D.C. Notes

Random thoughts from a brief visit to the National Gallery of Art last Saturday (3/23/24):
The addition and integration of works from the Corcoran Gallery give the National Gallery one of the strongest, if not the strongest, collections of American art in the country. Despite the softening of the auction market for works in this field, the amount and prominence of gallery space provided by the NGA reinforces my belief in the importance and quality of American painting in the years 1840 to 1913.
A new addition is “Five O’Clock,” a profile portrait of a woman with a large fruit-topped hat by Gretchen Rogers, circa 1910. I first saw this painting in Santa Barbara at Sybil Rosen’s house in her late husband’s collection. I thought it a fine companion to our Lichtenauer of “Helen” and jokingly offered to show them together if Sybil would lend it. Instead, she consigned it to Vose Galleries in Boston which evidently arranged a sale to the NGA. I was stunned by how good it looked on a wall by itself at the NGA, paired across a doorway with William McGregor Paxton’s “The House Maid” from the same year. In a room that also featured works by Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, John Twachtman and other turn-of-the-century notables, the Rogers was a commanding presence. It also, not coincidentally, furthers the NGA’s mission to expand its representation of overlooked female artists. I noted that the same source of funds used to purchase “Five O’Clock” in 2022 went to buy “The Writer” (c. 1912) by Mary Bradish Titcomb, perhaps an even more obscure artist.
In an East Wing gallery devoted to selections from the Corcoran, my favorites were two scenes of New York by George Bellows from 1909 and 1911, although coming from Chester Dale and Paul Mellon, not the Corcoran. Bellows’s large, busy views of New York, usually in winter, stop me in my tracks whenever I encounter them and are probably my favorite art from this period. I don’t feel this way about all of Bellows’s output, such as his large portraits or views of Maine, or even the famous boxing scenes. But the Hudson and the Upper West Side in winter – great stuff.
Speaking of Chester Dale, the small gallery of modern French paintings had an entire room of Modiglianis, thirteen in all, given mostly or completely (I didn’t check) by Chester Dale. They were the ugliest Modiglianis I’ve ever seen. It was amazing to find them all in one collection.
There was also a room (or more) of Picassos, whom I respect but whose work I seldom love. Except for his post-Cubism Realism period, when he painted people the way they actually looked, especially his Russian wife Olga. I don’t know if it is her face, but there was a half-length portrait of a woman looking to her right, with a gray jacket and a brown fur collar, her hair hinted at with a few loose strokes while her eyes, nose and lips were built up with paint and finely delineated, that was the single most beautiful sight of my day. By contrast, a Winslow Homer, “Sparrow Hall” (c. 1881-82), showed six standing and seated females with a uniform pinched expression, confirming my controversial view that Homer either couldn’t, or didn’t want to, paint women’s faces.
The main show at the National Gallery, just opened, is called “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.” We missed it at LACMA, where it debuted last fall, but we will have the chance to revisit it at MoMA next spring.  It was a very satisfying mix of fiber works and two-dimensional pieces, all sharing an abstract sensibility mostly based on lines. A large majority of the artists, past and present, were women, reflecting both their traditional role as weavers and their current role in the museum’s spotlight. This is not to suggest, though, that the artists were obscure. Many have been widely shown and recognized and even had their own show. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Ruth Asawa, Gego, Rosemarie Trockel, Eva Hesse, Hannah Hoch, Sheila Hicks (not to mention Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama in more token appearances) are as well known as the men represented, many of whom, coincidentally or not, are Black: Jack Whitten, Martin Puryear, Harmony Hammond. We continue to run into, and be fascinated by, Analia Saban, whose “Copper Tapestry” piece was both beautiful and the most technically conceptual piece in the show. And somewhat out of left field was a trio of Japanese bamboo baskets by Nagakura Ken’ichi, one of John Gabbert’s favorite artists.
A less successful show was the one-room juxtaposition of John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” (which I thought was in Boston) with two large contemporary pieces by Kerry James Marshall. These were more conceptual, semi-abstract works, not his paintings of Black people in familiar settings. Whatever the point of the exhibition (beyond highlighting a prominent Black artist), it eluded most of the visitors. While I watched the gallery there was a cluster of seven or more people studying the Copley, with no one more than glancing behind themselves at the two Marshalls.
Marshall’s art was also a disappointment to us on our visit to the National Cathedral, where his two stained glass windows of freedom marchers had replaced panes showing Confederate generals Lee and Jackson. They seemed so out of place with the rest of the Cathedral’s art that you wondered whether 20 years from now visitors will say, What were they thinking? In general, for other reasons, I was disappointed in the Cathedral, but that could have been my fatigue. The size, of course, was awesome, but I couldn’t help thinking the whole thing was ersatz. Not quite Disneyland, but it’s not quite an artistic expression when you’re trying to recreate something from the 14th century. I did think the Rose Window was gorgeous.
While I am harping on the artistic gatekeepers’ efforts to showcase minorities–Blacks, women, Indigenous–I should mention my visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), where four galleries were given over to works by Alma Thomas in SAAM’s permanent collection. They are a pure joy. Her sense of vibrant color is unmatched, happy and never cloying. The way she combined random strokes into cohesive patterns makes her works simultaneously restful and thrilling. I can only think that the prejudices of location, race and social connection left her behind, say, Helen Frankenthaler, to name the subject of the NGA’s next retrospective.
I was also glad to see Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s “Target” in the main gallery of modern art, next to Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, et al. The NGA’s first acquisition of a work by a Native American (at Kaywin’s instigation), it more than holds its own amid the more famous white male predecessors. I’m afraid I can’t say the same for any of the six new acquisitions I saw presented to the Collectors Committee on Friday afternoon. The artists represented ticked all the boxes of “woke” concern: Black; Native American; Latino; Asian-American; gay Mexican-American. Where would any of these works fit in the galleries I walked through the next day? They might expand the range of works on view. They wouldn’t elevate it.
I almost forgot the BIG show at NGA: a retrospective of Mark Rothko’s works on paper, both watercolors and acrylics. I was not aware that Rothko worked on paper, and it turns out it was a major part of his oeuvre. The NGA has the largest holdings, and the show was heavily supplemented with works held by his children, Kate and Christopher. Rothko’s paintings fell into four periods, the first three of which are very distinctive. His early watercolors follow the styles of Paul Cezanne, John Marin and Milton Avery, to cite the obvious precedents, and are quite lovely in a traditional way. Then he turned Surrealist, and many of these works are spectacular. He could have stayed there and called it a career.  But then he moved on to the style that makes him famous: rectangles of solid colors floating on a monochrome background. Except for their smaller size, I couldn’t tell the difference between many of these examples and his oil paintings (concurrently on display in a Paris retrospective). What you think of them depends almost entirely on what colors you like. I certainly didn’t like all of them. Then, and maybe this is the fourth stage, there is a suite of large black-and-gray paintings. We are assured that these were not intended to presage Rothko’s suicide in 1971, but it’s hard to see them without that thought. What attracted me was the variety in his paint handling: one square would be made of sweeping brushstrokes, while the adjacent square would be a feathery pattern, often quite beautiful. Like monographic shows at the Met, there was more here than you needed to see, and I would have thought better of the artist if the curation hadn’t been so exhaustive. The trick is to pick out the works in a gallery that grab your eye and not feel that you have to look at, and read about, each one. But that is hard to do.