Visual Arts

Ari Post • May 3, 2012

Walking up the grand staircase of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and into the rotunda, a noose tied at the end of a twenty-foot rope hangs from the middle of the domed ceiling. It floats heavily about ten feet off the ground. Circling the noose are nine wooden chairs on which Klan masks sit upright, their hollow eyes facing the rope as if in worship. The next things you see in the gallery, taking up the enormous wall at the entrance to the “30 Americans” exhibit, are the words “SAY IT LOUD.” You can feel James Brown belting into the microphone and you finish the lyrics quietly to yourself:

I’m black and I’m proud.

Brown recorded that song in 1968. There were still documented lynchings in the U.S. in 1968.

Like this juxtaposition, “30 Americans” offers an unrestrained and uncompromising dialogue on what it means to be black and American, exposing the racial, societal and cultural demons in us all, and forcing us to confront those things we spend our lives trying to ignore.

I am not a cultural historian, and I cannot pretend to understand the society or struggles of black America across the last century on any more than a literary level. So in order to discuss this show with any honesty or integrity, I have to strip away my third-party neutrality, my anonymous journalistic voice, and face it as a human being. I am a young white male. The baggage I carry into this show is that of ambiguous, quiet guilt, self-imposed ignorance and displaced confusion. I cannot help feeling a little self-congratulatory—and subsequently low—to be partaking in this act of cross-cultural dialogue, this academic diplomacy in exploring the art and sensibilities of another culture that is actually sort of my own culture. Was it going to isolate my whiteness? Are the stereotypes my own social filtering, or am I seeing them because the artist intended to show them outright? Coming into this exhibition, however, I felt connected with so much of this work.

The affectations and fetishized materials used by artists throughout the exhibition—shea butter, wax, cotton, soap, plastic rhinestones—the symbols and references to slavery, sharecropping and lynch mobs, the societal pigeonholes of basketball and hip-hop, were all things I fundamentally recognized. The often excessive glitz and grime of the work found me experiencing a world of which I have always lived just outside. I found unusual comfort in my kinship with the material, in understanding the ironies, injustices and tribulations of black America better than I realized. That was a short-lived and rather diluted epiphany.

Zora Neale Hurston, the seminal African American folklorist and anthropologist, wrote on the subject of understanding African American culture:

[African American culture is] particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioners, “Get out of here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing…

A self-portrait by Xaviera Simmons shows the artist with her brown skin colored coal black and sitting naked before her camera in an overgrown wheat field with a righteous afro. In the opposing image, Simmons stands in the field, wrapped in a trench coat as black as her darkened skin. The images are a surge of carnal and spiritual defiance, pointing to the stigma of African heritage and its increasingly dramatic, often misguided interpretations. We may see her and we may judge her on the surface, but that doesn’t mean we understand anything about her. We have not been let in.

Hank Willis Thomas exposes the trappings of African American youth culture with pop-poster-like images you might see tacked onto the wall of a college dorm room, but with a dark and troubled conscience. ‘Basketball and Chain’ depicts the lower half of two young black men in basketball jerseys jumping high into the air, a basketball chained to their leg. In another image, a Nike brand-shaped scar is etched into the shaved head of a young black man. It is not difficult to intellectualize the paralyzing societal delusions of urban teenagers striving for athletic fortune without other foreseeable options, but the struggle is not in seeing it. The struggle is in living with it or being able to change it.

Men stand poised between self-righteousness and preemptive submission in the paintings of Barkley L. Hendricks. A freestanding wall made of raw cotton and wax reaches almost to the ceiling. The cryptic symbology of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the divine, tragic beauty of Kehinde Wiley’s monumental 25-foot portrait, ‘Sleep,’ both have the power to unhinge your jaw in wonder and contemplation: what does it feel like to be black and American?

The difficulty in dealing with such deeply rooted, socially inflammatory subject matter is that it can tend toward the overwrought, and vehemence often gets in the way of true significance, running the risk of beating its audience over the head with its message. But “30 Americans” handles itself with grace and perspective, facilitating an open, honest conversation with its audience.

But the depths of what I may never understand linger in the back of my throat. I get the references to blaxploitation films. I am left sad and weak by the images of malnourished slaves and lynch victims. I empathize with the innumerable injustices the African American people have faced, and I admire “30 Americans” for providing a lens into the contemporary manifestations of these displaced feelings and issues. But the subtexts might forever elude me: what does it mean to be black and American today?

For some, this show is the embodiment of ambiguous race and class confusions neglected in our daily lives. For African Americans of my generation, I imagine “30 Americans” is a conversation across generations of families who have been dismantled and disassembled, and who put themselves back together through their stories, their art and the resilience of their spirit. “30 Americans” begins to explore what it would take to really exist in a post-racial society. It would seem that the answer is to understand—not shy away from—our distinctions.

“30 Americans,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is on display through Feb. 12, 2012. For more information visit [Corcoran.org.](http://www.corcoran.com/)

Ari Post •

This fall art season has brought a number of heavy-hitting exhibits to the Washington stage. Edgar Degas’ dancers arrived en masse to the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery’s 30 Americans exhibit has ignited racial and social discourse through the work of internationally acclaimed contemporary African American artists, and Andy Warhol has all but taken over the National Mall, with concurrent shows at both the National Gallery and the Hirshhorn. Looming on the near horizon are major exhibitions of Picasso, Annie Leibovitz and George Bellows.

But with all the sweeping, florid grandiosity of these major retrospectives, Harry Callahan at 100 stands out for just the opposite reasons, and in all the right ways. Tucked away in the basement floor of the National Gallery, the collection of work on view, commemorating the renowned photographer on the centenary of his birth, brings us perhaps the most intimate, utterly immersive show of the season.

Throughout his career, Callahan proved himself a discerning and incisive observer of the American subconscious, exploring a diverse range of visual ideas and concerns. He was also a fine teacher, as head of the photography department at the Institute of Design in Chicago and then a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. A college dropout with no early artistic ambitions and almost no formal training, he grew up “not being able to do anything that I felt good about,” until he picked up photography as a hobby. Five years later, he was a professional photographer.

