Curatorial Flashbacks #11: Meet George Augusta

By Carl Belz

Portrait of Warren E. Burger, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court by George Augusta © George Augusta, 1984, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in. (The Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States) )

You probably never heard of George Augusta. Not unless you’ve spent a lot of time hanging around the boardrooms and administrative offices of Harvard University, or Harvard ‘s Medical School or Law School or Business School, or Wellesley College, or M.I.T., or Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital or Children’s Hospital, or the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court of the United States, or a whole bunch of places like them up and down the East Coast and beyond, in which case you might have seen a few of the many portraits of dignitaries associated with—and honored by—those institutions that he was commissioned to paint during a distinguished career of more than five decades following his completion of military service in World War II. Even then it isn’t likely you learned his name, since the brass plaques accompanying those pictures—if there are any—generally identify only the subject, not the artist. 

Nor did I know George Augusta’s name, let alone his work, when my then boss, Brandeis Vice President David Steinberg, asked me to come up with an artist to do a portrait of the retiring chairman of the University’s Board of Trustees. I immediately suggested Andy Warhol, who was laughingly dismissed as inappropriate, and then found myself briefly stymied. The art world I knew—the art world of the 1970s, that is—didn’t include boardroom portraitists. Alex Katz? Alice Neel? They both did portraits, but their portraits were meant for the home or the museum, they wouldn’t fit the boardroom any better than Warhol’s would. But then I had an inspiration: I remembered the “Portraits Inc.” ad that I’d been seeing in Art in America for longer than I could remember, so I called and asked them to send me half a dozen portfolios that would give me a range of styles to select from. Which they were glad to do, but which turned out to be a dead end. The paintings were dry and academic, many looked as though they’d been done from photographs, the figures were enhanced by pretentious architectural features and scenic backgrounds, and the surfaces seemed generally lifeless.  

I was back at square one when spouse Barbara suggested I was thinking about my assignment from the wrong vantage point, I was thinking New York instead of Boston—Boston, where there are colleges and universities, law schools, business schools, and hospitals on every street corner, every one of them housing a boardroom hung with the kind of portraits I was looking for, portraits radiant with dignity and tradition. That equation led me before long to the Vose Galleries of Boston, a name synonymous with American pictures through a family business that had been founded in 1841, their home base just a block or two away from the contemporary galleries I regularly visited on Newbury Street. There I met Bill Vose, who, upon hearing about my mission, introduced me to the artistic world of George Augusta. 

I liked what I saw. George Augusta’s signature look, a descendent of Impressionism, blended confident and airy brushwork with a perceptive eye for likeness that felt everywhere natural, allowing easy engagement with his subject, and clearly indicating he worked from direct observation. With appropriate modesty, he allowed his pictures to be about his subjects instead of about himself. Relying on neither technical virtuosity nor the trappings of class—both of which plagued the portrait genre as I had come to know it—he comfortably partnered form and content while respecting in equal measures the full energies of art and life alike. He knew his job of work, and I strongly recommended we sign on to his program when I reported back to David Steinberg.  

Portrait of Rosalynn Smith Carter by George Augusta, © George Augusta,1984, oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in. (White House Collection).

There followed over the next decade four or five Brandeis portrait commissions, each fulfilling the promise of quality and meaning we’d hoped for, each providing a distinct esthetic pleasure—or so I’ve always imagined—for the president and members of the board to savor as they went about their business. Yet my favorite was destined not for the boardroom but for the University’s Goldfarb Library. It was a portrait of “First Lady” Thelma Sachar that would proudly hang next to the portrait of her husband, Abram Sachar, the Founding President of Brandeis and, at the time, still the University’s Chancellor. The only problem with this plan was that Abe’s portrait had been painted in the 1950s, a full three decades before Thelma’s would be painted, a time warp that seriously risked making the couple appear as mother and son instead of husband and wife. So I spoke with George and asked him what he could do, inquired whether his arsenal included any secret brushes or pigments that might enable a more youthful Thelma to appear during the several sittings she would have with him. To which he generously responded that he would make it happen—and so he did, he worked his magic, which is the magic of art, to everyone’s full satisfaction.

Through my association with George Augusta, I encountered a first-rate, highly successful artist working in an art world that orbited in tandem with the art world I knew but never intersected it. Had I not been assigned my unusual task—a task I admit to undertaking with reluctance, as I tacitly subscribed to the conventional wisdom of the time and so regarded boardroom portraits as mere shadows of a once noble ancestry—I would have missed entirely the rewards I discovered in George Augusta’s pictorial world. Which got me to thinking about other art worlds that might be out there, unknown and/or unrecognized by members of my art world, but the specter of what I might be missing never haunted me. I realized that I could never see every picture painted everywhere in the world at every current moment—because that kind of cultural access was as unimaginable as it was unrealistic—so I contented myself with having learned to think twice before presuming an equation between the parameters of my world and the parameters of the world at large. What did haunt me when thinking about multiple art worlds was a vision of art itself, of its vastness, of its breadth and depth, of its ability constantly to sustain and renew itself, while we—we curators, critics, art historians, and sometimes even our artists—regularly did our best to cut it down to size, bring it within our reach, and squeeze it into our theoretical constructs. I know, we’re just the messengers here, the go-betweens linking art with its audience, and I know I’m not supposed to shoot the messenger. But I also know that the messengers don’t always do justice to the message’s meaning. 

