Arts

Ari Post • May 4, 2016

One of Washington’s major gallery districts, the Georgetown galleries on Book Hill cluster along a few blocks of Wisconsin Avenue, enveloping the neighborhood with a vibrant spirit and cultural warmth.

The annual Spring Art Walk has become a seasonal fixture in Georgetown, right in step with the buzzing, foliate bloom of our gardens. As the galleries open their doors for a Friday night of open houses — filled with paintings and sculptures, music, wine and conversation — the event becomes a local inauguration of the cultural reawakening that warm weather brings.

There is a wonderful variety of works to explore this spring, from the luminous glasswork of David Patchen at Artists’ Proof Gallery and the primal naturalism of Katie Pumphrey’s paintings at Susan Calloway Fine Art to the intaglio prints at Washington Printmakers Gallery and the bold oil paintings of Rafael Torres Correa at Cross Mackenzie Gallery. (Full disclosure: This writer also has some work on view during the Art Walk, but we will get to that later.)

The 2016 Spring Art Walk is Friday, May 13, from 6 to 8 p.m. For details, visit georgetowngalleries.com.

Addison/Ripley Fine Art
1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Dan Treado: You Are Getting Sleepy

The playful merging of science and art, the genuine delight in tools and methods and the shared interest in performance art and experimental music are at the center of Dan Treado’s recent work. Often employing tools of his own design, such as squeegees and scrapers, the artist is able to fuse solvent and oil paint to create luminous, richly surfaced paintings on Baltic birch panels. Treado’s paintings are process works that often borrow from sources such as film and photography, physics and biology textbooks and electron microscope images. His multi-paneled canvases and Mylar works explore the relationship between science and art and the manner in which we view film and paintings.

The final works form clusters of brightly colored, ringed discs. In the artist’s words: “When clustered together, overlapping or occupying distinct envelopes of space, a collection of them becomes a dynamic force, willing themselves into motion.”

Susan Calloway Fine Arts
1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Katie Pumphrey: Heavyweight

In August of last year, Baltimore-based painter Katie Pumphrey swam the English Channel in 14 hours and 19 minutes. It was an emotional endurance test and a far cry from the art studio, it would seem. But for Pumphrey, athletic competition and painting are part and parcel of a single journey.

Pumphrey’s paintings investigate the primal urges of competition and movement in both humanity and wild animals, connecting us to the roots of our very instinct. Through her imagery, as well as through the raw energy and physicality of her brushwork, her paintings are meditations on the nature of what drives us to be physical beings, exploring themes of confrontation, reflex, territory and interaction.

The implications of her work are riveting. They offer insight into our cultural obsession with sports and athletic events, and our war-like and ceremonial glorification of star athletes. They also uncover a harmony in the hulking motion of wildlife and large animals, in rushing herds of buffalo and massive schools of fish, shedding light on our own traditions of highly social and herd-like competition, from marathon racing to football. This is not a show to miss.

Cross MacKenzie Gallery
1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Paintings by Rafael Torres Correa

In partnership with the Cultural Service of the Embassy of France, Cross MacKenzie Gallery will host an exhibition of paintings by the Cuban-born French national Rafael Torres Correa. Originally from Havana, this international artist has widely exhibited his work in Mexico, Spain and France and with Cross MacKenzie in 2014.

Correa creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases. His paintings evoke memories — symbolic and emotional—and conjure imagined experiences of water and floating islands with their shifting imagery and fluid execution, using washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors, a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

Maurine Littleton Gallery
1667 Wisconsin Ave. NW
John Littleton & Kate Vogel

On view at Maurine Littleton Gallery will be a group show of groundbreaking glasswork featuring the collaborative works of John Littleton and Kate Vogel. Littleton and Vogel met at the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. Since 1979 they have lived in the mountains of North Carolina, where they began their collaboration on blown and cast glass in the studio of John’s father, Harvey Littleton.

Their recent work includes a marvelous, gem-like series of desert flowers and succulents made of cast and hot-worked glass, which in the deft hands of these masters defies the perceived limitations of the medium.

