Fine Arts News

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  Raphaelle Peale is considered the first American professional still-life painter. His Still Life - Strawberries, Nuts, &c., 1822, exemplifies early American efforts to showcase the bounty of North America. (Gift of Jamee J. and Marshall Field)

In the age of celebrity chef fetishism and competitive ingredient sourcing, it can be hard to remember that there was a time when restaurants didn't exist in America.

Before the Civil War, most people ate at home, consuming mostly what they could forage, barter, butcher or grow in the backyard. But just because food choices were simpler back then doesn't mean our relationship to what we ate was any less complicated.

Food as a symbol of politics, diet, gender roles, technology, isolation, gluttony and blatant commercialism has, in fact, been with us for ages and in many forms.

A massive exhibit that opened last month at the Art Institute of Chicago gathers iconic (Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want) and not-so-well-known (Francis W. Edmonds' The Epicure) American paintings of food from the Pilgrims right on through to Andy Warhol. And it throws in some elegant (Art Deco martini set) and creepy (cabbage-shaped teapot) tableware, menus and memorabilia for good measure.

The curators of the show, called Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine, "offer a new approach to still-life and food-related genre paintings, revealing their importance in American culture, the history of American cuisine, and the ways that these have shaped and reflected our national identity," says Douglas Druick, president of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the preface to the 125-page exhibit guidebook.
For example, The Epicure, painted in 1838, is one of the earliest-known depictions of a tavern meal in America, according to Judith A. Barter, curator of American Art at the institute.

At first glance, it may just look like a portrait of a well-fed rich guy inspecting the humble daily supper offerings. But Barter points out that the well-marbled side of beef on the table was standard Northern fare, while the pig being offered by the innkeeper was a Southern dish.

"The work may be illustrating as well the political divide that separated North and South," she writes. "During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the debate over the future of the nation — the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of small farmers and limited national government versus the Hamiltonian vision of centralization and an economy built on international trade, banking, and speculation — came to a head."
All that from just one piece.



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• http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013...7a2-s6-c30.jpg
  Raphaelle Peale is considered the first American professional still-life painter. His Still Life - Strawberries, Nuts, &c., 1822, exemplifies early American efforts to showcase the bounty of North America. (Gift of Jamee J. and Marshall Field)

In the age of celebrity chef fetishism and competitive ingredient sourcing, it can be hard to remember that there was a time when restaurants didn't exist in America.

Before the Civil War, most people ate at home, consuming mostly what they could forage, barter, butcher or grow in the backyard. But just because food choices were simpler back then doesn't mean our relationship to what we ate was any less complicated.

Food as a symbol of politics, diet, gender roles, technology, isolation, gluttony and blatant commercialism has, in fact, been with us for ages and in many forms.

A massive exhibit that opened last month at the Art Institute of Chicago gathers iconic (Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want) and not-so-well-known (Francis W. Edmonds' The Epicure) American paintings of food from the Pilgrims right on through to Andy Warhol. And it throws in some elegant (Art Deco martini set) and creepy (cabbage-shaped teapot) tableware, menus and memorabilia for good measure.

The curators of the show, called Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine, "offer a new approach to still-life and food-related genre paintings, revealing their importance in American culture, the history of American cuisine, and the ways that these have shaped and reflected our national identity," says Douglas Druick, president of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the preface to the 125-page exhibit guidebook.

For example, The Epicure, painted in 1838, is one of the earliest-known depictions of a tavern meal in America, according to Judith A. Barter, curator of American Art at the institute.

At first glance, it may just look like a portrait of a well-fed rich guy inspecting the humble daily supper offerings. But Barter points out that the well-marbled side of beef on the table was standard Northern fare, while the pig being offered by the innkeeper was a Southern dish.

"The work may be illustrating as well the political divide that separated North and South," she writes. "During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the debate over the future of the nation — the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of small farmers and limited national government versus the Hamiltonian vision of centralization and an economy built on international trade, banking, and speculation — came to a head."
All that from just one piece.

