Visual Arts

Ari Post • January 26, 2014

Occasionally, a work of art comes along that cuts right through the static noise of the modern scene. It reflects the burden and balance of history and unveils for a moment the tragic beauty of human nature. Time falls by its side, as the past and present collide before it with startling immediacy, free from distortions, interferences and distractions. It is transcendent without need of religion, it is celestial while inextricably bound to the dirt of this earth. “The Dying Gaul” is one of these rare and consummate masterworks.

An ancient Roman marble sculpture created during the first or second century A.D., “The Dying Gaul” is a Gallic warrior, shown in his final moments of life, fallen from a mortal wound to his chest with his weapons and armor by his side. Long recognized as one of the renowned works from antiquity, it has not left Rome since 1797, when Napoleonic forces took the sculpture to Paris and had it displayed in the Louvre until 1816. Now on display in the rotunda of the National Gallery in coordination with the Embassy of Italy, this brief but historic exhibit is a gesture of cultural connectivity, in celebration of the ties that bind the United States and Italy, as well as the considerable influence that Italy’s history has had in shaping this country’s identity.

There is so much history with a work like this, from its discovery in the gardens of an Italian villa in the 1620s to the early misconceptions that it was a Roman gladiator or a Greek herald. It is, in fact, a Roman copy of a Greek bronze, originally created in the third century B.C. in Asia Minor to commemorate the victory of the king of Pergamon over the invading Gauls. They were evidently brought to Rome, where they would have reminded Romans of their own conquest of Gaul.

Not that this is really that important when standing before the dying soldier. Experiencing the force of this work makes the whole of Western art history feel at once totally dismissible and densely concentrated into a single, present moment.
The warrior hunches over with his head down, legs fallen out underneath him. The cut of the marble informs the figure, as the striated veins and mineral impurities of the stone are like kicked-up dust caking the soldier’s bare back. Slight cracks in the sculpture mimic battle scars.

The musculature is almost devastating. Visible are the seizures and contractions of a body broken, the forearms bulging, biceps in spasm, legs heavy, ribs constricting, chest sliced open and heaving, the warrior growing more faint with each breath. The body, held up by the wide back and shoulders, is full of vitality and life that it will never again experience. The Gaul is exhausted but determinedly strong, living in the prime of his life until the moment death takes him.

His head hangs wearily, as exquisitely carved as the rest of him. However, even hoisted above us on a pedestal the face is obscured by shadow. And though photographed in proper lighting on the surrounding panels for all to see, it feels inappropriate to hunch over and steal a look into the soldier’s eyes, as if to do so is a public exploitation of human suffering.
I think it is meant to be this way. In much the same way that we cannot stare coolly into the face of a crying friend, we see here the glimpse that the Gaul offers us—not the full brunt of his pain, but a sorrow that he obscures in search for solace and privacy amidst the chaos of his final moments. It is frankly a suggestion of something eternal that we can only ever realize in our hearts and minds. It is important to recognize that not everything can be shown, and it is often just as important to understand those things that can never be fully expressed to round out the sensation of being human.

To exhibit the Gaul in the rotunda of the National Gallery is a strangely Roman affectation, reminiscent of the political ethos of the ancient empire that originally put him on display. As an image of a vanquished enemy, the sculpture embodies courage in defeat, self-possession in the face of death and the recognition of nobility even in opposition. In the context of Washington, it fits in the gallery’s vaulted dome with its black marble columns like a brutalized political dissident on display, meant to impress and influence rather than inspire or enlighten. It distracts slightly from the ability to admire this as a work of art and shifts focus instead on its cultural and political poignancy. It would have been nice to view it in a more intimate gallery setting, unencumbered by the noise and distractions of gathering tour groups and the flow of visitors through the museum entrance. This, however, is probably how the Gaul felt on the battlefield.

Nevertheless, as the year comes to an end and the robes of winter wrap heavily around us, it is a beautiful experience to stand before a single work of art that lets us consider all that has passed by us, all that is yet to come, all that we are and all that we will never have the chance to be. Time and life are fickle and finite, but there is no discernable limit to the human spirit. ?

“The Dying Gaul” is on view at the National Gallery of Art through March 16. For more information, visit www.nga.gov.

Robert Devaney • January 17, 2014

“Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds,” possibly one of the world’s most famous notebooks, goes on view Friday, Sept. 13, at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum for a 40-day exhibit, ending Oct. 22.

Made up of 18 folios (two-sided pages) and written in the artist’s famous “mirror” script, the collection of notes and sketches foreshadows devices and principles of mechanical flight by exploring bird flight and behavior. The Renaissance genius created the notebook between 1505 and 1506, when he also painted his masterpiece, the “Mona Lisa.”

In a gesture of an eternal return, so to speak, the exhibit is at the entrance to the Wright Brothers exhibit, where their famous flyer resides. While the precious and protected book cannot be touched or photographed, video screens on the second-floor wall allow the curious to see the pages come to life.

“The opportunity to exhibit ‘Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds’ is an extraordinary privilege for the museum,” said Gen. J.R. “Jack” Dailey, director of the museum. “It allows us to trace the history of flight by sharing the work of a visionary whose genius transcends time, from the 16th century to today’s icons of aviation and space exploration.”

Claudio Bisogniero, Italian ambassador to the United States, was on hand for debut of the rare document and said during the Sept. 12 presentation, “ ‘Volare’ has always represented mankind’s dream to overcome nature’s boundaries. Those who love to fly – let me admit that my own passion for flight goes back over 25 years – know full well how exhilarating it is to embrace that dream.

“In words attributed to Leonardo himself and I quote: ‘Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there, you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

“Centuries ago, Leonardo had grasped not only the spirit of flight, but also some of the key principles that later enabled mankind to fly, as you can see in this wonderful museum.

