Arts

Gary Tischler • November 16, 2015

Sometimes, we forget just how lucky we are to be living in Washington—never mind the presence of politicians.

We have the zoo, the National Gallery, museums new and old, we have the mall, we have art and artists and their explainers and caretakers, we have places and people so unique and singular as to qualify as treasures.

And we have the Freer|Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian’s Museums of Asian Art.

We have Julian Raby, the Director of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery since 2002. He was the second speaker in the Georgetown Media Group’s second season of its Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series at the George Town Club Nov. 5.

If, in the midst of a crowd, you had to pick out a man who might have the touch of an antiquarian, an Oxford graduate, an author, lecturer and expert on Asian and Islamic art, who spends many of his waking hours in the presence of works of art from across the globe itself, you’d probably hone right in on Raby, even before he said a single word. He has the air of an explainer, the grace of a man who carries enough knowledge to water numerous university gardens without making a show of it. You would just say,“that’s the one.”

Raby, 65, had his passion on display before the attendees at the breakfast. You got not only the history of first the Freer and then the Sackler, but the personalities and quirks of James McNeill Whistler, the rise of art in America in a particular place and time, and the role of the artist in it. He explained the importance of the collections among the sister museums, their mutual mission to “expand knowledge” and the importance of the arts of foreign lands, civilizations and times.

Ask Raby a question, and he speaks not in slogans, but in punctuated and grammatical sentences, in whole paragraphs, and probably in tongues and tomes as well. He is impressive without being intimidating. He is, these days, also a man concerned with antiquities and art that are being threatened by destructive, nihilistic forces in the Middle East, where 2,000-years-old structures and objects that make up ancient Palmyra in Syria are all but destroyed.

“What we do and can do is very important,” he said, “living as we are in a time of increasing intemperance and hostilities which threaten the preservation of our historic past.”

Raby brought to life the beginnings of the Freer Gallery, the first museum of art on the National Mall (dedicated in 1923), spawning from the ideals of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, a full-cloth American self-made man.

“There was no silver spoon in the mouth of Charles Lang Freer,” he said, noting his beginnings as a maker and developer of railroad cars, which made him nearly a billionaire and allowed him to retire at age 47. He also had the good fortune, spurred by an interest in art collecting, to meet and be associated with Whistler from whom he at first bought just a modest etching.

“The relationship was an extraordinary match,” Raby said. “Whistler was choleric, quixotic, and Freer was an extremely thoughtful man.It was a match that would lead to the acquisition of 1,300 works which formed the foundation of the collection and started a passion in Freer, and even obsession, with Asian Art and culture, prints and screens, and with China.”

Freer endowed the museum with his collection—some 7,500 works.

Freer also endowed his passion for Asian art to Teddy Roosevelt, who understood the developing significance of the East and Far East to the culture, trade and global politics of the United States.

The fascination with Asian art, and then Islamic art, on the part of Freer was an expression, “of the universality of art,” Raby said. “There was a view that art had a core spirituality, that it could be therapeutic.”

The Freer Gallery became a part of the Smithsonian, which by a famous phrase was, “a collection of objects,” and included “that musty phrase and description, ‘the nation’s attic,’” Raby added.

Initially, the Freer Gallery was a “closed institution.” There was to be no lending or borrowing, but it is now a haven for scholarly work and research.

If you listen to Raby talk, you can see how he perceives the museum and its purpose. “There is a responsibility here, and an opportunity, it has always done so—the responsibility to help create empathy and understanding across the cultures, to gain a respect for other cultures,” he said.

That respect and love arises in his description of the famed Peacock Room, made for British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland by Whistler. “Imagine,” Raby said, “a relationship somewhat like what Velasquez might have had with the hidalgos.” A phrase you won’t hear every day.

“It’s not what it used to be, but when we open the windows and let the light in, it’s still spectacular.”

There are times—when he talks about “magical buildings,” about Orientalism and antiquity, about great discoveries of beautiful objects from lost civilizations—when Raby sounds like a pied piper, a master of the dance of appreciation. He has been in Washington since the 1980s, a city that he obviously loves. “Living in Georgetown is a privilege,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place.”

He is as alarmed as any museum director and caretaker of antiquity about the already disastrous damages that have been done to towns and places in the Middle East.

“It is of course terrible, but it’s not just about ISIS, it is about everything, natural disaster, wars. We have to do more than merely lament losses, we have to prevent further losses. People—museum directors—are working on protocols to create safe havens where objects of art and antiquity can be stored in a kind of interim time, until this is over. But there is this: In some ways, all of these things are part of memory, safely stored there in our minds. In some ways, in this age, nothing disappears. We must make sure that things remain that way also.”