Washington Printmakers Gallery
1641 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Transitions: Prints by Gabriel Jules and Books from the Eastern Shore

Washington Printmakers Gallery is a cooperative print gallery and the area’s primary source for contemporary, artist-pulled fine art prints. On view through May 28, “Transitions” showcases the intaglio prints of Gabriel Jules alongside gorgeous artist books of the Salisbury Book Guild and the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland.

Jules is an artist entirely fascinated with the practice of creating original, hand-pulled prints, engaging with the intimacy and rhythm of the etching process. Her work, largely representational, explores our individual and cultural ties with the surrounding world and celebrates this connectivity as an essential facet of being human.

Meanwhile, the showcase of artists’ books is a uniquely wonderful experience, presenting viewers with many surprises as they finger through the pages; they are among the few works of art you are encouraged to touch (with gloves, of course).

Book Hill Pop-Up Gallery
1666 33rd St. NW
High Art | Low Art: Works by David Richardson and Ari Post

David Richardson and Ari Post met in a Dupont Circle art gallery in 2009, where they formed an unlikely friendship. Richardson is a man who has long led two rather contradictory careers, as both a Marine Lt. Col. through multiple tours of combat duty, and as a contemporary painter. Post, who studied painting and illustration, built his career in the Washington arts community, where he now works for the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, writes about art for The Georgetowner).

This group exhibition, “High Art | Low Art: Paintings, Prints, Pulp and Propaganda,” showcases recent paintings by both artists, along with other artistic ventures not usually exhibited in galleries. Post has created multiple series of political caricatures, cartoons and ink-work more typical of the Sunday funny pages than a gallery wall — a love letter to newspaper comics and political cartoons, his first true loves. Meanwhile, Richardson, who normally deals with the subject of war through his art using allusion and abstraction, has come out with a series of far more brazen, blunt and politically charged works, influenced by and akin to war propaganda, but infused with a fascinating, mysterious ambiguity and unmistakable painterly bravura.

Artist’s Proof Gallery
1533 Wisconsin Ave. NW
Color in the Curve: Glass Sculptures by David Patchen

David Patchen is an American glass artist and designer who uses the Italian techniques of cane and murrine in an American style. Known primarily for a combination of complexity and scale in densely patterned glasses, his organic forms reveal something unexpected and precious, rewarding those who make a close study.

Patchen is captivated by the breadth of possibilities offered by glass and the opportunity for rich creative expression in three dimensions. He describes the optical properties of glass as intriguing, as the glass offers a refractive palette with the ability to bend, layer and twist color and light, modulating both density and translucency unlike any other medium. He relishes the dual challenge of designing and executing complex glass pieces, achieving elements of great detail or soft abstraction.
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Percy Metcalfe • April 27, 2016

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

This is the question asked by “The Tension of a Suspended Moment,” an exhibition of works by Kevin MacDonald on view through May 29 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.

The majority of the numerous pieces on display show what can only be described as empty scenes. Humans are absent from almost all the beautifully rendered locations. A silent suburban street, an abandoned diner booth and a vacant laundromat are all eerily depicted, hanging on the walls of the gallery.

The understanding one obtains from staring at MacDonald’s work is that the absence of people only makes their existence more noticeable. Every picture appears suspended in the time between when someone has just left the scene and when someone might return.

A lifelong Washington resident, MacDonald died in 2006 at the age of 59. The exhibition, which assembles an enormous range of his work, is simultaneously a celebration of his talent and a lamentation of his early passing. As Lee Fleming writes in the text at the entrance to the exhibition, the amassing of such a great number of pieces forces us to take note of their creator’s departure, 10 years ago.

By presenting so many of his pictures in only three rooms, the curators are able to reveal the full diversity of talent possessed by MacDonald, who was known to change his style and subject matter for every show. On one wall, you see a precisely drawn image of a suburban cottage, but across the gallery you find a far more abstract pastel drawing, “Angel of the Annunciation.” In one room, you might find 20 years of work, demonstrating the varied influences drawn upon by MacDonald in his artistic life.

