Arts & Society

John Blee • July 26, 2011

Visiting New York right now should include MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art sits in the middle of mid-town Manhattan in an assortment of buildings starting with the first International Style building in America by Stone and Goodwin, to the recent add-on by Taniguchi. With all the adding, the subtraction of this process has been the alteration of the way the original building opened onto the sculpture garden. It was once a real jewel of an urban space. I remember watching Natalie Wood way back in 1966 in MoMA’s garden, during the filming of “Penelope,” blowing bubble-gum.

Currently there is a triumphant show, “Abstract Expressionist New York” on the entire fourth floor that somehow fits the space of MoMA like no other. If you ever doubted the power of Jackson Pollock’s gifts you go away awed by his classical command of drawing and the creation of a totally new pictorial space. Somehow he keeps his demons at bay, but their power energizes his sometimes enormous pictures. All works in this show are in MoMA’s permanent collection. Pollock’s work exhibited here rivals anything else in MoMA.

There are several artists given solo-gallery status including Guston, Pollock, Rothko and Newman, with a few half-galleries thrown in for Kline and Gorky. David Smith’s sculpture is sprinkled throughout the galleries to great effect with his “Australia” standing triumphantly in juxtaposition with Pollock.

No museum can beat the assembled collection of Barnett Newman with “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.”
The Rothko room at MoMA is a treat, and one hopes it could be left up. Though seeing MoMA’s Rothkos makes one realize that DC’s own National Gallery has a much richer selection. Tie that together with the Phillips Collection’s Rothko Room and DC wins as Rothko City! Also the National Gallery’s “Stations of the Cross” by Barnett Newman comes close to matching MoMA.

De Kooning is the one painter that was a giant of the movement that is slighted in this show. He is not given his own room. And why in the world did they not show “Woman II,” which they own, along with “Woman I?” The one painterly abstraction “A Tree in Naples,” from 1960, is not one of the best of that period. Thinking on the title of the show I recall the exclamation of de Kooning at the time, “It is disastrous to name ourselves.”

Women are here in full force with Frankenthaler, Hartigan, Mitchell, Krasner and Sterne. Only Krasner and Hartigan are represented by first-rate work. Lee Krasner is never strong for me, after the 40s. Joan Mitchell really did her greatest work after the 60s. And the lone Frankenthaler should have been replaced by the far greater “Jacob’s Ladder.”

And why do they have the dreadful “Elegy” up by Motherwell when they own a much better one? It is probably due to the fact that today’s curators have discarded quality as an essential element of art.

Photography has its own galleries with great works by Aaron Siskind and Minor White among others. Collaboration with poets is featured in another group of galleries.

Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School, was the last art movement to really have all the arts on board at once. The poets were very much part of the milieu, as were the classical composers: one thinks immediately of Morton Feldman and Stefan Wolpe. All of these artists from various disciplines met at The Club where they discussed art in sometime heated debates.

Perhaps one reason why art has become more impoverished since Abstract Expressionism is this lack of interconnectedness. When I speak with artists today they speak about everything but the arts. They never mention poetry, and have never listened to classical modern music, nor do they attend dance performances.

Remembered fondly is poet, Frank O’Hara, who worked at the information desk at MoMA until someone remarked that he had written a book on Jackson Pollock. He was promptly promoted to curator. What museum would have the guts or wisdom (not a part of Postmodernism) to do that? He was a go-between to many of the artists in this show, and his poem “Why I am not a painter” should be posted on the wall.

Please note MoMA is closed on Tuesdays and “Abstract Expressionist New York” continues through April 25th, 2011.

Georgetowner •

Corcoran Gallery of Art
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NEXT at the Corcoran: BFA Class of 2011
April 23–May 22, 2011
On the footsteps of Corcoran’s progressive and wonderfully fresh “NOW” series, which spotlights contemporary working artists as comprehensively as most museums cover the classics, comes NEXT, an exhibition of the Corcoran College graduating class of 2011. There is sure to be an impressive array of budding artists on display with the bravado and curiosity that students exemplify, like horses chomping at the bit.

