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Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, 1654 "We have art in order to not die for the truth."  Donna Tartt quotes Nietzche in the opening of one of her chapters in The Goldfinch , an epic journey of life novel.  It's taken me all year, but finally, I've finished reading The Goldfinch ( need a long plane trip to do that ).   The entire drama is centered around a missing painting, or, shall we say, a stolen painting in the hands of the narrator. It's interesting that Donna Tartt chose a painting to be the symbol of her protagonist. I always enjoy reading books that center around a painting.  Usually these books imagine the fictions that influenced the creation of the paintings, books by Sarah Dunant ( In the Company of the Courtesan ) and Tracy Chevalier ( Girl with a Pearl Earring ). But this novel is not about how or why the painting was made.  It is about the journey of the painting and it's presumed caretaker, what it does for him through his growing years and into ...

Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Self-Portrait with Cerise Ribbons, c. 1782, Kimbell Art Museum Vigée-Le Brun: Woman Artist of Revolutionary France is major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum until May 15.  Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun's Self-Portrait from the Kimbell Art Museum explains her quite well. She shines with the confidence and elegance of a woman who would eventually become an international superstar. It shows off her top-notch artistic skills. Touches of brilliant red for the ribbon, sash, lips and cheeks to add sensual pizzaz. Portraits are not my favorite genre of painting, but Vigée-Le Brun's portraits are always dazzling. The light radiating through her earring is just the right touch. One reason we never hear her mentioned among France's top ten or twenty painters is that she was a painter of royalty who supported the wrong side of the French Revolution.  It is only last year that France gave her a major retrospective, although her international reputation w...

Rebecca Kamen, NeuroCantos , an installation at Greater Reston Arts Center  Six years ago, The Elemental Garden , an exhibition at Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) prompted me to start blogging about art. Like TED talks, the news of something so visually fascinating and mentally stimulating as Rebecca Kamen's integration of art with sciences needs to spread.  GRACE presented her work in 2009 and did a followup exhibition, Continuum , which closed February 13, 2016. Rebecca Kamen, Lobe , Digital print of silkscreen, 15" x 22" Like the Elemental Garden , Kamen's new works visually evoke and replicate scientific principles.  For the non-scientist and the scientist, the works and their presentation are fascinating.  Kamen worked with a British poet and a composer/musician from Portland, Oregon, each with similar intellectual interests. Two prints included in the show create a dialogue between her design and the words of poet Steven Fowler. I like how the idea of gray m...

Isamu Noguchi, Trinity, 1945, Gregory , 1948, Strange Bird (To the Sunflower) Photo taken from the Hirshhorn's Facebook page Biomorphic and anthropomorphic themes run through quite a few exhibitions of modern artists in Washington at the moment.  The Hirshhorn's Marvelous Objects: Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York has several of the abstract, biomorphic Surrealists such as Miro and Calder.  The wonderful exhibition will come to a close after this weekend. Isamu Noguchi's many sculptures that are part of  Marvelous Objects  deal with an unexpected part of the artist's life and work. Noguchi was interned in a prison camp in Arizona for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Whatever the horrors of his experience, he dealt with it as an artist does -- making art and using creativity to express the experience by transforming it.  Isamu Noguchi, Lunar Landscape, 1944 Lunar landscape comes from immediately after this difficult time period. The ar...

"Contemporary and ancient art are like oil and water, seemingly opposite poles....now I have found the two melding ineffably into one, more like water and air."  Hiroshi Sugimoto, Japanese artist Louise Bourgeois, Untitled , 1952, Spring , 1949 and Mortise , 1950 National Gallery of Art Two separate exhibitions in Washington at the moment illustrate the commonality of modern art and prehistoric -- especially in sculpture.  The me, that theme resonates with two sculptors who lived through most of the 20th century, Louise bourgeois and Isamu Noguchi.  The National Gallery has a two-room exhibition Louise Bourgeois:No Exit , and Noguchi (hopefully in another blog) 's works are part of the Hirshhorn's exhibition, Marvelous Objects: Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York . Constantin Brancusi, Endless Column, 1937 Three sculptures by Bourgeois in the National Gallery are what she called personages.  As a whole they're not unlike the archetypal images of Henry Moo...

Paul Gauguin, NAFAE faaipoipo  (When Will You Marry?) 1892  Rudolph Staechelin Collection The Phillips Collection's latest loan exhibition, "Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland," draws upon a pair of collections assembled by two prominent but very different Swiss art collectors. To me, the theme of dualism, pairs and split identities stands out strongly.  The exhibition highlights one of Gauguin's most famous paintings, When are You to be Married ? -- a painting that recently was sold.  (The Staechelin and Im Oberstag collections of modern art are normally on display at the Basel Kunstmuseum. Here's an article for background on the collectors why the paintings are traveling .)  Like so many other paintings by Gauguin, the two women in this infamous painting express two realities, which could represent the split identities within Tahitian society. He painted it during his first stay in Tahiti in 1892. The woman in front is natural, organic, rel...

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette , 1989 Sally Mann created controversy two decades ago when she published photographs of her three children, Immediate Family . The photos are beautiful, artistic and arresting. The idea of publishing nude pictures of her children is startling, knowing it can and would attract pedophiles.  Did she really think the photos would only attract the photographers and art connoisseurs, as she claims? I would not do the same sharing of my children's private moments, but should I judge her? To me, art is reconciliation.  I look at art to bring opposites together and to negotiate the ambiguities of life, so that is what I am able to find in Sally Mann's work.  She, too, photographed her children to reconcile her need to be a mother without suppressing the artist in her.  They are one and the same. In June Sally Mann spoke at the National Gallery of Art and read excerpts from her book, Hold Still.  She uses language exquisitely, much as she comp...