Portrait Gallery’s ‘The Face of Battle’
• April 19, 2017

    There is a tragic impermanence to artwork about war. For each immortal painting like “Guernica” or “The Third of May 1808” (Picasso and Goya, respectively), there are thousands […]

June Schwarcz at the Renwick
• April 5, 2017

Generally speaking, the “how” of art is not something that particularly interests me. A great deal of expository efforts go into exhibition descriptions of contemporary and craft artists, in which […]

In the Tower at the National Gallery: Theaster Gates
• March 22, 2017

  Walking into the Tower of the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, you are greeted by monuments. Towering planes and structures of stone and wood reach toward the skylights […]

At the Hirshhorn: Kusama’s Meditative Carnival
• March 8, 2017

The hype was staggering from the moment it was announced. The Hirshhorn would mount the first Washington exhibition of Yayoi Kusama, the radical Japanese artist who has dominated the worlds […]

Museums Are Our Responsibility: Visual Arts Preview
• February 22, 2017

One of our new president’s campaign promises was to eliminate government waste, pledging to cut all unnecessary federal spending. This includes line items like federally funded research and development centers, […]

Toulouse-Lautrec at the Phillips Collection
• February 8, 2017

Of all the Post-Impressionists in 19th-century France, perhaps no artist has maintained such a lasting cultural influence as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Admittedly, there is an audacity to that claim. This […]

Herman Leonard’s Jazz Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
• January 25, 2017

In all of American art, there is no contribution more significant to history than jazz. It is difficult to overstate this. The evolution of this electrifying new sound at the […]

“Stuart Davis: In Full Swing” at the National Gallery
• January 11, 2017

    I was 17 when I first saw Willem de Kooning’s black-and-white paintings from the late 1940s. These were the years just before his legacy was cemented in history, […]

A Refrain of Triumph Over Adversity: ‘The Migration Series’
• December 21, 2016

  In 1940, a 23-year-old artist named Jacob Lawrence set to work on a 60-panel series portraying the movement between the world wars of more than a million African Americans […]

S&R’s ‘Ward 12’ Showcases Inaugural Arts Fellows
• December 15, 2016

An exhibition by the 12 artists in S&R Foundation’s Studio Arts Program will run through Saturday, Dec. 17, at Halcyon House.