NOW at the Corcoran: Chris Martin
June 18–October 23, 2011
Although abstract, Martin’s paintings are a direct response to the physical world around him. Many of his works integrate objects from his immediate environment into their surfaces, including kitchen utensils, records, photographs, and Persian carpets. The works are as much about daily life—music, travel, and language—as they are about mythology, storytelling, the endurance of symbols, and the role of painting in art history.
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Freer | Sackler
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Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan
February 26–July 31, 2011 (Sackler Gallery)
Majestic sixth-century Chinese Buddhist sculpture is combined with 3-D imaging technology in this exploration of one of the most important groups of Buddhist devotional sites in early medieval China. Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan (pronounced “shahng-tahng-shahn”) were the crowning cultural achievement of the Northern Qi dynasty (550-77 CE). Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures–monumental Buddhas, divine attendant figures, and crouching monsters framed by floral motifs–the limestone caves were severely damaged in the first half of the twentieth century, when their contents were chiseled away and offered for sale on the international art market. The exhibit re-creates the forms and power of these sacred Eastern sculptures as they were originally constructed.

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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977
February 24, 2011- May 15, 2011
Palermo (1943-1977), renowned throughout Europe as an influential postwar painter, has been largely looked over by America. This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of his work in the United States, reflecting the artist’s progression, follows a loose chronology based on his four main bodies of work.

Directions: Grazia Toderi
Opens April 21, 2011
Best known for her large-scale installations, Toderi calls her video projections “frescoes of light.” The artist works from documentary imagery collected from urban night surveillance and military, satellite, and space program footage. Over these she superimposes her own photography and cinematography, altering the effect with digital manipulations and unifying the vista with sepia-tone filters. The result feels both familiar and mysterious, as the eye struggles to determine the horizon line and read the origins of fields of glimmering lights. Shown on an endless loop, these mesmerizing nightscapes represent the artist’s ambition to “visualize the infinite.”

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The Kreeger Museum
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In Unison: 20 Washington, DC Artists
January 15 – February 26, 2011
The Kreeger initiated this exhibition with DC artist Sam Gilliam, collecting 20 established artists from the local community, all working in different styles and mediums. All artists were invited to come together to create a series of five monoprints each, one of which was selected for the exhibition by Gilliam, Judy A. Greenberg, Director of The Kreeger, Marsha Mateyka of the Marsha Mateyka Gallery and Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D., art critic and art historian. “The ideas of creating a group portfolio and exhibiting together express the ideas of unity and identity that are underlying motives of the project, and which are vital to sustaining a thriving artistic community,” says Rousseau.

Tom Wesselmann Draws
April 8 – July 30, 2011
American pop artist and collagist Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) worked feverishly up until the end of his life, creating iconic pop imagery which, almost in contrast to the ironic and dismissive nature of the movement, spoke powerfully toward the history and influences of fine art. The exhibition at the Kreeger, which covers drawings from Wesselmann’s entire career, spanning 1959-2004, is the most comprehensive exhibition of drawings by the artist that has ever been assembled. Many of the 108 works have never been seen outside the artist’s studio in New York.
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The Phillips Collection
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90 Years of New – 90th Anniversary
Since it first opened its doors in 1921, The Phillips Collection has been revered as a pioneer in contemporary art; it was America’s first museum of modern art, and it has remained a relevant and progressive hub for contemporary fine art throughout its life. The 90th Birthday Celebration, which will stretch into the rest of the year, will feature focuses on a variety of installations, old and new, including an especially created new work by Sam Gilliam, who had his first solo show here in 1967. Firsts, and the re-emergence of classic works purchased by the Phillips will be one of the themes throughout the year.

Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border
June 11–September 4, 2011
After a visit to his native Moscow in 1912, Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) sought to find a way to record the “extremely powerful impressions” that lingered in his memory. Working tirelessly through numerous drawings, watercolors, and oil studies over a five-month period, Kandinsky eventually arrived at his 1913 masterpiece, Painting with White Border. The exhibition will reunite this painting with over 12 preparatory studies from international collections, including the Phillips’s oil sketch, and compare it with other closely related works. Complemented by an in-depth conservation study of Painting with White Border, the exhibition will provide viewers with a rare glimpse into Kandinsky’s creative process.
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National Gallery of Art:
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Gauguin: Maker of Myth
February 27–June 5, 2011
Gauguin (1848–1903) was one of the most traveled artists in history, and it showed up in his work. His colorful images of Brittany and the islands of the South Seas are some of the most striking, distinct works of the last 200 years. His travels will be on display in nearly 120 works by Gauguin in the first major look at the artist’s oeuvre in the United States since the NGA’s retrospective of the artist in 1988–1989. The exhibition, organized by Tate Modern, London, brings together an eclectic breadth of self-portraits, genre pictures, still lifes, and landscapes from throughout the artist’s career. It includes not only oil paintings but also pastels, prints, drawings, sculpture, and decorated functional objects.

Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals
February 20–May 30, 2011
Venice inspired a school of competitive painters, who focused on the land, sea and cityscapes of the Bride of the Sea, resulting in a remarkable achievement in 18th-century art. This exhibition celebrates the rich variety of these Venetian views, known as vedute, through some 20 masterworks by Canaletto and more than 30 by his rivals. The painters depicted the famous monuments and vistas of Venice in different moods and seasons.

In the Tower: Nam June Paik
March 13 – October 2
Paik (1932–2006) is a towering figure in contemporary art. Born in Korea and trained in Japan and Germany in aesthetics and music, Paik settled in New York in 1964 and quickly became a pioneer in the integration of art with technology and performance. Considered by many to be the first video artist, this exhibition features a selection from Paik’s estate as well as from the Gallery’s own collection. The centerpiece is One Candle, Candle Projection (1988–2000), one of the artist’s simplest, most dynamic works. Each morning a candle is lit and a video camera follows its progress, casting its flickering, magnified, processed image onto the walls in myriad projections.

Gabriel Metsu 1629–1667
April 17–July 24, 2011
One of the most important Dutch genre painters of the mid-17th century, Gabriel Metsu (1629–1667) could capture ordinary moments of life with freshness and spontaneity. Although his career was relatively short, Metsu enjoyed great success as a genre painter, but also for his religious scenes, still lifes, and portraits. The show will feature some 35 paintings by the artist.
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The National Portrait Gallery
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Calder’s Portraits: A New Language
March 11-August 14, 2011
Most people recognize Calder (1898-1976) for his grandly ambitious, larger-than-life mobiles, like the one hanging in the main plaza of the NGA’s East Wing, or the “Calder Room” in the same building. What many people don’t know is that Calder was also a prolific portrait artist. Throughout his career Calder portrayed entertainment, sports, and art-world figures, including Josephine Baker, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh to name a few. Calder worked largely in wire, which he shaped into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance. Suspended from the wall or ceiling, the portraits are free to move. The movement gives the subjects a life of their own.

Capital Portraits: Treasures from Washington Private Collections
April 8 – September 5, 2011
This exhibition presents portraits that reside in private Washington, DC collections. Many of the works have never been on public display before and the exhibition reveals a remarkable range of styles, images and perhaps most importantly, stories. Works included are by major artists such as John Singleton Copley, Mary Cassatt, and Andy Warhol.

150th Commemoration of the Civil War: The Death of Ellsworth
April 29, 2011 – March 18, 2012
On the site of a former Union hospital, the National Portrait Gallery will mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War through a series of four alcove exhibitions—one each year—commemorating this period of American history. The first of these exhibitions recounts the death of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth in Alexandria, VA. Ellsworth was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and the first Union officer to be killed in the war.

One Life: Ronald Reagan
July 1, 2011 – May 28, 2012
If you have seen the One Life: Katherine Graham, you don’t need to be told that this is bound to be a small gem of a pictorial biography, with both historical, social and emotional power for anyone who ever cared about Reagan, one way or the other.
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Smithsonian American Art Museum
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To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America
March 11, 2011 – September 5, 2011
During the 1940s, painter George Ault (1891-1948) created precise yet eerie pictures that have come to be seen, following his death, as some of the most original paintings made in America in those years. To Make a World captures a 1940s America that was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by a global conflict.

History in the Making: Renwick Craft Invitational 2011
March 25, 2011 – July 31, 2011
This exhibition presents the work of a group of artists: ceramicist Cliff Lee, furniture maker Matthias Pliessnig, glass artist Judith Schaechter and silversmith Ubaldo Vitali. These four extraordinary artists create works of superior craftsmanship that address the classic craft notion of function without sacrificing a contemporary aesthetic
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The Textile Musem
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Green: the Color and the Cause
April 16 -September 11, 2011
This exhibition will celebrate everything green, both as a color and as a cause, exploring the techniques people have devised to create green textiles, the meanings this color has held in cultures across time and place, and the ways that contemporary textile artists and designers are responding to concerns about the environment. The exhibition will include a selection of work from the Museum’s collection, along with extraordinary work by contemporary artists and designers from five continents, including two extraordinary on-site installations.