Callahan’s first major influence as a photographer, and someone who had a profound effect on his career, was Ansel Adams, who he met through a photography club while living in Detroit in his 20s. Later in life, Callahan said of Adams:

“There was something about what he did that hit me just right… He had pictures which were what I felt was photography… And I don’t think they were the great pictures, or the ones that were considered great of his, that really made me excited. It was the close-up pictures, near the ground, which I felt from then on I could photograph anything. I didn’t have to go to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, I could photograph a footprint in the sand and it would be like a sand dune. And I think this was probably the most freeing thing that could have ever been for me.”

The grandeur of the ordinary and the limitless scale of the intrapersonal are ongoing themes in Callahan’s work. And while he was also well known for his bold and constant visual experimentation (he was, among other things, one of the first fine art photographers to experiment with color), what stands out in this concisely curated show, which spans work throughout the course of Callahan’s entire career, is the status to which he raises our most basic surroundings and occurrences.

You will see trips to the beach. You will see trees throughout the season. You will see parked cars. You will see weeds and grass and junk. You will see buildings, storefronts and houses the same as you see when you look out your front door. And all of these images are engrained with a restlessness and fascination, as if the artist, having forced himself to evaluate the world immediately around him, demands that we too consider our world and come to a quiet understanding.

However, the most powerful series of images are of Callahan’s wife Eleanor. A photographer’s portrait of a loved one is hardly uncommon. Alfred Stieglitz, a seminal founding figure in fine art photography, famously photographed his wife, Georgia O’Keefe, with brazen sexual charge. Photographer Edward Weston’s portraits of his wife Flora are stark, severe and contemporary. But Callahan’s portraits of Eleanor are love songs in thin, black frames, and that sincere vulnerability is what makes them so engrossing. They show woman as woman, lover, mother and daughter, and speak of a more encompassing relationship based in profound trust, love and respect. Whether wrapped in a coat outside a bleak apartment building or lying naked in their bed, Eleanor becomes a symbol of a husband’s perception of his wife’s beauty, strength and fragility. And Eleanor does her part, looking into the camera, saying everything and nothing with her gaze, like she is looking right into her husband’s eyes.

Callahan’s photographs work on a level that comfortably serves dual, perhaps opposing functions. On the one hand, you can evaluate the socially critical, the autobiographical, the theoretical, the experimental and the technical nature of his work and walk away with your brain tingling. At the same time, and with equal bearing, the photographs are plainly beautiful. They are nice to look at. Like a Rothko or a Rockwell, there is a peaceful and satisfying presence about the work that washes you over inexplicably. Anonymous building facades of endless brick; cold, leafless trees reaching their draconian fingers into the ever-cloudy skies; the pensive, lovely faces of women, their downcast eyes distracted by the very matter of life, wherever it may be.

Callahan’s images are beautiful because they are made up of that which we balance just outside of our daily attention. These are the ever-present backgrounds—emotionally and physically—of our own stories. It feels like Callahan just chose to tell them.

‘Harry Callahan at 100’ is on view at the National Gallery of Art through March 4, 2012. For more information visit NGA.gov.

Ari Post •

An art professor once gave me a great piece of advice: “Whenever you look at a work of art,” he said, “always ask yourself one question: What is it?” It is with this unimpressive mantra that I walk into every museum and approach every exhibit. For whether I am looking at a Titian mural (a portrait) or one of David Smith’s twisting metal sculptures (an abstract), this process helps me define the parameters of the artwork and experience things evenly and honestly. But entering the Tower of the National Gallery of Art to see the recent exhibition of Mel Bochner, I was at a loss for definition. Ironically enough, it was a room full of words.

In the mid- to late 1960s, Bochner created a series of portraits of friends and colleagues using only words written on paper, assembled and organized largely through studying Roget’s Thesaurus. One of the founding fathers of conceptual art, Bochner has spent his career questioning the nature of the art object, focusing on process, perception and idea over—and often in lieu of—the usual conclusion of artistic practice: a physical work of art.

For example, his Measurement series used black tape to make measurements directly onto walls, effectively making large-scale diagrams of the rooms in which they were installed. But through making and compiling words, Bochner found a depth, eloquence and historical context uniquely suited to his palette—and what he perhaps never found in the standard definition of painting. Bochner would not paint a portrait. He would paint: “Portrait, Depiction, Archetype, Likeness, Model, Effigy.”

“The thing about English that’s so fascinating as a language is its ultimate flexibility,” Bochner says. “One thing about the thesaurus is that they always add words but rarely eliminate things. So you get an archeology of language.”

This is the foundation of Bochner’s recent work, a rather idiosyncratic history of English. His earlier words-based works were meant to be portraits, as well as erudite studies in the flaws, redundant coextensions and contradictions of English. His new work, the primary focus of this exhibition, has taken the form of borderline social activism, revealing an ever-evolving lexicon where “Amazing” is replaced by “OMG,” and “Screw the Pooch” has eclipsed “Perish.” It also reveals more than a few of the artist’s bugbears, philosophical and moral uncertainties, and the result is a remarkably naked, honest and fulfilling experience.

It had been over 30 years since Bochner made—or even looked at—his initial thesaurus series. But when he reexamined the drawings for a retrospective of his work at Yale in 1995, “My response was, there’s probably more juice in that lemon—probably worth another squeeze.”

The first new word-works he made were revisited portraits of Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson (both the originals and the revisited portraits are on view in the exhibition). “The earlier ones have the certitude of my youth—black ink, no mistakes,” Bochner says. “And I couldn’t go back to that anymore, it’s not my attitude toward life. So I redid them with charcoal and kept erasing and reworking and it formed a kind of bridge.”