Check out the slideshow above for some more Art and Appetite morsels. The exhibit closes Jan. 27.


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The Colobus Monkeys diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Polina Yamshchikov/for NPR
“ ...to really motivate and generate concern, it's gotta be based on data, but you've got to touch the heart and passion of the person.

- Stephen C. Quinn

You've probably never heard of painter Fred F. Scherer. If you've ever been to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, though, you may have seen his paintings — probably without realizing it.
Scherer died at age 98 a few weeks ago. His art — those big murals you see behind taxidermic animals in museum dioramas — deserves a closer look.

We visited the AMNH to photograph some of the installations containing his paintings, and spoke with Stephen C. Quinn, who recently retired as an artist from the museum, and knew Scherer well.
"Fred worked at the museum at the golden age of diorama production," Quinn says. "He started at age 19 and worked as an apprentice on the famed Mountain Gorilla diorama."

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Mountain Gorillas, one of the first dioramas on which Fred Scherer apprenticed.

Polina Yamshchikov/for NPR
Mountain Gorillas, one of the first dioramas on which Fred Scherer apprenticed.
Polina Yamshchikov/for NPR

Most of Scherer's paintings were created between the 1940s and '60s — at a time when city-dwellers may have had little access to nature. Museum artists like Scherer worked to bring nature alive indoors.
According to Quinn, Scherer was one of many working in this genre that went back decades — "to a time that preceded really good photography."
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The Birds of the Tundra diorama

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A Pennsylvania man who bought a raffle ticket for $140 dollars has won the top prize – a Picasso worth $1 million.

Jeffrey Gonano, 25, entered a raffle put on by Sotheby's in Paris offering "1 Picasso for 100 Euros" as a , an ancient Phoenician city in Lebanon.

Gonano, who works for his family's fire sprinkler business, found out on Wednesday that he'd won with one of the 50,000 tickets sold and is now the proud owner of the 1914 "Man in the Opera Hat," which dates from Pablo Picasso's cubist period.

"I'm still in shock. It's still very odd," . "I never thought I would win. I just saw a news article on Yahoo and bought a ticket. I don't even know why."

quotes Gonano as saying he "wants to keep the artwork, which features vivid shapes in opaque gouache paint."

"Maybe I'll lend it to a museum and let them put it on display rather than putting it in a vault, so other people can enjoy it," he told the newspaper. "It all depends. I don't know what the taxes are or anything."

Having sold all 50,000 tickets, Sotheby's should have raised close to $7 million for charity event.

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Can wealthy art lovers help save Detroit's pension funds — and one of its museums?

The city is struggling to find ways to emerge from bankruptcy. One idea: sell the city's art to save the pensions of city retirees. The Detroit Institute of Arts, or DIA, has faced serious financial difficulties over the years, and yet it holds the city's most valuable assets: a world-class art collection that includes works by Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Matisse. Estimates vary, but Christie's recently appraised these works at more than $850 million.

Because some of those masterpieces were bought with city funds, they could be auctioned off to pay creditors. "It's the only source of money that exists in the city of Detroit," philanthropist Paul Schaap says flatly.

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Philanthropist Paul Schaap says selling the Detroit Institute of Arts' masterpieces would devastate the city's morale. Christie's has appraised some works in the collection; the auction house estimates that this piece could bring in $20 million.
Gladioli, Claude Monet, ca. 1876, oil on canvas.

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David Sommerstein / NCPR
Two turntables carved from wood scratch out the sound of Beat Nation artist Jordan Bennett learning his native Mi'kmaq language.

At the entrance of a new exhibit at Montreal's Musée d'Art Contemporain, visitors are greeted with a red neon glow and a ping-pong of sounds. A dubstep groove thumps. A high-hat skitters. A pow-wow chant echoes from another room.
Beat Nation: Hip Hop as Indigenous Culture has become something of an art sensation in Canada. Featuring more than two dozen artists using beats, graffiti, humor and politics to challenge stereotypes, the exhibit coincides with the growth of Idle No More, an indigenous political movement in Canada.

