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Two Dancers at the Barre , early 1880s−c. 1900, Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 38 1/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1944. This painting is the centerpiece of the current exhibition. Point....Flex.....Relevé-----these themes of ballet dancing were the obsession of Edgar Degas, an artist associated with Impressionism but known for his paintings and pastels of dancers. Washington's Phillips Collection recently put their large painting, Dancers at the Barre , under their conservator's care. In the process, they discovered wonderful color and took a deeper look into the process of this artist. The exhibition Degas' Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint transports the viewer into Degas' mind and back into the opulent Garnier Opera House which opened in Paris in 1875. Most of the paintings, drawings and studies in the exhibition feature women, mainly ballerinas. After viewing the show, I once again get the feeling that Degas is the foremost among a...

Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman at Inn, 1623 Metropolitan Museum of Art Willem de Kooning, Merritt Parkway, 1959, from the Detroit Institute of Art, Bequest of Hawkins Ferry, is in a n exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (called MoMA), New York At first glance, Frans Hals and Willem de Kooning have nothing in common, other than being artists who originally came from the Netherlands. More than three hundred years separate their art and two very different New York Museums, the Met and MoMA, have exhibitions of their work. Hals was vividly realistic and de Kooning was a founder of Abstract Expressionism, but their common grounds are looseness of brushwork, luscious paint and bold energies going in all directions. In short, it is their painterly techniques. Women, II, in MoMA, part of the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Collection, is one of many paintings of women that de Kooning did in the 50s Analyzing the radiating diagonals of Hals' compositions and paint quality, we might won...