Yet, while MacDonald’s art, as presented at the Katzen, will amaze you with its variety, a clear and well constructed theme runs through the entire exhibition: that of momentary silence.

On Saturday, May 21, at 6 p.m., there will a gallery talk about the exhibition. For more information, visit american.edu/cas/katzen.
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Ari Post • April 20, 2016

There is a stirring tranquility in the architectural landscape photography of Alan Ward that causes me great human envy. As his work shepherds the viewer through the great parks, gardens, graveyards and winding mountain roadways of America, the photographs become living documents which evince that unalienable right so judiciously promised by Mr. Jefferson so long ago: the pursuit of happiness.

Ward’s photographs exhibit an encompassing soundness embedded in the foundation of our very earth. It is an emotional sensation disparate from the roiling charade of political demarcation and career spectacle that governs our daily lives, and it drives me nearly mad to know that someone out there has not only traversed this divine presence for a living but also captured it.

At the National Building Museum through Sept. 5, “Luminous Landscapes: Photographs by Alan Ward” is a sublime escape into the backyard of America, where you can unlace your shoes or roll down the window of your car, let the thick air wash over your face and know that the feeling is real.

“Successful works of landscape architecture have a certain resonance with us,” Ward said in a recent conversation with The Georgetowner. “After all, we are connected to land, humans always have been. And exceptional landscape designs express our relationship with the land. So when you see these images you see that it’s possible to design and build in harmony with the land.”

To that end (and among other things), “Luminous Landscapes” is a road trip. The exhibition journeys from the grassy tidewaters of the Deep South, over the rolling hills of the Piedmont and New England’s groves of academe, across Appalachia and into the sun-flecked nape of the Midwest, all the way up to the mossy shadows and old growth majesty of the Pacific Northwest.

Taken throughout Ward’s 40-year career, these photographs become a sort of domestic passport, documenting the expansion and evolution of our country. Through his lens, we get to see and understand the impact of the most significant designs in American landscape architecture; each site is either itself a landmark or emblematic of a pivotal transition point in landscape design.

At Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest surviving designed landscapes in America (dating to the 1740s), earthen terraces descend in long steps from the main house to the river. The plantation owner, Henry Middleton, relied on European precedents to achieve the vantage needed to oversee farming in the pre-Civil War era.

(All that aside, Ward’s photograph of a venerable, hulking oak tree at Middleton Place — framing the distant landscape with its branches as it cranes almost horizontally over a flooded rice field — is one of the most satisfying compositions one could ever hope to see.)

About 140 years later in Bratenahl, Ohio, the architect Charles Platt put a popularized Italianate influence to work on Gwinn, a distinctly American estate on the shores of Lake Erie that masterfully integrated ornate architecture in a billowing landscape. A spacious pergola is built into the hillside; the formal garden flanks the entry drive like an extension of the rooms in the house. Through Ward’s lens, the stonework seems to grow out of the surrounding environment, all the way down to the slick steps that break the seawall and invite us into the water.

By the 1970s, the Bloedel Reserve in the state of Washington pared away the ornamentation of previous generations of landscape architecture and explored architecture’s relationship to ecology through a design involving the forest, meadows and water. Here, the way that Ward portrays the walking paths, hedgerows and stonework that move in and out of natural streams, one can barely discern what is naturally occurring and what was manufactured.

What is so lovely and engaging about the way that Ward photographs these natural subjects is that he offers viewers the experience of standing on these very grounds, as if moving naturally through the landscape.

By way of comparison, Ansel Adams famously elevated his camera beyond the foreground, achieving a heroic, mythical quality in his sweeping landscape photography. Ward does almost the opposite, connecting the environment to the human scale and putting the viewer within the landscape.

“Ansel Adams was trying to transcend the human experience,” he said. “What I am trying to do is create an experience of a place, to draw you through it. These places were designed to walk through, for instance, so many of my photos are on paths.

“After Adams, and even at the same time, there started to be more of a critique of the landscape and the built landscape,” Ward continued. “So much landscape photography is highly critical, showing us how we’ve despoiled the earth and how development has overtaken natural landscapes. But I am trying to show that we can build wisely and in harmony with the natural landscape, and I want to find places where land and culture have come together to forge these beautiful, inspiring places.”