John Blee •

The thousand-year-old “Shahnama,” or Persian book of kings, is resplendently represented
in a jewel of a show at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. “Shahnama,” written by the revered ninth century Persian poet Firdawsi, is “in its cultural significance and popularity on equal footing with the works of Shakespeare, Homer and the Mahabharata,” says Massumeh Farhad, chief curator and curator of Islamic art, and organizer of the exhibition.

It is impossible to overstate the cultural importance of Firdawsi. It is not a subtle fact that Arabic is not the national language of Iran, a predominantly Muslim country. Firdawsi’s writing of the “Shahnama”
revived Farsi and made it the cultural as well as the everyday language of Iran. Farsi is spoken in part of Afghanistan, but it was also the court language of the Mughals in India. Firdawsi did this through retelling the actual and sometimes mythical and fantastical stories of the Kings of Iran until the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Included in the tales are three women monarchs. The “Shahnama”
also uses the “Avesta,” a collection of texts sacred to the Zoroastrians, as one of its sources.

The “Shahnama” is not a simple book of myth and history. It also emphasizes justice, a concept that perhaps came into Judaism during contact with the Persians. It also emphasizes divine glory, known as “farr” in modern Farsi.

What can make the eye feel the sublime through color more than the Persian miniature? There is nowhere that greater pleasure can be taken in the concise and daring juxtapositions of shape and intense color in miniatures, including the “Court of Jamshid.” When Jamshid ruled, it is told that, “The world submitted to him, quarrels were laid to rest.” He is credited with establishing the Iranian celebration of Now-ruz, a festive celebration of spring even marked by US presidents with special broadcasts to Iran. It is also said that in the reign of Jamshid, “Men knew nothing of sorrow and evil…and the land was filled with music.” The celebration of Now-ruz as well as music was antithetical to the prevailing religion in Iran. In fact, the current government tried to ban Now-ruz.

In another miniature the tyrant Zahhak, who ruled for a thousand years, is resplendent in red with green sleeves on a low throne embellished with floral design. Behind him are mauve rocky hills. It is said during his reign the wise had to conceal themselves, which is much the same sort of history recounted in the “I Ching.”

One thing to note is that these miniatures were pages in books and were not imagined by their creators as hanging on a wall. Looking at them it is best to imagine holding them in your hands.
The spaces around the figures in the miniatures are often lyrically imagined gardens created in hues of passion. The name “Firdawsi” is a penname, as the word actually means paradise—and paradise in Persia is a garden. Through April 17th, 2011 at the Sackler Gallery. [gallery ids="102550,102551" nav="thumbs"]

John Blee •

Paul Gauguin fills part of two floors of the East Wing of the National Gallery with some spectacular works that changed the form and focus of art (“Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” at the National Gallery through June 5). Gauguin’s color greatly influenced the 20th century. Gauguin could use color in an almost empirical way, and it was unlike anything in earlier European art. He was also a born illustrator, and when he joined those talents to his quest for a paradise unfettered by modern civilization, his work broke into a powerful dreamscape, showcased in paintings such as “The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch.”

It was Gauguin’s appreciation of Tahitian art, whose influence he incorporated into his own work, which led directly to Picasso’s appreciation of African art. Accordingly, Picasso had something of a revelation when he saw Gauguin’s phallic sculpture that was meant for his tombstone. That would jump directly into Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” It would also lead in turn to the art of Brancusi, as well as Modigliani’s marvelous sculpture. The paintings exhibited in Gauguin’s work, with its sparing use of paint and illustrative mode, brings into question whether this master did not also influence Picasso’s blue and rose period.

Born in Paris, Gauguin came from a complex parentage, with his mother being partly Peruvian as well as the daughter of an early feminist. Gauguin’s early childhood was spent partly in Peru, which would undoubtedly influence his quest for a pre-European idyll only fulfilled in his last years when he lived in Tahiti. Gauguin was not a paradigm of the good or kind artist. He abandoned his family in Copenhagen along with his job as a stockbroker in order to paint. The modern sleuthing of recent scholars also suggests that Gauguin, an expert fencer, may well have sliced off van Gogh’s ear.

