The Corcoran Gallery: Turner to Cezanne

I just got back from the sneak preview of the "Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection" exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery (http://www.corcoran.org/).  I am loving the benefits of Corcoran Membership...exhibit preview, getting to wander the Salon Dore and the rest of the permanent collection ALONE, and lemon squares (at least for tonight).

The exhibit displays 53 pieces from the collection of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, Welsh sisters who collected based on their personal taste not just the styles of the time.  As a result, they amassed a collection of some of the best known realist, impressionist and post-impressionist artists in the late 19th and early 20th century.  The exhibit features works from the National Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru...you have to love Welsh) many of which have never been seen in the U.S.  

Among my favorites: a strikingly violent painting of a tree uprooted in a storm by Millet, a hushed study of St. Mark's in Venice in deep midnight blue by Whistler, one of Monet's water lilies, and a Cezanne landscape with Mont Saint-Victoire in the background.  What stopped me in my tracks was Rain-Auvers by Van Gogh.  I knew that Van Gogh died young, but didn't remember that he was only 37 when he killed himself.  To think that someone in that much pain could create something so beautiful two weeks before he died makes my heart ache.  If only he could have felt how much his paintings would impact other people more than a century later.  Check it out on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/museumwales/2764545783/

Guggenheim Museum - New York

In New York for the weekend visiting friends, I got my museum fix with a quick trip to the Guggenheim http://www.guggenheim.org/.

 Much of the museum was closed because they were between exhibitions but they had small exhibit dedicated to Paris and the Avant Garde that Sam and I could easily fit in between baby Theo's naps.  The exhibit featured about 30 pieces coming out of the Avant Garde movement in the early 20th century in Paris.  The show began with analytic cubist pieces by Picasso and Braque, but moved on to more colorful pieces that came later in the movement.  The pieces selected were, for me, a nice mix of the familiar and beloved (Miro and Calder) and lesser known artists (Albert Gleizes).   As a bonus, we got to walk off the 3 doughnuts eaten from the Doughnut Plant that morning(http://www.doughnutplant.com/) ...creating a square jelly filled doughnut with jelly all the way may not earn a place in the Guggenheim, but qualifies as its own brand of artistic genius.

                                                          

American Art Museum

After my tour de force of the Portrait gallery, I went to the Cowgirl Creamery (http://www.cowgirlcreamery.com/) for sustenance before tackling the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum (http://americanart.si.edu/). Cowgirl Creamery quickly shot to the top of my list of happy places. I enjoyed my goat cheese and baguette in the covered Kogod Courtyard in the middle of the museum. The courtyard used to be an open sculpture garden, but when the building was renovated starting in 2000 was covered to allow year round use.

The MAA, as it sounds, exhibits works by American artists from all eras of American history. The collection as a whole is impressive, but I was particularly taken with the Reynolds Center Contemporary Art Collection. Taken is an understatement as I would happily have moved in to the top floor (I know, impractical with all the pets), but it is a beautiful space and I hated to leave the third floor and go back down to Mary Cassatt and the Peale brothers’ portraits.

Woman Eating by Duane Hanson

Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway

Facts from the NPG and AAM weekend:

• Artist Charles Wilson Peale named his sons Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphaelle, and Titian. Rembrandt and Raphaelle have pieces in the American Art Museum which are lovely. I suspect that Titian is still recovering from being beaten up on the playground.

Painting by Rembrandt Peale

• Wild Bill Hickok’s real name was not Bill, Buffalo Bill Cody’s was

• William T. Wiley (check out the website for images from his retrospective) is a new favorite of mine

• Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts, was born to a life of privilege in Georgia. When an unhappy marriage overseas led her to search for something useful to do with her life, she founded the Scouts based on the Girl Guides in England to teach girls to be more self-reliant.

• Zachary Taylor was nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready” …this was mentioned at least 4 times in the museum and is now indelibly seared in my memory.

• Jesse James, despite what Bobby Brady might have thought, really was a bad guy. His life of crime began out of anger at his family’s losses to the Union Army in the civil war

• Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to congress, was elected in 1916, four years before the 19th amendment was passed giving women the right to vote.

