Visual Arts

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.”

Georgetowner •

‘Turquoise Mountain: Artists Transforming Afghanistan’
(opens March 5)
Freer – Sackler

Decades of civil unrest that began in the 1970s nearly destroyed Afghanistan’s distinct artistic culture, a blend of traditions from India, Persia and Central Asia. Many of Afghanistan’s artisans were forced to leave their country or give up their craft. The old city of Kabul, once a bustling center of craft and commerce, fell into ruin. The British non-governmental organization Turquoise Mountain, founded in 2006 at the joint request of the Prince of Wales and the President of Afghanistan, has transformed the Murad Khani district of Old Kabul from slum conditions into a vibrant cultural and economic center, founding Afghanistan’s premier institution for vocational training in the arts.

To share this transformative story of people, places and heritage in Afghanistan, the museum will recreate a visit to Old Kabul, transforming galleries into an Afghan caravanserai, complete with artisan stalls, architectural elements, immersive video, large-scale photographs and demonstrations by visiting artisans from Murad Khani.?

‘Hollywood and Time: Celebrity Covers’
(opens April 1)
National Portrait Gallery

“Hollywood and Time” presents a selection of original cover art commissioned by Time magazine, highlighting Hollywood personalities who once graced theater marquees across the country. Focusing on 32 celebrities whose vision and talents carried us to different eras and exotic places, the exhibition displays vintage portraits and photographs of, among others: Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Diane Keaton, Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen.

‘Senses of Time: Video- and Film-based Works of Africa’
(opens May 18)
National Museum of African Art

In “Senses of Time,” six internationally recognized African artists examine how time is experienced — and even produced — by the human body. Bodies stand, climb, dance and dissolve in seven works of video and film art. These time-based works by Sammy Baloji, Theo Eshetu, Moataz Nasr, Berni Searle, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Sue Williamson will repeat, resist and reverse the expectation that time must move relentlessly forward.

‘Small Stories: At Home in a Dollhouse’
(opens May 21)
National Building Museum

This exhibition reveals the stories behind iconic antique dollhouses from the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood, taking visitors on a journey through the history of the English home, everyday lives and changing family relationships. The small stories of 12 dollhouses from the past 300 years are brought to life by imagining the characters that live or work there. “Meeting” the residents, visitors will discover tales of marriages, parties, politics and crime. The exhibition encompasses country mansions, the Georgian town house, suburban villas, newly built council estates and high-rise apartments.

‘Intersections: Photographs and Video from the NGA and the Corcoran Gallery of Art’
(opens May 29)
National Gallery of Art

Nearly 700 photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking publication “Animal Locomotion,” acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1887, became the foundation for the institution’s early interest in photography. The Key Set of more than 1,600 works by Alfred Stieglitz, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate, launched the photography collection at the National Gallery of Art in 1949. Inspired by these two seminal artists, Muybridge and Stieglitz, the exhibition brings together highlights of the recently merged collections of the Corcoran and the National Gallery of Art by a range of artists from the 1870s to today. The connections between the two photography collections will be explored through five themes — movement, sequence, narrative, studio and identity — found in the work of the two founding photographers.

‘Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions’
(opens May 27)
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Martin Puryear had his first solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. His drawings and prints are less well known than his elegant and playful sculptures, but they are equally essential to the artist’s studio practice. “Multiple Dimensions” is the first major exhibition to highlight these paper works, featuring over 50 drawings and prints, as well as 12 sculptures — many borrowed from the artist and never displayed before.

Several drawings and a maquette in the exhibition relate to his major outdoor sculpture at D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Building. The exhibition also features 14 works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection, including a portfolio of woodcuts and a major wood sculpture.?

LAST CHANCE:
‘Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World’
(closes March 20)
National Gallery of Art

A rare opportunity to view about 50 bronze sculptures from the Hellenistic period — between the fourth century B.C. and the first century A.D. — this exhibition draws on the collections of archaeological museums in the United States, Tunisia, Georgia and throughout Europe. [gallery ids="102257,128826,128821" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • February 18, 2016

As we wring the slush off our pant legs and break up the sheets of snow that cover our vehicles, doorsteps and walkways, just getting to work and back seems bad enough. How does this sound: trudging through knee-deep puddles of dirty ice water and pinballing around taxicabs trapped in lawless traffic patterns dictated by the randomly zigzagging pathways scooped out by overworked DPW drivers … all to visit an art museum? Show of (frostbitten) hands?

I would imagine that, over the next two weeks, museums around Washington will see their lowest attendance numbers in the past few years. With public transportation struggling to get back on schedule and most of us behind on work (and probably domestic chores), a museum excursion is most likely the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

However, if you have the time, that might also be the best reason to go to a museum right now: there’s a very good chance you will have the place to yourself. So if you’re willing to brave the elements and journey downtown, here are two stellar exhibitions to take in during the hushed and intimate state of D.C.’s museums in winter.