“It is our hope that the celebrations of the ‘Year of Italian Culture in the United States’ – including this exhibit on Leonardo – will continue to bear fruit for many more years to come: a true legacy through culture, innovation and discovery.”

The exhibit runs through Oct. 22 and then heads to New York.
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Ari Post •

Freer – Sackler
Aug. 24 – Feb. 9, 2014
Charles Freer and the Arts of Japan
Between 1895 and 1911, Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) visited Japan five times, establishing himself among Japanese collectors as a formidable and respected peer. Paintings currently on display in the Japanese galleries reflect the evolution of Freer’s understanding of Japanese art, as well as the diversity and quality of his acquisitions. At the time of his death, Freer bequeathed some 600 Japanese paintings to the Freer Gallery of Art. Today that number has more than doubled, but the prototype for collecting has continued to honor his sensibilities. These works are exhibited with a nod to the 90th anniversary of the opening of the Freer Gallery in 1923.

Aug. 24 – Feb. 9, 2014
Korean Style in Japanese Ceramics
Korean ceramics arriving in Japan as trade goods in the 15th and 16th centuries captured attention for the quality of their form, glaze, and decoration, far surpassing what Japanese kilns could produce. Korean bowls in particular were coveted for use as tea bowls. Even after Japanese pottery-making skills improved, neither potters nor customers forgot their profound admiration for Korean stoneware ceramic styles. Focusing on tea bowls, this exhibition offers a selection of Japanese vessels inspired by Korean models, spanning the 17th through 19th century.

Sept. 28 – September, 28, 2014
Off the Beaten Path: Early Works by James McNeill Whistler
In the summer of 1858, 24-year-old Whistler traveled with a friend from Paris through the Rhineland. Their goal was to reach Amsterdam and view “The Night Watch” and other paintings by Rembrandt van Rijn—but they soon ran out of money and were forced to return to Paris. Their excursion through the countryside, where they drew portraits in exchange for food and lodging, resulted in a body of work that for years served as source material for the artist. The drawings, etchings, and watercolors on view not only document Whistler’s adventures, but they also shaped his selection of subject matter and his approach to composition, light and shadow, and perspective.

National Gallery of Art
Sept. 1 – January 5, 2014
Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press
The exhibition features 125 working proofs and edition prints produced between 1972 and 2010 at Crown Point Press in San Francisco, one of the most influential printmaking studios of the last half-century. The stages of intaglio printmaking reveal the printmaking process in very particular ways. They are used to monitor and steer a print’s evolution, prompting evaluation and approval, revision, or rejection. Each proof compels a decision: yes, no, maybe. Among the twenty-five artists represented are those with long ties to Crown Point Press—Richard Diebenkorn, John Cage, Chuck Close, and Sol LeWitt—as well as those whose association is more recent, such as Mamma Andersson and Amy Sillman.

Sept. 1 – Jan. 5, 2014
Northern Mannerist Prints from the Kainen Collection
Ruth Cole Kainen was one of the most important collectors of prints and drawings in recent decades, and bequeathed major works to the National Gallery of Art. This exhibition?the first of three to focus on central aspects of her bequest?presents some 50 works that embody the sophisticated imagery, extraordinary stylization, and virtuoso technique of the flourishing printmaking industry in the northern Netherlands in the late 16th century. Included are exquisite interpretations by the finest engravers of the powerful works of Goltzius and the leading Netherlandish painters Cornelis van Haarlem, Abraham Bloemaert and Bartholomaeus Spranger.

Sept. 15 – Jan. 20, 2014
Tell it with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gauden’s Shaw Memorial
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Fort Wagner, this exhibit celebrates its magisterial Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, honoring Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first regiments of African-American soldiers during the Civil War. The exhibition features daguerreotype and tintype portraits of the soldiers, the people who recruited them, including Frederick Douglass, Charles Lenox Remond and Sojourner Truth as well as the women who nursed, taught and guided them, such as Clara Barton, Charlotte Forten, and Harriet Tubman. Letters, a recruiting poster, and the Medal of Honor awarded to the first African-American soldier who earned this distinction are also displayed, as is work by 20th- and 21st-century artists who have reflected on the continuing importance of the 54th Massachusetts, the Battle of Fort Wagner and the Shaw Memorial.

American University
Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
Opening Sept. 3
Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots
This exhibition of contemporary art addresses ecological issues, brought over from the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. The show is a multifaceted, “multi-seasonal” interactive art venture focused on art and agriculture that comprises several elements and a series of public programs. It will also incorporate broad community involvement across the county and region, with a goal to visually and spatially engage the public in a discussion around topics related to food, agriculture, urban farming and livability, and to expose the investigations artists are making in these areas. The exhibit is in collaboration with the Arlington Arts Center, which presents its half of Green Acres through Oct. 13.

Donald Rothfeld Collection of
Contemporary Israeli Art
This is the first exhibition of Donald Rothfeld’s extraordinary gift of Israeli Art to the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in honor of H.E. Ambassador Michael B Oren. Selections from the extensive collection chronicle Israel’s history and include the work of numerous prominent and emerging Israeli artists, including Uri Aran, Yael Bartana, Tsibi Geva, Moshe Kupferman, Siglat Landau, Elad Lassry, and Michal Rovner. The exhibition is sponsored by American University’s Center for Israel Studies.

Patrick Mcdonough:
Brightveridiansentinelevents
The exhibition, sponsored by the Office of Sustainability, examines the relationship between sustainability, aesthetics, and free time, a timely and important topic in the face of environmental flux and increased interest in alternative energy, technologies, and economies. Utilizing both the interior gallery space and outdoor sculpture garden, McDonough presents discrete objects, performance documentation, and solar sculptures that blend wit and insight, playfulness, and provocation.