For a man who deals so much with the remnants and glories of the past, Raby is excited about the future: “This city, and other cities, are changing. It’s becoming younger, smarter. It’s losing some of that stiffness. We can look at new ways to appreciate and display, to show all the beauties of cultures from all over the world.”
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Georgetowner • October 26, 2015

It is typically single works of art that survive in the public consciousness, becoming the iconic masterpieces by which we gauge our cultural evolution. Picasso’s “Guernica” gives us the resonant anguish of World War II, while Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm” seems to express the frenzied, explosive momentum of postwar America.

Necessary landmarks in our sociological timelines, pieces like these take on momentum as they sink more indelibly into our cultural identity. They become chapter markings in art history and bulwarks of generational progression, almost to the point where — unburdened by outsized symbolic density or perversely cheapened by sheer popularity — they are impossible to admire as works of art.

I have seen T-shirts with Warhol’s portrait of Che Guevara. I have seen the immaculate groin of Michelangelo’s “David” screenprinted on men’s underpants. I have seen Munch’s “The Scream” sold as an inflatable doll. I have seen “Mona Lisa” Halloween costumes, complete with handlebar-mounted picture frames.

These things cannot be unseen, and (as ludicrous of a complaint as this is) the experience of these artworks is inevitably, inalterably affected. If I want to truly, earnestly look at a painting by Van Gogh, for instance — to lose myself in its raw artistry and lap up its formal beauty — it almost has to be one I’ve never seen before. Otherwise, I find myself standing in front of a historical artwork “document” and thinking nothing more than, “How important!”

These days, I find myself most intrigued, fulfilled and overjoyed as a viewer by smaller works and multi-part series, which artists have been undertaking for centuries. It is here that artists can deal with subjects on a scale not possible in larger single works, exploring process, materials, color and theme — the meat of it all — that make up their daily practice and inform their larger works.

This type of artistic production was especially prevalent in the 1960s, as artists dedicated to conceptual, minimalist and pop approaches explored the potential of serial procedures and structures, as well as the rapidly expanding influence and implications of 20th-century mass media.

In the 1960s, Los Angeles became home to a printmaking boom. Founded in 1966, Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited), a fine-art workshop on Melrose Avenue, started collaborating with prominent artists, creating innovative prints that helped launch a renaissance of the graphic arts.
Coinciding with Gemini’s 50th anniversary, “The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.,” on view through Feb. 7 at the National Gallery of Art, sheds light on this phenomenon.

Some of the most important and influential artists of the past five decades have conceived and produced groundbreaking series — both print and sculptural — at Gemini. The exhibition showcases, in their entirety, 17 innovative series created at the workshop over the past five decades, including seminal early works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, as well as more recent serial projects by John Baldessari, Julie Mehretu and Richard Serra.

At Gemini G.E.L., artists are encouraged to do “projects in depth,” says Sidney B. Felsen, co-founder and co-director.?As living proof, this exhibition reveals the wide range of artistic approaches to serial production from all decades of Gemini’s history. What is perhaps most exciting about these series is seeing firsthand how the sequence is essential to the way the group is understood — quite a different way of looking at art than the classical pattern of standing in front of a single painting, then clearing it from your mind to observe the next one.

Another interesting aspect of the exhibition is that it lacks a traditional entrance and exit. As a way of “exploring the potential impact of alternate sequences,” it is structured so that it may be entered at either end of the gallery.?This is a chance to see work from familiar artists with fresh eyes, to delve into the machinations of their process.?It has been a long time since I could look at anything by Roy Lichtenstein or Jasper Johns without being unconsciously distracted or prematurely exhausted by the postmodern implications that cling to their very legacy. With this exhibition, I was free, and I felt like the artists were too.

Richard Selden • October 22, 2015

Olga Hirshhorn, 95, fourth wife of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden founder Joseph Hirshhorn, died Oct. 3 in Naples, Florida.

After their marriage, in 1964, she received an education in art from her husband and from the artists with whom they socialized: Calder, Chagall, Giacometti, Man Ray, Miró, O’Keeffe and Picasso, to name a few. She began to acquire art herself, stepping up her collecting after Joe Hirshhorn died in 1981.

In 1995, Olga Hirshhorn donated more than 600 works not to the museum with her name on it but to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Though she pledged the rest of her collection and one-third of her estate to the Corcoran, this promised gift was withdrawn after the 2005 departure of then-director David C. Levy and the cancellation of the museum’s Frank Gehry-designed wing.

A five-foot dynamo well into her 80s, Olga Zatorsky was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a chauffeur/gardener and a cook. Twenty-one years younger than Joe Hirshhorn, she first attracted his attention over the phone. Having married and separated from her English teacher at Greenwich High, she was running an employment agency and he was looking for domestic help at his Greenwich estate.

The gift of 6,000 works and an endowment that created the Smithsonian’s museum of modern and contemporary art came two years after they married. The Hirshhorn Museum opened in 1974.

Olga Hirshhorn served on the boards of the Hirshhorn, the Corcoran and the Baker Museum in Naples, which hosted the exhibition “The Mouse House: Works from the Olga Hirshhorn Collection” in 2009 (the show also traveled to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich). That collection of some 200 works was later donated to the Baker Museum.