• Rutherford B. Hayes (or probably Ms. Hayes) had kick-ass taste in presidential dinnerware…way cooler than the “variations on the eagle in gold and blue” that everyone else has chosen

National Portrait Gallery

I started to look through the National Portrait Gallery a week ago. I had gone to the Elvis exhibit thinking that I would check out the rest of the museum when I was done, but was overwhelmed by the size of the museum and ended up leaving after a few minutes of Elvis and another few admiring the ginormous portrait of LL Cool J that graces the first floor entry hall.


I went back this weekend with new resolve to see not only the NPG, but also the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The museums, housed in the same building, collectively are called the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. To add to the confusion, the AAM is technically housed in both this building and in the Renwick Gallery. Whatever…I covered this bad boy from top to bottom this weekend. Both museums, three floors plus courtyard and mezzanine, 6 hours of art (with a little break for cheese).

The NPG is located in the original government Patent Building, a beautiful Greek revival building at 8th and F streets downtown. After the White House and the Capitol, it was the third public building constructed in Washington. Construction began in 1836 and wasn’t completed until 1868, although the Patent Office used the finished wings starting in 1840. In addition to serving at the Patent Office until 1932, the building was the site of President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball, barracks during the Civil War, and, beginning in 1968, opened in its current iteration. Hard to believe walking through the gorgeous grand hall on the third floor that in 1953 it was slated for demolition to become a parking lot.

The Great Hall

                                                                         

The Portrait Gallery is unique in that it focuses more on the subject than the artist. There are substantial notes with almost every item in the museum giving the history of the subject in question. This amounts to a guided tour through American History….fascinating, but requiring mental stamina.

 

The permanent collection is substantial with artifacts from early North American life and portraits of notable Americans.  They do an admirable job of including all Americans in the mix...Native Americans, settlers, slaves, men, women...they try to cover all aspects of American history.

Iroquois Club and Wampum Belt

 Edith Wharton by Edward Harrison May

The America’s Presidents permanent exhibition is pretty fantastic. Portraits, sound clips and statues of all of the American Presidents including the iconic painting of Washington. My favorite part of the collection was that Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were (almost) elected sequentially. Damn Warren G. Harding for getting in the way of some good alliteration.

Landsdowne Portrait of George Washington

by Gilbert Stuart

 

The Bravo! Exhibit showcasing artists and performers is interesting too. The ONE thing that I skipped is the Champions exhibit. I looked at a portrait of Babe Ruth (that was for you Mark).

One final note on the permanent collection.  The prize for the strangest name EVER goes to....Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer....not kidding, that's his name.  Do you think that explains the look on his face?

The Textile Museum

This week I managed to museum and work myself into a bad cold so, although I enthusiastically tackled a few gallerys last weekend, all I've done this week is come home and crawl into bed.  Blogging isn't so fun when you're sick. 

A bottle of Nyquil later I'm feeling up to a quick entry about the Textile Museum.  The Museum is tucked away in D.C.'s Kalorama distict sharing the block with embassies of Myanmar and Costa Rica. 

The museum was founded by George Hewitt Myers in 1925 to display his collection of rugs and fabrics and to educate people about the beauty and importance of textiles. The museum building in the photograph is actually Myers' family home (designed by John Russell Pope). The neighboring building was purchased to allow more space to display the collection.

The day that I went, the museum was hosting a sold out fashion show of Harajuku Japanese Street Fashion. From the disappointed looks on the faces walking through the door, I was not the only one who didn't get tickets. The museum staff generously let me (along with about 20 teenage girls rocking DCs own street fashion) watch the models come through the lobby on the way to the show...the bride dressed all in black lace, the model in the red and black tulle skirt with red axe carried as an accessory...all were great, but frankly I think that the girls in the audience blew them all away. One cute girl had the de rigeur striped knee socks and miniskirt along with a teeny, tiny top hat set at a jaunty angle. My favorites were Bridget and Emma who came with Emma's Mom for the show. The hair clips, the rainbow gloves AND socks...they looked amazing.

The Renwick Gallery

The Renwick Gallery occupies the eye-catching building at 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just around the corner from the White House.  I have walked past the Renwick dozens of times and love its red brick facade with the slate gray mansard roof, but until today, hadn't paid it a visit.  The Renwick (named for its architect James Renwick) was commissioned in the 1850's by William Wilson Corcoran to display his private art collection. 