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

Serra and Caro at the Met

By Charles Kessler

Richard Serra, From left, works from 1989, The United States Courts Are Partial to the Government, No Mandatory Patriotism (center) and The United States Government Destroys Art,  (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times).

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, April 13, 2011–August 28, 2011

The usually perceptive Roberta Smith starts her review of Serra’s retrospective with this: Few artists have pushed drawing to such sculptural and even architectural extremes as Richard Serra. The thing is, most of Serra’s “drawings” (or should it be “drawing” as in the title of the show — as if he’s there all day drawing) simply aren’t drawings. Some are paint on canvas, some are even stretched. Simply calling paintings drawings isn’t defying convention or stretching the definition of drawing. He may as well call those room-sized installations he does sculptures. What? ...Oh. 

She’s on the money elsewhere in her review when she writes: But at times this show suggests that without the steel forms and volumes of the sculptures, the work can sometimes seem at once meager and histrionic. And that pretty much sums up my take on the show: pretty thin stuff, and surprisingly arty — even precious at times. One work in particular struck me this way, Institutionalized Abstract Art, 1976, re-created for this exhibition. It reminded me both of Japanese art at its most refined and James Turrell.

Richard Serra, Institutionalized Abstract Art, 1976/2011, Paintstick drawn on the wall of the Art Institute of Chicago on the occasion of the seventy-second American exhibition, 86 x 89 in., Private collection. copyright Richard Serra

What separates Serra's "drawing" from the work of hundreds of other artists who make minimal, monochromatic art, is there’s an architectural aspect to SOME of his “drawings.”  Some create the illusion of looking into dark voids or tilted planes. And to Serra’s credit, he knows how to create a dramatic space. They don’t, however, as has been suggested a lot, suck the light out of the room — there’s literally less light shining on them. (One room I noticed has two lights on the “drawing” and four on the adjacent white walls.) Most of his work, however, is pretty straight-forward minimal abstraction.

Serra’s personality sometimes works in his favor and sometimes works against him. His ambitiousness allows him to conceive of those enormous, room-sized sculptures, and to get the Met to install the work the way he wants. On the other hand he can be inauthentic, bombastic and downright cheesy. I mean, look at those titles, for God sake. The guy is shameless.


Anthony Caro on the Roof, The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

Anthony Caro, Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof, April 27, 2010.

What is this obsession with Greenberg? Why can’t people write about Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski or Anthony Caro without mentioning Greenberg. Has there ever been another critic or another artist that this is the case?  In the second paragraph of his condescending and dismissive review, Ken Johnson dredges up Greenberg: The authoritarian, arch-formalist critic Clement Greenberg was an admirer, friend and studio consultant. With characteristically imperious self-assurance, he told an interviewer in 1968, “Anthony Caro is a major artist — the best sculptor to come up since David Smith."  What's with this? Is Greenberg's mere approval (42 years ago!) somehow automatically condemning? Let it go already. ...It’s got to be something oedipal.

A little further on Johnson writes: Remarking on Mr. Caro’s roots in English tradition, Greenberg wrote in a 1965 essay, “Without maintaining necessarily that he is a better artist than Turner, I would venture to say that Caro comes closer to a genuine grand manner — genuine because original and un-synthetic — than any English artist before him.” No artist should take that kind of statement seriously, but it seems that Mr. Caro found it hard to resist.

Well actually Caro resisted the “grand manner” and that’s the problem with this show. If Caro had some of Serra’s chutzpah, maybe he could pull off a theatrical space like the Met’s roof. But he’s not bombastic, his work is intimate, however powerful. Serra's art may be thin, trite, and humorless, but it is helped immensely by his space; Caro’s art is rich, original and playful and is killed by this space.

When I came off the elevator, Caro’s sculptures looked sad and dingy, as if they'd been out there for thirty years. It also seemed there were too few of them, like a barren closet with only a few things hanging in it. In the context of this grand space overlooking Central Park and all, there was a desolate quality to the exhibition, even on a gorgeous spring day — or maybe because of it.

I saw one of Caro’s sculptures (End Up, 2010) at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery recently, and it worked much better inside where it was set off by walls so the sculptures could play off them. The space in this show is just too open.