‘The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art’
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Through May 30

From 1867 until 1877, the American-born artist James McNeill Whistler painted, scraped, repainted and finally destroyed his large-scale painting “The Three Girls.” From the outset of its creation, he had envisioned it as his masterpiece, tying together all of his artistic philosophies and stylistic innovations.?

“The Three Girls” was a monumental painting, meant to hang in Whistler’s now-famous Peacock Room — in the same location where the infamous mural of the fighting peacocks currently resides. Yet Whistler was never satisfied with the work. His mother Anna (the subject of Whistler’s most famous work, “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” popularly titled “Whistler’s Mother”) wrote that the painting eluded him precisely because “he had tried too hard to make it the perfection of art.”

All that remains of “The Three Girls” is a rescued fragment of the large unfinished painting, salvaged from his studio; numerous studies; and the frame that Whistler decorated specifically for the painting. These are among the clues on display in this unique show at the Sackler, hinting at the masterpiece that might have been.

The exhibition also includes Whistler’s “Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which has not been shown outside the Peacock Room since 1904. (The Peacock Room, and the entire Freer Gallery, are closed for renovations through the spring of 2017.)

The destruction of “The Three Girls” — called “the lost symphony” in the exhibition title because it was to be part of Whistler’s series of “Symphony in White” paintings — and the afterlife of its frame illuminate the artist’s preoccupation with patronage, payment and professional reputation. These themes are at the heart of the complementary Sackler exhibition, “Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s ‘Filthy Lucre,’” which reimagines Whistler’s extraordinary room “in a state of decadent demolition.”

‘Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today’
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Through Feb. 28

In the 1950s and ’60s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were dominated by men (yes, even more so than today), women artists had a considerable impact working in alternative materials such as textiles, ceramics and metals. Pioneers in these fields — including Ruth Asawa, Edith Heath, Sheila Hicks, Karen Karnes, Dorothy Liebes, Alice Kagawa Parrott, Lenore Tawney, and Eva Zeisel — became influential designers, artists and teachers. They helped to shape the way art was made and understood in the decades that followed, and their work continues to inspire artists, as this exhibition makes clear.

“Pathmakers,” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, presents dynamic women designers and artists from the mid-20th century and today. It is a diverse group, ranging from artists represented by New York galleries to participants in the Santa Fe craft scene (Magdalene Odundo’s earthenware vessels are standouts) to creators of large-scale art for General Motors, the Ford Foundation and other high-profile organizations.

Among the contemporary female artists and designers whose work builds upon that of midcentury predecessors are Polly Apfelbaum and Michelle Grabner, whose installations center on woven and knitted patterns; Anne Wilson, who focuses on the processes of textile manufacture; Magdalene Odundo and Christine Nofchissey McHorse, who adapt traditional techniques while absorbing global influences; furniture and fixture designers Vivian Beer, Front Design and Hella Jongerius; and Gabriel Ann Maher, whose work looks at the ways gender is constructed by the clothes we wear.
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Georgetowner • November 19, 2015

Relatively few museum exhibitions open in the winter months, but here are a few that are taking the polar plunge.

“Frank Sinatra at 100” pays tribute to Ol’ Blue Eyes with an exhibition of photographs, sheet music, album covers, posters, the trench coat he wore in the 1957 film “Pal Joey” and bowties made by his first wife, Nancy, to throw to fans at concerts. National Museum of American History, opens Nov. 20.

“New York City: A Portrait Through Stamp Art” will display 30 pieces of original postal artwork under the headings: Baseball, Broadway, City Life, Icons, Politics and Government and Music. National Postal Museum, opens Dec. 10.

“Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” will exhibit about 50 sculptures and related works from the Greek-dominated Mediterranean of the fourth to first century B.C., lent by archaeological museums in Europe and the United States. National Gallery of Art, Dec. 13 through March 20.

“Shakespeare: Life of an Icon” assembles books and documents — such as deeds for his real estate purchases and diary entries by audience members — from the Bard’s lifetime, providing context for his work and a tangible sense of the elusive author and man. Folger Shakespeare Library, Jan. 20 through March 27.

“Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman” displays work in various genres by this D.C.-based artist, who uses the alter ego Fatima Mayfield, a fictitious herbalist and fortune-teller, in her explorations of personal and social issues. American University Museum at the Katzen Center, Jan. 23 through March 13.

Note: Stout’s work is also on view at Hemphill Fine Arts through Dec. 19 in a solo show called “Wild World.”

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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