Kreeger Museum
Sept. 3 – Dec. 28
Mindy Weisel: Not Neutral
This exhibition is comprised of three significant bodies of work by artist Weisel that parallel one another in large-scale human and environmental tragedies: “Paintings of the Holocaust” (c. 1980), “Survival of Beauty” (2010) and “After Tohoku” (2012). Within each series of work, the artist explores deep emotion through color, gestural marks, surface tension and composition. These works are a profound expression of the triumph of beauty, reconciliation, and healing over human tragedy, loss and destruction.

Art Museum of the
Americas
Sept. 4 – Oct. 18
Brasil, Meu Brasil: Contrastes da
Modernidade (Brazil, My Brazil: Contrasts of Modernity)
This exhibition of 14 paintings by Brazilian artist Marília Bulhões promotes a constructive vision of South America’s future through local and hemispheric cultural exchange. It also offers a contemporary view of the artist’s relationship to her country’s people, natural beauty, modernity and troubles. These elements contrast with other vital components of the Brazilian culture in Bulhões’ work, such as the slums and the challenges of deforestation in the Amazon, examining these coexisting, although seemingly incompatible, worlds. With an abstract and minimalist approach, Bulhões assembles a distinct mosaic of present-day Brazil, subtly revealing intricate contrasts while weaving a sense of cultural unity. The artist also explores the concept of the nation based on its kaleidoscope of identities. She portrays Brazil, one of the most demographically varied nations of the Americas, as a unique melting pot of cultures.
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Ari Post •

2014 is a promising year for the
fine arts in Washington,
with exhibitions of
European master Edgar Degas and American
master Andrew Wyeth on the horizon, both at
the National Gallery of Art. A show of 16thcentury
Japanese tea jars at the Sackler will open
a unique window of history onto our longtime
adoration of this popular and ritualistic drink.
But while we wait for spring to usher in the first
major exhibitions of the year, there is a great deal
to keep die-hard devotees of museums and galleries
happy through the winter. Here are a few
things to see in the coming months:

**A New Era at the Textile Museum**
The new year marks an exciting chapter for
the Textile Museum, which begins its move to a
new museum space on the George Washington
University campus. Though the old S Street location
is no longer open for regular visiting hours,
as the nearly 20,000-piece collection is being
made travel-ready, programs will continue to be
offered at multiple venues during the transition.
One upcoming event is a curator-led tour of
“Workt by Hand: Hidden Labor and Historical
Quilts” at the National Museum of Women in
the Arts on Friday, Jan. 24. Quilts have long
been burdened by conflicting interpretations
– revered as nostalgic emblems of the past,
dismissed as women’s work, yet hailed as examples
of American ingenuity. This exhibition,
which showcases 35 18th- through 20th-century
quilts from the Brooklyn Museum, examines
quilts through the lens of contemporary feminist
theory, revealing the medium’s shifting cultural
status. Tickets are $20 for members, $25
for nonmembers. To register, call 202-667-0441,
ext. 64.

The first in a series of free Rug and Textile
Appreciation Mornings begins on Saturday, Jan.
25. History professor Katrin Schultheiss will
discuss the complexity of gender roles in textile
production in the 19th century, when certain fabrics
were deemed worthy of male craftsmanship
and others were regarded as “simple” enough
for women to produce. Reservations are not
required.

**New Editions at Adamson Gallery**
Opening with a public reception on Saturday,
Jan. 18, 6-8 p.m., Adamson Gallery will show
new editions of master photographic prints from
a number of internationally acclaimed artists,
including Marc Babej, Chuck Close, Roberto
Longo and Gary Simmons. Close’s portrait series
of Brad Pitt, for example, shows the iconic actor
in a new and uncomfortably close perspective,
exposing every nook, cranny, wrinkle and
pockmark on his face. The result is a fascinating
examination of the nature of exposure,
privacy and identity, particularly for those who
live their lives in the public eye. The exhibition
runs through Mar. 29, by appointment. For more
information, call 202-232-0707 or email [Info@
AdamsonGallery.com](mailto:info@Adamsgallery.com).

**The Shenandoah Comes to Susan
Calloway Fine Arts**
Painter Ed Cooper reflects the subtleties
of early morning and late afternoon light and
color in his plein-air landscapes, capturing the
interplay of sun and shade on trees, water and
grass. With an opening reception on Friday, Jan.
17, 6-8 p.m., “Ed Cooper: New Landscapes,”
on view at Susan Calloway Fine Arts through
Feb. 15, explores the regional Shenandoah
and Chesapeake landscapes through the tip of
Cooper’s reliably breathtaking paintbrush. A
wanderer, Cooper carries as constant companions
a pochade box for quick oil sketches and
an easel for more elaborate paintings. “While
wandering I am constantly looking for scenes
or objects that evoke an emotional response in
me – something I just have to paint,” he says. For
more information, visit [www.CallowayArt.com](http://www.CallowayArt.com).

**Goodbye to Heiner Contemporary**
After three prolific years in Georgetown,
Heiner Contemporary has moved to Farmington,
Conn. While there will be no brick-and-mortar
space for some time, the gallery will maintain
an active online presence and continue to
offer comprehensive art advisory services. In
Connecticut, Heiner Contemporary will showcase
work through pop-up exhibitions, participation
in art fairs and via Artsy.net. Over the past
few years, Heiner has brought an unforgettable
body of contemporary artwork to Washington,
and given Georgetown’s Book Hill neighborhood
a vibrant shot of life. We wish them prosperity
and success in all future endeavors. [gallery ids="118500,118503" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • November 25, 2013

Friday, November 22, will be day of remembering all over Washington, D.C., and the country and the world, but especially here in a city full of venues and cultural institution which will dedicate themselves to commemorating and remembering the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

Among the numerous screenings, talks, exhibitions and the like, the screening of a 50-year-old movie about Kennedy, his legacy and his death and funeral with a talk by its producer might not seem like such a big deal.

