Strange Art

 

[It seems I’ve been focusing on visual art on Rick On Theater over the past few weeks.  I started July off with a tribute to Sam Gilliam (posted on 2 July) and two weeks ago, I launched two-part profile of the pre-teen artist Andres Valencia (17 and 20 July).

[Over the years since I started the blog, I’ve raided my archive of pre-ROT reports on both theater and art.  Now I’ve reached back to the 2000s and put together a collection of vintage reports on art exhibits that focused on unusual, even peculiar art or artists.  For lack of a better descriptor, I’ve called the assemblage “Strange Art”—although, of course, strangeness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.]

DECEPTIONS AND ILLUSIONS: FIVE CENTURIES OF TROMPE L’OEIL PAINTING
National Gallery of Art, East Building
Washington, D.C.
9 & 12 January 2003 

Here’s my report on one of the art exhibits I saw while in Washington, D.C., over the year-end holidays of 2003.  On an art trip downtown, my mother and I went to the National Gallery of Art’s East Building to see two shows.  One was a Willem de Kooning (Dutch-born American, 1904-97), an exhibit on which I’m not going to comment here.  The other was unusual, but quite curious with respect to its theme.

After Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (29 September 2002-5 January 2003), which, as the title specifies, focused on the artist’s “figurative” drawings, we went upstairs to Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting (13 October 2002-2 March 2003).  Escaping Criticism (1874) by Pere Borrell del Caso (Spanish, 1835-1910), a painting of a boy climbing out of the frame of the painting, had been prominently featured in the New York Times as part of a review of this show (Holland Cotter, “Playing Tricks With Reality and Realism,” 11 October 2002). 

Actually, from my perspective (an unintended pun, as it turns out), that was the most interesting thing in the show.  It had an element of whimsy that seemed to be missing in all the other pieces (and this was a big show: 116 paintings, sculptures, books, prints, drawings, decorative arts, and one mosaic.) 

The concept behind the exhibit is that it presents examples from Roman times (several frescoes from Pompeii) through the 19th century of art intended to fool the viewers into thinking they’re looking at real objects, not paintings.  Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, was the guest curator and Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings at NGA, was coordinating curator

Some were remarkable as phenomena (not necessarily as art, you understand) because they were painted long before perspective was discovered; others used forced perspective—a favorite gimmick of the 18th century, as witness the stage settings of that era (that’s my insertion; it’s not in the exhibit—though there are some paintings that were for all intents and purposes little stage sets)—to fool the eye.  (That’s where my lame pun comes in, by the way.) 

The problem with the exhibit, for me at least, is that it’s repetitive and presents works as examples of an idea, not of good art.  The show’s divided into themes—fruit, insects, flowers, coming out of the frame (that’s where Escaping Criticism is), and so on—but the technique exemplified in each section is the same.  After a couple of themes, the idea was well established and everything became a repeat of what went before. 

Except for Escaping Criticism, none of the paintings themselves were particularly interesting, so after seeing the technique exemplified a couple dozen times, it was boring to me.  We rushed through the last several rooms of the show. 

(We were also pretty “arted out” from the de Kooning’s 65 works and the 20th-century exhibits we’d seen just before at An Artist’s Artist: Jacob Kainen’s Collection in the West Building [22 September 2002-9 February 2003; 77 prints and 2 drawings].  Unlike some culture-vultures, we go through an exhibit slowly, so it takes some time on our feet; one or two shows at a time is often all we can handle.)

[After I got home to New York, I loaded Escaping Criticism into my PC as the wallpaper for the desktop.  When properly sized, it looked as if the boy is climbing out of the monitor.  It gave me a chuckle every time I booted the computer up.  (My current wallpaper is Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which I think is one of the most beautiful paintings ever created.)]

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WHEN WE WERE YOUNG: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ART OF THE CHILD
Phillips Collection
Washington, D.C.
21-25 August 2006 

[The art in this small exhibit isn’t really so strange—but the point of it seemed . . . well, odd.  It’s meant to examine drawings by children, looking at the issues of present and future giftedness.  “Do childhood works by artists reveal traces of their future genius?” asked Leslie Camhi in the New York Times.  “What can the drawings of gifted children teach the viewer about the relationship between art and society?”

[The exhibit catalog included reproductions of childhood work by other now-famous artists, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and the 8-year-old Joan Miró (1893-1983).  It also includes 17th-century drawings by the very young Louis, Dauphin of France (1601-43), the future King Louis XIII (reigned: 1610-43).]