Earlier than van Gogh, in 1919 Gauguin entered the mythology of literature with Somerset Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence.” It later became a movie starring George Sanders. In most of Gauguin’s self-portraits he portrays himself as an earnest, almost ordinary looking man, with the exception of the incredible specimen from the Chester Dale collection in the National Gallery. This very arch and slightly demonic self-portrait is an indelible image that disturbs with its magnetic color and through the use of a snake as a kind of cigarette. Over Gauguin’s own head he painted a halo. Two dangling apples imply a male Eve, and perhaps he is being true to his grandmother, taking original sin onto man.

Another arresting portrait is of Jacob Meyer de Haan, sliced as it is by a shelf with two books. One of the books is “Paradise Lost” by Milton. This is the subject of Gauguin’s greatest works, including “Contes Barbares.” De Haan is placed crouching to the side of two young beauties in the tropics.

Dominating the later galleries of the show is the vision of paradise Gauguin encountered in Tahiti. Earlier there are the peasants he depicted in Brittany with masterpieces such as “The Yellow Christ” and “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.” There may be no greater or more timely 19th century paintings with Biblical subject matter.

Though it is the startling image of “The Loss of Virginity” that almost steals the show. A fox hugs the shoulder of a prone nude girl. Here Gauguin dives deep, going further and further into dream and myth.

“Gauguin: Maker of Myth is at the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art through June 5, 2011.

Ari Post •

It is difficult to encapsulate the significance of The Ralls Collection to Washington’s artistic community, much in the same way it is hard to grasp the broad archive of substantial artwork that has passed through the gallery since its opening 20 years ago.

In both cases, the amount accomplished and the merit achieved by owner and founder Marsha Ralls dwarfs any singular summation or exhibition. But the work present at The Ralls Collection’s 20th Anniversary Exhibition, “20 Years, 20 Artists” (March 18 – May 28), does not try to weave any sort of narrative or biography. With this show, Ralls has done what she has consistently done for nearly a quarter century: put together a remarkable exhibition of beautiful contemporary artwork with a clear vision and impeccable taste.

A Texas native, Ralls began her career in the arts as an apprentice to American master painter Robert Rauschenberg. After doing consultation and advising work for several major galleries and auction houses, including Sotheby’s Auction House in New York, she founded The Ralls Collection Inc. in 1988 and opened the doors to the corresponding gallery in Georgetown in 1991. Since then, she has been sharing her expertise with the Washington arts community, working within the city and internationally to forward the development, education and appreciation of the arts.

Her more recent accomplishments and contributions include a longstanding seat on the DC Arts & Humanities Commission Board, having been appointed by Anthony Williams in 2004, as well as traveling to the UAE and Saudi Arabia to provide advisory services, looking to collaborate with local leaders on arts initiatives and fostering economic development through the arts.

But inside the doors of The Ralls Collection, you wouldn’t need to know any of this. All that you need to know is hanging on the walls, proving to you that there are still galleries showcasing innovative and relevant artwork in Washington. Like all of Ralls’ other shows, “20 Years, 20 Artists” is focused absolutely on the art and the artists. “We have such close, successful relationships,” she says of the artists she represents, “and I wanted to celebrate them, their art and their contribution to the Ralls Collection.”

Many of the artists Ralls chose for the exhibition have been with the gallery since its beginning, Melinda Stickney and Caio Fonseca among them. Stickney’s “Bliss + Grief,” a modest-size canvas that plays out like a whimsical, brutal family history, utilizes a classical sense of color and composition to realize a deeply textured canvas. Her empirical use of shadow within her weightless, abstract shapes recalls a hyperbolic theatricality and experimentation that is almost literary.

Fonseca’s “Pietrasanta Painting CO6.54” is a huge, encapsulating black canvas, a sort of adumbrated landscape littered with sharp flecks of white that dance around the dark field like a vague melody. A pastoral blueprint that might be reminiscent of Pietrasanta, Italy, where the artist lives and works, the viewer feels immediately comfortable in front of the canvas, but its mystery lingers long after the initial viewing.

Among a select few artists new to the gallery, DC painter John Blee’s “Orchard Mist” serves as a most remarkable centerpiece. The first painting one sees upon entering the gallery, it is a luscious environment of color, which warms you from within like dawn’s first light. Blee’s color is full of meaning, as significant to his searching canvases as with the impressionists, who used their paint to define light, time and atmosphere. Blee has been heavily influenced by poetry, notably the work of Rilke. “It is Rilke’s insistence on putting the impossible at the center of the quest that stays with me every day,” he says.

