'Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib' (2007)

[On 21 November, I posted “A Passion for Art,” an article about my parents’ art collecting.  Prominently featured in both the article and the collecting was a painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, who was also the subject of several exhibits at the art gallery in which my parents had an interest.  Back in 2007, my mother and I went to a very special show of work by the artist, Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib, and I decided my archival report on the show would make a good follow-up to “A Passion for Art.”  So, here is a reedited version of that pre-ROT report.]

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November 2007, and on Saturday, my mother and I drove to the nearby American University Museum to see the exhibit of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings and drawings, part of AU’s “Art of Confrontation: AU Exploring Human Rights through Art,” a three-exhibit series at the museum  

The Botero exhibit was a display at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center of his paintings about the torture and mistreatment of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, inspired by the photos that were released in April 2004. The depictions of torture are unnerving and the artist doesn’t intend to sell these works because, he says, he doesn’t want to profit from the pain of others.

Fernando Botero was born in 1932 in Medellín, Colombia (d. 2023), the second of three sons to David Botero, a salesman who traveled by horseback, and the former Flora Angulo, a seamstress.  David Botero died of a heart attack at the age of 40 when Fernando was four and his mother supported the family; his uncle Joaquín took a major role in his life.  Although isolated from art as presented in museums and other cultural institutes, Botero was influenced by the Baroque style of the colonial churches and the city life of Medellín, at that time a relatively small and isolated city, while growing up.  He began drawing and painting watercolors as a young child. 

He received his primary education at the Antioquia Ateneo and, thanks to a scholarship, he continued his secondary education at the Jesuit School of Bolívar.  In 1944, Joaquin enrolled him in a school for matadors for two years, but it was soon obvious that the boy was more interested in drawing and painting the bulls than in fighting them.  His earliest works, watercolors of bulls and matadors, were sold by a man who traded them for bullfight tickets.  In 1948, when he was just 16, Botero had his first illustrations published in the Sunday supplement of the El Colombiano, one of the most important newspapers in Medellín.  He used the money he made to attend high school at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia.

                                                    

From 1949 to 1950, the young artist worked as a set designer before moving to Bogotá in 1951.  His first one-man show was held at the Galería Leo Matiz in Bogotá, a few months after his arrival.  In 1952, Botero travelled with a group of artists to Barcelona, where he stayed briefly before moving on to Madrid, where he studied at the Academia de San Fernando and spent his days copying the Old Masters at the Prado Museum.  In 1952, he traveled to Bogotá, where he had a solo exhibit at the Matiz gallery.

In 1953, Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time studying the works in the Louvre.  He lived in Florence, Italy, from 1953 to 1954, studying the works of Renaissance masters.  While Botero was enrolled in art schools for periods during these early years, he considers himself to be essentially self-taught.  In 1958, he won the ninth edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos.

Botero’s early artistic inspiration began with the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886-1957), José Orozco (1896-1974), and David Siqueros (1883-1949), as well as the Spanish masters Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Juan Gris (1887-1927). While Picasso’s Cubist breakthrough came after experimenting with the deconstruction of a guitar, Botero found his artistic insight in a mandolin. In 1956, while he was living in Mexico City, Botero painted a mandolin with an unusually tiny sound hole, allowing the instrument to suddenly take on exaggerated proportions (Still Life with Mandolin).  (Personal note: the Botero canvas my parents owned is Boy with Mandolin, ca. 1960.)  This began the artist’s iconic distortion of figures, known as “Boterismo,”  including people, animals, and objects, in his paintings and sculptures.

Botero maintains that “art should be an oasis, a place of refuge from the hardness of life,” but some of his work is blatantly political.  He and his art have even been the target of criminals and suspected terrorists: Colombian drug dealers tried unsuccessfully to kidnap him for ransom in 1994 and in 1995, a bomb was exploded beneath one of his sculptures in Medellín, killing 25 people.  In the 1990s, he started a series focusing on Colombia’s drug-related violence (which was largely centered in Medellín), including Death of Pablo Escobar, which depicts the notorious Colombian drug lord being gunned down by police.  Later, of course, the artist produced his Abu Ghraib series.  As Erica Jong, who wrote an editorial review of the exhibit for the Washington Post, averred, “Before the Abu Ghraib series I would have shrugged off this image.  Now I see all Botero's work as a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.  I would be surprised if the Abu Ghraib series of images did not completely change our view of Botero as an artist.” 