This, the original Corcoran Gallery of Art,  opened its doors in 1874, but by the late 1800s a larger building was needed giving rise to the present day Corcoral Gallery just down 17th street.  The building was used for government offices for several decades and fell into disrepair.  It wasn't until the Jacqueline Kennedy took an interest in preserving the building that it was renamed (for its architect, James Renwick) and established as part of the Smithsonian.   The Renwick opened in its current form in 1972.   Partnered with the Smithsonian American Art museum, it displays primarily crafts and decorative arts, although it also has a small collection of 19th century paintings.

I  picked the Renwick today because it was the last day of the 2009 Renwick Craft Invitational, an showing of the works of 4 up and coming craft artists.   This year's invitees were Christyl Boger and SunKoo Yuh, both ceramacists, Mary Van Cline, who does pieces combining glass and photography, and Mark Newport, knitter extraordinaire. 

This exhibit was just plain fun...even the pieces that weren't my style, made me giggle (who doesn't love grecian style ceramic nudes with inflatable pool toys?).  However, SunKoo Yuh and Mark Newport were the hands down winners as far as I'm concerned. Yuh creates amazing narratives in clay with his large scale sculptures.  Some of the pieces were easily 3 feet tall and were comprised of dozens of people, animals and inanimate objects.  I have no idea how he manages to build sculptures that are so complex and so large that come out of the kiln intact, much less with all of the color and sculptural detail coordinating as well as they do.  

The focus of Newport's work?...superheros.  Or rather, would-be, B-list superheros that will never make it into the League of Justice.  Some of his work was displayed as drawings of the superheros engaged in mundane tasks (knitting a force field, having mom button that top button on the super suit).  The remainder, were giant, ill-fitting, knitted superhero suits.  Batman's suit was there, but also less likely heros like "sweaterman".  As a fan of "The Tick", I was somewhat disappointed not to see a big blue suit included in the showing, but sweaterman would probably be more helpful on a single digit January day like today.   I couldn't take pictures of the pieces in the invitational, but the Renwick has a link with photos from all of the artists.

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2009/craft_invite_2009/

I perused the permanent collection at the Renwick as well.  It is an eclectic collection including jewelry, furniture and textiles.  There are also some crazy large scale pieces like Beth Lipman's "Banquet", a banquet table set entirely in glass (plates, food, drink, candles...all of it) 

My personal favorite for the day, Larry Fuente's GameFish, a swordfish decorated to the nines in yo-yo's, trophy figurines, combs, dominos, and complete with a set of dentures.  Game Fish alone is worth the trip...I would absolutely decorate my house like this, but that might push my house clutter over to the wrong side of crazy.   I'll just have to settle for visits back to the Renwick.

The Old Stone House

I thought it fitting to start the Museum Project with a visit to one of the oldest buildings in the city of Washington.  The Old  Stone House is located at 3051 M. Street NW smack in the middle of Georgetown.  The original parcel of land (the third lot in Georgetown) was purchased in the 1751 for less than the cost of a latte at the Starbuck's across the street (1 pound 10 to be exact). 

The house was completed in 1766 and is the only standing pre-Revolutionary war building in the city.  It has been used for everything from a family home to a used car dealership and was acquired by the National Park Service in the 1950s.   The house has three floors with a great room and kitchen on the street level. 

The second floor has a diningroom and two bedrooms including one with a rocking view of Barney's.  The upstairs has the childrens' room with the only closet in the house...closets were few and far between in the 1700s because closets were counted as rooms by the British and subject to the "closet tax".  With two closets devoted to shoes alone, a closet tax would have been enough to incite me to revolt.

Despite the weather, I enjoyed the outside of the house as much as the inside.  There is an expansive garden in the back that is almost completely hidden from the street.  January is probably not the ideal time to visit, but even on a cold, bleak day, it was charming.  

Favorite facts of the day:

•  First floors had low ceilings to trap the heat, warm the stones of the house and, thus, heat the upstairs.  Our forefathers were quite clever.

• I am 8 and 1/2 inches taller than the average colonial woman, but still could have worn heels on a date with George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and had room to spare.   At 5 foot nothing, Martha Washington would have needed a step ladder.