The “mouse house” was her name for a converted, art-filled carriage house she owned on Embassy Row in Washington. She also owned houses in Naples and on Martha’s Vineyard.

She is survived by her sons John and Denis from her first marriage, to John Cunningham

Ari Post • May 11, 2015

Walking through the Textile Museum’s new exhibition, “Unraveling Identity,” I became aware of just how meaningful a role fashion plays in my life.

I am not a fashionable sort of person. “Nice outfit” is never a compliment I have received. Striving at best to blend into the background of a well-dressed workplace, my wardrobe takes on a monochromatic economy of blue-gray with occasional fits of red. The only goal here is for the plainness of my outfits to avert any deeper third-party appraisal of how well the clothes actually fit (not very).

But that doesn’t mean I don’t stand in front of my closet every morning in utter defeat, staring hopelessly at my modest assembly of overworked shirts and pants for a moment of fashion inspiration that never strikes. So, I put on the shirt I presume was worn least recently, smooth out my rumpled chinos with a few brisk swipes, walk out the door and try not to think about the whole sad ordeal.

Even as I write this, I struggle to focus on the subject of clothing.

From a vague and squinty distance, I can recognize the general overwhelming significance of cloth to human history. Along with things like language, architecture and religion, it exists in the rarefied pantheon of the earliest and most essential and lasting inventions that defined humanity. Across oceans, the disparate tribes of early man each devised the same solution to a problem no animal had ever considered: how to cover their bodies.

For millennia, textiles and clothing have functioned in the world as products and symbols of social status, industry, currency, religion and even – in some notable 20th-century cases – human rights.

When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island in South Africa in the 1960s, one of the first causes for which he fought (and won) was the inmates’ right to wear pants instead of shorts; shorts were for boys and he and his comrades were civilized men.

The simple act of making yarn on a spinning wheel was elevated to almost a religion by Gandhi in the 1920s. A symbol of resistance against British colonial rule, Gandhi spun for an hour a day as a call for Indians to achieve self-sufficiency, refusing British cotton goods and readopting the use of local handicrafts.

All of these conversations surround “Unraveling Identity,” a stunning exhibition on view through August 9 in the Textile Museum’s beautiful new space at George Washington University. Taking up all three floors of the museum, it feels like a well-earned retrospective of the museum’s historic collection of textiles, spanning centuries and almost every continent.

Loosely arranged by categorical themes, the show explores the international history of textiles as sources and signifiers of political, cosmopolitan, religious and spiritual identity.

What we find are far more than garments: Incan crowns made of radiant yellow bird feathers, the shockingly tiny silk slippers worn by Chinese women after excruciating foot-binding rituals, Iranian silk and metal ground panels from the 17th century which once functioned as international trade currency in Southeast Asia (they required over a year to weave and were perhaps used as throne covers in the Siamese courts).

On the second floor, a profound and powerful display of grand hangings and rugs from the 16th-century Ottoman Empire confronts visitors.

We are also greeted with more modern pieces that turn out to be no less exquisite or peculiar: Audrey Hepburn’s famous black feather dress from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the chess-like Royal costumes from the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (like something out of Lewis Carroll, both hallowed and alien), even a hand-knitted Batman suit made of yarn by contemporary artist Mark Newport, which hangs hysterically limp on a closet hanger and casts a skeptical eye toward our own culture’s bizarre fetishistic superhero worship.

And here I sit, in a pair of khaki shorts and a moth-eaten tank top that used to belong to my mother. What does this mean? Would it make any difference if I were writing this column wearing a tailored suit and an ascot? Is this my small way, as someone otherwise devoted to aesthetic principles, to cast my arty pretensions aside and play the part of the bedraggled creative genius?

Prior to now, I would have insisted that the very idea was a load of rubbish; I simply don’t give a damn and I’m comfortable. But after seeing this exhibition, I am forced to concede that this is probably exactly what I am doing. Like it or not, what we wear is a choice, a reflection of who we are. It is deeply rooted through a lifetime of looking through old family albums at the black wool suits our grandparents wore, and watching the silly debates over Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits and enduring the endless Style Weekly barrage in checkout lines and the wonderfully irreverent fashion policing of Joan Rivers on Hollywood’s red carpet.

It is who we are, how we define ourselves for friends, family and strangers alike. It is how we compare ourselves to one another, to our past and to the emerging generations of defiant, tacky teenyboppers. It is how we step out into the world and say, “This is me.” It is indeed how we unravel our identity.

Ari Post • April 23, 2015

As titles go, “Conversations” is a perfect distillation of the sprawling body of work now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. To celebrate its unique history, the museum has mounted “Conversations: African and African American Artworks in Dialogue” as part of its 50th anniversary.

The exhibition, on view through Jan. 24, 2016, brings together pieces from the museum’s collection with others from the landmark African American art collection of Camille and Bill Cosby.