But, as it seems, Bochner’s “attitude toward life” rapidly took to the forefront of his new work, evolving it from portraiture of the individual to portraiture of time, place and sentiment. The headlining diptychs of the exhibition, “Master of the Universe,” “Oh Well,” “Amazing!” and “Babble” are monumental paintings over eight feet tall, painted in crass neon hues with a bubbly Comic Sans-type font.

“These paintings are my response to everything I see around me,” he says. “They address the disillusion of language in terms of contemporary discourse. I look at this as basically an inarticulate expression of the underlying contradictions of the systems we live in, with a lack of articulate consciousness. And maybe it’s an educational deficit.”

The political edge of these pieces is hard to ignore. “It was very important to me to have that painting, ‘Master of the Universe,’ in Washington,” he says. “And I hope that people get, without my having to explain, the sociocultural undertones of that painting next to the other painting, ‘Oh Well.’”

“I long ago gave up on the idea that art can change capitalism,” Bochner says. “But anything that can bring people to greater consciousness about their own experience is positive and, I believe, a step in the right direction.

For instance, it is no coincidence that his painting “Amazing” begins with the words Amazing and Awesome—biblical words with which the Old Testament denoted God’s power—and then runs through the chronology of evermore contemporary exclamations, until concluding like a fart with OMG. The Awesome becomes more of a self-involved hyperbole than anything worthy of real rejoice.

“I want the paintings to be part of a conversation, a discourse,” he says. “Otherwise, why use language? The best quote I know about this is from Nietzsche: ‘We write not only to be understood, but also to be misunderstood.’ And that’s really it. To be misunderstood is to carry forth the conversation. It’s to raise questions, create arguments and disagreements. That’s basically what philosophy is. People misunderstanding each other.”

For a lifelong conceptual artist, Bochner’s new work is uncharacteristically ubiquitous, and it dances oddly around abstract expressionism and pop art. On the one hand, in answer to my self-imposed question, What is it? the answer could not be more tangible or concrete. It is words. Just like Warhol’s soup cans or Van Gogh’s purple irises, the work is inert. But a series of words cannot help but be read and, just as in abstraction, the interpretations can spin out endlessly and wildly. To quote theorist and critic Frederic Jameson, “The work…is taken as a clue or symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth.” The beauty of Bochner’s exhibition runs synonymous to the crudity of daily American life: we are free to pay as much or as little attention as we please, but there’s no denying the harsh reality before us, displayed in bold bright colors across the walls of our consciousness.

Mel Bochner’s Thesaurus Works are on view at the National Gallery through April 8, 2012. For more information visit Nga.gov/Exhibitions [gallery ids="100403,113248,113239,113233,113227" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

For our third year running, The Georgetowner’s annual photo competition has let us reach into the community and ask our readers for their most memorable scenes of the last year. Georgetown’s historic beauty is something often overlooked in the bustle of urban life—after a while you begin not to notice the gold-domed grandeur of the PNC Bank on Wisconsin and M (erected in 1814 as part of Riggs Bank by a group which included George Washington’s nephew), the Frank Schlesinger-designed apartments overlooking the waterfront, or even the beauty of Key Bridge, the oldest surviving bridge across the Potomac. And this doesn’t even touch upon our historic row houses, cobblestone streets, waterfront views of the Potomac, boathouses and parks.

Sometimes it takes a photograph to capture the essence of a time or place, and in Georgetown’s case, they are bridged tenuously between the tradition of the past and the promise of the future.

Many thanks to those who submitted this year. Of all the standout entries we received, the overarching theme seemed to focus on our neighborhood as a focal point for some of Washington’s most memorable landscapes and cityscape, and the overwhelming submissions that flowed beyond Georgetown and wandered around our city limits were impossible to ignore. Tom Ward’s photograph of the Vietnam Memorial, at right, was a subtle and moving portrait, echoing the souls of all those we lost so many years ago in the folding reflections of the granite walls within themselves.

As we look on from the newly completed Waterfront Park, past the Kennedy Center and into the city beyond, one thing remains in focus: we live in a beautiful place. Let’s not forget it.

About the winner:
‘Sunrise Over 34th Street,’ photo By Didi Cutler, winner of The Georgetowner’s 3rd Annual Photo Competition. Thanks to all who participated. For more photos, turn to page 16.
A 34th St. resident, Isabel “Didi” Cutler has spent many years living and traveling in the Middle East. Her photographic portraits and landscapes hang in embassies, museums and offices throughout the world, as well as in many private collections, including the White House. Her portraits include prominent statesmen, artists and authors, as well as a broad range of other individuals, ranging from royal families in their palaces to neighborhood children in intimate family surroundings. Cutler’s book, ‘Mysteries of the Desert,’ was published by Rizzoli in 2001. [gallery ids="100454,115438,115403,115430,115413,115422" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

In the seasonal cycle of arts and entertainment, summer and autumn bring about the blockbusters. Hollywood pulls out the big action spectacles and Oscar bait, lists of the year’s best books and music pop up in all our syndicated leisure sections, museums open their big name exhibitions to attract the inflated summer crowds and holiday visitors, and the Kennedy Center usually brings in “Wicked” for a few weeks. Over the past six months on our museum and gallery scene, we’ve seen a major Edgar Degas retrospective, a multifaceted citywide adulation of Andy Warhol, the wire-sculpture portraiture of Alexander Calder, the stentorian “30 Americans” exhibit at the Corcoran, and pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik in the Tower of the National Gallery.

The winter months, on the other hand, often bring us rich and subtle experiences, opening the doors to work that might not have the opportunity to shine during the busy season. The work Sam Gilliam did with The Phillips Collection last winter, installing a site-specific work and curating a concurrent exhibition of his artistic influences, was an unprecedented homage to Washington art culture. Last February, The Hirshhorn’s retrospective of Blinky Palermo, a relatively obscure, German-born postwar painter, was the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in the United States. And while shows like this are the salty bone marrow for Washington’s art-going crowd, they would be overshadowed by the Warhols and Calders in the primetime months.