In recent decades, he has lived most of the time in Paris but spends one month a year in his native city of Medellín.  The prolific artist has had more than 50 exhibits in major cities worldwide, and his work, which is seen all around the world in museums, private and corporate collections, and in public spaces, can command prices in the six and seven figures.  (Botero’s second solo show in the United States was Botero at the Gres Gallery, the gallery my parents part-owned in Washington, D.C., in 1960.  It was from this exhibit that they bought Boy with Mandolin.  It was also from this show that the Museum of Modern Art purchased Mona Lisa, Age Twelve, 1959.)  Over his career, Botero had donated more than 300 works of art, including both his own and those by 19th- and 20th-century European Masters, to cities, museums, and public spaces all around the world, such as Reclining Woman in the cultural plaza on Avenida José de Diego in San Juan across from the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico which I spotted when on a visit to the island in 2008.  In 1993, 14 of Botero's monumental, voluptuous bronze sculptures of people and animals were exhibited for about 2½ months along the grassy median strip of Park Avenue. 

Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib at the AU gallery, part of the new Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle near my mom’s [then] apartment, from 6 November to 30 December 2007, is an exhibit of 79 paintings and drawings of the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  The series was reportedly inspired, in part, by Picasso’s 1937 Spanish Civil War-protest painting, Guernica.  (Full disclosure: Mom went to the opening of this exhibit because Botero was there.  Furthermore, as I said, we own a Botero painting.)  Botero was so incensed and angered by the photos and reports of the acts by American soldiers entrusted with the oversight of the Iraqi prisoners that he spent much of 2004 and ’05 creating the series, which is graphic, disturbing, explicit, brutal, and, unfortunately, accurate.  “I did it because I was very angry.  It was a shock for the rest of the world—for everybody—but for an artist, even more,” said Botero in an International Herald Tribune review.  “The whole world and myself were very shocked that the Americans were torturing prisoners in the same prison as the tyrant they came to remove,” the Washington Post quoted Botero as stating to the San Francisco Chronicle. 

For those who don’t remember the scandal, the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison 20 miles outside Baghdad became widely known when CBS News broadcast a report in April 2004 on its television news-magazine 60 Minutes, followed by a detailed story by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker in May.  The war to unseat Saddam Hussein, the military dictator of Iraq who’d made the United States his principal enemy, began in March 2003 and Baghdad, the capital, fell in April.  The U.S. and its allies occupied Baghdad and took control of the prison in the city’s outskirts.  It housed both criminal detainees, including those arrested by the post-Hussein Iraqi government, and suspected Hussein and Ba’athist partisans and supporters, who were under the control of the coalition forces. 

In January, members of the U.S. unit serving as prison guards and interrogators, both military (at least one woman among them) and contracted civilians, were convicted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice of prisoner abuse, including the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees.  The report and published photos, taken by the perpetrators, horrified American citizens and the international community as well.  Fernando Botero began sketching the series in 2005 after “stewing over the outrage.”.  “I started seeing these images in my mind of what was going on,” the artist explained.  He completed the series around September 2006.

While the artist didn’t try to recreate the photos, he says he didn’t paint anything that wasn’t reported in the news media.  “I didn't invent anything,” said the artist.  “If I did, then all the rest of the paintings would lose their significance.”  The figures of prisoners, guards, and dogs, while bearing all the bulbous features of the artist’s habitual style, are nonetheless frighteningly realistic.  Zadzi, a reviewer on an on-line journal (who happens to be Egyptian-born), characterized the pictures as “a strange marriage of horror and caricature.”  Post critic Kennicott made an interesting point about this aspect of Botero’s series: 

These paintings leave you with the sense that two worlds have collided with very odd results.  The men at Abu Ghraib may not have been skeletal, but they weren't pleasantly plump, a condition that suggests (in artistic terms) bourgeois prosperity or complacency.  Indeed, being fat, in our image-conscious society, is almost the same as being guilty, and yet the guilt, at Abu Ghraib, rests squarely with the Americans—who are never explicitly represented as such; no identifying flags or insignia appear in any of these works.  The perpetrators are often faceless or are represented only by a hand or a boot coming in from the margin of the painting.

The artist has previously used his roly-poly figures as objects of amusement and fun—commenting wryly on the indulgences of the upper classes in his South American society. 

Whereas Botero’s typical paintings are brightly colored, however, the palette of the Abu Ghraib pictures is subdued: flesh tones, military olive drab, a kind of bile yellow for the floor tiles, and black for the darkness and the bag hoods the prisoners wear in some of the renderings.  Bright colors are reserved for what Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott designated “the paraphernalia of sadism: a blue latex glove worn by an American captor, strangely festive blindfolds, or bright-red women's underwear, used to demean and embarrass the men.”  Then there’s the dull, brick-red of the blood that stains the prison clothes of the abused men in many of the paintings.