And, yes, it is that Bill Cosby. It would be foolish to ignore the inevitable wave of vitriol that his name now conjures, and which will very likely haunt him for the remainder of his life. However, it is just as irrelevant and naïve to condemn a successful and moving museum exhibition in order to admonish a television celebrity who owns some of the artwork on loan. So, as regrettable as it is to begin this way, let us clear the air in order to move on.

First, it takes a very long time to mount a museum exhibition. By the time the allegations against Cosby were brought forth last year, this show was, for all purposes, mounted, funded and finished.

Second, we must make a distinction between art and current affairs, which includes forgoing who the owner of a painting is at a given point in time. As an enormously unfair (but bluntly effective) example, the Vermeer painting, “The Astronomer,” today under the stewardship of the Louvre, was for a time among the prized possessions of Adolf Hitler. Do we censure the museum? Destroy the painting? Of course not.

The point is that, by and large, art has the capacity to move through time, outliving the fickle temporality of social and political tangles. We can stand before an Aegean fresco from the 15th century B.C. and subject it to the same terms as Jeff Koons’s flowery “Puppy” sculpture in Bilbao. Art is relative, and that is a piece of its great and lasting beauty.

So let’s talk about this exhibition, which is exceptional. “Conversations” offers virtually endless connections and perspectives into the ways that artists have explored complex ideas about the social, political and aesthetic roles of art in African and African American contexts and identities.

To this end, nearly every work in the exhibition is shown alongside a related counter-work, offering a clear and real juxtaposition of similar or divergent ideas. “Benin Head,” a painting by American artist David Driskell (b. 1931), hangs beside a commemorative Nigerian portrait-carving from the 18th century made in the court style of the Kingdom of Benin. Here, the contours and planes of the carved head illuminate the clear influence upon Driskell of the African work of that period.

A nearly identical – if less direct – line can be traced in the thematic section titled The Human Presence between male and female figures carved in wood by a mid-20th-century Senufo artist from Côte d’Ivoire and a marble sculpture by African American artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012), “The Family,” depicting a man and a woman raveled in an embrace. Works like these are marked by their aesthetic relationships: bound by style, subject and a conscious effort by contemporary artists to unite with the heritage of their forebears.

But there are less direct conversations within the exhibition as well, in many cases presenting fascinating challenges to oversimplified presumptions. Take, for instance, an untitled pastel drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the prodigal New York graffiti artist. This is a quintessential Basquiat drawing, a gritty, visceral scribble. Its broken, aggressive lines and dented circles seem to come together through some act of cyclonic magnetism, forming a proto-grunge voodoo doll of a human figure on the mutilated surface of the paper.

Beside this drawing is a neat colonial portrait of a white American woman and her daughter in white lace. The biracial artist, Joshua Johnson (1763-1824), a portraitist of prominent Marylanders, is often viewed as the first person of color to make a living as a painter in the United States.

The exhibition is too smart and too thoughtful for this pairing to be coincidental. Both Basquiat and Johnson were near-isolated minorities who single-handedly cracked the code of the white-controlled mainstream art culture, shifting the vantage point in both periods.

Masterworks abound in the exhibition, from “Nexus” by Martin Puryear (b. 1941), a beautifully crafted, evocatively minimal ring-shaped sculpture made from bent saplings of laminated wood, to “The Thankful Poor” by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), a delicately hazy, brilliantly atmospheric oil painting of a black boy and his grandfather praying at the breakfast table.

There is also a myriad of unclaimed gems that skate the border of art and historic treasure, such as an Orthodox-style Ethiopian icon – sharply juxtaposed beside Tanner’s painting – and a collection of musical sculptures and carved drums from Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The latter forms the centerpiece of the unmissable “music” gallery.

This facilitation of contextual connections is something too often lacking (or otherwise poorly executed) in a museum experience. The National Museum of African Art has mounted a terrific exhibition, which fills the deep and seemingly unresolvable gaps between the devastating estrangement of African and African American heritage. [gallery ids="102041,134725" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • March 11, 2015

Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum

“How the Civil War Changed Washington”?
Feb. 2 – Nov. 15
This exhibition examines the social and spatial impact on Washington, D.C., of the Civil War, an era of radical population growth. The growth in the African American population continued until, a century later, African Americans became the majority in the District. This was also a time when women joined the federal workforce and neighborhoods were built out of the hilly terrain, expanding the city’s footprint. The exhibition contextualizes these and other changes while telling the stories of individuals who came to Washington during the Civil War.

National Building Museum

“Scaling Washington: Photographs by Colin Winterbottom”
Opens March 21
Over 20 years ago, photographer Colin Winterbottom began taking dramatic, highly textured photographs of Washington, D.C.’s many architectural masterpieces. Always determined to create imagery unlike any he’d seen before, he quickly recognized the power of scaffolding to provide up-close – and high-altitude – access to these historic structures. As sole photographer for restoration efforts at the Washington Monument and National Cathedral following the August 2011 earthquake, Winterbottom blends documentation with artistic expression, crafting photographs that share his unusual access to remarkable vantage points.