Anthony Caro, End Up, 2010, steel, 72x90x62 in. (Collection of the artist, courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York).

The only thing that seems to work well up there are spectacles like Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú or Roxy Paine on the Roof: Maelstrom.

Caro is credited with taking sculpture off the pedestal in the sixties. He wasn't the first to do so (probably that overachieving pest Picasso was), but he carried it further and drew more implications from it than any other artist. And it was more than mere formal innovation; it meant that sculpture inhabited the same phenomenological space we do. (See my posts on Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Cezanne and Picasso.)  Likewise, his use of industrial materials (i.e., not art materials like bronze or marble) makes the work more accessible; and spreading the sculpture out along the floor engages the viewer -- as opposed to monolithic sculpture like that of Caro's teacher Henry Moore (who also worked in bronze).

Caro is currently working on a huge multi-part public sculpture for three blocks of the Park Avenue meridian. It’s supposed to be installed next year. I’m afraid it just isn't his thing -- but artists in their late phase often surprise. This is the third show in the last few months by great 87-year-old artists (Charles Garabedian and Ellsworth Kelly were the others). 1924 must have been a good year for an artist to be born.  



P. S. After the Met, I went to the Guggenheim to see The Great Upheaval show again, and I was really taken by the Franz Marc paintings on view. Wouldn’t a major exhibition of Franz Marc’s paintings be a valuable contribution to the field?

Franz Marc, Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh), 1911. Oil on canvas, 55 3/8 x 74 1/2 inches (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Franz Marc,  Stables (Stallungen), 1913. Oil on canvas, 29 x 62 inches (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

African Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Charles Kessler

I was disappointed I didn’t get to see the Tishman/Disney collection of African art when I went to Washington last week, so after looking at the Richard Serra and Anthony Caro shows at the Met a few days ago, I decided to spend time studying the Met's African art.  It's quite simply some of the best art in the city -- some of the best art anywhere.

Traditional African artists were respected professionals who underwent rigorous training in the styles and conventions of their culture, but artists were expected to make interesting variations on traditional themes. Standards were very high, and their degree of skill was acknowledged and the subject of considerable discussion.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if one of the reasons African artists were so respected, and their art is so powerful, is because it evolved when there was no written language. It was left to artists, as a result, to physically manifest a culture's wisdom, history, law, morality, etc. The incentive, the necessity, to produce richly meaningful art must have been enormous. 

African art, of course, has a staggeringly expressive range, as you'd expect of the art of a country that's more than three times the size of the continental United States. But I want to focus here on art that is elegant and graceful -- at least what is thought of as elegant and graceful in western terms.  It is an art based on nature without copying nature. This is a subtle and sophisticated art that's abstracted down to the essentials.  Here are some of my favorites. (I included the acquisition number in the captions so you can easily look them up on the Met's Collection Database.)

The first two works are relatively old and are breathtaking examples from the Edo Empire (1440-1897), the pre-colonial African state of Benin, located in what is now Nigeria.  (Coincidentally, the Edo period in Japan was about the same time, 1603 - 1868, but there is no connection.)

Head of Oba, 16th C, Edo peoples, Nigeria, Court of Benin, brass (Met #1979.206)

Detail: Head of Oba. Click to enlarge.

Both these sculptures (the brass Head of Oba and the ivory Queen Mother Pendant Mask) epitomize Itutu (or Tut), the Yoruba word for "cool" or "serene" or "composed." Itutu is one of the most important aesthetic ideals that Robert Thompson learned about in interviews with traditional African dancers and artists and documented in his classic African Art in Motion. (I treasure this book and it's missing -- if I loaned it to someone out there, please return it.) They also exemplify another aesthetic ideal Thompson's informants held: a balance between realistic portraiture and abstraction.

Queen Mother Pendant Mask - lyoba, 16th C, Edo peoples, ivory, iron, copper, 9x5x3 in (Met #1978.412.323)

Ewe peoples are from Ghana and Togo, the western part of Benin where this striking terracotta sculpture is from. (Note the subtle asymmetry --  one horn is slightly bigger than the other.)

Buffalo Head, 19-20th C, Ewe peoples, Togo, terracotta, 9x9x5 (Met #1979.206.1)

The Bamana peoples live in west Africa, and are mostly known for their flamboyantly swooping antelope masks (see the  photo below this), but I wanted to include this unusual abstract animal (a water buffalo?) because it, and the buffalo head above, beautifully illustrate the case for the sophistication and subtlety of abstract African art. This is not mere design -- there's something about these works that feels alive and vital, which is another aesthetic ideal Thompson wrote about.

