect Gordon Bunshaft’s original design. The first exhibition in the new galleries, “At the Hub of Things” reveals a fresh perspective on the museum’s collection, accentuating the museum’s role as a dynamic “hub” where diverse ideas converge. Included are favorite artworks that have not been on view in years, such as large-scale installations by Spencer Finch, Robert Gober, Bruce Nauman and Ernesto Neto, as well as paintings and sculptures by Janine Antoni, Cai Guo-Qiang, Alfred Jensen and Brice Marden.

Days of Endless Time
In a world conditioned by the ceaseless flow of digital media and information, many artists are countering these tendencies with works that emphasize slower, more meditative forms of perception. “Days of Endless Time” presents fourteen installations that offer prismatic vantage points into the suspension of time. Themes include escape, solitude, enchantment, and the thrall of nature.
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Ari Post •

“A Tribute to Anita Reiner” at the Phillips Collection (through Jan. 4)

The career of Anita Reiner, one of Washington’s most passionate contemporary art collectors, was given shape by her early experiences at the Phillips Collection. As a young collector, she visited the famous Mark Rothko room when it was first installed in the 1960s. While there, an elderly gentlemen inquired about her response to the work, which she initially dismissed. This stranger told Reiner, “Young lady, you always have to meet new art half way.” She later found out that this man was museum founder Duncan Phillips, and she never forgot his words.

Reiner passed away in August of last year, and this tribute exhibit is the first to explore her landmark collection. At its center is Anselm Kiefer’s “Dein blondes Haar, Margarete (Your golden Hair, Marguerite)” of 1981, recently gifted to the Phillips by Reiner’s family in her memory. The other 12 works in the exhibition, selected from Reiner’s collection, are by Mimmo Paladino, Robert Mapplethorpe, Fred Wilson, Katharina Fritsch, Yayoi Kusama, Wangechi Mutu, Shilpa Gupt, Zhang Huan, Gabriel Orozco, El Anatsui, Shirin Neshat and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

www.PhillipsCollection.org

“The Intimate Diebenkorn” and “Sculpture Now 2014” at the Katzen Arts Center (through Dec. 14)

Foremost of the remarkable exhibitions now at American University’s Katzen Center is “The Intimate Diebenkorn: Works on Paper: 1949-1992,” the first show produced by the Diebenkorn Foundation. Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) was the painter’s painter. One would be hard pressed to find a working artist today that does not adore this man’s work. It is painting as the idea in itself, which seems to speak about everything – about an artist in his environment, but also about things transcending any singular time, place or individual. “The idea is to get everything right,” Diebenkorn once said, rather prophetically. This gem of a show features 40 of Diebenkorn’s works on paper, most of which have never been publicly viewed. The selected works of pencil and ink drawings, collages of torn paper and watercolors portray a richly intimate glimpse into the artist’s evolution spanning more than 40 years.
Also on view is the Washington Sculptors Group’s 30th anniversary exhibition, “Sculpture Now 2014.” The notion of sculpture has evolved dramatically in the last thirty years. In 1978, the art theorist Rosalind Krauss declared that sculpture as a discipline had collapsed because of the wide range of practices. More recently Johanna Burton remarked that the category of sculpture had not collapsed but was rather “a state of being.” Curated by AU Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, the exhibition endeavors to respond to Krauss and Burton’s speculation with a selection of contemporary sculpture.

www.American.edu

“Eye on Elegance” at the DAR Museum (through Sept. 2015)??

In “Eye on Elegance,” the DAR Museum uses its extraordinarily rich holdings of Maryland and Virginia quilts to examine regional styles prior to 1860. The exhibition seeks to reveal the true story behind each subtle, deceivingly beautiful masterpiece.?Because historical knowledge of the quiltmakers is well preserved, one can identify these quilts by hyperlocal regions of Maryland or Virginia, and explore the makers’ histories, including the family and household members in each quilter’s home that may have helped stitch the tapestries.?The show is divided into four sections: the ‘Appliqué’ section presents quilts and counterpanes of chintz appliqué, or with appliqué centers; the ‘Pieced’ section features mathematical stars, strippies and other designs; Baltimore and Maryland ‘Albums’ have their own section; and the ‘Migration’ section examines quilting designs moving between continents and to other regions of the United States.??

eyeonelegance.dar.org??