National Museum of African Art

“The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists”
April 8 – Aug. 2
Curated by the internationally acclaimed writer and art critic Simon Njami, this dramatic multimedia exhibition reveals the ongoing global relevance of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic as part of a shared intellectual heritage. Including original commissions and renowned works of art by approximately 40 of the most dynamic contemporary artists from 19 African nations and the diaspora, this visually stunning exhibition will explore the themes of paradise, purgatory and hell with video, photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, fiber arts and mixed media installation.

National Portrait Gallery??

“Elaine de Kooning: Portraits”
March 13 – Jan. 10?
Elaine de Kooning’s gestural portraits of friends and family were much admired during her lifetime, and included such well-known Americans as poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg, critic Harold Rosenberg, choreographer Merce Cunningham and painters Willem de Kooning (her husband) and Fairfield Porter. De Kooning made both abstract and figurative paintings and drawings during the height of Abstract Expressionism in New York City. In her portraits, de Kooning sought and worked to capture the “instantaneous illumination” of recognition.

Smithsonian American Art Museum??

“Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits”
Feb. 27 – Aug. 2?
In 2013, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired a collection of artwork made between 1969 and 1976 by a self-taught local artist known only by his alter ego, Mingering Mike. This exhibition comprises artworks constructed as part of his youthful fantasy of becoming a famous soul singer and songwriter, including LP albums made from painted cardboard, original album art, song lyrics, liner notes and self-recorded 45 rpm singles. The works are a window into a historical moment when black radio was new and Washington-based performers such as Marvin Gaye were gaining national attention and transforming American music.

“The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi”?
April 3 – Aug. 30?
This exhibition is the first overview of Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s work in more than twenty-five years. Born in Japan, Kuniyoshi (1893-1953) came to the United States as a teenager. He came into prominence during the 1920s through his distinctive modern figural style, original subjects and humor. Classified an “enemy alien” after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he worked with the Office of War Information to create artworks indicting Japanese atrocities. After the war, Kuniyoshi developed a compelling late style, with bitter subjects and paradoxically bright colors.

National Gallery of Art

“Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence”
Feb. 1 – May 3
A contemporary of Botticelli, da Vinci and Michelangelo, Piero di Cosimo was known in his day for his versatility as a painter of many different subjects, from the sacred to the profane, the latter often of beguiling meaning. His fantastic inventions rivaled the verses of the ancient poets whose myths and allegories he set out to transform in a wonderfully strange language all his own. The first major retrospective exhibition of paintings by this wildly imaginative Italian Renaissance master features 44 of the artist’s most compelling paintings, including fanciful mythologies, powerful religious works (one on loan for the first time from the church in Italy for which it was created 500 years ago) and sensitive portraits.

“American Masterworks from the Corcoran, 1815-1940”
Feb. 7 – May 3
In 2014, the National Gallery assumed stewardship of over 6,000 works of art from the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s renowned collection. Thankfully, they have wasted no time in getting that work back out to the public. Two installations featuring highlights from the Corcoran collection are now on view in the West Building, including such celebrated paintings as Frederic Edwin Church’s “Niagara,” Albert Bierstadt’s “The Last of the Buffalo,” Sanford Robinson Gifford’s “Ruins of the Parthenon,” Samuel F. B. Morse’s “The House of Representatives” and Edward Hopper’s “Ground Swell.” And of course there is Frederic Remington’s bronze sculpture of a lively depiction of cowboy revelry – for what American collection is complete without that?

Freer and Sackler Galleries

“Seasonal Landscapes in Japanese Screens”
March 7 – Sept. 6?
Cherry trees bloom in this selection of folding screen paintings from the Freer Gallery. These landscapes from the 16th and early 17th centuries combine ink painting techniques assimilated from China with the vibrant color and gold of traditional Japanese paintings.??

Art Museum of the Americas??

“Libertad de Expresión: The Art Museum of the Americas and Cold War Politics”?
Feb. 19 – June 7?
Drawing from the Museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition surveys the taste and cultural diplomacy of founding director José Gómez Sicre, featuring artists who have worked in many of the influential styles at mid-century – Surrealism, Concretism, Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism – and who also experimented with forms and themes drawn from Pre-Columbian civilizations. Sicre lauded the diversity of expressions in Latin American art. This support also allied him with U.S. Cold Warriors, who used freedom of expression as a tool in the cultural and intellectual struggle against the Soviets. [gallery ids="101995,135308,135311" nav="thumbs"]

Peter Murray • February 23, 2015

Piero di Cosimo’s paintings never reached the canon of High Renaissance art inhabited by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and even Giorgione works. Yet his pieces, a myriad of which are on exhibit now at the National Gallery, show a fun-loving, eccentric artist bounding from style to style all while demonstrating the aristocratic tastes of that period in which both whimsical mythology and devout adoration were sought after for personal consumption.