On Thursday, 17 August 2006, Mother and I took a bus to the Phillips Collection near D.C.’s Dupont Circle to see Klee and America.  As an adjunct to the Paul Klee (Swiss-born German, 1879-1940) exhibit, in a gallery next door is a display called When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (17 June-10 September 2006), one of the first museum exhibits, according to the New York Times, to look at children’s art from an aesthetic point of view. 

One of the curatorial points of Klee’s works is that he maintained a sort of childlike innocence in his pictures—not unlike Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910; see “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” in “Short Takes: Some Art Shows,” 17 June 2018), though the source and result are quite different—and the nearby exhibit of Washington children’s artworks is an extension of this notion. 

When We Were Young juxtaposes three childhood drawings by Klee and one by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) with a work by the mature artist and with work by children from the private collections of Rudolf Arnheim and Victor Lowenfeld, the best-known writers on the subject of 20th-century American children's drawings, and Melody Klein, a well-known psychoanalyst of children.

The exhibit catalogue, edited by modern and contemporary art scholar Jonathan Fineberg, who curated the exhibition, addresses the psychological implications of the children’s art, as did a lot of the press coverage.  (The New York Times ran a heavily illustrated, two-page article on the exhibit in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday edition, “If a Little Genius Lives in the House, What's on the Fridge?” by Leslie Camhi, 18 June 2006.)

I’m not competent to comment on that, or even really to understand it, and I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the artistic content of the works on display.  [Sixteen years later, I seem to have shifted my position some when I wrote my profile of 10-year-old painter Valencia, but he was entering the professional field and selling his art for tens of thousands of dollars.  He was also appearing on television and sitting for published interviews.]

I’ll say here only that, aside from the three Klees and the Picasso, the children’s artworks shown in When We Were Young were by youngsters ranging in age from 3 to 5 and revealed various levels of skill and manual dexterity—as one might expect.  The level of perception concerning the works around them was universally astonishing.  [I felt the same way about Valencia’s work, but he was 10, which is quite different from 3-5, I think.]

The interesting thing in this exhibit, for me, is the presence of the several childhood drawings by the future greats.  One of the Klees, Woman With Parasol (1883-5), was one he did at around age five or so; the Picasso, Bullfight and Pigeons (1890), was from when he was about nine.  It astonishes me that these drawings still exist and that someone had them on hand to display!  It’s like someone knew they were going to grow up to be famous artists, so they kept these early pieces.

As I said, neither of these shows made all that much of an impression on me with respect to the art on display.  You can tell this is so because there are no paintings I wanted to come back for on a midnight shopping trip.  (I’m running out of wall space anyway.)

[This exhibit, though I saw it almost 16 years ago, came to mind recently while I was writing my profile of 10-year-old artist Andres Valencia.  I kept wondering, as I was reading and writing about the young painter, if there was any real correlation between the kind of attention he’s been drawing this summer and future success as an adult artist.  As the New York Times’ Leslie Camhi pondered, does the talent of a child artist predict future achievement?

[I also wondered if any of the baby geniuses of the past, such as Klee and Picasso spotlighted here, received the kind of excitement Valencia has been getting.  I suspect they might have if they had the kind of media—TV, Internet videos, and social media postings—that we have today, but since they didn’t, it took looking back at their youthful output after they reached the high level of acclaim as adults to see the nascent talent exhibited when they were children.]

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DARK METROPOLIS: IRVING NORMAN’S SOCIAL SURREALISM
American University Museum, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
Washington, D.C.
29 November 2007 

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend of 2007 because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  (And we’ve just come out of a stagehands’ strike in New York that shut down most of Broadway since earlier this month.)

I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November, and on Saturday, my mother and I drove to the nearby American University Museum in the Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle, right near Mom’s apartment.

We went to see Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (6 November-30 December 2007; see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 26 November 2017), an exhibit of 79 paintings and drawings by the Colombian artist (b. 1932) of the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism (14 works on paper and 25 large canvases; 9 April-29 July 2006) was in the gallery below the Botero show in the AU museum, so we had a look. 

Norman (American, 1906-1989), a West Coast artist, used his art to inspire social reforms.  Born Isaac Noachowitz in Vilnius, Lithuania, the artist drew on his experience fighting fascism in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) to create highly detailed, monumental works that critique the inhumanity of war, the inequity of capitalism, and the tyranny of the elite. 

What he painted were depictions of a dystopia where capitalists essentially consume not only the products of the workers’ labor, but the workers themselves.  His canvases are like story boards for Tim Burton on acid.  George Romero with a social conscience. 