With these works, Ward has developed a resounding and poetic argument, and contributed significantly to the dialogue about modern society’s relationship with the natural world.

Who knew that it was possible to bottle transcendence?
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Ari Post • April 8, 2016

For a long time I’ve harbored a shameful secret: I adore landscape paintings.

As revelations go, that was probably an underwhelming spectacle, but the cultural climate around art today is a strange affair. As prevalent as the landscape is through art history, it feels as if the subject has been slowly relegated to the overstock aisles.

This is not to say that landscapes get no attention. Should a museum be so blessed to own a Monet, a Cezanne or a Turner, those are sure to be among their prized holdings, installed indefinitely. But for every theme-driven exhibition I’ve seen focusing on portraiture, abstraction or the still life, I cannot think of a single one in recent memory that dealt directly with the art of landscape.

In fact, “Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,” at The Phillips Collection through May 8, might be this city’s first major exhibition devoted to landscape painting in the six years I’ve covered arts for this paper. (If my memory is failing, I blame my editor entirely.)

Why is this?

It is impossible to really know, but as a thought experiment I might say it’s because there is relatively less historical or cultural marrow to sap from a landscape than from any other subject. A cypress tree in 19th-century France is more or less the same sight now as it was then. An artist can handle the subject differently, but a tree is always a tree.

By contrast, the content of a portrait or still life is hardwired with information relevant to cultural shifts and social evolution — fashion and hairstyles, furniture and man-made objects — which offer distinctions as to what, when and sometimes who we are seeing. And abstraction by its very nature is the deconstruction of a given cultural mood. Any Abstract Expressionist exhibition may as well be a show about American postwar bravura and the riveting detonation of artistic preconceptions.

By this interpretation, landscapes offer comparatively less opportunity for a museum to present new and interesting content. And so they simply break up these lovely works by period, assign them to the appropriate galleries (see the Impressionist galleries at the National Gallery of Art) and leave them to be passingly admired by their audience on their way to the major loan exhibitions.

What “Seeing Nature” demonstrates (or perhaps simply reminds us of) is the billowing richness of landscape painting through history. While it does not always provide the same cultural clues as other subjects, it is probably the ultimate vessel through which history’s greatest artists have experimented with paint and honed the very matter of their medium.

The other remarkable aspect of this show is that the works all come from one collector, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft and an evidently wicked connoisseur.

The works are all pretty much jaw-dropping, obscure masterpieces by some of the greatest artists in history, as well as works by a scrupulous selection of secondary artists who, for my dollar, have always deserved to be among this pantheon. To see Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Hart Benton and Arthur Wesley Dow taking their place with Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe feels like a small but momentous vindication. Similarly, to exhibit Milton Avery, a hugely important American artist who was all but left out of the major art historical literature, as a contemporary of Max Ernst evinces a deep understanding of 20th-century art, well beyond the history playbooks.

All this still omits a broad swath of works in the show that offer new insights into many of our most beloved painters. Gustav Klimt’s “Birch Forest (Birkenwald)” shows a different side to the artist’s process that is worlds apart from the hyper-stylized human jewelry of his portraits of Austrian high society. Aggressively naturalistic, “Birch Forest” shows a compulsive, almost scientific observer at work; the tree’s bark and the crunchy forest floor are rendered to a fault.

Monet’s “The Fisherman’s House, Overcast Weather” is stunning even by Monet’s standards. Its panoply of colors and flickering brushstrokes serve to create an inversely subdued and intimate portrait of brittle, windswept brush and a raw gray sky. It is the kind of painting you want to wake up to (if, like me, you’re slightly fond of your own melancholy).

A suite of five paintings by Jan Brueghel the Younger depicts “The Five Senses.” What a bounty of sensory allusion, an ode to that which makes up our experience with the world and the functions we employ to perceive it.

The final gallery is reserved for contemporary works, which actually do give us a glimpse of the future of landscapes. Ed Ruscha’s untitled painting is like a post-apocalyptic interpretation of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” all blackness and hard angles, and the radioactive hot-pink glow of David Hockney’s “The Grand Canyon” manages to give a strangely similar feeling.

