Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950

Where: Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden

When: through May 26, 2014

I'm not sure that I've ever been quite so far ahead in seeing exhibits as I am right now.  This show doesn't close until next May, but I've already crossed it off my list.  I'm trying to see everything I can, before the government shuts down again in January.  I know that's not certain to occur, and some Congressional leaders are insisting it won't, but my source for House gossip tells me it will happen, so I'm taking no chances.

Ironic that I'd be off to the Hirshhorn on the week of Thanksgiving as, when I think of the museums for which I am thankful, the Hirshhorn does not spring to mind.  It's so ugly and uninviting on the outside and so full of nonsense on the inside.  Long-time readers must surely have wearied of my rants on this subject, but that's how we roll here at "Luncheon of the Museum Goer."  Hirshhorn = ick.

To be fair, I have seen some interesting things over the years at my least favorite Smithsonian museum.  The "Black Box" series is always worth a trip (who could forget "Floating McDonalds" or the video of the flamingos with the gunshots in the background?), and I enjoyed the Ai Weiwei show as well.

This exhibit, however, does not fall into that small category of "good things at the concrete donut."  It's on the 2nd floor, so it's one of their Bataan Death March shows - you just keep walking and walking through room after room, thinking, "when will this be over?"  The theme is destruction, and so we get lots of damaged goods - a smashed grand piano greets you in the first room.

As if an endless line of examples of broken objects isn't enough, we also have a letter (not damaged in any way that I could see) from Yves Klein (NOT my favorite artist) making an exciting offer to the President of the International Conference called "Blue Explosions."  He tells this body that he will undertake to paint all bombs blue, so that they will be recognizable when they go off.  If it were anyone else, I could appreciate the attempt to make countries or other groups accountable for their use of weapons of mass destruction, but it's Yves Klein, so my eyeballs just rolled back into my head.  Apparently there is nothing he won't do to call more attention to himself.

One item I at first thought was a jar of moldy cookies (check the back of the fridge for art!!), but turned out to be the cremated remains of an artist's work.  He just burned up everything he'd done over the course of several years and exhibited that.  That was followed by an erased de Kooning drawing by Robert Rauschenberg.  I could erase countless drawings; does that make me an artist?

Not content merely to exhibit static works, the Hirshhorn has kindly set up numerous videos for your delectation.  One features Yoko One having people in an audience come up to the stage and cut off her clothes.  I feel like Cindy Lou Who from "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" asking "Why Santy Claus Why?"  At least the Yoko Ono video was quiet.  The others were all loud, and I do mean LOUD.  I felt sorry for the guards who have to listen to this cacophony all day long.  I think the destruction must be to their hearing, or their sanity.  I saw one family watching a video of someone dragging an amplified guitar behind a truck (such a racket as you cannot imagine).  The mother turned to the father and said, "But what's the point of it?"  Good question, I thought to myself.  One  might ask that of the show as a whole.

I made more notes, and I could write up even more about this show, but really, why?  You get the picture.  I'll close by saying my favorite piece was one by David Ireland that I saw at the very end of the show - it's of the Hirshhorn on fire.

Verdict: Feel free to just walk on by this exhibit.  There's plenty of other things to occupy your time at the holiday season.

Women in Chinese Painting

Where: Freer Gallery of Art

When: through April 27, 2014

Two trips to the Freer in one week - heaven on earth!  This show, considerably larger than the small case of Freer bibles I saw on Monday, is on both representations of women in Chinese painting and on paintings by Chinese women.

Even though they had none of the rights of men, women were critical to Chinese society; as Mao put it, centuries later, "women hold up half the sky."  In traditional Confucian philosophy, however, women had no control over their own destiny or ability to determine the course of their own lives.  They existed simply to serve men, to assist them to fulfill their potential.  How depressing.  Attending this show made me wonder why women have been assigned this second-class role in so many societies and to be thankful that I live in a (sometimes only slightly) more enlightened period.

Women painters were most likely to come from the households of male painters, and in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the figure of the courtesan artist emerged.  Women's paintings tended to look a great deal like men's paintings - dealing with the same themes and using the same techniques.

One of the themes I noticed particularly was that of the sad woman: neglected, idle and lonely, with nothing to do.  Even though they were members of the wealthiest part of their society, they had no role to play and no contribution to make.  A sad life to live.

Verdict: A more somber exhibit than I'm accustomed to see at the Freer, but one with a vast deal of food for thought.