While Botero never intended to sell his Abu Ghraib works, collectors have bought—and, I assume, displayed—Norman’s dark, demented works; I don’t know how anyone could live with one of them on his walls.  (Reports are, unsurprisingly, that Norman didn’t sell well—but he did sell!)  They’re fascinating, however, and engrossing—the way a horrible auto accident is: you can’t stop looking at them, and searching for the minute details of societal disintegration in them. 

In a statement, Norman said, ”I try to go beyond illusion to tell the truth.”  Well, it’s his vision of the truth—the man had a horrific view of the world.  (“He scares people,” wrote a San Francisco critic.  That’s an understatement!) 

In his Washington Post review, Michael O’Sullivan, who encountered Norman’s work in 2001, wrote: “Life [in Norman’s art] is a nasty, brutish and short business from cradle to grave, interrupted only by bouts of unhealthy eating, joyless copulating and slavishly serving our corrupt masters.”  

On his blog, Lines and Colors, Charley Parker, an artist and illustrator (not the jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker), asserts that Norman’s art was “suppressed” by the “modernist art establishment” for a number of reasons, among them: “because it intentionally makes us uncomfortable” and “because his horrifically elegant tableaux of the landscape of suffering humanity, that expose how those with power dominate, manipulate, control and use those without, make those same powerful individuals uncomfortable and angry.”

In Meeting of the Elders (1977), bar charts hang like tapestries in a great hall where a cigar-smoking council emerges from stacks of gold coins atop human-skin rugs.  Norman’s Air Raid Shelter (1958-1977) resembles a nuclear reactor, with the people inside twisted into Guernica-like agony.  Even a topic as simple as rush hour is intensified to the point of anguish: dozens of cars become jail cells to the weary commuters of The Bridge (1946). 

Norman borrowed from religious imagery for his grand triptych, Human Condition (1980), and the towering (27' high) Crucifixion (1961-62), and from neoclassicism for his epic battle scenes, which look as though they could have taken place on the set of the movie Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927). 

Perhaps the bleakest and most hard-hitting of Norman’s predictions is our era of cause célèbre in To Have and Have Not (Charity Gala) (1979), where futuristic models and socialites mingle and dance on a runway surrounded by the pockmarked and skeletal.  As one San Francisco critic wrote in 1970, “You may not like what he reveals.  You probably didn’t like what you read on the front page this morning.”  No newspaper story is as terrifying as Norman’s world, however.

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JOHN DREYFUSS: INVENTIONS
The Sylvia Berlin Katzen Sculpture Garden, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
American University, Washington, D.C.
13 October 2009 

On Saturday, 26 September 2009, Mom and I drove over to the Katzen Arts Center at American University to have a look at John Dreyfuss: Inventions (8 September 2009-17 January 2010), an exhibit of six sculptures by this Washington artist.  (Mother had been an acquaintance of Dreyfuss’s parents and grandparents, though I didn’t know any of them; Dreyfuss [American, b. 1949] isn’t an artist I’d encountered before.) 

The outdoor exhibit in the Katzen’s sculpture garden (there’s another show of works for sale at Hemphill Fine Arts downtown) is of large-scale pieces evoking bones (one piece in front of the AU building housing the Art Center is a giant Vertebra) and “early tool shapes” in a study the Center’s brochure characterized as “examining the relationship between form, strength of materials and the harnessing of power.” 

For my dough—and thank God I didn’t have to expend any—this is close to Quatsch.  I was underwhelmed, to put it succinctly.  Of curiosity value, the manufacture of the sculptures was by a firm in Minneapolis, Alliant Techsystems, that calls itself “America’s largest supplier of commercial and military ammunition, a top manufacturer of satellite components and missile-defense systems” whose best customer is the army.  (The Hemphill exhibit includes a group of three “abstracted, truncated models of submarines,” collectively called Enigma [2009]—named for the World War II German encoding/decoding machine.)

ATK, as it calls itself, made the monumental sculptures from “composite materials,” presumably some of the same stuff out of which it makes post-modern weapons.  “Not the typical offerings at your local art store,” quipped Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post (“Sleek, Silent and Powerful,” 23 September 2009).  I’m not going to go into any more detail than this because, frankly, despite the oddity of their fabrication, I was unmoved.

[I posted an examination of the ideas of aesthetics philosopher Susanne Langer on art, beauty, and theater on 4 and 8 January 2010.  She had a few things to say about some of the kinds of art and artists on which I reported in the collection above.  For instance, Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions.  Where, then, does beauty enter the equation?