The show ends on two paintings by Gerhard Richter, “Apple Tree” and “Vesuvius,” which offer a meditation on the nature of observation today as much as any denouncement of the modern landscape. (I’ll leave it to you to make the none-too-subtle connections between the paintings’ titles and his prognosis of our human fate.) Concisely rendered paintings of analog photographs of their subjects, they begin to border on abstraction when you consider their odd extrication from the natural environments they depict. The paintings are at once an affirmation of art’s power and a warning not to trust that the world is so flattering or beautiful as it is romanticized through art.

Nevertheless, once you experience “Seeing Nature,” the world certainly becomes a far more beautiful place.

For more information visit www.PhillipsCollection.org. [gallery ids="102398,122712" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • April 6, 2016

For a long time I’ve harbored a shameful secret: I adore landscape paintings.

As revelations go, that was probably an underwhelming spectacle, but the cultural climate around art today is a strange affair. As prevalent as the landscape is through art history, it feels as if the subject has been slowly relegated to the overstock aisles.

This is not to say that landscapes get no attention. Should a museum be so blessed to own a Monet, a Cezanne, a Turner or anything of the ilk, those are sure to be among their prized holdings, installed indefinitely. But for every theme-driven exhibition I’ve seen focusing on portraiture, abstraction or the still life, I cannot think of a single one in recent memory that dealt directly with the art of landscape.

In fact, “Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,” at the Phillips Collection through May 8, might be this city’s first major exhibition devoted to landscape painting in the six years I’ve covered arts for this paper. (If my memory is failing, I blame my editor entirely.)

Why is this?

It is impossible to really know, but as a thought experiment I might say it’s because there is relatively less historical or cultural marrow to sap from a landscape than from any other subject. A cypress tree in 19th-century France is more or less the same sight now as it was then. An artist can handle the subject differently, but a tree is always a tree.

By contrast, the content of a portrait or still life is hardwired with information relevant to cultural shifts and social evolution — fashion and hairstyles, furniture and man-made objects — which offer distinctions as to what, when and sometimes who we are seeing. And abstraction by its very nature is the deconstruction of a given cultural mood. Any Abstract Expressionist exhibition may as well be a show about American postwar bravura and the riveting detonation of artistic preconceptions.

By this interpretation, landscapes offer comparatively less opportunity for a museum to present new and interesting content. And so they simply break up these lovely works by period, assign them to the appropriate galleries (see the Impressionist galleries at the National Gallery of Art) and leave them to be passingly admired by their audience on their way to the major loan exhibitions.

What “Seeing Nature” demonstrates (or perhaps simply reminds us of) is the billowing richness of landscape painting through history. While it does not always provide the same cultural clues as other subjects, it is probably the ultimate vessel through which history’s greatest artists have experimented with paint and honed the very matter of their medium.

The other remarkable aspect of this show is that the works all come from one collector, Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft and an evidently wicked connoisseur with a sharp eye for paintings.

The works are all pretty much jaw-dropping, obscure masterpieces by some of the greatest artists in history, as well as works by a scrupulous selection of secondary artists who, for my dollar, have always deserved to be among this pantheon. To see Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Hart Benton and Arthur Wesley Dow taking their place with Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe feels like a small but momentous vindication. Similarly, to exhibit Milton Avery, a hugely important American artist who was all but left out of the major art historical literature, as a contemporary of Max Ernst evinces a deep understanding of 20th-century art, well beyond the history playbooks.

All this still omits a broad swath of works in the show that offer new insights into many of our most beloved painters. Gustav Klimt’s “Birch Forest (Birkenwald)” shows a different side to the artist’s process that is worlds apart from the hyper-stylized human jewelry of his portraits of Austrian high society. Aggressively naturalistic, “Birch Forest” shows a compulsive, almost scientific observer at work; the tree’s bark and the crunchy forest floor are rendered to a fault.