Piero’s birth, in 1462, proceeded Michelangelo’s and preceded Leonardo’s by about a decade each, respectively. Like other artists of the era, the Florentine Piero was given biographical treatment by the one and only Giorgio Vasari in his “Lives of the Artists” writings, which chronicled with debatable veracity of exactly that. Vasari, Piero’s only biographer, painted a picture of bizarre, even outlandish man in his writings.

He wrote that Piero suffered from such bad pyrophobia that he subsisted solely on eggs that he boiled (fifty at a time) with the glue he worked with. According to Vasari, Piero lived “more like a beast than a man” with regard to cleanliness, preferred animals to humans and had a propensity for seeing beauty in the lowliest street scene.

Vasari’s passages on Piero ring truest and with most relevance for today when he writes that Piero “changed his style almost from one work to the next.” That much is apparent in the National Gallery’s six-gallery-spanning retrospective “Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence.”

Upon entering the exhibit, visitors are greeted by Piero’s “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Sts. Peter, John the Baptist, Dominic, and Nicholas of Bari,” a painting clearly influenced by colleague Fillipino Lippi (and the International Gothic Style) but with the High Renaissance in mind. Piero uses Lippi’s bright palette and fanciful adornments in dressing the figures, whose sharp contours flatten the painting. There is balance though, which carries through in three paintings in the predella where scenes involving St. John the Baptist, St. Dominic and St. Nicholas of Bari are neatly arranged with figures, slopes and vegetation that create a sense of balance.

“The Finding of Vulcan on Lemnos” continues the Lippi-esque style in the next gallery, but with pagan subjects, flirtatiousness, nudity and highly detailed deptictions of flowers, birds and plants. In “Vulcan and Aeolus,” Piero shows a naturalist tendency again, including, most notably, a giraffe but also a number of birds and smaller mammals in a pagan scene. (The giraffe was given to Florence’s leader Lorenzo de’ Medici as a gift from the Sultan of Egypt but met an untimely death after hitting its head on a low palace entrance.)

Nature runs wild in a subsequent piece, “The Hunt,” depicting lions, tigers and bears (oh my!), not to mention satyrs, deer, beavers and the men who have ignited a fire in the woods in order to slay all of these animals. The organized chaos of Piero’s “Hunt” comes to a serene end in “The Return from the Hunt,” where women take stock of animal carcasses and even nurse a bear cub that’s been separated from its mother. Oddly enough, the set was a wedding gift for

In the epic “Perseus Freeing Andromeda” Piero is near-Boschian in constructing the peculiar sea monster sent by Poseidon to capture Andromeda, the daughter of Ethiopian king Cepheus. Piero doesn’t quite nail human skin tone in th work, as Andromeda and other figures meant to be black appear sickly more than anything else. But Flemish inspiration leads to incredibly detailed illustrations of water, landscape and architecture in the background. (Details in the background of “The Visitation of Saint Nicholas and Saint Anthony Abbot,” too.)

Piero’s devotional tondi come as a surprise then when juxtaposed with his fanciful, mythological works. Traditionally, a tondo is a circular piece of art given to a bride upon marriage. Piero’s works in the medium vary in style with Piero giving some a Flemish attention to detail and others the forms of a Leonardo painting. Nonetheless, all of the works are rife with devotion and matronly emotion showing, perhaps, a more devout artist than his mythology suggests. “Mary Adoring the Child” and “Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels” stand out the most in this regard.

The National Gallery’s retrospective makes clear that Piero di Cosimo, despite and maybe even because of his eccentricities, was a masterful painter. Had he stuck with and built one style or streamlined his subjects more effectively, maybe he would be considered a master today. But then the National Gallery’s exhibit wouldn’t be so much fun.

Ari Post • February 6, 2015

El Greco was foremost an artist of the Spanish Renaissance, whose painted icons are among the most recognizable works in all of art history. With even the slightest familiarity of the artist’s work, his paintings become as instantly attributable as a Jackson Pollock. Not much work of the 16th century survives in the realm of intellectual pop culture, yet El Greco endured centuries of obscurity to achieve a sudden transcendence in the early 20th century, and his legacy seems all but fated for the ages.

For sake of candor, I will not feign any deeper knowledge of Renaissance art than a vague canonical familiarity with the masters—certainly no more than a middling history buff. In El Greco’s era, all subject matter in art was effectively predetermined, relegated by church and the nobility to biblical scenes, portraiture and what amounts to political propaganda. So the real issue of El Greco in our time is not what he painted, but how he painted—not what his work showed, but what it revealed. What brought this work suddenly into the limelight some 300 years later, and why are their impressions so deeply affecting and seemingly permanent?