But the 3 p.m. screening of “John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums,” and an introduction and discussion by its producer George Stevens, Jr., is a big deal. The film—a documentary written and directed by Bruce Herschensohn, produced by Stevens and created in the immediate aftermath of the assassination for the U.S. Information Agency—has not been seen in years. An expertly restored version of the film, narrated by Gregory Peck, is now available as a DVD.

“I hadn’t seen it myself for a number of years,” said Stevens, a noted film and television director, producer of the Kennedy Center Honors and founder of the American Film Institute, “The negative was lost, God only knows how. The prints from an inter-positive negative, I think—which I did see—were smudged, cracked, awful. I didn’t think it could ever be restored properly, but the people at Warner Brothers who restored “Giant,” which was directed by my father George Stevens, did a remarkable job of restoration. When I saw it, it was an amazing experience for me.”

Stevens, who was then head of the film department of the USIA, proposed the project to its director Edward R. Murrow. “At the time, we had never made a feature length film before,” Stevens said. “We used 35-millimeter color film in filming the funeral and the internment and the lighting of the eternal flame, and I still recall how vivid the colors were, how real everything seemed, even today. We did not have color television yet at time. Looking at it for the first time in a long time, I was amazed how energizing the color was.”

The structure of the film began with the inauguration speech, went to the somber days of the funeral, and went back and forth among the administration’s major achievements, including the creation of the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. space initiative, the Cuban missile crisis, and efforts at world peace with the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and back to the funeral. All through the film, you see the president and his family, mostly, the president in crowds, the president on his trip to his ancestral homeland in Ireland and the president in Costa Rica among cheering crowds.

The narration by the familiar (to an older generation) voice of Peck seems in spots old-fashioned, with the imagery rooted firmly in its time and places. It has a grieving, but also idealistic tone and feel to it, a documentary made by a wounded heart clasping hope for a permanent legacy to its bosom. It is a documentary in the sense that everything in it is real—and therefore powerful and moving—but it is a documentary which embraced the president’s pragmatic idealism, fueled by grief and dashed dreams.

“We sent camera crews to 14 countries to capture the world’s reaction,” Stevens said. “By law, we were not supposed to be allowed to screen for American public consumption, since the agency created material for overseas consumption. But the congress passed a special law allowing this film to be distributed in the United States in 1964. There was a screening at the State Department, which the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther attended, and he praised the film in the highest terms.”

“I don’t what the box office results were, but I think it did very well and it was popular,” Stevens said.

“You know that it is a film very much of its times,” he said. “But Kennedy, he seems so real in it, he speaks very much to us still. I have my own feelings about what might have happened and I think the country as a whole would have been better for that. He had a quality. He inspired men and women to do, not just to dream, to change the world through action.”

That ability to inspire on the part of Kennedy—and his much-lauded humor– comes through in the film, he might as well be alive so vivid are the scenes of his speech at the inauguration, after entering in the wake of top-hatted Ike and Nixon, his reception in Costa Rica, the gladness of it all, and the sheer happiness on display among the crowds all over Ireland.

What makes the film truly powerful—you can scrutinize it all you want for flaws or cinematic style, but no matter—is its artlessness. It is not seamless, the language is often culturally and socially anachronistic, things move too swiftly in the funeral procession of the mighty led by Charles De Gaulle. But it’s not presenting art. Viewed from this distance by people who were alive then and have echoes in their heads about the day of drums, it’s almost shattering to see Caroline—now the U.S. Ambassador to Japan—along with Jackie, Ted and Robert, and, John, Jr., saluting. Viewing this is knowing the rest of the story, which is the story of our lives.

On Friday, Nov. 22, there will be noon and 3 p.m screenings of the film at the American History Museum; George Stevens will speak at the 3 p.m. showing.

Robert Devaney • November 18, 2013

You may have already viewed President George Washington’s proclamation that created the first federal Thanksgiving Day in 1789. This piece of American history was on a national tour by Christie’s and stopped at the Jefferson Hotel Nov. 4. It is now on the auction block at Christie’s New York at Rockefeller Plaza. If you are in midtown Manhattan, you still have time to see it and make a bid.

Here are some details from Christie’s: “On Nov. 14, in a special single-lot evening sale, Christie’s New York is honored to offer a proclamation signed by George Washington on October 3, 1789, establishing the first federal Thanksgiving Day, called for the last Thursday of November (estimate: $8 to12 million). This sale, which follows a national tour, offers a unique opportunity to acquire a foundational document in the history of our great national tradition of Thanksgiving.”

Here are excerpts from President Washington’s proclamation:

“• By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation…

• …both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer…

• Now therefore do I recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being…That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for… the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed–for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted–for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge…”

Marie Loiseau • November 15, 2013

Artist’s Proof, a gallery with a unique compilation of artists and styles, opened Oct. 19 in Cady’s Alley.

The gallery is dedicated mostly to contemporary art, but it really does not cater to a particular style. Instead, its main focus is the stories shared by the artists.

Gallery owner Peggy Sparks, who knows each artist personally, places the utmost emphasis on the stories behind the works. She will lead gallery guests through the space, passionately explaining the personal journey of each artist. ”It’s not just art on white walls,” says Sparks. ”It’s a conversation.”

The pieces within Artist’s Proof range from geometric to chaotic and black and white to explosively colorful. There are two-dimensional works on canvas and three-dimensional wooden and bronze pieces. The place currently carries works by a variety of international artists, including Jean-Francois Debongnie, Hunter Hogan, and Fred BergerCardi.

