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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...

Electronic Superhighway, 1995,a gift from the artist to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington. This 49-channel installation is neon, steel and other electrical parts. In the Tower: Nam June Paik is at the National Gallery of Art until October 2nd. This Korean-American artist introduced the realm of tv/video art with sculptures made of televisions in 1966. The exhibit encompasses themes and ideas important to art of the last 50 years. His last video sculpture made in 2005, Ommah (mother in Korean) uses a 100-year-old boy's robe, hanging like a cross, with a projection of Korean-American girls at play, linking past and present . It is in the National Gallery's permanent collection To fully appreciate his work one must see the exhibition in the museum's East Wing. His art is about tv/video, a relatively new medium in visual art. A room of Paik's drawings accompany the exhibition and help the viewer understand his thought process. One of the most interesting ...

T he Phillips' Kandinsky exhibition centers around this painting from the Guggenheim, Painting with White Border, 1913. It appears primarily abstract, but has two specifically Russian iconographic references: a troika (three horses) and St. George and the Dragon. The Phillips Collection's current exhibition on Kandinsky not only provides insight into the thought process of this giant of early 20th century abstraction, but it also gives us a chance to compare the artists with whom he worked and influenced. The Kandinsky exhibition is juxtaposed next to an exhibition of contemporary artist Frank Stella, whose sculptures are influenced by music of Domenico Scarlatti, called Stella Sounds . The metal and plastic sculptures point, poke off the walls and into space curving vigorously with color. They become 3-dimensional expressions of abstraction comparable to Kandinsky. Frank Stella's K43 comes out of the wall and into space. His sculptures on view at the Phillips are based on ...

Six famous women hold up the Porch of the Maidens of the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis of Athens. These statues are admired for their graceful poses and drapery, but who notices the hair? An Art Historian who specializes in the sculpture of the Acropolis, Katherine Schwab, has studied the hairstyles and made a project of it for her students at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Here's a summary of a presentation she gave last night at the Greek Embassy in Washington. In the New Acropolis Mus eum, Athens --which was just built a few years ago -- one can see the statues from the back with their beautiful long braids of hair, falling in fishtails followed by more curls. In fact, the hair of the statues is in better condition than the faces and bodies whose arms are completely missing. (Caryatid is the name given to a feminine statue which acts as a column to hold up a building; Kore is a statue of a maiden. ) These six caryatids are labeled Kore A - Kore F. Every ha...

P aul Gauguin was impressed with the sincere, unspoiled piety of women from Brittany, where he painted in 1887. He placed the Yellow Christ , 1889, in a Breton landscape. Paul Gauguin, an early modern rebel against western culture, is influenced by religious culture like his French forebears who painted for kings and churches 400 years earlier. After seeing the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition of Early Renaissance Art in France , I saw the Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery. Many of Gauguin's subjects also had religious themes. He put the Crucifixion in a setting of yellow and ocher pigments, and blended it into the landscape of Brittany, a region he respected for its piety and cultural backwardness at that time. The standing woman in Delectable Waters , above, has the shame of Eve being expelled from the garden of Paradise. We don't know her relationship to the other women, although they also seem to live in a lush tropical place, much like a Garden of Eden Ma...

This Crucifixion from the Getty Museum is the center of a 3-part altarpiece which can be seen at the Art Institute in its original format until May 30th. The unknown master used saturated colors in oil paint, while packing an incredible amount of detail into a panel 19 x 28 inches. Click on the photo to see an enlargement. The Art Institute of Chicago is currently showing a major exhibition of French Renaissance painting, Kings, Queens and Courtiers . To me, the most impressive and interesting piece is by an unknown painter, the Master of Dreux Budé. It dates to about 1450. One of the values of this type of scholarly exhibition is the opportunity to find and gather lost or separated parts of paintings. Here, we view the original pieces of what was once formed a triptych, three panels connected by hinges to tell a concise history of Christian Salvation. The largest painting was in center; it's a Crucifixion from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Resurrection , from the Musée Fab...