Now is the time for galleries and museums to release their B-sides and alternative works, and challenge tradition of the Western canon. It’s a two-month art junkie paradise. This is the stuff you don’t usually see in books. All you can do is bundle up to combat the whipping winter wind and go experience the work firsthand. Once your fingers thaw, you’ll be glad you did.

Annie Leibovitz at American Art Museum
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Since she made her indelible mark in the landscape of contemporary pop culture with her Rolling Stone photographs of a naked John Lennon cocooned around a black-clad Yoko, Annie Leibovitz has been generally acknowledged as the eye of Hollywood. Anyone who’s anyone since the 1970s has assuredly looked down the barrel of Leibovitz’s lens.

But don’t expect to see Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio hanging on the walls of the American Art Museum this year. The exhibition, “Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage” (opening Jan. 20), is uncharacteristically void of any people at all.

Visiting the homes of iconic figures, including Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pete Seeger and Elvis Presley, as well as places such as Niagara Falls, Walden Pond, Old Faithful and the Yosemite Valley, Leibovitz let her instincts and intuitions guide her on a journey across America. Revealing her curiosity and infatuation with the country, the photographs span landscapes both dramatic and quiet, interiors of living rooms and bedrooms as well as objects, rendered in a way that feels almost unconscious. Some of the pictures focus on the remaining traces of photographers and artists Leibovitz admires such as Ansel Adams and Robert Smithson. The photographs in this exhibition, bridging a period between April 2009 and May 2011, were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject. And it cements her as much more than a photographer of American dreams, but a filter of the American experience. For more information, visit AmericanArt.si.edu.

Picasso’s Drawings at the National Gallery of Art
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As an artist, Pablo Picasso covered so much ground it becomes difficult to discuss any of his individual contributions without missing an alternative, equally integral aspect of his work. From cubism and collage, to the undulating restraint of his blue period and the effortless, classical ambiguity of his Rose period, it’s easy to get lost in his composition, his perspective, his color and texture, his visual sense for love, madness, grief, joy and everything in between. What’s often overlooked is how well the guy could draw.

Picasso was a master draftsman, and his command will be on full display at the National Gallery this month in “Picasso’s Drawings, 1890–1921: Reinventing Tradition,” opening Jan. 29. The exhibit spans the artist’s drawings over 30 years, from his early studies as a young student in the 1890s (10 to 15 years before he shook the art world with the introduction of his cubist works around 1907), to his virtuoso drawings and portrait sketches of the early 1920s. Delving into the importance of drawing to Picasso’s process of creation, experimentation and discovery, the audience will get to see how intricately his work is connected with the grand tradition of drawing by European masters of the near and distant past from Rembrandt to Vermeer. For more information, visit NGA.gov.

‘Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space’ at the Hirshhorn
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The Light and Space movement was introduced to American around the 1960s in southern California. Focused on perceptual phenomena such as light, volume and scale, the tenets of the movement sound like a neo-impressionism for the 20th century, with a focus on the ethereal perception of light, volume and scale in its most raw form. Whether directing thre flow of natural light, toying with light through transparent, translucent and reflective materials or embedding artificial light within objects and architecture, the works always used a range of materials and often incorporated modern innovations in science and even aerospace engineering.

The Hirshhorn will be presenting the first exhibition to reevaluate the evolution of the international Light and Space movement through the work of five pivotal Latin American artists, who almost a decade before the movement’s introduction to America were creating environments of light and color that challenged traditional standards of art. The five installations that make up “Suprasensorial” (opening Feb. 23) will create enveloping optical effects that overwhelm and transform sensory experience and demonstrate Latin America as a source of innovation for the global Light and Space tradition. For more information, visit Hirshhorn.si.edu.

Ari Post •

By the door of the entrance into “Pilgrimage,” a new exhibition of photographs by Annie Leibovitz at the American Art Museum, hangs a photograph of the messiest workshop you’ve ever seen. Blanketed in the green, swampy light of an old fluorescent bulb, wires, saws, copper pipes, oil canisters, paint cans, pruning shears, and drills are crammed within every dimension of a wooden worktable, built into the wall against a peeling, dust-caked window. Chairs are covered in such clutter that they are only recognizable by the legs that stretch toward a ground. This is Pete Seeger’s workshop, just off from the log cabin that he built for his family’s home in Cold Spring, New York, in 1949. He has lived there ever since.

But Pete Seeger is conspicuously absent from the photograph. And for Annie Leibovitz to take a picture of a renowned icon without the presence of the individual is, if nothing else, unprecedented.

Throughout “Pilgrimage,” the audience is in the presence of important figures and icons, tied loosely but surely to a collective American-European consciousness. But the figures all lie just beyond the lens. We see a doorway. It is the entrance into Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico studio. We see a wicker bed frame. This is the bed that Thoreau slept on at Walden Pond. We see a windowless room bathed in red light. This was Ansel Adams’ darkroom in Carmel, California, where he developed his photographs in the last twenty years of his life. We don’t get but a haunting of Leibovitz’s subjects—all of whom are dead, save Seeger—yet there their presence is engrained deeply within the images, connecting us to the past not through nostalgia, but within the context of our present.

Annie Leibovitz was 21 years old and still in school when her portrait of John Lennon ran on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in January of 1971. By 1973, she was the magazine’s chief photographer. Almost over night, she became a photojournalism sensation, and through the years her camera has captured some of the most recognizable and iconic portraits of our time, revealing her to be among the foremost documentarians of the American social landscape. Her most famous photograph is arguably that of a nude John Lennon cocooned around a black-clad Yoko in 1980—taken five hours before Lennon was shot and killed.

Rather than focusing on her subject’s face, or having them pose with the banal glam of your typical high-profile photo shoot, Leibovitz is known for photographing her subject’s full self, from head to toe, engaged in something beyond the camera, frequently posed amidst objects from their lives.