"The idea behind hip-hop is the idea of a mix," says Mark Lanctot, a curator at the Montreal museum. He says the sonic soup that follows you throughout the exhibit represents the diversity of being indigenous today.

"Aboriginal culture isn't a monolithic, single, static entity. It's always changing, always takes from other cultures," he says.
Listen closer to the sounds, and you'll hear more indigenous stories filtered through hip-hop's lens. DJ Madeskimo mixes traditional throat singing with electronic beats and footage of "Hollywood Indian" stereotypes for a multimedia presentation called Dubyadubs. In another room, Kevin Lee Burton slices and dices his native Cree language into a sort of rap.

A Drumbeat And A Heartbeat

Beat Nation was born in Vancouver in 2006 as an online gallery; today it's a traveling exhibit. Co-founder Tania Willard, a member of Canada's Secwepemc nation, says she first made a connection between native culture and hip-hop when she was 16. She saw breakdancers at a traditional pow-wow.

"Hip-hop was just making inroads in mainstream culture and here was this all-native break-dance crew — this is 20-plus years ago — who are touring around the pow-wow circuit," Willard muses.

Hip-hop blew up in Vancouver's huge native community in the 1990s and 2000s, spawning influential MCs such as Manik 1derful. Willard says hip-hop beats fit naturally into the indigenous worldview. "We sort of talk about Beat Nation as not just electronic beats, but also the drumbeat and the heartbeat," she says.

Hip-hop also filtered into native culture as young people left isolated, poverty-stricken territories for Canada's city streets, where things weren't much better. Many shuttled back and forth, nd that cycle — known as "the churn" — is evident in Beat Nation. Skateboards turned into snowshoes are on display, along with turntables carved from wood, and "indigenized" iPods made of felt.

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Artist Dylan Miner worked with indigenous youth to make low-rider bicycles designed to demand attention, just as Canada's indigenous communities have been doing recently.
David Sommerstein / NCPR

Dylan Miner worked with indigenous youth to make low-rider bicycles. tricked out with painted hides and hand drums. He says a theme running through many pieces in the show is the claiming space, like a slow-and-low moving low-rider, backing up traffic and demanding attention. "[We are] asserting indigenous presence in the contemporary moment in a way that's letting people speak for ourselves," he says.

Agents Of Change

That message of presence has been a big one in Canada recently. A year ago, a handful of indigenous women started a movement called Idle No More. The hashtag #IdleNoMore spread virally across the country, and thousands marched to protest poor living conditions and environmental degradation in native territories.

Geromino Inutiq, a.k.a Madeskimo, says Idle No More and Beat Nation are of a piece. "We're not idle anymore. See us in the governments and the institutions and the companies. See us on TV," Inutiq says. "We're not sitting there idly on our reserves, waiting to die. We're agents of change within society and that's what it means."

It's tempting to view Beat Nation as representative of an Idle No More generation, something new and different. Tania Willard doesn't see it that way. She says native artists have been mixing, borrowing and sampling — hip-hop-style — for centuries.

"I see Beat Nation as this continuum of innovation that indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of," she says.
Beat Nation runs in Montreal through Jan. 5. Then it's off to Halifax and, this summer, Saskatchewan.


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Zhao Mengfu was the preeminent painter and calligrapher of the early Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). His Sheep And Goat scroll is estimated to be worth $100 million.

Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Outside of China and Taiwan, U.S. museums hold the world's best collection of Chinese paintings. It's worth billions of dollars, but it's also fragile: Over time, these paintings fall apart. In the U.S., there are only four master conservators who know how to take care of them, and they're all approaching retirement.

Invisible Conservation

Inside the gallery, there's a softly-lit room with a high ceiling. To the right there's a painting that's about 4 feet long. In it, two Chinese scholars dressed in long robes stand under a gnarled tree. There's a river and a soaring mountain range in the background. It's called Summoning The Sage At Wei River and it's from the Ming Dynasty, making it about 500 years old.

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Li Tang painted Summoning The Sage At Wei River on silk during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).