[Well, in a way, it doesn’t.  It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art.  “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criterion Langer applies to art when she considers beauty.  It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant.  In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

[“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition.  In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty.

[The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work.

[I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings over 60 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive.

[When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it.  Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism.  We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in.  Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

[Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging.]

Art By Indigenous Peoples

[Pursuant to my recent article about my parents’ art collecting (“A Passion for Art,” posted on 21 November), I wrote a little about my father’s connection to the then-private Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.  I’ve also recently been planning a visit downtown to the New York City branch of the National Museum of the American Indian (a report on which should appear within a couple of weeks, though I’ve written on NMAI before on Rick On Theater).  These two preoccupations have prompted me to revive two archival reports, both brief, on exhibits at each of those museums that predate the start of ROT; to round out this post, I’ve added a report I never published on an exhibit of another aboriginal art collection, this time Australian, all under the title “Art by Indigenous Peoples.” ]

THE FIRST AMERICAN ART

(NMAI-New York, 2004)

On Friday, 30 April 2004, my mother and I went down to Bowling Green to the National Museum of the American Indian.  (You may know that a new NMAI is opening later this year on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  The Smithsonian took over this private museum, then simply the Museum of the American Indian and located at 155th and Broadway, in 1989.  It moved into the former U.S. Custom House downtown in ’94.  I don’t remember when the Smithsonian started construction on the D.C. building, and I don’t know if the current collection at what’s called the George Gustav Heye Collection—named for the man who started the private museum with his own collection of American Indian art—will be moved to D.C. [it wasn’t], but the Custom House will remain a satellite facility of NMAI.) 

I caught the review of a show at NMAI just before I left D.C.—The First American Art: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection of American Indian Art from 24 April 2004-29 May  2006 at the Heye Center—and suggested to Mom that we check it out when she was here.  Like the Maya exhibit at the National Gallery [4 April to 25 July 2004 in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington; report posted on “Theater & Art,” 14 August 2014], the focus of this show is the artistic appeal of the items, not their ethnographic value. 

Of course, there are pots and bowls (including one gorgeous example of Maria Martinez’s black-on-black Pueblo pottery!), baskets, beadwork, carvings, katchina dolls, and such things that you would consider art, even though they were made for use rather than for aesthetic display, but there are also pieces of clothing, saddles and saddle bags, pouches, and other items that would ordinarily be in an anthropological exhibit.  But it was their aesthetics that was under consideration—both in the show at NMAI and in the private collection at the couple’s New York home. 

I was also surprised to see several drawings on paper—pages from books made and illustrated by Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, clearly under the influence—and even at the behest—of Euro-Americans.  These illustrations were of Indian subjects, of course, and from an Indian perspective.  As such, they included not only depictions of Indian ceremonies, but also of Indian victories over white invaders.  They may have taken the lead of the dominant European culture, but they didn’t cop out!  I never knew the Indians did this kind of thing—at least not until modern times when Indian artists adopted and adapted Western techniques for their own themes.

The First American Art is a medium-sized show—200 objects, but all in one room.  (There are other exhibits, part of the permanent collection, all around, of course, so there’s a lot to see if you want to hang about.  That depends, of course, on how interested you are in Indian art and artifacts.)  Much of the stuff dates from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, but there are some really old things here and there.  A couple of pots from the Pueblo Ancestors (who used to be called Anasazi until the Pueblos objected—it’s apparently really a put-down from another native culture) which were not only beautiful, but in incredibly good condition for crockery that’s over 1000 years old!  (There were also a couple of carved implements from before that—back into BCE and double-digit CE. 

American Indian stuff wasn’t made to last—it was intended to be used until it was used up.  They weren’t made of stuff that stood up against time—no metal or stone; it’s mostly pottery, wood, skins, straw.  Stuff that old is really, really rare!)  I was delighted to find a number of pieces from the Pacific Northwest—work I like very much—and there were even some Inuit/Eskimo items (even though they’re not actually Indians). 

One thing I found annoying, because the exhibit focused on the aesthetics and not the cultural implications, was that, though the items were identified by tribe/culture, there was no indication where these people lived or anything to identify them except their names.  I know some of the peoples exhibited, but many were strange names to me, and it would have been interesting to me to know what part of the country they came from.  Items were grouped strangely—not by region or tribe, not by similarity of the objects or of technique or medium/material—so I couldn’t guess who might have been close to whom when techniques looked alike.  I guess the curators didn’t think that was significant, but I was curious.  Even a map with the tribal areas marked would have been sufficient, or a note on the labels telling the area inhabited by the culture. 