Figure - Boine (Boli), 19th-20th C, Bamana peoples, Mali, wood, sacrificial materials (patina), 14x8x21 (Met #1979.206.175)

Headdress (Sogoni Koun), 19th–20th century, Bamana peoples, Mali, Wood, cane, string, bamboo, 23x8x10 in, (Met #1979.206.158)

The Met's website has only this poor black and white picture of a door made by the Baule peoples (below), but I was able to get a good detailed shot that gives a better idea of the graceful drawing and beautiful golden color of this masterpiece. Doors are interesting because they're bas-reliefs rather than sculptures and deal more with drawing and pattern than rounded form.

Door (Anuan), 19th-mid 20th C, Baule peoples, Cote d'Ivoire, wood, pigment, 62x23x3 in (Met #1979.206.120)

Detail: Door (Anuan). Click to enlarge.

The exhibition label for this figure, and a gallery talk I overheard, made note of its "slight bilateral asymmetry."  Thompson's informants felt perfect symmetry is deadening and that slight asymmetry leads to vitality. Of course this applies to a lot of art -- to Cezanne for example.

Figure, 19th -20th C, Mumuye peoples, Nigeria, wood 36x7x6 in (Met #1983.189)

Headress - Serpent (A-Mantsho-na-Tshol), 19th-20th C, Baga peoples, Guinea, wood, pigment, 55 in (Met #1978.412.339

For some reason installations of African art are lit in a dark and spooky theatrical manner, as if it's night in the jungle and the natives are dancing around a fire. Documentary films and photographs of ceremonies where this art is used show how naive this notion is. The ceremonies clearly take place in broad daylight, usually on a dusty field. To its credit, the Met treats this work with more respect.

Installation view, Masquerades Masks, 19th-20th C,  Baga and Nalu peoples, Guinea

Finally, there's this very old sculpture (13th Century) that's simple and sensual but, because it's so raw and gut-wrenching, it doesn't quite fit in with the other work. It's such a powerful piece I want to include it anyway.

Seated figure, 13th C, Djenne peoples, Mali, terracotta, 10x12 in (Met #1981.218)

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

A Parable by Carl Belz

I went outside this morning and was struck by the realization that all of my neighbors are writers. It happened again at the post office when I saw my acquaintances from around town, they were writers too, every one of them. Even people I didn’t know—I could tell they were writers. On I went to the market where, to my astonishment, everything seemed to have changed overnight. I was assaulted by a whole new battery of signs: Discount Words—The Writers Paradise! Check Our Metaphors Bin, A Cornucopia Of Verbal Images! Buy One Alliterative Triad, Get One Free! Create Your Own Words With One Of Our DIY Syllable Packs! Grab A Handful Of “2Ways,” Nouns that Double As Verbs!

My mind was spinning. I retreated to the parking lot. It had begun to drizzle, just lightly at first, just consonants, but the precipitation quickly became mixed with vowels and before I knew it words were raining upon me, pooling and streaming at my feet, forming here and there what appeared to be phrases or the beginnings of sentences, but mostly they piled up in incomprehensible clusters. My footing was becoming unsteady, but I wanted to linger, maybe put together a few words of my own, leave a comment or message for one of my friends, or maybe pocket a few to use later—but when I scooped them up they were pale and limp, as if lifeless, they came apart in my hand, and the letters slipped through my fingers and were swept away, useless. I’d experienced in the past words coming from out of the blue, but they were invariably fresh and vital and clearly articulated in concert with inspiration, or enlisted to serve an urge toward meaning. In contrast, these words were exhausted—they appeared even to have been abused—and their sheer volume, their gaudy abundance, was like nothing I’d ever seen, making me cringe and turn away from their lurid spectacle.

What was happening? Had these words been denigrated for refusing to participate in tiresome clichés? Had they been hawked to excess by the marketer’s pitch? Had they—for irony’s sake—been dangling for too long in the ambiguous space between saying and meaning? Had they suffered the indignity of the poor carpenter’s maligned tools? I sat in my car, sadly watching the words settling around me, coating the streets, running into the streams that run to the rivers that empty into the sea, and their silent message gradually surfaced in my consciousness, comforting me with the assurance that they’d be there after the storm to verify my world, just as they’d been there to verify it before it forever changed.    



 Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

An Art Obsessive’s Guide to Washington Museums

By Charles Kessler

Washington D. C. Museums

If you read my last two posts (here and here), you know I spent two exhausting days in Washington scrupulously touring the museums. I think it’s possible, with enough stamina and planning, to see most of the Washington museums in one day, at least if you’ve been there before and don’t need to spend a lot of time with the permanent collections. You should at least be able to check out all the important special exhibitions in one day. There's no reason to see everything -- no sane person needs to be as obsessive about this as I am.

Transportation should cost about $100 round trip if you’re careful which Amtrak train you take, or about $40 if you take the Chinatown bus. Amtrak doesn’t have wifi yet, like some of the buses, but they usually have electric outlets, half decent bathrooms and a snack bar; and it's pretty comfortable and reliable.