Monet’s “The Fisherman’s House, Overcast Weather” is stunning even by Monet’s standards. Its panoply of colors and flickering brushstrokes serve to create an inversely subdued and intimate portrait of brittle, windswept brush and a raw gray sky. It is the kind of painting you want to wake up to (if, like me, you’re slightly fond of your own melancholy).

A suite of five paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicts “The Five Senses.” What a richness of sensory allusion, an ode to that which makes up our experience with the world and the functions we employ to perceive it.

The final gallery is reserved for contemporary works, which actually do give us a glimpse of the future of landscapes. Ed Ruscha’s untitled painting is like a post-apocalyptic interpretation of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” all blackness and hard angles, and the radioactive hot-pink glow of David Hockney’s “The Grand Canyon” manages to give a strangely similar feeling.

The show ends on two paintings by Gerhard Richter, “Apple Tree” and “Vesuvius,” which offer a meditation on the nature of observation today as much as any denouncement of the modern landscape. (I’ll leave it to you to make the none-too-subtle connections between the paintings’ titles and his prognosis of our human fate.) Concisely rendered paintings of analog photographs of their subjects, they begin to border on abstraction when you consider their odd extrication from the natural environments they depict. The paintings are at once an affirmation of art’s power and a warning not to trust that the world is so flattering or beautiful as it is romanticized through art.

Nevertheless, once you experience “Seeing Nature,” the world certainly becomes a far more beautiful place.
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Ari Post • March 18, 2016

There is something exceptionally and uniquely satisfying about seeing ancient sculpture.
Since the idea of “l’art pour l’art” took hold in the 19th century, the art-going public has been fed a steadily increasing diet of what is conceitedly called “autotelic” art: Art that exists with intrinsic value, serving no greater political, religious or didactic functions.

This principle laid the groundwork for a new era of art and artists, from Monet to Picasso to Pollock and from Impressionism to Cubism to the atomic crack of pure abstraction.

For all that it can be exalted or demonized for its lasting influence on the history of art, one of the truly great effects of this powerful idea was that it taught the world to look always with fresh eyes and to perpetually reconsider the nature of beauty. This has opened the doors to a wider, more dynamic and inclusive appreciation for art.

So when confronted with a 2,300-year-old bronze sculpture, a richly cultivated history comes together with a beauty so inherent and incomparable that the result is something like the absolute museum experience.

At the National Gallery of Art through March 31, “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” offers this experience, bringing together 50 of the greatest remaining bronzes from a monumental period of Western history.

The Hellenistic era was a wildly fertile period for the development of art and literature, beginning around 330 B.C. with the conquests of Alexander the Great and ending in 31 B.C. with the rise of Augustus Caesar and the Roman Empire over Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Within these three centuries, the art of bronze casting drove artistic innovation in Greece and across the Mediterranean. Surpassing marble with its tensile strength, reflective surfaces and ability to capture fine detail, bronze statues were produced in the thousands throughout the Hellenistic world.

Of the countless bronzes that once adorned Hellenistic cities, fewer than 200 are known today, many of them just fragments. This gives a false impression today that ancient sculpture was mainly of marble. As bronze is a recyclable and valuable commodity, most of the sculptures were melted down after the fall of the empire to make coins or weapons or for other commercial uses.

Others corroded, and still more were lost to shipwrecks. (There are unknowable quantities of bronzes sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean; several works in this exhibition were chanced upon by fishermen.) So it is a rare case that a bronze sculpture survived.

But if you knew nothing of the remarkable and unlikely history that put the works before you, the sculptures would still send tingles through your spine.

As they are cast from models of wax or clay, bronze sculptures can capture a startling delicacy of features and emotion. Hair is wistful, lips pout gently, brows furrow and torsos twist in controlled motion.

There is a mythical quality about their collective presence as they stand over you, looking toward an imaginary horizon in unknowable preoccupation. And the fractured, mottled, porous ancient metal of which the faces and bodies are composed hides among its cavities and cankers the most delicate, nuanced representations of human emotion ever rendered. The galleries are thus transformed into a sanctuary for apparitions.