Nonetheless, the objects themselves were really beautiful—many of them truly exquisite.  This show is well worth a visit (I saw a number of things I’d come back for after the place closes for the night—one of Mom’s and my fantasy “midnight shopping trips”!) and the building itself is wonderful—a terrific (re)use of an old Beaux Arts building whose original purpose has expired.  (The customs function moved out in 1973 and the 1907 building was slated for demolition.)  The Smithsonian did an excellent job turning the Custom House into a beautiful exhibit space while preserving the original interior, sort of like a ghost of the building’s past life hovering over its present.  (The southern tip of Manhattan has lots of things to explore.  It’s easily a day’s outing, and on a nice day it’s a good place to spend time wandering around the streets and parks seeking out little-known monuments and historic sites.  NMAI couldn’t be easier to get to—the exit of the Bowling Green subway station on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line is right in front of the building’s entrance.) 

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AFRICAN VISION

(NMAfA, 2007)

On the afternoon of Thursday, 15 February 2007, my mother and I drove down to the National  Mall in Washington and checked out a small exhibit of the Walt Disney-Tishman Collection which had opened at the National Museum of African Art that day.  The exhibit, African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection, consists of 88 items from the 525-piece collection which Disney donated to the Smithsonian in 2005. 

After my father returned in 1967 from serving at the embassy in Bonn, he was introduced to Warren Robbins (1923-2008), a man who had had the same job there, cultural attaché, prior to my dad.  (Robbins had the job from 1958 to 1960; Dad had held the post from 1965 to 1967.)  When he retired from the Foreign Service, Robbins settled in Washington, and one day he read that the townhouse that had been the Capitol Hill home of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s Recorder of Deeds for Washington, was up for sale.  He decided it would be a shame if the house were sold and torn down or converted into a condominium, losing the original historic residence forever. 

Robbins had some family money so he bought the Douglass house without knowing what he was going to do with it at first.  He ultimately determined that it should house African art, which he himself had collected for some time, and he set about establishing the Museum of African Art in 1964, the first museum in the United States devoted exclusively to the art and culture of Africa.  Eventually, with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the MAA expanded to the nearby houses—nine ultimately—and included a display of modern Western art alongside the African pieces that had inspired them—works by artists like Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.  (There was also a room that had been Douglass’s office in the house that was furnished as it might have been in his day.) 

My father worked for Robbins in these years on a volunteer basis as director of development, and we became very interested in African art as a consequence.  (After the expansion and redesign financed by the Rockefeller grant, the museum had a reopening gala in the spring of 1971, the time I was stationed at Fort Holabird in nearby Baltimore.  Hubert Humphrey (1911-78), the former vice president, was an honorary chairman of the museum board; Senator Humphrey—he returned to the Senate in 1970—couldn’t attend, so, attired in my army dress blues, I escorted Muriel (1912-98), his wife, to the reopening.  Now that was a formidable—and delightful—lady, in the full meaning of that word!) 

In August 1979, the Smithsonian Institution acquired the MAA and established a home for it on the Mall in an underground facility (next to the similarly-constructed Sackler Gallery of Asian Art) beside the old Smithsonian Castle.  The current museum was begun in 1983 and completed in 1987.  [I have posted an article on ROT, “The National Museum of African Art,” recounting this history in more detail on 19 January 2015.]

I hadn’t visited the NMAfA for long time, and this new exhibit sounded exciting—the Disney-Tishman collection became famous for two reasons.  The first is that, lacking a home of its own, it has often been out of sight for long periods, making it a sort of legend among African-art enthusiasts.  The second, and more significant, is that it contains some unique examples of art from the African cultures of, mostly, West Africa from Liberia to Nigeria.  The collection had been assembled over decades by New York real-estate developer Paul Tishman (If I were a Tishman . . . .) who sold it in 1984 to the Walt Disney Company.  Disney had planned to exhibit it in a specially-built facility at EPCOT Center in Florida, but that pavilion was never built and the collection remained in limbo, going out on loan (to Paris, Jerusalem, L.A., and New York’s Met) from a climate-controlled storage warehouse in California where it was available to scholars and researchers (such as the animators for Disney’s 1994 Lion King), but not publicly open to viewers on a regular basis. 