Herein is perhaps the lead-in to “Pilgrimage.” Leibovitz has divested herself of her subjects all together, to tell their stories with only their significant surroundings. The subjects of her photographs, as with the Pete Seger workshop, are only shown in absence. From a busted television to a hat (Elvis and Lincoln, respectively), from a concert gown to a bedroom wall (Marian Anderson, Virginia Woolf), we only see these people through the objects and places tied to their lives.

The focus of these photographs is still celebrity, in a way. Perhaps “persons of significance” is a better way to say it—you won’t see George Clooney’s liquor cabinet or Angelina’s dirty laundry in this show. You will see Sigmund Freud’s bookshelf, Elvis Presley’s busted television (he had a habit of breaking them, with apparent force), Emily Dickinson’s nightgown, her only surviving dress, and Yosemite Valley, from the same location that Ansel Adams took his archetypal photographs of the landscape throughout the early 20th century.

Leibovitz’s own pilgrimage, which led to this exhibit, began by accident. “I started the project at a difficult time in my life,” she said at a tour of the exhibit on Jan. 24. Two years ago, she explains, she was in the middle of some financial and personal hardships. “I took the kids to Niagra Falls as a day trip. As they were leaning on the rail, I walked up behind them and snapped a photo. It’s a photo that anyone could take—an American snapshot.”

This photo hangs in the exhibition, marking a jumping off point for the journey to come. “I hope that what anyone can get out of this is that we are in a great country, and there is so much to see if you just hit the road. That’s what happened to me.”

Through her exploration, Leibovitz revisited locations repeatedly, letting them lead her to new ones, like a subconscious scavenger hunt. Concord, Massachusetts, for example, was a particularly rich area of discovery. First going there to photograph Walden Pond, she was drawn into the world of Thoreau, which led to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson. All these figures are represented in some way in the exhibition. One of the Alcott sisters was a mentor to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Leibovitz followed the trail, winding up in French’s studio in western MA, which led her to the National archives, where she found a rare multiple-lens glass pate of a Lincoln portrait. The National Archives led to Gettysburg. This led to Matthew Brady’s studio. And so on.

“I was trying to find a reason to live, places to be inspired,” Leibovitz said. “This is the kind of project that doesn’t end. The show went up, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. I did this to feed my portrait work, to save it. And it did. But there’s no reason I can’t return to this later.”

She also discussed the significance of children to this work: “Hanging this show, I saw children running around the museum. I loved it. So I hung everything low, cluttered the rooms with pictures, for children. The book [accompanying the exhibition] is dedicated to my children. I can’t wait to see a classroom in here, to see what the children think.”

Equally significant to the show are two technical facts regarding Leibovitz’s process. Unlike the work that made her into the presence she is today, none of this work was commissioned. This is Leibovitz’s first personal assignment since she was a student. This is also her first foray into digital photography. She used an array of cameras, starting with a cheap digital number that fit in her pocket, and eventually upgrading to a wide-angle lens with tripod.

“Pilgrimage” is significantly smaller and more intimate than almost anything Leibovitz has ever done. And its audience of museum goers is comparatively more modest than the national and international syndication of the magazines she works with. But Leibovitz is thrilled with the outcome and location of her project. “The Smithsonian is popping right now,” she said. “Doing a lot of great things. I feel very cool being here, so steeped in history.”

“We think we know who people are,” Leibovitz said. “But when you try to really understand someone, you find out how much there is to know,” and perhaps how much we can never know. Through her explorations, however, Leibovitz doesn’t seem to be worried about how well she knows her subjects. Her understanding is on a different level—an interpersonal one, tied to her intellectual roots, her heritage, her family and her sense of self. To put a face to self-discovery is no small feat, especially for someone who has lived her life behind the public spotlight, not in front. This show offers a portrait of a portrait artist and, as it turns out, there is not a face to be seen—just the essence of various selves.

For more information visit [AmericanArt.si.edu](http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/leibovitz/)
[gallery ids="100469,115888" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

Post-Impressionism is a movement that often diverges the innovations of the collective whole among its individual artists. The painters are known and respected— Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Seurat—but their styles varied wildly and their directions were individually effusive and disparate. They also thrived in the precarious decades between Impressionism and Cubism (roughly 1890 – 1910), two of the most profound, loud and influential art movements of the past 300 years. As such, they are frequently and easily unhinged from their art historical parameters in museum settings.

“Snapshots: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” the newest exhibit at The Phillips Collection, deals extensively with the Post-Impressionists, rethinking the movement and redefining everything in its wake. It not only solidifies the distinct and long-term influence of Post-Impressionism, but illuminates the profound artistic impact of a landmark technical innovation from 1888: the Kodak handheld camera.

The amateur camera made it possible for a broader public to capture daily life in snapshots, and in the hands of painters the door was opened to an entirely new understanding of composition, value and spatial relationships that reenergized the artists’ methods and creative vision. “Snapshots” presents works by seven of the first artists to experiment in photography: Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton, George Hendrik Breitner, Henri Evenepoel and Henri Reviére.

This exhibition is the first of its kind, presenting over 200 photographs along with about 70 paintings, prints and drawings by the artists who took them. We are brought into the world of photography at its inception, and through these artists we see how the Kodak altered the perspective of our cultural lens. Even without a single work by Picasso, Braque or Duchamp, the urgency of cubism to resuscitate the future of painting becomes pertinently clear. We feel just why fine art began moving so quickly, without ever stopping to look back.

Entering the exhibition, you come upon a handful of small paintings by Bonnard. One is a portrait of the artist’s sister and brother-in-law. They sit smoking in a sharp, stark light, and at the bottom of the canvas is a large hand holding a pipe. It comes from outside the canvas, presumably belonging to the artist.

Immediately, we get an understanding of a photo-influenced composition. The figures act as compositional devices rather than subjects. As in a Rothko painting, Bonnard’s family members become strategically placed shapes that support an abstract harmony.