Here's the Amtrak website for buying tickets. The cheapest Amtrak ticket I found is $49 each way. One of the $49 trains departs New York Penn Station at 7:17 a.m. (Newark Penn Station at 7:33 - same price), and arrives in Washington Union Station at 10:40 a.m. (3 hr, 23 min). There’s another $49 ticket for you slackers that departs at a more civilized 8:10 a.m. (Newark at 8:26 a.m.  - same price) and arrives 11:29 (3 hr, 19 min), but you’ll miss an hour and a half of museum going.

A Metro fair card with about $4 or $5 on it should cover your subway transportation. Don’t buy food in the museums or on the Mall unless you’re really strapped for time  — it’s relatively expensive ($5 for a hot dog at a stand!) and not very good. Union Station has a large food court in the basement; a quick lunch or dinner there when you arrive or depart would probably be better. Or bring a lunch and eat it on the train — it’ll save time.

The best day of the week to go is Thursday because The Phillips Collection stays open until 8:30 p.m. on Thursdays; the other museums close between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA)
Go here first because it closes the earliest, 5 p.m., and it's the nearest to Union Station -- and it's the best. It’s an easy 15 minute walk from Union Station via Louisiana Ave. to the National Gallery East Wing. It’s about 0.8 mile and goes through a park and, toward the end, along a highway; or take a taxi from in front of Union Station (about $7 including tip).

The American Indian Museum is directly across the Mall from the National Gallery.
The Hirshhorn is just a couple of blocks west of that. (Closes 5:30 p.m.)
A block and a half further west is the African Art Museum.  (Closes 5:30 p.m.)
And a half a block more is the Freer/Sackler Museum.  (Closes 5:30 p.m.)
The Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum are in the same building. It’s about a 15-minute walk from the Freer. Go north on 9th Street past the National Gallery Sculpture Garden to F or G Street (about 7-8 blocks), turn right for a block to 8th Street. (You could take the Orange and Yellow Metro lines, located in front of the Freer, to Metro Center and change to the Red line to Gallery Pl/Chinatown, but that seems like a lot of trouble and probably wouldn’t save any time.)
Keep The Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum for later in the day since they close at 7 p.m.

Relevant section of the Washington Metro Map

The Corcoran Gallery  (Closes 9:00 p.m., admission is $8 - $10)
 500 Seventeenth Street NW. The main entrance is located on Seventeenth Street between New York Avenue and E Street NW.
The Corcoran is just a few blocks away from two Metro rail stations: the Orange/Blue lines (located right in front of the Freer) to Farragut West (four stops), exit 17th street; or take the Red line (located near the Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum) to Farragut North (two stops), take the K Street exit. From either station, walk south on Seventeenth Street to the Corcoran.

The Corcoran Gallery and Phillips Collection

The Phillips Collection  (Closes 8:30 p.m. on Thursdays. Admission to the permanent collection is by donation, but they charge $10 - $12 for special exhibitions.)
1600 21st Street NW, near the corner of 21st and Q Street.
Take the Red Line to the Dupont Circle station. Make sure to use the Q Street exit from the station to avoid several minutes of extra walking. At the top of the escalator, go left (west) on Q Street to 21st Street.

You can make the best use of your time by keeping the Phillips for last when the other museums have closed. After you’re done here you can go back to Dupont Circle and take the Red Line Metro to Union Station to get the train back home.

Returning:
The only $49 return train I know of fortunately leaves at a good time, 8:45 p.m. Union Station is a terminal, the trains start and end here, so you don’t have to worry about getting a seat. If all goes well, you should arrive at New York Penn Station at 12:10 a.m. (Newark Penn Station, 11:52 p.m.).


Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

Washington — Day Two

By Charles Kessler

FREER/SACKLER Museums of Asian Art
What a classy museum the Freer is! It's the only museum I went to that didn't have hundreds of school kids traipsing through, or tourists doggedly fulfilling their cultural obligation. There were no people making fun of the work either, like I encountered at the Hirshhorn and American Museums. (Why these people bother going to art museums I’ll never understand.) Instead the people at the Freer were knowledgeable lovers of Asian art.

The Freer is quiet and well lit, and the galleries are orderly without being repetitious. There are even comfortable chairs you can rest in under a shady loggia overlooking a beautiful courtyard. Like I said --- classy.

The Courtyard of the Freer Gallery of Art

My only complaint is most of the hanging silk paintings are covered with glass that makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, to see the older, dark Chinese paintings without being distracted by reflections.