Before settling in Washington, D.C., a year ago, Sparks took time to visit the major art cities of the United States, spending extra time in Boulder, Colo. She’s worked internationally in cities such as Shanghai, Dubai, and her homeland of Singapore.

Sparks has worked in the art world for the past ten years. She didn’t expect to end in this industry, having originally studied linguistics. But when she took a job in an art gallery upon graduating college, she ”starting falling in love with the works.”

Since her move to Washington, D.C., Sparks has worked on the gallery opening.

”This is the fastest I could get it open,” she says, adding that she is concerned more about the guest’s in-gallery experience, rather than the amount of pieces a guest ends up purchasing. Her first and most important goal, she says, is for ”people to leave the gallery with their hearts filled.”

Sparks plans to hold an event on Dec. 8, she says, tentatively called ”Lazy Sunday.” Mosey on over to Artist’s Proof, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., that day, for art appreciation and adult beverages.

Ari Post • November 7, 2013

There are pictures of soldiers in “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” whose faces are indelibly distant, hollow and weary. They are faces of otherwise healthy, beautiful men and women whose eyes have gone limp and whose jaws have gone slack, their minds detached from the distress that surrounds them in temporal acts of self preservation. The “thousand-yard stare” of a shell-shocked soldier is surely as old as warfare itself, but not until the invention of photography in the mid-19th century could its stark reality be captured to give a face to the perennial trauma of warfare. Only then did the human cost of war enter the lives of those so far removed from the source of conflict.

Perhaps more so than images of a trench-scarred battlefield, stacks of bodies aligned in a ditch or even the dreadful grandeur of a mushroom cloud: the face of an enervated soldier brings the lasting effects of war to the forefront of our hearts and minds.

In so many ways, “War/Photography,” on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through Sept. 29, does just this, confronting its audience with the psychological brutality of war and its lasting physical and cultural ramifications.

To be honest, it is a hard-hitting show. There are many portraits of soldiers with mud-streaked faces looking somewhere beyond the camera’s lens. Others are seen only in silhouette, perceptible by the heavy slump of their shoulders. They are drinking from dirty tin mugs, leaning on the nose of their rifles, resting in trenches, holding frail children.

There are also images of triumph and respite, peace and camaraderie. There are pictures of refugees, fallen soldiers and war-torn streets, as well as memorials and reconstruction efforts. It is a portrait of war that spans 165 years and six continents—from the Mexican-American War through present-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing together images by more than 185 photographers from around the world. This is a landmark photographic exhibition, vast in scope and ambition, that shows us the world we live in, how we got here and where we are likely heading.

Walking into the exhibit, viewers are confronted with Robert Clark’s photographic sequence showing the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The four photographs are effectively inert. With the exception of their high quality and resolution, there is nothing visually unusual about them, like a flat tourist snapshot of the New York City skyline from across the Hudson River—except that it shows a Boeing passenger airliner crashing into the World Trade Center, an event that killed almost 3,000 unarmed civilians and instigated of one of history’s longest, deadliest, and most costly wars.

In this articulate plainness, we feel a shock, confusion and panic born from nothing that brings us back to that infamous and fateful day. Like a canvas ripped through the center from within itself, the awe and helplessness of the photographer’s experience comes through—what could he, or anyone, do amidst this instantly monumental devastation? In Clark’s case, he did all he could: he took a picture.

“The Advent of War,” the first chapter of the exhibit’s arc, takes us through this journey. It shows the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, as well as the sinking of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba in 1898, which led to the Spanish-American War. Both convey with clarity the concept of war’s advent.

The photographs are thus arranged not as a chronological survey, but according to the stages of war: the progression of conflict from acts of instigation to recruitment and training of soldiers, to “the fight” and the fog of war, and to the aftermath of combat, with images showing prisoners and executions, refugees and the wounded, the memorials we construct, and our remembrance.

Part of the exhibit’s success is that it makes no effort at social activism. It is not a cry for peace or an admonition of war’s inevitable devastation. It is a very direct presentation that strives to present facts and context for its images, not its moral parables. With so much contemporary art that wants to point things out and espouse proverbial wisdom—glossary notions of depleting natural resources or the cultural impact of gentrification, for instance—it is incredibly powerful to walk through an exhibit that simply deals with realities head-on, allowing the power of the images to succeed on their own merit. There is no filter to the presentation of the material, and yet it is a body of work that is both profoundly beautiful and deeply impacting. We are immersed in the experience of both soldiers and civilians, prisoners and victors, which enrich our understanding of this momentous subject.

The unhinged gaze of a soldier amidst the chaos of battle is an immeasurably significant contribution to the portrait of modern times, a passing glance filled with profound exhaustion and sorrow. When we talk about war, it is not just history and information we are dealing with, but acts that force us to confront our humanity. And walking out of this taxing exhibit an even stronger feeling emerges: our humanity is worth preserving. To capture it, both at its highest and lowest points, is a sacrifice and a duty that many photographers perform amidst gunfire and civil destruction in order to help us understand our dignity and to bolster the consciousness of future generations.

Ari Post •

Almost everything you should want to know about the monumental paintings of Kerry James Marshall is infinitely accessible in a way that the work of past masters could never be. One of the most celebrated painters currently working in the United States, Marshall makes work about African American identity and experience, and the narratives of their history that have been widely excluded from our country’s ever broadening patrimony. He also proves himself a discerning and eloquent ambassador to not only his own work, but to art history and an alternative American heritage.

There is no better explanation or critique of Marshall’s work than what comes from Marshall himself, and a quick Google search yields hours of interviews and video recordings—from a recent lecture at the Smithsonian, to documentary features, college guest talks and semi-formal conversations with museum curators. This is an artist who does not mince words. He holds forth on a vast array of topics—from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the African American experience, to Hans Holbein, to the extant psychological turmoil of present-day Iraq—examining everything from an incisively self-aware, curious, and optimistic perspective.