These portrayals are not fun.  Botero composed the works after reading official reports of the atrocities, but he concentrated on the suffering and dignity of the victims, often naked and blindfolded or hooded, rather than their tormentors.  All of the images we saw in the photos are interpreted here, including sodomy and forced fellatio, as well as several images of guards urinating on prisoners.  There are also a number of details of bound hands and feet and one of a pair of hands, bound at the wrists and suspended over the unseen prisoner’s head from a ceiling.  Some of the scenes are very reminiscent, intentionally I believe, of crucifixion scenes and other depictions of Christian martyrdom.  In fact, Jack Rasmussen, director of the AU museum, acknowledged that Botero is “using the iconography of Christian art.”  Having noted the same parallels I did, Rasmussen continued, “In a way, you could argue that he’s making martyrs out of Arab men.”

The pictures, which are all untitled (they are given numbers, like prisoners I guess) are intentionally difficult to look at, graphic and unblinking; Botero believes that Americans have been willfully blind to the actions of our surrogates and their leaders—and I’m not sure he isn’t right.  (This atrocity isn’t an issue in the current presidential primary campaign—among Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Bill Richardson for the Democrats and  John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Fred Thompson, Alan Keyes, Duncan Hunter, and Rudy Giuliani for the Republicans—and though Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey, who replaced Alberto Gonzales at the end of the George W. Bush administration, was asked about waterboarding in his confirmation hearings—a depiction of which is the subject of one of Botero’s paintings—the actual use of torture wasn’t raised.  Mukasey was ultimately let off the hook—no pun intended—and confirmed even though he never answered the questions.)  In the Washington Diplomat, Rachel Ray calls the exhibit “an in-your-face experience of the media-reported atrocities.”  Just as the victims are blindfolded, the faces of the tormentors are unseen or hidden—they are anonymous, generic.  Often all we see of the American torturers is a latex-gloved hand, a boot kicking out of nowhere, or a leashed dog snarling  at a terrified prisoner.  Except that we know who they are, of course. 

Erica Jong noted that “Botero calls art ‘a permanent accusation,’” and posited that “his Abu Ghraib series seems to me more than an accusation.”  The novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer observed, “Botero’s Abu Ghraib series has been shown before, but never in Washington.  It is a moment: The people who got us into Abu Ghraib can contemplate what went on there.”  Jong added, “I dare them to look at these images and be unmoved.”  Also in the Post, Kennicott, who viewed the pictures in a New York City showing at the Marlborough Gallery (which handles Botero’s work), declared:

It is a remarkable show, and a disturbing one.  Few artists in this country have focused so obsessively on the events at Abu Ghraib, and even fewer have done it in a figurative, representational style.  And no artist with a style so recognizable as Botero's has dared to infuse his cash-cow calling card with such nakedly political sentiment. 

The artist doesn’t hold out any hope that his work will actually change anything: “Guernica was the greatest painting of the 20th century,” Botero asserted, “but it could do nothing against (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco.”   Botero’s Abu Ghraib depictions, said Kennicott, “form a kind of history book, not one written by the victors but one sketched and colored by the meek of the earth, hidden away until the tables are turned and the truth can come out,” and the artist himself proclaimed, “But this will remind people of a dark moment of this government, of what is torture.”  

Perhaps not ironically, no U.S. museum would show the Abu Ghraib works until AU’s gallery the next year so they had their U.S. première here in a commercial New York gallery.  Rasmussen revealed that he had had to be especially persuasive to get the American University administrators to present the exhibit.  In the end, the museum director affirmed, the freedom of speech and academic inquiry prevailed.  The university spokeswoman, Maralee Csellar, attested, “Because the museum is linked to the university, we are allowed to be more open and daring with our exhibits,” and then Botero added, “There was criticism, phone calls, letters and hate mail.  It was expected.” 

The AU showing, which is the first exhibit of the entire series, is the opening of a tour to several U.S. galleries, as well as abroad, following New York’s Marlborough (18 October-21 November 2006) and the University of California at Berkeley from 29 January to 25 March 2007.  Botero has announced he will donate the entire collection to UC-Berkeley.  

Jong asked in her review if Botero’s art will have any lasting effect on our attraction to violence and brutality.  “No,” she said.  “But the role of the artist in raising our consciousness and bearing witness is essential.  The artist makes us open our eyes to our own cruelty, our own passivity, our own indifference.” 