But what a collection! They have some of the best Chinese bronzes I’ve ever seen, and they’re in pristine condition — pretty amazing considering they’re thousands of years old. Look at the detail of this owl:

Detail: Ritual Wine Container (You), Shang dynasty, 13th century B.C., bronze (Freer/Sackler Museum)

They also have more than one thousand works by James McNeill Whistler (yes, that Whistler — the Whistler of Arrangement in Grey and Black fame), including The Peacock Room, a lavish London dining room painted by Whistler in 1876–77.

Whistler’s art was heavily influenced by Asian art and he encouraged Charles Lang Freer, founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, to collect it; hence the connection.

James McNeill Whistler, The Peacock Room, 1876-77

The Sackler part of the museum isn’t as genial as the Freer. It’s newer, below ground, claustrophobic and somewhat of a labyrinth. Most of the larger temporary exhibitions are installed there, like:

The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan (until July 31st)    
These caves were one of the great achievements of the 6th century Northern Qi dynasty. They once contained monumental Buddhas, divine attendant figures, and crouching monsters that were carved into the mountains of northern China. Tragically, they were destroyed in the first half of the twentieth century when the sculptures were chiseled away and sold. With the aid of 3D imaging technology and several fragments of the sculptures on view, this exhibition captures some idea of what this awe-inspiring devotional site must have been like.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM
From one of the best museums, the Freer, to one of the worst. I don’t mean the collection, which isn't great (Hirshhorn was infamous for seeking bargains) but has some good things. It’s the building I have issues with — it’s bad even by the low standards of modern art museums. In addition to my earlier complaints about a boisterous atmosphere, poorly proportioned, odd-shaped rooms, and a distracting and wasteful atrium, the building is doughnut-shaped so it feels like you’re walking down an endless corridor rather than viewing the work in separate rooms. (The de Young Museum in San Francisco has the same problem, but that’s a rectangular space so they have even less of an excuse.)  To make matters worse, the interior wall is all windows (looking out over a dreary courtyard), and as a result, the galleries are so busy and distracting it’s almost impossible to focus on the work.

They have five major Clyfford Still paintings in their permanent collection, several given to them by Still. Thankfully they’re hung in their own, relatively private, room.

Clyfford Still, 1948-C, 1948, oil on canvas, 81 x 69 in. (Hirshhorn)

Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977  (Until May 15th)
This is the first retrospective of German abstract artist Peter Schwartze, aka Peter Heisterkamp, probably best known by the name his teacher, Joseph Beuys, gave him: Blinky Palermo.

Installation view, Blinky Palermo Retrospective, 1964-77

Even though this work is conceptual and minimal, there’s a nice, free-wheeling spirit to his exploration of decoration and modernism. It’s sad he died so young (33) — it would have been interesting to see where he’d go with all this.

ColorForms
This show is composed of works from the Hirshhorn's collection and is supposed to “explore the ways in which color has been an essential tool for artists, regardless of medium,” to quote from the catalog. Half the work in the show is black and white (or may as well be) — enough said.

AFRICAN ART MUSEUM
The Freer, Sackler and African Museums are interconnected, and the Sackler and African museums, except for their entrances, are completely underground. It's almost impossible to get your bearings in these spaces. (To make matters even more confusing, the Ripley Center International Gallery, a multi-purpose building including the Discovery Theater, is also under ground and connected to the others.) 

They supposedly have a great collection of African art originally collected by Paul and Ruth Tishman and sold to Disney for its Epcot Center but never installed there. Ultimately Disney gave the collection, all 525 objects, to this museum. I was not able to find it, and I couldn't find anyone to help me either. I really have no idea what this museum is about. The shows I saw were a mishmash of contemporary art and traditional (what we used to call "Primitive") art, jumbled together by some flimsy theme like “Technique and Object” or “Movement and Gesture.” I think Holland Cotter had a good point in his recent Times piece about how contemporary African, Chinese and Indian art is supplanting traditional art. That is certainly the case here.

One interesting installation piece I stumbled on was by Henrique Oliveira, a Brazilian artists of all things. There was no justification for it being at this museum as far as I can tell, but it was an impressive piece.

Henrique Oliveira, Bololo, wood, hardware, pigment, site specific installation (National Museum of African Art)

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
The American Indian Museum is mainly a cultural museum like the American History Museum, and it is another example of Holland Cotter’s argument. If you’re hoping to see some Northwest Coast Indian art, or other American Indian traditional art, you’re better off going to The George Gustav Heye Center in the old Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, One Bowling Green, in New York.


SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
The American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery share a block-long, historic, beautiful building with a large covered courtyard. They’re located a few blocks north of the National Gallery, in the heart of the hip and bustling Downtown.

I must confess that I had never been to either of these museums. I had an entirely wrong impression of them. I thought they would be filled with dark and dreary 18th and 19th century American portraits, boring landscape paintings, and silly, pompous history painting — but was I ever wrong. There was some of that, of course (see below), but both museums have much more modern and contemporary art than I expected, maybe about a third of the art exhibited. (Cotter’s point again?)