In “Head of a God or Poet,” from the first century B.C., there is an unshakeable sorrow that emanates from the sunken cheeks and hangdog eyes, framed by a billowing beard and windswept hair. It feels pointedly like loss, in the same way you would recognize it in a stranger’s face on the street.

“Athlete,” from the first century A.D., is just overwhelming, a perfect intersection of history and unadulterated beauty. Pieced together after having been shattered, the quilt-patch surface of the figure, as it refracts subtly against the light, corresponds to the rolling planes of its body, marrying organic curves with a subtle geometric fracturing.

The National Gallery does a fine job contextualizing the work, creating atmospheric environments by displaying original sculpture pedestals and hanging large-scale reproductions of wall paintings from Pompeii behind some of the works.

As the gallery walls will tell you, this exhibition is an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate bronze in antiquity and the innovations of Hellenistic sculptors. It also offers an elusive encounter between abstract beauty and stunning realism, unveiling universal threads of fragile emotion that forge personal connections with individual people that have been dead for over two millennia. It is a stirring, strange and transcendent experience.
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Robert Devaney •

The Embassy of Sweden kicked off this year’s celebration of 10 years at the House of Sweden — along the Georgetown waterfront — with an exhibition on gender equality, in time for International Women’s Day, and an art show on Swedish crafts.

“Sweden’s achievements in gender equality are hailed as inspiring examples,” according to the House of Sweden. “Regardless of whether they were made possible by tradition, culture or legislation, steps have been taken to ensure that women and men have equal opportunities and equal power to shape society and their own lives. This exhibition aims to inspire and reflect as well as discuss the changes which have been made and to initiate the changes still needed to reach gender equality in your part of the world. . . . Sweden has one of the world´s highest representations of women in parliament.”

The second exhibit is “Next Level Craft,” which the embassy reports, “is not your typical handicraft exhibition — it has its own soundtrack and music video. The renowned young Swedish artist Aia Jüdes has created a playful and different tale of craft, mixing voguing (a modern dance style characterized by perfect, stylized hand and arm movements, acrobatic poses and flamboyant fashion), street art, high fashion, pop culture and electronic music with everything from wool embroidery, weaving and felting to root binding, wood turning and birch bark braiding.”

The show presents works by more than 40 crafters, artists and designers from all over Sweden — and is “based on the craft traditions and rich nature of Sweden.” It runs through April 24.

The exhibit, “Gender Equality,” runs until December.
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Georgetowner • March 16, 2016

There is something exceptionally and uniquely satisfying about seeing ancient sculpture.

Since the idea of “l’art pour l’art” took hold in the 19th century, the art-going public has been fed a steadily increasing diet of what is conceitedly called “autotelic” art: Art that exists with intrinsic value, serving no greater political, religious or didactic functions.

This principle laid the groundwork for a new era of art and artists, from Monet to Picasso to Pollock and from Impressionism to Cubism to the atomic crack of pure abstraction.

For all that it can be exalted or demonized for its lasting influence on the history of art, one of the truly great effects of this powerful idea was that it taught the world to look always with fresh eyes and to perpetually reconsider the nature of beauty. This has opened the doors to a wider, more dynamic and inclusive appreciation for art.

So when confronted with a 2,300-year-old bronze sculpture, a richly cultivated history comes together with a beauty so inherent and incomparable that the result is something like the absolute museum experience.

At the National Gallery of Art through March 20, “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” offers this experience, bringing together 50 of the greatest remaining bronzes from a monumental period of Western history.

The Hellenistic era was a wildly fertile period for the development of art and literature, beginning around 330 B.C. with the conquests of Alexander the Great and ending in 31 B.C. with the rise of Augustus Caesar and the Roman Empire over Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Within these three centuries, the art of bronze casting drove artistic innovation in Greece and across the Mediterranean. Surpassing marble with its tensile strength, reflective surfaces and ability to capture fine detail, bronze statues were produced in the thousands throughout the Hellenistic world.

Of the countless bronzes that once adorned Hellenistic cities, fewer than 200 are known today, many of them just fragments. This gives a false impression today that ancient sculpture was mainly of marble. As bronze is a recyclable and valuable commodity, most of the sculptures were melted down after the fall of the empire to make coins or weapons or for other commercial uses.