[With a man in the Oval Office who, as a presidential candidate, said he “would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding,” Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib pictures may have even more significance now than they did in 2007.  Though I doubt the depictions of the depravity perpetrated by U.S. personnel at the Baghdad prison would have any effect on Donald Trump, it might remind those around him and the lawmakers in Congress of the excesses our country and its government have already committed.  As Botero himself has said, “I hope that these paintings will serve as a testimony through time.”]

'Washington Art Matters'

The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, a gallery my mom and I used to visit periodically because it’s right near where she used to live, spotlighted the art of my hometown this summer.  Five exhibitions featuring works by Washington artists opened 15 June and closed 11 August.  I only caught one show, Washington Art Matters: 1940s-1980s, a comprehensive exhibit of about 80 artists, occupying the entire third floor of the AU Museum, that told the story of art made in the Capital over five decades (starting just before I was born, as it happens).  This was reportedly the first significant endeavor by a museum to present a comprehensive retrospective of the District’s most prominent artists.  The exhibition, which Mom, two friends, and I saw two days before it closed, was based on Washington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940-1990, a book published in June by the Washington Arts Museum, a recently-closed organization dedicated to the presentation and promotion of the city’s art and art history, and co-authored by Jean Lawlor Cohen, Benjamin Forgey, Sidney Lawrence, and Elizabeth Tebow. 

As I wrote in my report “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10),” 18 January 2010: “[S]ince at least the post-World War II years, the Nation’s Capital has been a true art center.  Not only have the big museums . . . long been important venues for displaying and viewing art of many cultures and eras, but Washington had long had a vibrant retail gallery presence. . . . .  But all of these facts aren’t what made Washington an art center.  That would be the community of artists, some native Washingtonians . . ., others born elsewhere but drawn to the active art scene there.”  Washington, though, was an unlikely place for an art center to blossom: aside from its innate conservative taste (which the emerging artists soon challenged and quickly exploded), the book’s authors point out: “Despite a number of optimistic gallery owners, the city had no bohemian neighborhood, no cafes or coffee houses to pull the artists and their patrons, no gathering places for a subculture during the war.”  By the start of the next decade, however, “all the elements for a Washington art community were in place.  The city had commercial galleries and a growing, albeit low-profile, base of collectors.  It had an academic center—American University—providing a regional presence and a link to the national scene.  But most importantly, Washington had a critical mass of brashly confident free spirits.” 

Most of the painters and sculptors of that culture are represented by at least (and largely) one work in AU’s Washington Art Matters (including several who’ve showed up in some of my past blog reports).  Despite a few notable sculptures (Ann Truitt most prominently), some “constructions” (Yuriko Yamaguchi's Water and Dream, 1989) and several photographs (Sally Mann and a handful of others), the exhibit is clearly “a painter’s showcase,” as O’Sullivan of the Washington Post observed, because, he asserted, “Washington has traditionally been a painting town.”  Neither the AU exhibit nor the WAM book claim to be comprehensive; the AU Museum has computers placed around the galleries inviting visitors to type in the names of artists whom they think should have been included but weren’t, and the authors of the book’s preface baldly state, “No doubt many artists, institutions and events have been missed, although they deserve mention.”  Nonetheless, both the book and the show made the point that, even in Washington’s segregated society before the mid-’50s, the city’s largely African-American population contributed greatly to the art scene, with many successful black-owned galleries (including the Barnett-Aden Gallery, the subject of John Nathaniel Robinson’s 1947 painting First Gallery, displayed in the show) and important African-American artists (aside from Robinson, others on exhibit at AU included Lois Mailou Jones, Alma Thomas, Sylvia Snowden, Jeff Donaldson, Allen “Big Al” Carter, Martin Puryear, Sam Gilliam, and Michael Platt).

Though the AU Museum mounts many exhibits of work from all around the country and the globe (a sixth show at the Katzen showcased a San Francisco artist), it’s known for showing local art, something director and curator Jack Rasmussen initiated when the museum opened in 2005.  (The other four exhibits in the series were Kitty Klaidman: Beneath the Surface, which highlighted recent mixed media paintings by the Washington artist; Nan Montgomery: Opposite and Alternate, consisting of the artist’s recent oil paintings; Raya Bodnarchuk: Form, spotlighting sculptures by the influential mentor in Washington art for 40 years; and Tim Tate: Sleep Walker, which featured video installations by the District’s best known contemporary glass artist, as well as collaborations with Pete Duvall, a Washington photographer, and Richard Schellenberg, a painter, sculptor, and video artist in the city.) 

