Posted in February 2010 …

Feb 22 2010
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Phillips Collection

Museum Find: This Is Paris

I’ve got a pretty good handle on the kaleidoscope of travel guidebooks out there and what each offers. Several friends have authored guides, and I’ve long relied on Lonely Planet or Rough Guides to steer me through Shanghai or Istanbul, away from the madding crowds.

So, at the Phillips Collection recently, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble on a guidebook series I’d never seen before: the This Is… city series for kids, created 50 years ago by Czech author/illustrator Miroslav Sasek.

Sasek’s first guide, This Is Paris, pays homage to the city’s concierges, waiters, flower vendors and artistes in charming watercolors, from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the steps of the Sacre-Coeur. Issued in 1959, it’s a little dated now– Parisian gendarmes no longer wear capes or ride bicycles– but it captures the spirit of the city with a child-like wonder that holds up over time.

In fact, it makes Paris seem like one big adventureland, Moroccan carpet-sellers, dog cemeteries and all. A great gift for anyone with a jones for all things Gallic.

I’ve now got a copy resting comfortably next to my Lonely Planet Vietnam.

Sasek’s This Is Paris, This Is London, and This Is San Francisco are available in the Phillips Collection gift shop, and also on Amazon.

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Feb 20 2010
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National Gallery of Art

Photo of the Week: Thinking About Snowmelt

In the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, the Thinker on a Rock contemplates the remains of Snowmageddon.

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Feb 14 2010
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National Portrait Gallery

Portraits of Pain and Bravery

I love portraits for the same reason I love memoirs: they go deep where journalistic works go broad. With paintings or photographs, I find myself making all sorts of assumptions about the emotional life of the subject, based on a glance, gesture or pose.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition exhibition, now on at the National Portrait Gallery, offers a chance to invent 49 back stories via a wildly diverse group of finalist entries. Here, my three favorites:


Sarah, David by Yolanda del Amo captures an estranged couple in the midst of ending a marriage. As the woman sits helplessly among packed boxes, we see her male partner through the kitchen door, looking bewildered. Searing.


Tara Cronin by Satomi Shirai is all about 21st century multiculturalism. The subject is half Korean, half-Irish but born and raised in the U.S. According to the exhibition notes, she now considers herself of no particular cultural orientation. It all melds together. I know people like this.


Irish journalist and activist Nell McCafferty wins for bravery. Portrait of Nell by Daniel Mark Duffy celebrates a woman who decided to “get over herself” at age 60 and confront aging head on. I’m impressed. A defiant f**k you to youth; a salute to life, well-lived.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 is on through August 22, 2010 at the National Portrait Gallery.

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Feb 13 2010
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Corcoran Gallery of Art

I Heart Corcoran’s Lion

I loved this cool infographic of museum admission tags from around the world by Fast Company magazine. From a designer’s perspective, these have got to be fun to work on; they’re the museum’s thumbprint, and the most successful ones (like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s da Vinci “M” tag) become iconic.

This is one aspect of museumgoing that DC residents and visitors miss out on: the various branches of the Smithsonian, and many other no-admission museums here, don’t use them. Of the few that I’ve picked up around town, however, I have to give props to the Corcoran’s winged lion. It’s got a strong brand identity and exudes gravitas.

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Feb 12 2010
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National Gallery of Art

Chester Dale Collection: It’s About the Women

The National Gallery of Art’s new blockbuster show, From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection, is really a “best of” the gallery’s holdings. Upon Dale’s death in 1962, the gallery received more than 300 works from the bond trader’s collection, and it’s a star-studded lot.

Fans of impressionism will find plenty to soak in, including fan favorites “Girl with a Watering Can” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and “Four Dancers” by Edgar Degas. But I read the exhibit primarily as an appreciation of women. In one room, you’ll find Matisse’s “La Coiffure”, Cassatt’s “Mother and Child” and Modigliani’s “Nude on a Blue Cushion”: femininity in its many guises.

Of all the paintings in the room, it was the Modigliani that people had a hard time walking away from– something about the subject’s “come hither” gaze and rose-orange skin. If there were an illustration of “seduce” in the dictionary, this might be it.

From Impressionism to Modernism runs through July 31, 2011 at the National Gallery of Art.

Image: Nude on a Blue Cushion, Amedeo Modigliani

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Feb 06 2010
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Uncategorized

Homage to Salinger

Once DC has dug out from Snowmageddon, check out the National Portrait Gallery’s homage to J.D. Salinger: the original portrait created for a 1961 Time magazine cover, in which the famously anti-authoritarian scribe stands against an amber wave of grain.

And if you’ve ever doubted Salinger’s eccentricity, read this fascinating essay by Joanna Smith Rakoff, a former literary agency staffer who opened Salinger’s fan mail for many years. I’ve read several pieces on Salinger since his Jan. 27 death; Rakoff’s is by far the most illuminating.

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Feb 06 2010
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Uncategorized

Snowmageddon Silence

If you were hoping to visit any DC museums this weekend, forget it. I got as far as Taft Bridge in Woodley Park.

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Feb 06 2010
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National Portrait Gallery

Artists’ Lists: To Do, To Pack, To Drink

Lists can be a window into someone’s soul.

My grandfather, for example, was an expert listmaker, forever jotting down instructions and to-do items in distinctive block print on graph paper, a nod to his days as an engineer. When we’d visit him in his later years, I’d find penciled lists of things he wanted to tell my mom tucked away in a desk drawer.

These notes were bittersweet– “getting old is hell,” said one– and I always felt as if I’d stumbled on a personal diary.

Turns out great artists keep lists equally as revelatory. You’ll find a few on display this month at the National Portrait Gallery (via the Archives of American Art) in what might be Washington’s quirkiest exhibit of the year.

Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Archives of American Art includes a handmade address book by Alexander Calder; a list of “29 personal facts” by H.L. Mencken; and a lengthy list of home improvements planned by architect Eero Saarinen shortly before his death.

Willem de Kooning’s “notes for a tax return” reveals the artist earned $6664 in 1953, and a liquor store receipt issued to Franz Kline shows he bought $275 worth of booze for a New Year’s Eve blowout in 1960.

Traveler that I am, I most enjoyed painter Adolf Konrad’s illustrated list of items he planned to pack for a 1962-63 trip to Egypt and Rome. His tiny watercolors could’ve been a model for the J. Peterman catalog: three pairs of socks, a camera, a toothbrush, a couple overcoats, and tubes of oil paints.

All that’s missing is the overwrought copy: “Her eyes glowed violet as we set off down the Nile…”

Lists runs through September 19, 2010, at the National Portrait Gallery.

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