The perspective of the artist’s own hand and pipe is not a view Bonnard would ever have had before his canvas, but only if he put his hand before the camera lens. There is also radical foreshortening of the figures in space, making the painting almost graphic, illustrative or claustrophobic—we are contained in the space with them. This is the cropping and lighting of a photograph.

Sure enough, Bonnard primarily photographed his family and immediate circle of friends at home or during summer days in the countryside, examples of which abound in the exhibit, many strikingly similar to the scene in the painting. The eye of the camera, as it seems, is a contagious and invasive visual filter. It didn’t take even a decade to alter artists’ sense of space.

Walking through the exhibit, these moments reoccur and overlap: we see photographs that look like studies for paintings, paintings that bring together surrounding photographs, sketches and prints filtered through a camera lens. To these artists, photography was still a mimetic medium, used to better understand their paintings—to clarify a perspective, to study the shape of a figure or the dimensional accuracy of a mirror’s reflection.

Photography was initially frowned upon by critics, which made the artist’s reserved about revealing their work with it, which is perhaps why most of these photographs have never before been on exhibit. It is interesting, though, that even within this exhibition we start to see a certain superfluity of the paintings, not the photographs. However beautiful the paintings are, the act of painting what is captured in the photograph becomes redundant.

Breitner’s photographs, among the others in the show, are in fact more compelling than his paintings. A pioneer of street photography, he focused on the city as a visual resource: his street scenes of carriages, canals, sand carters and mill workers, construction and urban bustle, are some of the most moving images on display.

In the work of Vuillard, the marriage of painting and early photography becomes almost seamless. His photographs of family and friends, posing in the mundane theater of quiet existence, sit alongside his paintings of domestic moments. They inform one another, communicating to its audience the artist’s world and vision. The works in this room serve also as nice companions to similar Vuillards currently on view in the National Gallery of Art’s “Small French Paintings” exhibit.

“Snapshots” comes at a unique time, as Kodak files for bankruptcy and digital photography poises to monopolize the industry, leaving traditional film with almost no place in contemporary culture. But just as oil paints took the place of tempera and egg-based paints in the 15th century, the takeover of digital photography does not negate the impact of the precedent set by film. The introduction of photography altered our perceptions of our surroundings, but it took a group of painters to reveal the potential of its beauty.

Exhibiting the works among this subset of Post-Impressionists showcases an important development within a movement that is often difficult to pin down, concentrating the significance of the exhibition as well as the unity of these artists. These works seem in many ways like the sparks that set off the explosion of 20th century art. And yet here they hang, delicate, pensive and ethereal, as if standing on the precipice of an endless free-fall without thinking to look down.

“Snapshots: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard,” is on view at The Phillips Collection through May 6, 2012. For more information visit PhillipsCollection.org

Ari Post •

Nestled like an egg in a courtyard of high-rises and apartment buildings just off Dupont Circle sits Gold Leaf Studios. A 10,000-square-foot carriage house built in 1903 by Evalyn Walsh McLean, the building stands as an urban anomaly — one of those small architectural wonders that momentarily suspends reality when first seen. Its stucco walls and adobe tile roof recall something of the Old West, as if at any moment a cowboy-capped young stablehand will swing open the heavy wooden door and wonder aloud what sort of business a confused looking man in strange, foreign clothes has with the boss.

But the traditions at Gold Leaf Studios date much further back than the old west. And the boss, William B. Adair, a master gilder, frame historian and catch-all depository for aesthetic and historical idiosyncrasies from here to Byzantium, knows a little more than your average rancher.

Adair is among a small handful of international authorities on frame fabrication, conservation and the nearly extinct art of gilding: applying fine gold leaf to the surfaces of paintings, wood, frames or anything else you could possibly conceive (Martha Stewart did it to pumpkins — Adair taught her how). He has employed his expertise extensively with every major museum in the city and consults with gallerists, architectural firms and private collectors throughout the world. His eyes look not into a work of art from the outside, but out from the artwork into the world it reflects.

Walking into the studio, you are greeted by a flurry of activity and projects, which it becomes clear is a reflection of Adair himself. His five studio assistants occupy every dimension of the crammed and cavernous workshop, wielding brushes, cotton swabs and an arsenal of unidentifiable tools that date back to the Renaissance. Indeed, the gilding techniques employed at the studio are of an age-old craft that has remained unchanged since the Late Middle Ages

“Man has worked with gold as long as it’s been around,” says Adair. “Gilding, in fact, is the third oldest occupation in history — behind prostitution and advertising.”

As with the other two oldest professions, there are varying techniques for gilding. But the oldest and most common form is a process called water gilding, which Adair employs exclusively at Gold Leaf Studios. After first applying layers of gesso to linen or wood — for a painting or a frame — the gilder then applies a layer of clay and glue, called bole, to help the small thin sheets of gold leaf adhere. The applied gold is then burnished and can be lightly manipulated. For a textured, dynamic surface, such as embossed vines wrapped about a picture frame, warm gesso can be carefully ladled upon the surface to create the patterns before laying the gold leaf, a process called pastiglia.

Examples of gold leaf abound in museums and buildings around the District, perhaps most prominent displayed in the National Gallery of Art’s permanent collection of 13th and 14th century Italian paintings, which is all but overrun by brilliant gold leaf altarpieces. “The National Gallery is resplendent with examples of Renaissance gilding,” says Adair. “There’s really nothing like it in the area.”

The collection’s few paintings by the Italian master Duccio (about 1260 – 1319) illuminate the ethereal splendor of gold leaf, as well as the sweep of humanist philosophy at the heart of Renaissance. (But that history is for another day.)

Adair began his long tenure with framing and gilding rather fortuitously. After studying fine art at the University of Maryland, he found work with the National Portrait Gallery. “I was hired to work in the exhibits department,” he says. “And they put me in charge of framing. Of course, one thing led to another, as it goes, and in 1982, I left to found Gold Leaf Studios.”