At the National Gallery through February 16, a 400th anniversary celebration of El Greco features ten works by the groundbreaking genius of figure painting, which offers a rare opportunity to see the accumulation, breadth and development of his career.

Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541 – 1614), universally known as El Greco, was born on the Greek island of Crete, where he achieved mastery as a painter of Byzantine icons by age 26. Moving to Venice, he absorbed the lessons of High Renaissance masters, notably Titian and Tintoretto, before departing for Rome in 1570. There, he studied the work of Michelangelo and encountered the style known as mannerism, which rejected the logic and naturalism of Renaissance art. He relocated to Spain in 1576 and spent the rest of his life in Toledo, where he finally received the major commissions that had eluded him in Italy. Unlike the Italian mannerists, who aimed at elegant artifice, El Greco used their dramatically elongated figures and ambiguous treatment of space for expressive ends. Integrating these diverse influences, he developed a unique style that, from a historical perspective, captures the religious fervor of Counter-Reformation Spain.

But this is not what attracted artists like, Cezanne, Degas, Modigliani, Picasso, Giacometti, and so many others well throughout the 20th century, who ensured El Greco’s place in history. I would suggest that it was his figural obsession which, though couched in biblical allusion, exists almost unfettered by religious fervor. This resonated with the agnostic spirituality of turn-of-the-century artistic innovation, as well as its defiance of narrative conventions.

In paintings like “Saint Ildefonso,” “The Repentant Saint Peter,” and especially “Saint Jerome,” there is a physical agony to the figures, as the bodies crane and twist as if sculpted from crude clay. They contain a strong sense of yearning, doubt, distortion and chaos that found its id among the industrial age, and again amidst the new social consciousness brought about by Einstein’s age of relativity.

The painting, “Laocoön,” is strangely a modern masterpiece, painted three centuries too soon. The figures pose dramatically in a relaxed state of heightened physicality, like Degas’ dancers, and float in narrative and moral ambiguity, like Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques.” In a mere impression of a horse and clouds in the background, many brush strokes exist on their own terms, defining nothing but the space of the canvas. It is hardly abstraction, but it is certainly a broad step away from reality and into the realm of painterly suggestion.

Not much work from the 16th century can be absorbed purely on its own terms, in the way that art of the last 150 years strives for self-actualization and is made to be understood for its own sake (which is itself but a reflection of our intellectual era). El Greco was perhaps the first artist to recognize his medium as its own religion. He was an innovator of expression in light, the human figure, and paint itself. His work conveys deep spirituality, like the Byzantine icons of his youth, but they are independently alive in their sheer force of expression.

Perhaps El Greco’s rediscovery in the late 19th century was no more than a fluke, but it may just be that the Gods of paint rescued him from a long trial in purgatory. At the very least, he is most deserving of our time and consideration, and the paintings remain beautiful.

El Greco in the National Gallery of Art and Washington-Area Collections: A 400th Anniversary Celebration, is on view at the National Gallery of Art through February 16. For more information visit www.nga.gov

Gary Tischler • November 6, 2014

The photographer Alfred Wertheimer passed away on Oct. 19 in New York.

Elvis Presley lives on and on in the photographs of Wertheimer, who captured the budding king of rock and roll in 1956 with close to 3,000 images, taken over a period of a week in which he stayed in close proximity to Presley, traveling to New York, on the Steve Allen Show, on a train to Memphis, in Richmond for a concert, in hotels, at a diner, in the spotlight, and away from it, and finally at home, with his parents and friends.

Those pictures—before Elvis became irretrievably a legend—are as fresh as the other day. You can hear things in them, see the energy, and the charisma, and the response, and more than that they’re a kind of portrait of the life and times, his life and times, and for some of us who were unbelievably young then, our life and times.

The rest of the story is the music, which is permanent, for always and the rest of the days, never lost, always new.

John Lennon once famously said, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.”

Wertheimer, who was the son of German immigrants who escaped from Nazi Germany, was a free-lancer in 1956, struggling to get assignments, place photos, a 26-year-old not far removed from Elvis who was 21 then, fresh as a dangerous daisy. The thing was: Wertheimer was not exactly a rock-and-roll baby at the time. Asked to take on the assignment of shooting Elvis for more than a week, his first response was, “Who’s Elvis Presley?”

You can’t tell by the pictures, which he kept even after he moved on to other work over the years. One of them found its way onto the cover jacket of “Last Train to Memphis,” part one of the two-part definitive biography (Part two is “Careless Love”) by Peter Guralnick, who also wrote a biography about the troubled, bluesy balladeer of rock-pop Sam Cooke. That image—Elvis in an empty hall, hunched intently over a piano—was spotted by Chris Murray in 1995, who was intrigued. In the mid-90s, he found Wertheimer in New York, alive and well, putting together his Elvis collection. Govinda showed some of those images in a small, but compact, and evocative exhibition back then.