This influence is clear in his work. Like the garden paintings of Pierre Bonnard, Blee’s paintings are elegant and contemplative, effortlessly composed, intricate and expansive. Blee’s work will be exhibited in a solo show at The Ralls Collection this coming fall, which this paper greatly anticipates. Keep an eye out for it in the coming months. It is not a show you want to miss.

Two canvases by David Richardson, whose show at The Ralls Collection ran through last month and garnered tremendous national attention, hang in the gallery for the exhibition, including a new piece commissioned for the show. With Richardson’s planes of bold colors and textures, his work recalls a landscape both foreign and familiar, contained yet effusive.

Ralls has assembled another monumental exhibition, significant to the local community and the artistic community at large. Masters like Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Serra hang next to renowned local and international painters, bridging an array of styles and influence into a cohesive and relevant body of works. It is only March, but this exhibition will surely go down as one of the major arts events of 2011.

“20 Years, 20 Artists” will be on view at The Ralls Collection through May 28. For more information visit RallsCollection.com

Ari Post •

Nam June Paik and Lewis Baltz are not a likely association. They’re not Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Picasso and Braque, John Cage and Merce Cunningham.

Born in Korea, Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was a contemporary, avant-garde composer who became the pioneer of video art. Lewis Baltz (b. 1945) is a fine art photographer who made a career out of capturing bleak industrial landscapes of parking lots, office buildings and empty storefronts. Paik worked in New York City, Baltz worked largely on the West Coast. The two artists never met in any substantial capacity or worked together, nor did they express any noted interest in one another.

What they do have in common is that their works are both on display in compelling, complimentary exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art. With these concurrent shows, the National Gallery has fostered a dialogue on the industrial and technological sprawl of the mid to late 20th century. Together the installations offer a look into the searching minds of modern artists dealing with the encroaching disaffection and homogeny of surrounding environments, cultures and medias. That these artists came to such similar conclusions in their work in such different ways is remarkable, but as the Gallery suggests, it is also perhaps inevitable. As art historian David Joselit said, “It’s hard not to ask oneself how something so simple has become so complex.”

Joselit was referencing Paik’s installation, now on view in the Tower Gallery in the East Wing of the museum. As with many references in modern art, this statement is at once glib, generalizing and grandly ubiquitous, while concurrently site-specific. The Paik installation is all of these things—which is not to say it isn’t great.

A lone candle burns in the middle of the totally dark room. Monitoring the wick with its infrequent flickering is a video camera, whose uncompromising gaze at a proximity of a few feet is—not unintentionally—hilarious. The camera is plugged into a jumble of wires, which the gallery leaves visible, connecting to a number of projectors that cast the candle across the room in a smattering of prismatic, Technicolor distortions and spliced RGB projections.

Off to the side a Buddha statue, defaced with paint and graffiti, stares at itself in a column of four stacked televisions, which display distorted images of the Buddha, which is in turn lit only by the light from the TVs that are reproducing its own image, and so on to infinity.

Indeed you ask yourself, standing in a room that is decidedly obsessed with itself and all its unsacred nothingness, how something so simple and pure as a candle is suddenly laid out in such nonsensical, overwrought terms. The Buddha, a symbol of holiness and enlightenment, becomes the center of its own limited universe. Something so virtuous turns unappealing, dirty and unwelcoming.

Much like the aluminum siding, cracked concrete walls, paint-flecked steel doors and potholed asphalt Baltz captured in his photographs. The great human striving for culture and community, beauty and betterment, is historically manifested in architecture. In this respect, Baltz’s portraits of deserted storefronts, alleyways, parking lots and gutter drains offer grim criticism of American taste and progress. Largely void of any perspective or horizons—and completely void of human life, natural elements and anything beautiful—these pictures draw attention to a loss of history, a cloying triumph of mass industrial corporation in the cultural landscape of our country.

Television, Paik’s medium of choice, is a part of this takeover. (Paik in fact made a point to note that he never actually watched TV, but used them only to distort or create images.) The artists together speak about a world in decline—not by way of bankruptcy, war or starvation, but by way of shriveling beliefs and restrained, unengaged consciousness.