He tells the story like a shrug, undermining the inevitable mad passion that evidently took him over. This is not an occupation one just happens to fall into, like business administration. Adair’s multifaceted work requires him to be a historian, anthropologist, diligent researcher, tedious craftsman and sharp intellectual — usually all at once. He can distinguish periods and demographics in history from the geometric flourish on a strip of wood lining a painting that most of us would entirely disregard.

“But that is precisely the job of the frame,” he says. “If the frame jumps out at you or feels incongruous to the artwork, it isn’t doing its job. It’s a little bit like God — if it’s doing everything right, most people won’t even notice that it’s doing anything. In the Middle Ages, it was said that an empty niche in a cathedral is where God dwells. They were often left empty intentionally — like an empty frame can stand for an unspoken wonder otherwise within its borders.”

His history with gilding began in 1975, when the Smithsonian awarded him a grant to travel to Europe to learn about tools and techniques from the few remaining master gilders working in the Renaissance tradition. Working back and forth between these interwoven ancient crafts, Adair found his calling.

The year after he founded Gold Leaf Studios, Adair mounted the first ever exhibition of American frames, titled “The Frame In America, 1700 – 1900.” Along with the exhibition, which was sponsored by the American Institute of Architects, he produced a catalogue that is still regarded as an invaluable reference for American frame history. (The book, titled after the exhibit, is available at Blurb.com.) In 1995, he curated a follow-up exhibition, “The Frame In America, 1860 – 1960,” which traveled around the country through the Mid-Atlantic Arts Alliance for five years.

In 1991, the American Academy in Rome awarded Adair’s achievements with the Rome Prize in Design, wherein he spent six months further immersed in the elusive study of the origins of frame design. He is a founding member of the Society of Gilders and a member of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. The list of accolades, acclaim, professional anecdotes and associations stretches on like the scrolls of Ancient Alexandria, but talking to him, all that seems to matter is the craft and the history.

“Back in the 13th and 14th centuries,” he says, “as much time and money was spent on the frame as the artwork. They were custom designed to fit each individual painting.”

A well-designed frame is integral to illuminating a sound work of art. And Adair has made it his life’s work to preserve these traditions, while reintroducing them to the cultural market.

At his studio, Adair develops new frame designs and reproduces period frames. Each frame is handmade to enhance and relate to the work it holds. Through the years, he has amassed a repertoire of frame designs that pays homage to historical periods and styles around the world.

Meanwhile, in his conservation department, he preserves and repairs antique frames, gilded objects and furniture better than any in the trade. Since its founding, Adair has held his studio to museum standards of conservation, and it has long been a member of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic Artistic Works. “We’re committed here to combining contemporary techniques with age-old and proven methods,” he says. “Nothing is more important than preserving the historic and aesthetic value of each piece, whether we’re working with an old family portrait from the turn of the century or a Cézanne watercolor.”

Adair also hosts regular seminars throughout the country and internationally on gilding, finishing techniques and frame history. Instructing students, hobbyists and field professionals, he is a regular at the annual Frame Convention in Las Vegas, and is frequently booking classes at the Washington Design Center, just off L’Enfant Plaza.

For several years, Adair has been in partnership with Montgomery College in Silver Spring, holding seminars for educators on gilding practices. “My goal right now is to train the trainers,” he says. “I want teachers to be familiar with the art of gilding so that it can be reintroduced as a viable art.”

Through these seminars, he hopes to combat the decline of trade skills in education in the U.S. But despite what Adair calls, “a lack of artisanship in the world,” he has begun to notice an increasing interest in these forgotten arts.

“Along with the digital revolution,” he says, “there has been a parallel movement in homegrown craft revival. It has taken many forms. You see it in the local food markets and in the growing interest in vintage and custom goods. People want to know where their products come from, their histories, and they want to know that they are made well.”

Adair has found a unique companion for championing this cause in Prince Charles.

The Prince of Wales has long noticed this cultural and utilitarian deficit and called on Adair to consult in his international mission, The Prince of Wales Foundation’s Artisan Training Program. “From tiles, to woodwork, to gilding, The prince has a keen interest in reviving lost arts,” says Adair. “When he found out I was teaching those things here, he contacted me.”

Adair’s last seminar took place at the Intersections D.C. American Arts Festival, through Atlas Performing Arts Center, on U Street. On the weekend of Feb. 27, Adair’s staff hosted two free interactive seminars, demonstrating and teaching the application of gold leaf to mirror frames.

If you missed that one, there are always more to come. Adair’s latest exhibition is currently on view at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, the museum for the College of William in Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., which he will accompany with a lecture and gilding seminar on Friday, March 16. Invited by Scholar-in-Residence John T. Spike, a noted art historian, author and lecturer specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, Adair has put together a show of “The 20 greatest frames from my private collection, representing the history of frames from Byzantine to modern.”

Accompanying the exhibition are the paintings of artist Kay Jackson, Adair’s wife and collaborator. An acclaimed painter whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a commission by President Clinton for the official White House holiday card in 1997, Jackson’s work has a long history of addressing environmental concerns such as endangered species, pollution and loss of habitat. Jackson frequently employs gold leaf techniques in her work, which she learned through her husband, and for the coming exhibition she has created gilded icons of endangered species, drawing parallels to the endangered craft of gilding.

A technically brilliant artist, Jackson has made more than just paintings in these gold leaf works. She has constructed intricate, cryptic, glowing panels and boxes, encasing the endangered animals — from crayfish and salmon to the spotted owl — in armatures of gold and surrounded by symbols that span eras and iconologies.

Jackson custom designs the frames for each work, inspired by 14th century panel paintings. She herself observes that her boxes are like 16th century cabinets of curiosities, those assembled by wealthy European collectors to celebrate and catalogue their knowledge of the world. Yet despite these callings upon the past, the works look entirely contemporary. Her pieces depict both the fragility and resiliency of our ecosystems and species, and connect the vulnerability of our planet with the delicacy of our artistic culture.
“Creating art is an act of faith,” says Jackson. “With each passing year it takes an increasing commitment to continue what most people think is a spontaneous and blissful activity.”