“El Greco” at the National Gallery of Art?(through Feb. 16)??

The artist Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541-1614), universally known as El Greco, was born on the Greek island of Crete. Aspiring to success on a larger stage, he moved to Venice in his late twenties and absorbed the lessons of High Renaissance masters Titian and Tintoretto. He then departed for Rome, where he studied the work of Michelangelo and encountered mannerism, a style which defied the naturalism of Renaissance art.?Relocating to Spain in 1576, El Greco spent the rest of his life in Toledo, where he achieved unprecedented mastery as a painter of Byzantine icons, developed an artistic vision that captured the religious fervor of Counter-Reformation Spain and defined something of the grainy, arid Spanish landscape that has shaped the aura of its cultural heritage from that point onward (think Don Quixote).?The National Gallery has seven paintings by El Greco, one of the largest collections of his work in the United States. Four of them have recently returned from Spain, where they were featured in major exhibitions honoring the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death. The reunited paintings are joined here by three others from Dumbarton Oaks and the Phillips Collection and from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.??

www.NGA.gov

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
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Richard Selden •

How often does one get to hear an electric guitarist improvise on famous themes from Russian music?

“We have upped the ante for the upcoming season,” says Vera Danchenko-Stern, artistic director of the Russian Chamber Art Society, which she founded nine years ago to bring a rarely heard repertoire to Washington.

That repertoire includes not only solo jazz guitar—played in this instance by Serge Khrichenko, a classically trained musician based in Silver Spring—but also arias and art songs by Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff.

The opening gala concert of the Russian Chamber Art Society’s 2014-2015 season will take place Friday, Oct. 10, at the Embassy of Austria. Titled “Russian Kaleidoscope,” the program features Khrichenko’s jazz, contemporary works for clarinet and piano performed by Julian Milkis and Danchenko-Stern, and vocal selections sung in Russian by two emerging talents: soprano Yana Eminova and mezzo-soprano Magdalena Wor.

Is the Society’s audience made up primarily of Russian speakers? “Absolutely not,” says Danchenko-Stern. Many patrons are opera aficionados who welcome the opportunity to hear and learn more about Russian vocal music, a tradition as worthy of international admiration as that of Russian literature.

Danchenko-Stern, a graduate of Moscow’s Gnessin Institute of Music was a faculty artist there and at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto where she and her family moved in 1978, says she “immigrated for the second time” this time to the United States in 1990 when she married her second husband Lev Stern. She has coached singers for Washington National Opera productions and taught “Singing in Russian” for more than 20 years at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, one of the few music schools in the country to regularly offer such training.

Two of Danchenko-Stern’s colleagues on the Peabody faculty, violinist (and brother) Victor Danchenko, and pianist Alexander Shtarkman, will perform at the Russian Chamber Art Society’s holiday concert, “Tchaikovsky is Forever,” on Friday, Dec. 5. They will perform alongside her former student, soprano Natalia Conte, mezzo-soprano Elena Bocharova and tenor Viktor Antipenko.

At the Oct. 10 gala, which also includes a buffet dinner, open bar and dessert, the concert begins with the duet between Tatyana and Olga from “Eugene Onegin.” Tchaikovsky specified that the singers should be young and beautiful—Tatyana is supposed to be just 14 years old—and, while not in their teens, Eminova and Wor qualify by age and appearance as well as by vocal ability.

Wor, born in Poland, is an alumna of Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program and the Merola Opera Program in San Francisco.
Some of the pieces for clarinet and piano on the Oct. 10 program were heard in D.C. a few years ago when Danchenko-Stern gave a concert of works by Russian Jewish composers in honor of Rabbi Howard S. White, longtime Jewish Chaplain at Georgetown University. Others are Washington premieres.

Referring to the champagne reception for VIP ticket holders, the dinner and other festivities, Danchenko-Stern calls the gala concert “a chance for a whole event.”

More information about RCAS and online ticketing are available at thercas.com.

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"]