Others corroded, and still more were lost to shipwrecks. (There are unknowable quantities of bronzes sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean; several works in this exhibition were chanced upon by fishermen.) So it is a rare case that a bronze sculpture survived.

But if you knew nothing of the remarkable and unlikely history that put the works before you, the sculptures would still send tingles through your spine.

As they are cast from models of wax or clay, bronze sculptures can capture a startling delicacy of features and emotion. Hair is wistful, lips pout gently, brows furrow and torsos twist in controlled motion.

There is a mythical quality about their collective presence as they stand over you, looking toward an imaginary horizon in unknowable preoccupation. And the fractured, mottled, porous ancient metal of which the faces and bodies are composed hides among its cavities and cankers the most delicate, nuanced representations of human emotion ever rendered. The galleries are thus transformed into a sanctuary for apparitions.

In “Head of a God or Poet,” from the first century B.C., there is an unshakeable sorrow that emanates from the sunken cheeks and hangdog eyes, framed by a billowing beard and windswept hair. It feels pointedly like loss, in the same way you would recognize it in a stranger’s face on the street.

“Athlete,” from the first century A.D., is just overwhelming, a perfect intersection of history and unadulterated beauty. Pieced together after having been shattered, the quilt-patch surface of the figure, as it refracts subtly against the light, corresponds to the rolling planes of its body, marrying organic curves with a subtle geometric fracturing.

The National Gallery does a fine job contextualizing the work, creating atmospheric environments by displaying original sculpture pedestals and hanging large-scale reproductions of wall paintings from Pompeii behind some of the works.

As the gallery walls will tell you, this exhibition is an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate bronze in antiquity and the innovations of Hellenistic sculptors. It also offers an elusive encounter between abstract beauty and stunning realism, unveiling universal threads of fragile emotion that forge personal connections with individual people that have been dead for over two millennia. It is a stirring, strange and transcendent experience.

Georgetowner • February 24, 2016

If artwork in museums signifies a kind of rooted, historical achievement, then the working artist is the seedling from which this history will continue to flower. It is old growth and new growth, working in tandem to create an organic creative ecosystem. The responsibility falls on local artists to make Washington a destination not just for fine art, but for a dynamic culture of the arts.

In keeping pace with this pseudo-thought experiment, the paintings of Dee Levinson occupy a unique place among the creative forces of old and new. On view at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW, through Feb. 28, Levinson’s work is contemporary, fresh and alive, while also recalling a romantic classicism from across the art historical landscape.

Upon first seeing Levinson’s paintings, the idea of “Greco-Nouveau” materialized quite immediately in my mind. Imagine if Alphonse Mucha or Gustav Klimt were to make studies of ancient Greek sculptures: marbled, graceful and stoic figures with a stark, two-toned contrast against dramatic light, enveloped by flowing planes of flat textile and floral patterns. The compositions seem to billow forth from the canvas.

In the best possible way, they are rather like paintings of sculptures, capturing a certain ethos and grandness of the ancient arts in an altogether new light.

And yet there are a range of other aesthetics and influences that Levinson folds into her work. “Le Reina Plata” is a bold portrait of an aged Native American woman, whose face bears a wise, matronly pride as it gazes into the distance. This pose could invariably signify something like the envisioning of new horizons — say, promise for future generations — or a more sober reckoning with her own mortality and place in a vast, beautiful world.

Surely, there is a purpose and a history in this painting. But like a Greek sculpture, this portrait also has the power to transcend historical knowledge with a more universal, inherent beauty. It is at its core a depiction of humanity, imbued and heightened with a historical specificity and distilled into an eternal moment.

Levinson uses this aesthetic vocabulary to build emotional connections and leave distinct impressions with her audience. By turns searching and exploratory, beautiful and moving, bold and delicate, her work is a delight.

It is also work that connects currently with our city’s museum offerings. It is hard not to make connections between these paintings and the recent exhibition of Hellenistic bronze sculptures at the National Gallery, “Power and Pathos.”