However, maudlin sentiments aside, the shows also work very well as plain old art. Baltz’s photos are beautiful in an abstract way—many of his contemporaries were minimalists, and paintings by Richard Serra smartly accompany this exhibition. Baltz has a sharp, classical sense of composition, and his images induce a sort of hollow nostalgia. The Paik installation is in turn a lot of fun and eerily interactive. Stand behind the Buddha and you become part of the perpetual image; you are tempted to blow at the candle to watch the room bounce with light. Or perhaps you’re tempted to blow it out.

“In the Tower, Nam June Paik,” through October 2 in the Tower Gallery of the East Wing of the National Gallery. Lewis Baltz’s photography exhibition, “Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit,” through July 31 in the West Wing of the National Gallery. For more information visit NGA.gov/Exhibitions.

Georgetowner •

Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. The slob and the neatnik. We know these guys, since, like forever. They’re Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. They’re Walter Matthau and Art Carney and or Jack Lemmon. They’re “The Odd Couple.”

Yeah, those guys driving each other nuts like a married couple and delivering sure-fire laughs to thousands, millions of theatergoers, and movie and television viewers.

Neil Simon, until he actually got a Pulitzer
Prize for “Lost in Yonkers,” used to complain regularly that he wasn’t taken seriously enough as an artist. He claimed people considered him just a superstar gag writer and author of hit plays—which in turn became hit movies, and in the case of “The Odd Couple,” hit television series.

He deserved better, but god bless him, he sure could make you laugh.

“The Odd Couple” is often used as Exhibit A of a big laugh machine. The production, now at Theater J at the JCC, is also Exhibit A for the case that Simon had a legitimate complaint. People forget. This production, with two of DC theater’s more gifted actors in the leads, shows again and for sure that Simon was writing about people who struck a chord with audiences, not just because gags and jokes came out of their mouths faster than a speeding bullet, but because they had something to say about who we were ourselves.

Simon, in short, was funny because he struck a nerve—because we men and women, single and married, old and young, all recognized ourselves in his characters. For men of a certain age, that’s especially true of Oscar and Felix, the most polar opposites who ever ended up sharing the same living space (except perhaps for Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman). For them, laughter isn’t just the best revenge, but also the best disguise.

We are so familiar with the plight of Oscar and Felix that we think the play is one joke after another, a barrel of laughs. And it still is in the sure hands of director Jerry Whiddon. The actors are equally commendable. Rick Foucheux plays Oscar Madison, a grumpy, divorced and perpetually broke sports writer. J. Fred Schiffman is Felix Ungar, an edgy, fussy, neat freak news writer who’s just been thrown out of the house by a long-suffering wife.

The laughs are still there—Oscar’s apartment where he and Felix hold a weekly poker game is alone worth the price of admission. When pigs fly, this is where they come to rest. The space, as imagined by designer Misha Kachman, looks like a city dump with a ceiling and windows where old milk cartons, beer bottles, cigarette butts, dirty ashtrays, and frayed couches share space with yesterdays socks and newspapers. It is a man’s cave, a man who’s completely forgotten how to clean up after himself and his friends.

When Felix can’t be found, but does finally show up at the poker game, there’s concern for the forlorn, wounded, almost-but-not-quite suicidal grown waif. Oscar, who hasn’t gotten over his own divorce, takes him in. The rest is basically a pain-filled, funny, destruction derby, especially when Oscar lures two expatriate British ladies from upstairs down for a disastrous couples dinner party.

Often, this material is played almost strictly for laughs: the nuances in the script get trampled by the situations, even when they revived the play with a female cast a couple of decades ago, starring
Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers.

Here the nuances, thanks to the actors, arise out of the situations to the point where you see Oscar and Felix for what they are: a couple of lonely guys, unused to being alone, who recreate exactly the atmosphere that caused their marriages to fail.

It isn’t just that Oscar is the ultimate cigar-smoking, milk-rotting-in-the-fridge slob; it’s become a proud habit with him. And Felix is the ultimate fussy, I-love-to-cook, control-freak type who goes so far as to wash the poker cards. These are ingrained habits that are bound to drive the other men crazy. And they do. And it’s funny. And it’s sad. And it’s just like men get sometimes when all they can do is what they’ve always been doing.