“Museums were not showing Washington art except on very rare occasions,” Rasmussen said in a May interview with American, the American University magazine.  (The Washington Show, a 1985 exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, was one such rarity.)  “It’s important to have local artists on your side,” added Rasmussen.  “They support you, they talk to their friends, the friends come, and all this makes it possible to have a scene in which people want to participate.”  (In the mid- and late ’50s, as I’ve reported before, my parents were partners in a small art gallery in Washington, and the managing partner was adamant about not letting it become a “Washington gallery.”  As a result, she turned down exhibits by some artists who became highly regarded, such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, one of each of whose canvases were included in Washington Art Matters.).

According to John Anderson of Washington City Paper, Rasmussen got wind last year of the planned publication of WAM’s Washington Art Matters and the authors gave the director-curator a list of the artists to be covered in the book.  He opened a gap in the Katzen’s exhibition schedule and went about assembling the samples for an AU show paralleling the book.  The AU Museum already owned about a third of the works in the prospective show, so Rasmussen started borrowing the rest from private collections and three large museums in Washington, putting the exhibit together in less than 10 weeks, which may account for a cobbled-together feel.  In a way, however, this also made AU’s Washington Art Matters a doubly Washingtonian show—the artists have lived and worked in the District and the art on exhibit came from local sources, too. 

Anderson quoted the Washington Post’s Paul Richard on the 1985 Corcoran show: “Any show so varied, it is bound to leave a blur,” adding that AU’s Washington Art Matters “pursues the same mission” and therefore encountered the same drawback.  Anderson thought the exhibit felt like an eclectic art auction, and I can’t disagree.  To try to cover half a century of one region’s artistic creativity (or, really, any human endeavor) is asking for a blurry, unfocused outcome: individual elements may be interesting, even stunning, but the overall experience is bound to be a little like herding cats.  If you make each cat a different color and breed, you get an idea what viewing Washington Art Matters was like.  My father used to say of the popular restaurant meal back in the day, the mixed grill, that it had too much of some things and not enough of anything; that’s a bit like what Washington Art Matters was like.  Not that the effort was unworthy (as I’ll try to explain shortly).

Rasmussen’s Washington Art Matters, a title whose double entendre I rather like, both for the book and for the exhibit, is divided vaguely into three sections: a small gallery (with a long tail) of works from the 1940s and ’50s; a larger, quasi-circular space with art from the later ’50s and, mostly, the 1960s; and, over the bridge-like ramps across the gap of the museum’s atrium (a gulf between the Vietnam and pre-Vietnam turbulence and the post-Watergate wildness?), into the 1970s and ’80s.  If some sort of developmental timeline was Rasmussen’s aim, it was subverted by the fact that when we got off the elevator on the third floor, more-or-less directly in front of us was a view of Gene Davis's untitled 1966 canvas of vertical rainbow-colored stripes and, across that gallery but still in sight as we stepped away from the elevator door, Morris Louis’s vertically dripped, bright-colored stains and Kenneth Noland’s equally colorful op-art bull’s-eye target.  (For a report on a Louis show and a mention of Noland’s work, see “Morris Louis,” 15 February 2010, and “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” 26 June 2011.)  To start the exhibition at its chronological beginning, we had to make a sharp right turn to view a small wall displaying a little collection of works from the 1940s, including an abstract geometric print by Jacob Kainen and a serene, black-and-white linoleum-block print by Lila Asher, a woman my mother’s known since they were at summer camp together as children.  (My parents also knew Kainen, but not well.  I own a Kainen print and both my mom and I own an Asher; both artists specialized in printmaking.)  These artists are among those Jean Lawlor Cohen calls “The Old Guard.”

Following the chronology of the layout, as my friend Rich did, the works of the 1950s trailed off to the left of the elevators in a long, narrow gallery where Marjorie Phillips’s Night Baseball (1951), a very literal painting of a ballgame with which I wasn’t familiar, was on display.  The artist was the wife of Duncan Phillips, the man who founded the Phillips Collection, and I wondered if the baseball diamond depicted might have been the old Griffith Stadium, home of the original Washington Senators ball club (subject of Damn Yankees).  I found out later, on a website of the Phillips Collection (which loaned the painting to AU) that not only does the painting depict Griffith Stadium, but the game in progress is the Nats playing the hated New York Yankees (“Joltin’ Joe” is at the plate)—an iconic match-up!  (Hey, maybe that game was the inspiration for Damn Yankees, which, after all, opened on Broadway only four years later.)