And this isn’t even to talk about his paintings currently on view at the National Gallery.

I was scheduled to interview Marshall on June 27, the day before an exhibition of his work opened at the National Gallery of Art as part of their In the Tower series, which focuses on artistic developments since the mid-20th century. Over the past few years, the Tower series has featured Mel Bochner, Nam Jun Paik, Mark Rothko and Phillip Guston, to name a few. Marshall’s work fits uniquely within the series’ ostensible focus on the evolution of the Western artistic tradition.

His work speaks to art history, dealing with subjects from the Renaissance through modernism. But Marshall departs broadly from these institutions commonly featured in the National Gallery, drawing on his inordinate knowledge of African diasporic culture and iconography, as well as alternative and commercial visual languages. While it functions as art (and beautifully so), it also explores a tension between the historically gentrified privilege of fine art and a black American social history on the receiving end of severe economic and cultural exclusion.

“The history and the subtext of race is always present in the United States whether we recognize it or not,” Marshall says. “It’s part of the intellectual air that we breathe. But art has always occupied in a rarified social strata. Most of what we see in museums now was once in somebody’s house—these were all privately owned things that circulated among the aristocracy.”

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, Marshall grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where he observed firsthand the social tumult brought about by the Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Strongly influenced by his experiences, he developed a signature artistic style in the 1980s that involved the use of figures that are essentially and literally black—flat shades of stark, inky darkness that recall Greek black-figure vase paintings—representing a culture of separation with distinct inner and outer appearances. To this day, his work continues to confront racial stereotypes within the United States, forcing his audience to consider a very basic but difficult question: how do we, individually and as a society, perceive the black experience?

Prior to our meeting, I spent a few hours alone in Marshall’s exhibit, which is composed of 10 paintings and more than 20 preparatory drawings, including the landmark canvas “Great America” which the National Gallery acquired in 2011. The paintings in the main gallery work together to form a patchwork of corresponding icons, figures and allusions. He employs painting techniques as a visual vocabulary, combining physical gestures of abstraction, modernism, pop art and Renaissance influence while stripping them of their inherent intentions. In “Great America,” for instance, a coarse block of blue-white paint that evokes the nonobjective abstraction of someone like Hans Hofmann becomes an antithetical mechanism for narrative erasure, leaving a vacuous hole in the middle of a seascape.

That seascape, however, is the territory of a piece that deals directly with the experience of African slaves forcibly transported by European investors from their homeland to the New World through the Middle Passage. This journey of inconceivable suffering, where nearly two million died at sea, is a great void in African American culture, as Marshall explains it, from which grew enduring cultural attitudes and dispositions. “We can only locate our point of origin at a ‘no place’ in the middle of a vast sea,” he says. “It represents nothingness.”

This abstract mark that floats over the water comes from the Western canon of art history, but Marshall links it to the lost cultural legacy of native African societies. It is an almost literal representation of the “nothingness” that remains, and so it also retains the essential principals of contemporary abstraction. It is a convoluted relationship to both art and history, and one that Marshall makes sure is impossible to understand without accepting them as a single, unified idea.

All of this discussion is about a series of brushstrokes in the corner of “Great America,” forgetting its banners of text, esoteric African symbols, figural allusions and other interwoven Western and African tropes that fill the canvas. As Marshall will be the first to admit, “The point is it’s complicated.”

But I cannot pretend to understand all the connections between Marshall’s cross-pollinated genius, and I cannot distill or communicate the information half as well as the artist himself, which he has abundantly done. His Q&A with curator James Meyer in the exhibit brochure is a wonderful and enlightening dialogue, and each painting in the show is accompanied by a panel with richly informative descriptions. It was all said before I even got to it. As a critic, my job is to hopefully get at the root of an issue, but these roots already seem so beautifully tended.

What do you talk about with a brilliant artist who so creatively and intelligently offers you every avenue into his life’s work before you even sit down with him? It becomes a surprising challenge to just think of anything to say.

Marshall is a leading contemporary artist who represents the future of our cultural inheritance, and leading up to the 4th of July at the end of a difficult and emotionally fraught year of political and cultural turmoil (even by today’s standards), it became an opportunity to reflect on the art and cultural legacy of our American heritage.

I asked him about his early artistic influences—mid-century black artists like Charles White who have been largely forgotten—and he described how he came to terms with the burdens of race in art. “I had to come to terms with the fact that this work is masterwork, but no one else seems to think that,” he said. “Is there a deficiency in the work or a deficiency in the people who validate it? And if my heroes as artists always ended up on the second or third tier, does that mean I am aspiring to be a second rate artist?”

He explained in our conversation the evolution of African American mythology in a way that tied in pervasive issues of violence and crime in black communities as a consequence of oppression, and how it became clear to him through the American invasion of Iraq.

He talked about the perception of primitive art by modern audiences as “less than art,” and the value of protest illuminated by Martin Luther King’s handwritten letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. What is most impressive in listening to Marshall speak is the way he is able to connect art and ideas from different eras and continents into a kind of ecstatic worldview.

Marshall’s exhibit is a landmark moment for the National Gallery of Art, and maybe for art in America. It is the first solo show by a living black artist in our country’s foremost museum of visual art, which is significant for the institution, for the city of Washington, and for Marshall’s own deserving place in history. The lessons in it are not always easy to take, but the exploration and discomfort is part of a process of growth we ought not and cannot avoid.

Kerry James Marshall
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A Conversation with the Artist

The Georgetowner sat down with the artist upon the opening of his exhibit and discussed a broad number of topics.

The Georgetowner: Do you try to reconcile a loss of personal history among African Americans in your work?