In 2005, Disney donated the collection to the Smithsonian and the NMAfA has been curating it since then.  The small sample of the collection in African Vision covers 75 cultures from 20 countries; most of the objects are from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but a few are from the 16th through the 18th centuries.  (Objects of African art, like those of Native Americans, seldom last very long for two reasons: they are made for use, not aesthetic or decorative display, and they are made mostly of perishable materials.  Very old objects are rare.) 

Some of the objects in African Vision were familiar from the years my folks were involved in the original African art museum, like the Bakota reliquary figure, a stunning stylized face of brass and wood from Gabon, and others were new to me, such as one virtually naturalistic figure from Madagascar of a warrior carved from wood and painted.  Needless to say, there are lots of masks and carved figurines, mostly of women, though they differ greatly in iconography, size, and style from culture to culture.  There are several carved doors, a symbol of status in an African village, and one carved stool, usually the perch of the headman. 

There are several pieces that clearly show the influence of European exploration, including the oldest item in the exhibit, a hunting horn from Sierra Leone carved from a single elephant’s tusk which is dated to about 1500.  Not only are there carvings of letters from the Latin alphabet, but the horn displays the coats-of-arms of both Spain and Portugal.  (It was apparently commissioned by the crown prince of Portugal as a gift for the king of Spain.)  

The most curious piece of this kind is a small 17th-century copper-alloy sculpture from the Congo of a man in a crucifixion-like posture.  The museum label explains that the cross (which is missing from this item) is a portentous design in Bakongo iconography.  The crucifixes worn by the European missionaries caught the attention of the Africans, and they appropriated the form, without necessarily the religious implication, for their own uses.  (This figure was almost certainly mounted on a wooden cross, which has been lost or decayed.)  

Among the most beautiful and intricate works, however, are the few beaded pieces, including a Yoruba crown (Nigeria) and an elaborate scabbard for a ceremonial staff, covered in the glass beads that are the frequent medium for African beadwork.  Unlike American Indian beadwork I’ve seen, the African beadwork here is not flat; it’s full of relief, some of it quite high, with full human figures and faces of both people and animals raised from the surface. 

Western artists of the early years of the 20th century discovered the imagery of Africa, but it astonishes me that the general public, even the art-consuming public, relegated African art to the realms of anthropology and ethnology rather than art until relatively late in the 20th century.  Remember that Warren Robbins’s museum, started in the last third of the century, was the first of its kind; even American Indian art had by then been long accepted as an extraordinary aesthetic accomplishment.  I remember being immediately taken with the sophistication, not to mention the pure beauty, of the pieces I saw when my parents first took me over to the MAA on Capitol Hill.  The Bakota reliquaries I saw then and the Bambara antelopes from Mali remain among the most stunning pieces of art I have ever seen still today.  How could anyone overlook that?  (Yes, I know: it’s ethnocentrism and racism—I still don’t get it.)

*  *  *  *

AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART TRIENNIAL: CULTURE WARRIORS

(Katzen Arts Center, 2009)

On Saturday, 26 September 2009, Mom and I drove over to the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle to have a look at an exhibit that was of interest to my mother (John Dreyfuss: Inventions, an exhibit of sculpture by a Washington artist with whose parents and grandparents Mother had been acquainted), but which underwhelmed me, to put it succinctly.  The Katzen Center, however, had several other collections on exhibit and we wandered through the museum to see what we could see. 

Of most interest was a display called Australian Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors (10 September-8 December 2009), on tour from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.  (This is an abbreviated exhibit—90 works by 31 artists; the full show, which often contained included nearly twice as many artworks, toured Australia starting in 2007.)  It’s an assembly of pieces by Aboriginal artists from every state and territory of Australia.  It’s not entirely accurate to call it “indigenous” art because, like the Inuit whom I discussed recently on my blog (see “Pudlo Pudlat, Inuit Artist,” 28 September 2009), some native Australians didn’t have much in the way of decorative art before colonialism.  The works shown here, though entirely sui generis, are frequently derived from styles and techniques learned from Europeans (including video art).  The materials used are indigenous (several pieces were works on bark), though, and application of the techniques is unique. 

What is most fascinating about the collection is that all the works express some sort of political point, often about the displacement of the tribe from which the artist comes or the destruction of the habitat and environment in which the people were living.  The exhibition’s “very existence acknowledges a country’s history of state-mandated racism,” observed Jessica Dawson in her Washington Post review.  That’s why the exhibit was subtitled Culture Warriors.

'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.)]