I don’t mean to suggest that “The Odd Couple” doesn’t retain the power to make everyone in the audience laugh. It does. It’s just that this production, thanks also to a great supporting cast, reveals itself to be a terrific play full of characters, instead of caricatures. Watch the two guys together on the stage: Foucheux’s Oscar stands up like a wad of paper unrolling itself; he’s all round valleys and paunches, balding a little at the top. Felix, next to him, often holding a duster or cooking utensil, is all straight lines, white shirt, tie, shiny, perfectly tied shoes, edgy face—you could get a paper cut just touching him. And they can’t help themselves, just as when Oscar drops a cigar butt on the floor in final exasperation and grinds it out with his feet, and Felix guilt trips him or nags him like a fussy mother or wife.

“The Odd Couple” is still funny as all get out. But now, when the laughter stops for a second, we see who Oscar and Felix are. They’re us guys, unfettered by the imagination.

“The Odd Couple” runs through November 28 at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street.

David Richardson •

Ari is a trained draftsman, and it shows in his series, “Place Names,” showing at the Parish Gallery in Georgetown, November 19-30. Ari’s paintings are “old school”—stripped of flash, subject matter irony and mixed media techniques of many painters showing today. The work is straight oil paining: pigment, linseed oil, turpentine and board, all applied with earnest, grit and hard labor.

This body of work is partially inspired by a combination of the painter’s Jewish heritage, a recent trip to Israel and a search for universal spirituality. Ari comments: “My great grandparents on both sides were born in small villages scattered throughout what is now Latvia, Poland and Russia, almost all of which were wiped out over the last century. When even these scraps of history are lost, what becomes of the ancestral traditions and beliefs? And what do they then mean? With cultures so violently uprooted and jostled, what is there to look back to?’’

Ari’s family history is one of migration, and his pieces are an expression of this background. He addresses the tragedy of these vanished places directly. As the show’s name implies, the titles of these paintings are largely drawn from Jewish Shtetls, or townships, from Latvia and Poland, most of which were wiped out during the Bolshevik Revolution and World War II. Along with the towns, centuries of tradition and heritage were lost to its people.

One of two larger pieces, “Bauske,” features three well-placed figures that crowd the space of the canvas. Two of the figures, contemplative in appearance, are juxtaposed and nearly mirror each other. A third, more youthful figure casts an open gaze that creates a psychic and visual contrast, which I read as knowledge of a fate that the two dominant figures are resigned to or unaware of. The reddish circular areas above each figure reflect an eternal presence, perhaps their souls.

This sense of displacement sits deep in Ari. His mother hails from South Africa, where her grandparents migrated from Eastern Europe. Immigrating to this country, she brought with her African masks, carvings and paintings, which Ari has viewed since childhood. Carried dormant in his memory for years, remnants of these images are revealed in his own paintings. This element of Ari’s work causes me to recall Richard Deibenkorn’s comments about composing from recollections of Bayeux Tapestry reproductions given to him in his childhood by his maternal grandmother.

Ari paints the gnarled hands and contemplative faces in the pictures in a direct manner. The anatomical aspects of the paintings are modeled to volume using interlocking and flowing flat planes, accented by strong graphite or etched lines. There is a sense of wood carving simply in the manner that Ari builds dimension in his figures. Additionally, much of the color of the work is earthy, perhaps akin to the colors of his mother’s African pieces. Ari’s work resonates with a viewer familiar with expressionist and possibly cubist work done before 1930, yet the style is unique and surprising.

Aside from the mystical intrigue of the contemplative figures and the unique manner that Ari paints, his painting “Zagare” stands out for its color composition of black, red and green. The figure’s massive blue-black beard and head covering weigh well against the carefully crafted red shape of the garment and the receding greenish-blue background, which are painted with equal thoughtfulness and care. The overall effect Ari creates in this and other pieces is one of separate elements subordinated to the organic whole of the image. One almost overlooks the delightful way the fingers of the sitter in “Zagare” rest on the cane he is holding.

This series of paintings provides a first look into the work of a young, ambitious painter. With unlimited potential and a deep reservoir of talent, Ari will no doubt produce much more work.

Ari Post’s exhibition, “Place Names,” will be showing at the Parish Gallery in Georgetown from November 19-30, with an opening reception on the 19th from 6-8 p.m. For more information visit www.ParishGallery.com. [gallery ids="99549,104489,104496,104493" nav="thumbs"]