Kerry James Marshall: There’s a particular difference in the way African Americans experience things like personal history and individual legacy—the whole concept of whether you see yourself or operate as an individual in the world, or if you see yourself as part of a group that has a certain particular history as a whole. Because African Americans are not a part of the individual immigrant experience. Nobody in our group decided to come to America. There was no brochure on the wall that said ‘You would have better opportunities if you left here and went over to this place.’ They weren’t recruiting us for those kinds of purposes. We came here as part of a group with a particular group experience. So you were still an individual, but the laws that determined how you were able to operate within the United States under the experience of slavery were laws that affected the group.

GT: Your work deals with a specific area of cultural history, but it is not traditional history painting.

KJM: In the works in this exhibit there’s a kind of broad sweep of the historical implications of things, and there’s actually less specificity in most of these works than you would find in pictures like conventional history paintings which are usually about a single event.

GT: It takes a lot of class to stand up and simply talk about what your work is these days, which you frequently do, and give specific examples, concede certain metaphors and allusions and let people in. You really seem to want to give people the tools to be able to look at your work, as opposed to perpetuating some self-sustaining mythos of contemporary art.

KJM: I’m not trying to be mysterious, I’m not trying to be cryptic, I’m not trying to confuse people. There’s a way if you take note of all the elements of a picture and you think about what each one of those things are, you start to look at the relationships between those things and other things in the picture and start to assemble what my objectives in the picture are. But there really is no conclusion. My paintings don’t come to conclusion.

GT: I’ve always thought that’s why a lot of painters paint: it’s one of the few careers where you can succeed by simply presenting problems. You don’t have to solve a thing.

KJM: Painting really has no particularly transformative capacity. But it can show you stuff in a configuration you might not have seen it in before. So, my primary objective is to show people things and show them enough to make them think about the relationships between things, in history and in society.

GT: It can be hard to know where to start with your paintings. There is so much happening in each one. For instance: the banners of text throughout so many of the paintings.

KJM: You see that in a lot of early Renaissance and Medieval paintings. A lot of those banners floating around had text on them back then just because there was stuff the artist wanted you to know. You find that in a lot of painting in the 15th and 16th century, particularly in Spanish painting, a scroll or something.

A lot of my paintings start with other paintings. And it starts with a problem that some of those other paintings present. And a lot of the paintings I make are ways of coming to terms with or addressing or reversing in some ways a problem that was presented in another picture. It’s a motivation for making a picture in the first place. So take my painting “The Gulf Stream” in this exhibit. It is based on the Winslow Homer painting [of the same name from 1899, pictured in the panel beside the painting]. The Homer painting centralizes the figure of a black man lost at see in a boat surrounded by sharks.

My painting converges with Homer’s because the Homer painting is a painting about the Middle Passage and the slave trade. So the sharks and the boat in the water and the man sort of adrift, it’s the same kind of picture as mine, even though my painting depicts a pleasure boat. It’s a group of black people out on the lake, there’s a regatta out in the distance. But it’s still a middle passage picture.

GT: And the pelican in the front and storm in the background of the painting, are these then harbingers, though less direct than in Homer’s painting with a roiling sea full of sharks?

KJM: You can see them as a kind of harbinger. But it reduces all of the drama that’s in the Homer painting. There’s none of the drama that’s in the Homer painting, really. So it’s not out of the question to read the pelican as a harbinger, but it’s also a stupid goofy convention of maritime painting, to have a pelican sitting on a pylon. It becomes much more ambivalent in that way. I wanted to really strip away all of the modernist conventions from this picture, all of these gestural effects and the drips and the markings.

GT: There is an art historical phenomenon where artists from a dominant culture can draw inspiration from a less dominant culture and be considered innovative and groundbreaking, like when Picasso copied African masks. But an artist from a less dominant culture is judged as derivative for borrowing influence from a more dominant culture, and often accused of diluting their culture’s long-established artistic traditions.

KJM: That’s a pervasive idea that circulates among all of the people who are among the defeated people. People who have been colonized, conquered, enslaved. It’s part of that whole notion of belatedness. And it comes from the idea that whatever those societies were making before they had contact with the West, that it was not art. It may have been nice stuff, it may have been interesting to look at, we might really even appreciate it for some of its formal aspects. But because they hadn’t codified and theorized those formal developments, then it is not intellectual. It is considered as just simply habit and impulse, absent of any intellectual investment, and this is really the dichotomy between the West and everybody else. That the west was always intellectual, and everybody else operates on instinct and impulse. So even though it might be artistic, it’s not the same thing. When Picasso or Van Gogh or Gauguin borrows from Japanese or African traditions, they are borrowing because they’re making a break with a long history and tradition of Western intellectual investment in what a painting is supposed to look like. Those less dominant cultures, regardless of what the stuff looks like, they don’t have the institutional frame of reference to make their stuff read as intellectual. Black people deal with that all the time.

To that point, if you read the manifesto of Africobra [a Chicago-based artist collective committed to developing work that reflects African American and non Eurocentric cultural and aesthetic sensibilities], its Achilles heel is one line in which they say that black art is not intellectual, it is not art for art’s sake. It has a particular message that is meant to be disseminated among the masses. But that phrase, “It’s not intellectual, it’s not art for art’s sake,” is the Achilles heel. Because what they are really trying to do is set up a distinction between the way the white art world works and the way the black art world works. They are saying that we are emotional, they are intellectual.

GT: An early influence of yours was the black American artist Charles White. How was his work perceived in his time, and did that effect you?