It was easy, however, to keep walking up the ramp from the ’40s works into the larger space that housed the art of 1970s and ’80s or peel off into the 1960s (pulled in by the extremely colorful and enticing Noland, Davis, and Louis canvases I mentioned).  If that happened, as it did to my mother and Sallie, the other friend who was with us, you lose any progression Rasmussen wanted to demonstrate, any sense that one generation of Washington artist fed the next or was nurtured by the previous one.  “[V]isual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists,” observed F. Lennox Campello, an artist, art dealer, and critic (and author of 100 Artists of Washington, D.C.) who blogs at Daily Campello Art News.  “Artistic lineage—how the baton of tradition is passed on at times and then rejected and replaced at others—is one of the show’s sub-themes,” asserted O’Sullivan in the Post, though I can’t say I caught it in the gallimaufry of works in AU’s Washington Art Matters. 

Also in the ’50s-’60s gallery was Stair (1977—yeah, the chronology gets a little . . . ummm, creative), one of Sam Gilliam’s draped hangings; an earlier Davis (Black Flowers, 1952, with elongated vertical stem-like abstractions topped with red-and-white puffs); Pietro Lazzari’s Bull (c. 1950), a thick application of “concrete” into which the artist incised the abstract silhouette of a raging bull; and one of Anne Truitt’s glossily painted, minimalist wooden-tower sculptures (this one in silver gray).  “There’s lots to look at in this gallery,” remarked O’Sullivan.  (For a report on work by Gilliam, see “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin,” and for a brief discussion of Truitt’s art, see “Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10),” both mentioned above.)  The Post writer called these Washington Color School pieces “iconic” works, and for me they were the most salient works and artists in the exhibition, but that may just be because some of those artists’ work is among my favorite of modern art.  It may also be that this gallery alone, as City Paper’s Anderson pointed out, presented “a coherent sense of identity or movement happening in D.C.” because during that period, “seemingly every artist in Washington was under the spell of Abstract Expressionism and the so-called Washington Color School.  After that, District art hopped all over the map.” 

(In the late ’50s through the mid-’60s, Morris Louis with other Washington artists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis, all of whom have canvases in Washington Art Matters, helped develop what became known as Color Field painting—simultaneously establishing the Washington Color School, a name that, like Impressionism, was taken from the title of an exhibition.  The principal tenet of the colorists was to cover their canvases with unified blocks of bright, pure colors.  Like abstract painters, with whom the colorists shared many parallels, Color Field painters rejected the representation of identifiable figures.  In addition, colorists also eschewed symbolism in art, feeling that even abstract forms distracted viewers from experiencing the pure color.  There weren’t supposed to be any subjective, emotional connotations in the hues or forms on the canvas.  Red was just a color, not an expression of passion.  The painting was just art, nothing more meaningful or symbolic.  It was all supposed to come to a pure sensation of enjoyment.  The focus on purity of form strongly links Color Field painting with Minimalist art—as we see in the work of Anne Truitt.  Louis, for instance, pared his paintings down to just what he felt was necessary, the bare minimum to create his effects.)

Hopping all over the map was openly demonstrated in the last gallery of AU’s Washington Art Matters which focused on the District’s art scene of the ’70s and ’80s.  The media employed as well as the subjects and the styles, not to mention the creative dynamic and the points being made by the artists, weren’t emblematic of just a herd of cats—but cats on PCP.  Like the pop music that started after 1975 or so, the art from that era on began to appeal to me less and less.  (Okay, I’m not just a geezer, I’m a reactionary geezer.  So, sue me!)  Not much in this gallery affected me—it was all mostly a matter of curiosity.  The most interesting piece in this collection was among the half dozen or so photographs: one by Sally Mann.  I’m not much of a fan of art photography, but Mann, whose work has been controversial as well as praised since she made the scene in the mid- and late ’70s, is known to me because she was a teenaged townie when I was in college.  (Her mother ran the university book store.  By the time I was a junior and senior, Mann began dating some of my younger schoolmates—it’s a small school—so I knew who she was.)  I had no idea she was considered a Washington artist, though.  Mann’s from Virginia, where she still lives with her family, but not the D.C. suburbs across the Potomac; she’s from central Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley.  (Benjamin Forgey, in the WAM book, suggests that the Washington metropolitan region should include the Shenandoah Valley and other areas far from the city’s immediate suburbs, but Rasmussen didn’t make such a stretch notable in his AU display.)  I was surprised to see her work included in Washington Art Matters, but I’m no authority.  (I guess that’s obvious, isn’t it?)