Yousuf Karsh: American Portraits, Part I

Where: National Portrait Gallery

When: through April 27, 2014

The Portrait Gallery is really on a roll lately.  This is the second excellent show I've seen there in just the last couple of weeks.  I blogged earlier about the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (if you've not seen that, I highly recommend it); this entry is about the first of two exhibits of Yousuf Karsh photographs.

Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia and fled from that country's genocide to settle in Canada.  He apprenticed with a Boston photographer, John H. Garo, after his uncle saw great promise in his abilities with a camera.  He returned to Canada after his apprenticeship, determined to photograph "men and women who leave their mark on the world."  His big break was photographing Winston Churchill on a visit to Canada.  The bulldog expression became the iconic representation of Britain's determination to defeat the Nazis.

Each of the photographs on display is interesting, both for the great photography and for the subject matter.  They are each a marriage of style and substance.  Even though almost all of them are in black and white, I didn't miss the color, and if you've read this blog for any length of time, you know what a statement that is.

Perhaps my favorite of the pieces on display is one of Franklin Roosevelt with his son James and two Canadian government ministers.  It's an outdoor shot which is atypical of Karsh, and the story goes that everyone was posed very stiffly for the picture.  After it was over, the men relaxed, and that is the shot that Karsh took.  The thing I noticed is that you have to look carefully to see the President being supported by his son; his hand on James' arm is just visible.

Karsh died in 2002, and in 2012, his widow donated 109 of his portraits to the National Portrait Gallery.  Happily, there is another Karsh display that will go up in May and run through November.  I'm eagerly awaiting that show now.

Verdict: If you are at all interested in photography or 20th century American history and culture, do not miss this very fine show.

Exhibiting Freer's Bibles

Where: Freer Gallery of Art

When: through February 16, 2014

The Peacock Room has a temporary addition - two Bibles that Freer acquired in Egypt.  These are from the 5th and 6th centuries, so as you might expect, they're not in the best of shape.  The picture above is from the cover of one of the Bibles, which is probably the most interesting of the three objects on display.  The color is still pretty good, and you can imagine that these wooden plates would have given the manuscript a certain heft.

The shutters were closed when I went to see these antiques, and it made me realize that it's well worth it to visit the Peacock Room when the shutters are open.  The light sensitive nature of these manuscripts means that they won't be opening the shutters until next February, so you'll have to endure the darkness (and the room is really dark without some natural light).  It also felt smaller to me than it had on my last visit.  Not sure if that's also due to the shutters, or to faulty memory...

Verdict: Always worth while to see anything as old as these, plus you can easily add on another Freer exhibit in a lunch hour.

Bound for Freedom's Light: African Americans and the Civil War

Where: National Portrait Gallery

When: through March 2, 2014

The National Portrait Gallery has a large collection of Civil War-related pieces, as one might expect, and as we're now marking the 150th anniversary of the War, they've set up a series of exhibits on different aspects of that conflict.  They are displayed in a little niche in the area where the Civil War portraits are hung, and they change each year.  Right now, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the focus is on the role that African Americans played in the Civil War.

At the beginning of the conflict, neither side would allow African Americans to take up arms, perhaps in part due to the fact that both North and South believed the War would last only a short time.  Sadly, that proved not to be the case, and in 1863, the Union Army accepted African American recruits.  Mention is made here of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the focus of the larger show at the National Gallery of Art.  I realize that the National Gallery is not part of the Smithsonian, but it would have been nice to see a reference to that show.  If someone's looking at this exhibit, they'd probably like to know about the NGA display.  I guess it's the librarian in me - always looking for cross-references.

The South did, however, make use of slave labor in non-military roles.  This struck me as incredibly awful.  To force people to assist their captors in fighting to make sure they can continue to own other human beings is yet another demonstration of how repugnant the institution of slavery was.  Many Confederate officers brought their own slaves to serve as body servants, but almost no images of these people exist.  One is on display here, the only such photograph in the Gallery's collection.  by 1865, things were sufficiently desperate that the South did enlist African-Americans in the Army, but by that time, the writing was on the wall.

Some African Americans escaped from their captors and gained their freedom by crossing the Union lines.  Until they were allowed to enlist in the Army, they served in the Navy or in support roles.  Women served as nurses.  One slave, Abraham, was literally blown to freedom.  The Union Army was attempting to break through a Confederate fortification in Vicksburg.  Abraham, working in the tunnels underneath, was blown across the Union lines by an explosion and gained his freedom in a spectacular fashion.

There's also a portrait of Major Martin Delaney, the first African-American major to receive a field command.  He'd been concerned that, although there were African-American troops, there were no officers to lead them.