The sentiment is echoed in the work of her husband. Adair works daily to pull a near-extinct art form back from the fate of obscurity, just as Jackson puts her artistry to work to combat environmental threats. It is a bond that, in many ways, must move beyond love and into a commitment that bridges more than just the distance between two persons. They are committed to eight centuries of artistic traditions, the preservation of cultural heritage, life and ideas. As a gilder lays each feather-like sheet of gold leaf delicately to the frame, they approach their work with a focus that must be narrow and unwavering, but with a vision that sees into and beyond the picture as a whole.

For information about William B. Adair and Gold Leaf Studios, visit www.GoldLeafStudios.com. To get information on Adair’s exhibit and lecture at the Muscarelle Museum of Art and to sign up for his gilding seminar, visit web.WM.edu/Muscarelle. For information about other workshops hosted by Adair on gilding, frame history, or inquiries regarding framing or consultation, call Gold Leaf Studios at 202-833-2440. [gallery ids="100519,119175" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

Just a few blocks from the Dupont Circle and McPherson Square Metro stations, the art galleries around 14th Street, between U Street and Logan Circle, hold some of the strongest collections of contemporary artwork in the city. Original, effusive, tasteful and energetic, the community of galleries in this area hosts work by new and emerging local artists as well as nationally and internationally renowned artisans. It binds communities and creates ambitious dialogues not only between the viewers and the works but among the artists. The common thread throughout the galleries, on top of its contemporary bent, is the impressive quality of the work. From the photographs of Annie Leibovitz to interactive sculptures with their own idiosyncratic attitudes, the works on view at these galleries should not be missed. And they’re all within a 15-minute walking radius. The weather is about to turn warmer, and there’s no better way to celebrate a nice Friday evening like a walk down the 14th Street galleries. Here’s what’s coming up.

Hamiltonian Gallery

Hamiltonian will feature the work of gallery artists Jenny Mullins and Sarah Knobel, March 17 – April 14, with an opening reception on Saturday, March 17, from 7 to 9 p.m. The drawings and paintings of Jenny Mullins, who recently completed a Fulbright Nehru grant in India researching spiritual tourism and traditional Buddhist Thangka painting techniques, explore the Western adherence to Eastern spirituality, while exploring notions of commercial mythology and consumer culture. They are “a world of low-budget mysticism . . . consumable, disposable and filled with the empty calories we crave.” The works are — perhaps ironically — gorgeous, engaging and meticulously rendered. The video art of Knobel explores individuality when forced through the sieve of cultural assumptions. The photos and videos in this exhibit are tied together by the use of origami, wherein Knobel focuses on its connections to ritual and spirituality.
www.HamiltonianGallery.com

Gallery Plan B

Five artists, all working with metal or metallic mediums in painting, etching, photography and sculpture, are featured in Gallery Plan B’s latest exhibition, “Precious Metals,” on view now through April 8. Andrew Wapinski layers gold and silver leaf with acrylic, graphite, pigments and resin resulting in substantial panels with visual and physical depth. Using photos of local scenes, Shelley Carr etches copper, then cuts and composes the copper pieces within a composition. Filmmaker Donna Cameron shifts focus of her film to the subject matter of photographs applied to aluminum surfaces. Mike McClung burns through layers of vellum into heavy paper underneath and treats the burned edges with metal leafs and layers them into whimsical patterns. Well known local artist Robert Cole will round out the group with a few of his whimsical, stylized steel sculptures. In addition, on the weekend of March 24-25, Tina Bark will be showcasing her jewelry designs from 1 to 4 p.m. each day.
www.GalleryPlanB.com

Project 4 Gallery

Rhode Island-based artist Paul Myoda’s latest works will be on view in the exhibition “Glittering Machines” at Project 4, from March 24 – April 28. A Yale MFA graduate, who has been awarded grants from the NEA, the Warhol Foundation and Howard Foundation, Myoda has been developing this series of interactive sculptures for several years now, out of his studio near Brown University, where he works as an assistant professor in sculpture and new media. “Glittering Machines,” writes Myoda, “are modular, kinetic, interactive, and illuminating sculptures. Each sculpture behaves in different ways depending upon the proximity and behavior of the viewer. Taking cues from various bioluminescent animals and insects, these behaviors range from attraction to repulsion, camouflage to revelation, predictability to spontaneity.”
www.Project4Gallery.com

Hemphill Fine Arts

“Gun Shy,” an exhibition by photographer Colby Caldwell, will open March 24 at Hemphill, with a public reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 24. Caldwell’s photographs of depleted shotgun shells, abandoned buck blinds, found birds, feathers and abstractions derived from a corrupted film frame highlight his preoccupation with the relationship between photography and memory. “A photography embeds time, freezes it and carries it forward,” says Caldwell. His works, inspired concomitantly by the changing landscape of his rural Maryland home and by a corrupted frame of Super 8mm film of landscapes shot while traveling, conjure feelings of nostalgia and loss, serving as “epitaphs for the now antiquated film age that Caldwell himself mourns.” These beautifully alluring depictions of things discarded and left behind are captivating.
www.HemphillFineArts.com

Adamson Gallery

Master printer David Adamson, who lives and works locally out of his Adamson Gallery, was the man who made the archival pigment prints for photographer Annie Leibovitz’s landmark exhibition, “Pilgrimage,” now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (for our coverage of that exhibition, visit www.Georgetowner.com and visit our Arts & Society page). If you would like to spend time with Leibovitz’s photographs outside of the crowded museum atmosphere and in a more intimate setting, Adamson is currently exhibiting a selection of her photographs in his gallery through March 24. This is a unique opportunity to get some “alone time” with one of the most lauded living artists working today.
www.AdamsonGallery.Jimdo.com [gallery ids="100521,119226,119185,119219,119212,119196,119205" nav="thumbs"]