Nonetheless, the exhibition was worth having been mounted and having seen.  As Campello, the art blogger, advised art students and gallery directors, “[T]ake the opportunity to visit and learn about our area's visual arts footprint.”  (He also strenuously recommended his fellow artists see the show.  “[T]his is Washington . . .,” he admonished local artists, “so go and pay homage to your predecessors.”)  I knew that D.C. had an art life—because I’m a hometown chauvinist and my family’s been involved on the fringes of the Washington art community (after the gallery ownership, my dad became involved in the private precursor of what’s now the National Museum of African Art in the ’60s and ’70s, then he served as a docent at the National Portrait Gallery through the ’80s into the early ’90s; my mother’s still friendly with Lila Asher and Sam Gilliam) most of my life—but a lot of people, including a lot of Capital-area residents, have no idea.  At AU’s Washington Art Matters, I was surprised at how many of the artists’ names I didn’t recognize—and I mean even before the mid-’70s.  That’s me, the Washington chauvinist, like I said.  I knew this world existed—I just didn’t know as much about it as I thought I did! 

Washington has always had a sort of inferiority complex; Anderson wrote about D.C.’s sense of competition with New York over the significance of its indigenous art, but that’s not what I mean.  While I was growing up in Washington, there was little sense that the city was a true community, with a municipal character unique to itself and a cultural life of its own, not something connected to or derived from the federal government.  Before his short stint as a Foreign Service Officer, my dad ran an ordinary business, the kind every city and town has (he operated movie theaters); the parents of all my friends were in the same line—doctors, dentists, vets, lawyers, shoe store-owners, builders, liquor importers, factory-owners, even some farmers (because back then there were still family farms in Maryland and Virginia just outside the city).  To all of us, Washington was just our home city—but to everyone else, including many of the kids I went to school with (politician’s kids, military brats, children of foreign diplomats), Washington was the “capital of the United States,” the seat of government, not a real town.  We had poor restaurants, little in the way of theater, a losing joke of a baseball team (Washington: “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League!”) that even left town in 1960.  People traveled out of town to shop for clothes and we even had to go to Baltimore for deli.  (Assignment to Washington was not considered a plumb posting for foreign diplomats.  It was a backwater.  The book quotes one art dealer who arrived from France in 1945: “Washington was a village.  Cows were grazing on Georgia Avenue.”)  It took until the 1980s for Washington to grow into a real community, establishing itself at the same time as a cultural center.  But the fact that through all that time, there was an indigenous and vibrant art world in the District meant that real people did live there, that Washingtonians made things other than laws and bureaucratic rules.  The decades covered by WAM’s book and AU’s exhibit “bracket the evolution of Washington, D.C.’s art identity,” assert the book’s authors.

It’s high time Washingtonians and everyone else knew about this part of my native city.  That, Mr. Rasmussen, is more than worthy of a major art exhibit.  (It would be great, and really interesting, if a show devoted to Washington-area artists were mounted in New York and maybe traveled to cities like L.A. and Chicago.)  Even if the show is messy and unfocused artistically, without a clear aesthetic message, many of the artists in the show are good and quite a few are even great.  When I visited Quebec some years ago and then Vancouver, I made a point of going to the museums that were dedicated to the local art.  Both collections were mediocre at best, uninspiring—even the Québécois, who are more French than the French, didn’t inherit the art gene from their Old World forebears.  I mean, name three world-famous Canadian artists.  Okay, name one . . . .  That’s not a problem in Washington—you can name famous D.C. artists—it’s just that most people don’t know that’s where they’re from.  There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with the art on the AU walls—this wasn’t a bad art show; the problem was only that there were too many trees to see the forest.  But the mere fact that there was a Washington Art Matters is laudable and beneficial.  Not that either the book on which the exhibit was based nor the American University show was didactic—the book is dubbed “conversational” by Anderson.  In O’Sullivan’s words, Washington Art Matters was “an attempt to tell the story—make that the stories—of a city’s art scene, from the musty if modernist old guard to the funky vanguard”—and a most welcome one.  The city needed it, and the world needed it.  As Campello put it: “[T]hank you to American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, whose drive and insight and skill shows and demonstrates what a museum can do to become . . . a key part of a city.”