Verdict: A good display, especially if you're interested in the Civil War or African-American history.  It's small, so easily managed in a lunch hour.

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art

Where: Smithsonian American Art Museum

When: through March 2, 2014

A Washington Post art critic gave this exhibit a pretty ho-hum review recently, positing that Latino art wasn't really a meaningful concept.  His opinion is that the works of art displayed here are too diverse to make a coherent show.  This has been a controversial opinion, with Latino artists objecting to the idea that they are often overlooked from general surveys of American art, and when they get an opportunity to display their work, they get criticized then as well.  I decided to see what all the fuss was about and make up my own mind if there is such a thing as Latino art.

I'll grant you that the works displayed here are certainly diverse.  With so many different artists, how could they not be?  This show also covers a fairly wide time period, with some works from the 1960s and 1970s, and others quite recent.  A lot has gone on in the art world in the last 40+ years; there's no reason to think that Latino artists would be immune from these changes, any more than any other groups of artists.

What I did find was that there was a unifying characteristic to this art that transcended the different types of work on display.  I'm not entirely certain exactly how to describe it, but the best word I could come up with was exuberance.  There's something uninhibited in each of these works, something that's unafraid of being expressed.  To describe it as "in your face" sounds pejorative, and I don't mean it to be.  There's a determination to speak out, without fear and without dissembling.  Is this a uniquely Latino quality?  Is this what marks a work of art as not just American art, but Latino American art?  I'm not qualified to say, but that's my opinion - make of it what you will.

Setting aside the question of whether there is or is not Latino American art, the question becomes is the show any good or not?  I liked many of the pieces I saw, but others I passed over fairly quickly.  This is typical of my reaction to most shows; it's rare that I like or dislike everything that I see.  It's a great way to see artists with whom you might be unfamiliar, and I must say, the work "An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio" by Amalia Mesa-Bains is worth seeing all on its own.  It's interesting to see a group of people making art that influences the mainstream American community while feeling isolated from that world.

Verdict: Go and see this show to make up your mind for yourself.  As for me, I think there is such a thing as Latino art, and I look forward to seeing more of it in years to come.

Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections

Where: National Gallery of Art, West Building, Main Floor

When: through March 2, 2014

There's lots of heaven and not much earth on display in this exhibit at the National Gallery.  If you like religious iconography, this is the show for you!  If you don't, you may want to give this a miss, or spend your time in just a couple of the rooms.  Personally, I grew weary of the religious art after a short time and was happy to move into a part of the show that dealt with jewelry and coins.  This is the Gallery's first show of Byzantine art, and I'm always happy to be part of the first of something or to see works that have not been on display in the US before, so that was satisfying.  Overall though, this just wasn't to my taste.

The Byzantine Empire began in 330, when Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to the site of the ancient city of Byzantium.  The city was renamed Constantinople and is now the modern city of Istanbul.  The Byzantine Empire lasted for over 1,000 years before it was sacked by the Turks in 1453.  This gives a wide scope for artistic expression, as times and tastes will undergo numerous changes in a millennium.  Interestingly enough, the art doesn't really change all that much.  Once Christianity displaced paganism, there's a certain sameness to the works, until the end of the Empire, when gothic influences can be seen to appear.

The first room has several examples of pagan statues, sadly defaced by Christians.  If you like noses, you'll be sorely disappointed.  Why knock them off, one wonders?  Is it because it's the easiest way to destroy a statue?  They were also moved by religious fervor to carve crosses into the foreheads of these representations of the ancient gods.  I was appalled by the senseless destruction, much like when the Taliban blew up those Buddhist statues.  Anyone who destroys art is a poor excuse for a human being.

Once the Christians had firm control of Byzantium, a new movement sprang up called Iconoclasm.  This is a belief that graven images are evil and must be destroyed.  Obviously, you don't have a great deal of artwork from this period.  The original Iconoclasts (this must be where the word comes from?) seem to have a lot in common with Oliver Cromwell, who also had a problem with art almost a thousand years later.  A pox on both their houses, I say! Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and the icons returned.

Although I lost interest in all of the religious paintings after a while, I did enjoy the mosaics on display.  I like tilework generally, and this was quite nice, although not in the best of shape after so many years.

The section entitled "The Pleasures of Life" held my interest most strongly - lots of jewelry, not so many paintings of a dying Christ.

Verdict: Overall, not a show I'd go to see again, although I did like seeing the early, pre-Christian work.  It was quite crowded when I went, so be prepared to share your experience with many others.