JKM: He had great stature among the African American artists and community, but in the main stream he was almost nonexistent. This is one of the things I really had to come to terms with. When I was growing up I was so overwhelmed by his work. It’s masterful drawing. And I had to come to terms with the fact that this work is masterwork, but no one else seems to think that. If I go to a museum, if I open an American art history book and he’s not there, what does that mean? I had to figure out what that means, because I think this is as good as anything that anybody ever made. So is there something that I don’t know, or something they don’t know? Is there a deficiency in the work or a deficiency in the people who validate it? And if my heroes as artists always ended up on the second or third tier, does that mean I am aspiring to be a second rate artist? And if not, what’s the difference between that and the other level? Those are questions that have to be asked, because race is very complicated in America.

GT: Is that part of the reason why you paint black people that are completely black, with no distinction in the pigment of their skin?

KJM: It’s all tied into the notion that being dark skinned has always been stigmatized in the United States. It comes down to that.

GT: Zora Neale Hurston’s book, “Mules and Men,” told a lot of firsthand accounts of black American mythology, and the heroes of these stories always triumphed through deception and trickery.

KJM: This happens when you develop a culture around the lack of capacity to address things head on, which goes back to the oppression of slavery, Jim Crowe. Everything you do is a feint. That is reflective of a fundamental weakness, and you recognize it. When you can’t employ power and force in the same way as somebody else, you know you’re weak.

If you think about the way crime runs through black communities, I argue that this is also a consequence of this pervasive feeling of weakness and powerlessness. You can beat up the people next door, but if you go outside your neighborhood trying to do that stuff, the force that’s able to be mobilized against you is always overwhelming. Within black communities, the violence rarely migrates outside.

It became clear to me after the invasion of Iraq. What we were witnessing there in the crumbling of societal structure was destruction of the country’s patriarchy. Think of how old those American soldiers were—mostly early twenties, they were kids. The authority of the father was completely undermined by someone who was younger than him, who came in from outside. The reverberations of that through the culture from that moment on are incalculable. If you are a child and see your father being treated like that by another kid, what is a father now? And we ask what is wrong with those people, and we tend to think they are crazy. But they’re not—there’s always a precipitating factor.

GT: Your portrait of ‘Nat Turner with the Head of his Master” [Turner was an American slave who led an infamous slave rebellion in 1831] is your most recent painting in the exhibit, from 2011. It is a pretty gruesome piece, with the dismembered head of Turner’s master lying on a pillow behind the grim looking central figure of Turner. James Meyer, the curator, mentioned that you pushed to have that piece in the show. Why?

KJM: The larger selection of works were chosen by James, and thematically organized. And it works very well. But it leaves out a dimension of the implication of what these pictures all refer to. It’s a certain kind of historical agency that pushes against the notion that black people were simply passive victims of the slave trade and accepted the condition without resisting. I always want to have a space that indicates they didn’t accept it. They never did. There was resistance from the start. It is represented by people like Nat Turner, though he wasn’t the first to rebel like that.

There are also paintings in National Gallery’s collection that have a parallel reality to that picture. Think of David with the head of Goliath. So it’s a way of drawing these distinctions between this painting with a black figure and thematically similar historical paintings that have white figures that do the same things. So you have to figure out: Why do I feel differently about this than I do about that?

When you’re dealing with the history of Jim Crowe and segregation, this notion is something you have to consider. It’s part of it. Which is the precipitating factor for Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham jail. It responds to a letter from white ministers and religious figures that were saying, “Come on now, stop all that protesting, it’s not the way to go right now. Just be patient and eventually it will all work itself out.” But eventually doesn’t have a timeline. Sometimes things have to happen now.
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Ari Post •

This Friday, June 21, the Parish Gallery will open its doors to host its final exhibit, with a reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Norman Parish, the gallery’s owner and director, who has meant so much to Georgetown since he opened his gallery doors more than two decades ago, is closing the book on a remarkable career in the arts and community service.

The final exhibit, “Norman Parish: The Artist,” will highlight Parish’s career as an artist and a painter, which is a unique departure for the gallery.

“Norman never used his gallery as a showcase for his own work,” said Alla Rogers, a close friend to Parish and owner of the neighboring Alla Rogers Gallery. “His business was dedicated to focusing on underappreciated groups of artists.”

Parish, however, has always been an artist. As a young man in Chicago, he worked alongside many of the founding members of the AfriCOBRA art movement, including Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell. He helped paint The Wall of Respect in 1967, an outdoor mural on the South Side of Chicago by a group of artists from the Organization of Black American Culture. In the late 1990s, his work was selected as part of a traveling art exhibit with the Smithsonian, “Seeing Jazz.”

The Parish Gallery opened its doors in June 1991, after Parish came across a “Gallery Space for Rent” sign in Georgetown’s Canal Square one Saturday afternoon. He long had aspirations to open a gallery, and when the opportunity came he seized it.

It was important for him to continue his work in Chicago, he said, promoting the work of artists from the African diaspora alongside artists from other walks of life, “artists missing opportunities because nobody was looking out for them. Nobody was out their promoting their work.”

“It was his passion,” said his wife Gwen, who was there when he opened the Parish Gallery and who runs it with him today. “He was an artist, and he understood the difficulties artists encounter in trying to get their work out.”

Over the years, the Parish Gallery has exhibited works by artists from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and Morocco, alongside those from Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Spain and France. Parish brought together international and cross-cultural traditions with a harmony and ease of diversity that most galleries never achieve. The gallery hosted hundreds of exhibitions and artists over its storied career, and its memory will live on in Georgetown’s memory.

In May of last year, a malignant tumor was discovered in Parish’s brain, and he underwent surgery immediately to have it removed. It has been a slow road to recovery over the following months. He and his wife Gwen have decided, with great difficulty, to close the gallery and focus on his recovery. The Parish Gallery will be dearly missed, but we wish Norman and Gwen a happy, prosperous and healthy future. [gallery ids="101353,152360" nav="thumbs"]