That first show evolved into another show at Govinda, and then an even bigger exhibition, co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, which turned into a national tour. “Elvis at 21, New York to Memphis” had a lengthy stay at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010. It’s where we saw Wertheimer at the NPG, regaling visitors and critics with stories of shooting Elvis, a bearded man happy in his task of overseeing a party at Georgetown sculptor John Dreyfuss’s Halcyon House, watching as notables (Murray, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a host of others) danced away to rock-a-billy music.

Thousands saw the exhibition, with Wertheimer’s photographs enlarged into almost noise-and-atmosphere-filled examples of drama and action—in them, you can hear the trains, smell the diner food of the day’s special, hear the splash of water at a swimming pool, listen to the preternatural screaming of totally gone girls of the time, hear the whispering and murmuring, and the rustle of skirt against slacks that resulted in a now famous series of images, called “The Kiss.”

In his foreword to the book, Murray writes, “These photographs of Elvis Presley are without a doubt the most important and compelling images ever taken of the greatest rock-and-roll icon of all time. No other photographer has ever come closer to catching Elvis Presley’s magic than Alfred Wertheimer.”

In a tribute to Wertheimer on the Govinda web site, Murray describes the man as “thoughtful, truthful, imaginative, clever, supportive, tender, magnanimous, funny, talented and true friend.”

In the photographs of Elvis and his one-week milieu of traveling, you find the something—Elvis, to be sure, pouting, the great wavy mass of black hair, the intense look, even in repose, asleep, he’s a sight to see, the pelvis in action, mom and son, the mother and child revolution, reading an Archie comic book and a newspaper, the big, cocky smile, running in a field toward home in Memphis.

The pictures are so fresh, they seem not landlocked in 1956, but more like a vivid dream of your own life and memories.

The rest is music in our ears—“Love me tender, love me true,” “Jail House Rock” and “I wanna be your Teddy Bear,” jangled, back-of-a-truck stuff rock-and-roll forever true.

The image of him then, securely fixed into the forever, thanks to Alfred Wertheimer.

Robert Devaney • October 23, 2014

The Corcoran Gallery of Art died this weekend at the age of 145. Founded in 1869 by Georgetowner William Wilson Corcoran, the gallery was one of the oldest art museums in the United States. Through bad business decisions, the institution could not sustain itself and was divided between the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University. The gallery’s last day was Sept. 28.

“We are all art widows now,” said Corcoran curator emerita Linda Crocker Simmons, an organizer of the requiem for the gallery.

Former staffers of the gallery — many dressed in Victorian funereal garb — met Sept. 27 to hold a mock memorial service at the Flagg Building on 17th Street and to celebrate what was once a vibrant beacon of the visual arts, especially American, and then proceeded to Oak Hill Cemetery on R Street in Georgetown, where Corcoran was buried in 1888.

As they reunited with old friends, mourners walked through the museum and were read a honor roll of names of those involved with the Corcoran. With names of artists and of those at the gallery, the service began to evoke a personal feeling — and also showed how those works of art in the room with Peale’s “George Washington” and Bierstadt’s “The Last of the Buffalo” shall no longer be together as once they were. The Flagg Building will be renovated. The tears of former Corcoran staffers were real.

A white funeral wreath — reading, “Rest in Peace, Corcoran Gallery of Art” — greeted visitors walking up the steps with the Canova Lions sculptures on a beautiful, warm Saturday afternoon.

“We are left with a gorgeous building, but it is now no longer the Corcoran, but a cenotaph, a memorial to something that is not there, an empty tomb,” said former Corcoran director Michael Botwinick in statement, read by Carolyn Campbell, one of the funeral’s organizers and a former public relations head for the Corcoran.

As Botwinick praised the art collection, the artists and students and those who worked at the Corcoran, he observed: “If there is one thing that surprised me in the last two years, it has been the deafening silence. Except for that circle that rallied to help people understand what was at stake, the voices of the larger community of patrons, colleagues, politicians and community leaders have been absent from the conversation. And that silence has now rendered this building mute.”

After taking in the grand hall and rooms one last time, mourners left for their cars to follow the hearse in a funeral procession to Oak Hill Cemetery, where that white wreath was carried in a procession and placed in front of Corcoran’s mausoleum. There was another chance for staffers to reminisce, as they stood for a time in the sunny peace of the Victorian cemetery.

Storytellers recalled the time Robert Mapplethorpe was smoking a joint in the downstairs gallery featuring his first museum exhibition while his friend’s photo collection was on view in the upper five galleries — and then there was the book signing where Andy Warhol used lipstick to kiss each book with an impression of his lips. He had to leave to catch a plane and told a disappointed staffer on the end of the line to use his lipstick and kiss the book herself.

On the hillside, bagpiper Tim Carey played “Going Home” by Dvorak, and those remaining left for the Jackson Art Center, one block away on R Street. The center with working artists had prepared afternoon refreshments, and it seemed a most apropos ending to the day.