Washington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940-1990 (available from the AU Museum Shop and Amazon.com, but not at ordinary bookstores, including Barnes & Noble or The Strand) represents the final project of the Washington Arts Museum, a curatorial institution that, since its inception in 1999, mounted exhibits of work by significant, perhaps neglected, regional artists.  ”The focus of almost all the museums within the city is not local,” says the now-defunct non-profit’s website.  As part of its mission, WAM has documented Washington’s artistic history in audiotaped interviews and videotaped panel discussions with artists, curators, gallery directors, and others in the city’s art scene.  (The tapes and other WAM archival materials have been turned over to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.)  WAM founders Renee Butler and Giorgio Furioso see the book, which covers the years of WAM’s primary focus, as a finale to their efforts “to spotlight Washington‘s unique and creative community and history and to provide an alternative to the largely national and international focus of the city’s longstanding private and public art institutions and museums.”   (I stopped in at the Museum Store to have a look at the book and I overheard the clerk explaining to another customer that the creators of Washington Art Matters are planning a sequel which will bring the history of the District of Columbia’s art up to the present, covering the last two decades of local creativity.)  In terms that can also be applied to Rasmussen’s art show at the Katzen, Campello called the book an “intense and important labor of love” and Benjamin Forgey, a former art and architecture critic for the Washington Star  and the Washington Post, dubbed his afterword, “Art Life on the Edges,” “what I would like to be a love letter to Washington as an art city.”  That sort of goes for my report here, too, but I’d call mine a “thank-you note.”

[The gallery my parents bought into in the 1950s was the Gres Gallery, 1729 20th Street, N.W.  I once considered writing an article on the little gallery, but I found a dearth of documentation (though I suppose if I made a research trip to D.C., I’d find some information bearing on its history).  It got a passing mention in Washington Art Matters, however, so in the interest of nostalgia (mine), I’ve decided to append it to my report:

[What most artists wanted even then [the 1950s] was gallery representation, an agent who not only provided space for shows but also promoted sales and kept the books.  Fortunately, the still-active commercial pioneers . . . were joined by a number of new galleries . . . .

[One of the most ambitious was north of Dupont Circle, the Gres Gallery founded by a South American woman named Madame Tanya Gres [this is an error: Mrs. Gres was Spanish and her name was Tana], who soon sold the operation to 10 shareholders putting up $1,000 apiece.  Their manager Mrs. Hart Perry traveled to Europe and South America. Selecting works for first-in-America exhibits, such as oils by “a skinny young artist” named Fernando Botero.

[Although the Gres had little interest in showing local art, it created excitement among collectors who, until then bought only in New York and Chicago.  And it created a social scene—with Larry Rivers, playing jazz piano into the night.  Alice Denney remembers that gallery goers would arrive at her less-endowed operation the Jefferson Place Gallery trailing balloon bouquets from the Gres’s more elaborate openings.

[Gres Gallery was only the second gallery in the U.S. to mount a solo show of Fernando Botero’s work; MoMA bought his Mona Lisa from the Gres show.  It was the first U.S. gallery to exhibit abstract paintings from Poland in Fifteen Polish Painters, a whole show MoMA took to New York.  By the turn of the decade, most of the partners, many of whom were Foreign Service Officers, were transferred out of the country—my own parents went to Germany in 1962—and Gres Gallery closed.  “Helping out” in the gallery—I stuffed envelopes and such—and meeting artists at the vernissages the partners hosted are some of the most vivid and cherished memories of my childhood.  When I hung around the gallery and met some of the artists, none of their names meant anything to me at the time—I just knew they were artists and created the works I saw at the gallery.  I even made collages (cut-out construction paper, to be sure), inspired by a collagist exhibited at the gallery.  The experience provided me with an exciting and eye-opening art education before I was a teenager, and the influence has remained strong ever since.

[By the way, one additional sidelight, concerning Marjorie Phillips’s Night Baseball.  I doubt I was at that Nats-Yankees game—I’d have been four then—but later my dad took me to Griffith Stadium.  More significant, at least in terms of my memories, is the fact that Clare Griffith, the daughter of Calvin Griffith, owner of the Senators for whose adoptive father, Clark, the stadium was named, was a classmate in middle school.  I remember we got to listen to an occasional game on the radio in class, but I don’t think that was because of Griffith’s influence—Sidwell Friends School didn’t work that way—but we had an outing to a Nats game in the spring and there was also a pool party for the whole class at the Griffith’s home while Clare was at Sidwell as well.  (Calvin Griffith was the Branch Rickey of Washington.  He didn’t integrate the Senators, but he took our home team away, moving it Minnesota after the 1960 season where they became the Twins.  I lost interest in baseball at about that same time—but I don’t recall that that was a result of Griffith’s betrayal.  (I went away to school in ’61 and then abroad in ’63.  When I got to college, I did manage the ball team for two season.)]