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Adams Memorial, modeled 1886-91, cast 1969, bronze

Contemporary highlights of the collection include Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway (reproduced in the last post); impressive large-scale work by Alfred Jensen, Sean Scully, Edward Kienholz, and James Rosenquist; and this unusual room-size work by David Hockney. It changes color when different colored lights are shined on it:

David Hockney, Snails Space with Vari-Lites, Painting as Performance, 1995-1996, oil on two canvases, acrylic on canvas-covered masonite, wood dowels, overall: 84 x 260 x 135 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum

The museum also gives a chance for lesser known but deserving American artists to get shown, artists like Paul Wonner whose work is best illustrated in a close-up detail.

Detail, Paul Wonner, Model Drinking Coffee, 1964, oil on canvas

Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow (until May 8th)   
The American Museum has organized Rockman’s first major survey, and it includes 47 paintings and works on paper from the mid-1980s to the present. I don’t think this survey does him any favors; seeing his work in quantity makes me realize how much like illustration it is. Rockman built his career around environmental issues, and they’re good environmental illustrations, beautifully painted and all — but illustrations nonetheless.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
As one would expect of a portrait museum, art isn’t the major issue here. There’s just as much or more emphasis on the sitter (presidents, famous actors, historic figures, etc.) as there is on the artist. Nevertheless, there is a lot of great art to be seen here. I forgot how many contemporary artists have made portraiture a major part of their oeuvre. Off the top of my head, there’s Chuck Close of course, but also Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, David Hockney, Alice Neel, Lucian Freud, and the way over-rated Elizabeth Peyton. And these are just the painters; there are a lot more photographers.

Alice Neel, Self-Portrait, 1980, oil on canvas, 53 x 40 in (National Portrait Gallery)

Alexander Calder with his portraits of Edgar Varese (c.1930)
 and unknown man (c. 1929), 1963 photo by Ugo Mulas

Calder’s Portraits - A New Language (until August 14th)
This exhibition was the last one I saw, and one of my favorites. Calder's wire portraits are an absolute delight: inventive, playful, masterful caricature. Even the shadows they cast were considered and fun. Calder clearly enjoyed doing these, and he continued to do them even after he moved to abstraction in the 1930s.

Next post: A day trip to the Washington Museums -- tips and details.

Charles Kessler is an artist and writer, and lives in Jersey City.

Washington D. C. -- Day One

By Charles Kessler

There’s not a bit of art to see in New York so I thought I'd go down to Washington for the day and see Gauguin, Maker of Myth at the National Gallery (until June 5th), and Philip Guston, Roma at the Phillips Collection (until May 15th).  I soon realized I'd need at least two days to see all the other shows in Washington now. And of course there are the permanent collections of all those great museums. It was an exhilarating and exhausting two days!  Here are some brief thoughts and a photo diary of some highlights of my tour.

But before I start there's something I'd like to get off my chest — something I find both baffling and exasperating. Why is contemporary art almost always shown in spaces that are noisy, too brightly lit and too big, not just in Washington, but practically everywhere. Some art may be able to handle this, but not most. Walking from the West Wing of the National Gallery, where the Old Masters are, to the modern collection in I. M. Pei's East Wing, is to go from a quiet, genteel, orderly space to an assault of bright lights and noise -- a chaotic cacophony of oddly shaped rooms, arbitrarily arranged and way out of scale. 

National Gallery East Wing Atrium

Could it still be the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim after all these years? That might also explain why museums of modern art are usually surrounded by high blank walls outside, and distracting, wasteful, atriums inside. What are they thinking?

Okay, I feel better now.

NATIONAL GALLERY
I spent almost half of my time here because, in addition to the Gauguin show, there were so many other exhibitions to see: Gabriel Metsu, 1629–1667 (until July 24th); Lewis Baltz: Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit (until July 31st); Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals (Until May 30th); Larger Than Life: Ter Brugghen's Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (until May 15th); and In the Tower: Nam June Paik (until October 2nd). Plus the National Gallery's permanent collection has some of the best art in the world, including this bit of perfection best seen close up as illustrated in this detail:

Detail, Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra Benci, c.1474-78, oil on panel, 15 x 14 9/16 inches (National Gallery).

Several of the 19th century French galleries in the main part of the museum are being renovated, but don't worry, most of that art is downstairs in an exhibition of the Chester Dale Collection, a major collection of mostly 19th and early 20th century French painting given to the museum in 1962. It’s installed in a lower, more crowded space mainly used for changing exhibitions of prints and drawings, but the work is so great it hardly matters. One of the many treats was seeing two great large group portraits, Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques and Manet's The Old Musician, displayed on opposite walls.

Edouard Manet, The Old Musician, 1862, oil on canvas, 73 3/4 x 97 11/16 in.

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, oil on canvas, 83 3/4 x 90 3/8 in.

Gauguin, Maker of Myth
This is a big show — 120 paintings, drawings, prints and ceramic and wood sculptures. Despite his prominence, Gauguin isn't the easiest artist to like. His colors are acidic and wishy-washy — even his major exception, Vision of the Sermon, is so bold only because it was supposed to be seen in a dark church. In addition, the space in his paintings is disjointed, and his drawing and shapes are graceless.

Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888,
oil on canvas (National Gallery of Scotland).

Even more damning, there's something dry and inauthentic about his work. This whole savage, primitive, Tahiti baloney was just a calculated PR campaign to promote his work. I agree with Philip Kennicott's objection to the post-modern analysis espoused in the catalog:

...but Gauguin still awaits a proper understanding, a reckoning that is both artistic and moral. The worst thing about phrases such as "narrative strategies" is that they reduce biographical data to a post-modern stew of moral relativity: Fraudulent self-promotion becomes "self-mythologizing"; theft becomes playful appropriation; the repeated rape of a child - for what else can you call sex with a girl who wasn't mature enough to consent or economically or socially powerful enough to refuse - becomes something grouped under the theme "fictions of femininity."

Nevertheless, or maybe as a result, this is powerful and disturbing work — a dark and troubling lost paradise, hauntingly evoked.

In the Tower: Nam June Paik
I would have thought video pioneer Nam June Paik might be one of the few artists that could handle the East Wing ruckus, and that it would be a waste to put his work in the tower, a more intimate and secluded space, but the show, 20 videos and a few works on paper borrowed mainly from Paik's estate, worked beautifully there. I guess video is a private (as opposed to public) medium.

Paik is very well represented in Washington. In addition to this show, there are several major works on display in the Hirshhorn and American Art museums, including this popular favorite:

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway, 1995, 49-channel closed circuit video installation, neon, steel and electronic components, approx. 15 x 40 x 4 ft., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
The Phillips Collection is open until 8:30 on Thursdays so I was able to go there after the National Gallery closed. (I’ve developed sturdy gallery legs over the years.) Maybe it's because they don't show much contemporary art, but the Phillips is very much an exception to the obnoxious MOMAs I was complaining about. Even their new additions maintain the intimacy of the original Phillips' home, and it's a pleasure to look at art there. (That’s why I so despair for the Barnes.)

Philip Guston, Roma
In 1970 Guston received a lot of negative criticism for an exhibition of his new work at New York’s Marlborough Gallery. The work was painted in a clumsy, cartoony style and dealt with political satire and allegorical narratives.  It was a radical departure from his popular Abstract Expressionist paintings, and stunned the art world.

Philip Guston, Residue, 1971. Oil on paper. (Estate of Philip Guston; image courtesy McKee Gallery, New York, NY.)

Rome was a good escape for Guston, and inspiring. During the six months he spent as artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1970–71, he was able to study the old masters and explore new possibilities for his art away from the art world. This show brings together for the first time 39 paintings from this period. All the work is small, no more than studies really, but exciting to see because they are precursors of the themes and images he would pursue later in his larger paintings.

David Smith Invents
This show was a real surprise to me. I thought I knew Smith’s work well, but this is work that wasn’t shown, or hardly ever shown. The work is a transition from the anthropomorphic, figurative works in the early 1950s to his famous large-scale steel abstractions. It is the most painterly work of his I've ever seen, not only because he literally painted these sculptures, but because they are as frontal as paintings. Greenberg must be turning over in his grave.

David Smith, Black Concaves, 1960, painted steel

There were also many of his paintings and drawings in the show. Typical of sculptors, Davis stayed away from the edge, usually centering his shapes or lines. 

David Smith, White Egg with Pink, 1958,
oil and metallic paint on canvas (Hirshhorn Museum)

Some favorites from the permanent collection:

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Dead Bird, 1890's, oil on wood, 4 3/8 x 10 in

Dead birds seems to be a Phillips specialty. They have some by Braque, Soutine, and several by a contemporary artist I can’t remember.

A very late Cezanne landscape that's more like one of his watercolors:

Paul Cezanne, The Garden at Les Lauves, c.1906, oil on canvas, 26 x 32 in (Phillips Collection)

Check out this close-up of it I was allowed to take:

Detail: Paul Cezanne, The Garden at Les Lauves, c.1906

After the Phillips closed I had a late dinner and walked around the Dupont Circle area where the Phillips is located. The weather was glorious and the outside cafes were packed. I don't know if it's Obama or the same urban gentrification that occurred in New York, but Washington has become very young, prosperous and hip, at least around Dupont Circle and Downtown near Chinatown where the Portrait and American museums are, and where I spent part of the next day. More on that next post.