"The lighting in the museum gallery is very good, because it also helps to mask a lot of the damages," says Grace Jan, an assistant conservator at the gallery. "You can see there [are] horizontal lines that are slightly darker, and then you can see there's like kind of a vertical line down the center above the figure on the left."

She says that the faint black streak was once much more serious damage. These paintings weren't done with oil paints on wooden panels, like the Mona Lisa; they were painted on fragile pieces of silk or rice paper, which is why Chinese painting conservation is so important. Summoning The Sage At Wei River had to be carefully cleaned and painted over.

"We just do as minimal treatment as we can so that it doesn't jump at you when you're looking at the painting," Jan says. She points to an example on the Wei River painting. I can barely see it, but that's the point.

A Lifetime Of Training

The Freer has more than 2,000 Chinese paintings and master conservator Xiangmei Gu is responsible for maintaining all of them. One of the first things she shows me is an ancient map that was torn halfway down the middle. She says once she remounted it, it looked fine, and she's right: Standing just inches away, I can't see where the tear used to be.

It took Gu a long time to learn how to do that. She started at the Shanghai Museum as an apprentice to the resident master there in the 1970s. For 15 years, she learned how to repair and remount ancient paintings and calligraphy. In 1987, she came to the U.S. to join her husband, and three years later, she got a job at the Freer.

"I worked so many years, almost 40 years," she says, "[I] still never finished; [I] continue to learn this job."
That's right, 40 years and she says she's still learning. Still, she can't work forever. The Mellon Foundation recently gave the

Freer a million-dollar grant to train an assistant Chinese painting conservator.
In the meantime, Gu is passing her skills on to Jan. Jan has a master's degree in conservation from New York University, and she got interested in the practice because her grandfather was also a painter.

"I remember seeing his paintings turning yellow," Jan says. "They turned yellow after they were mounted, in the next couple years."

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Conservator Xiangmei Gu works at a red lacquer table in the gallery's conservation lab.


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Listen to the Story


In Detroit, a group of local and national foundations has pledged more than $330 million to keep the city from auctioning off assets from the Detroit Institute of Art. The purpose of the deal is twofold: to preserve the collection and to raise money for the city's underfunded pension plans.


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A new exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., features a flock of 70 finches and an array of tuned and amplified guitars. As the flock fills the open room, the birds are free to land on the guitars, making music of their own as they move and jump off the instruments.


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This Egyptian cosmetic box of the cupbearer Kemeni, ca. 1814-1805 B.C., is made of cedar, ebony, ivory and silver.

Metropolitan Musem of Art
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Gold, porcelain, glass and steel compose this 18th-century necessaire from France.

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This French mechanical table was intended for Madame de Pompadour. The designs depict her many interests, including gardening, painting, music and architecture.
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This American worktable was made of satinwood and served as a sewing table and writing desk as well as a vanity.
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A 1925 French dressing table shows off the Art Deco style.
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The shapely drawers of Raymond Loewy's 1969 valet eliminated the need for hardware.

Ever since there have been puddles of water, human beings have gazed at their reflections.
Our need to primp and preen, whether we live in the Bronze Age or the Space Age, can be seen in a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called Vanities: The Art of the Dressing Table.

Curator Jane Adlin offers a show that reminds us that while our vanity may ultimately be in vain, the instinct goes back a long way.

An Ancient Conceit

The exhibit begins with an inlaid cedar cosmetic box from Egypt's Middle Kingdom. The box, preserved in a Pharoah's tomb, contained stone ointment jars, perfumes, face paints and other potions. A hand mirror was made not from glass but of polished metal, with a wooden handle decorated with gold.
Found in 1910 by Howard Carter — who would later discover Tutankahemen's tomb — the box is 3,000 years old. Depicted on the drawer is a servant carrying a vessel, "a cupbearer, which was a high title," Adlin says.

Carter found the box in another tomb. "The fact that it was buried in their tomb with them shows how important it was as a means of showing status and their ability to adorn themselves," Adlin says.
The Egyptians weren't alone in their desire to adorn themselves. Through the ages, women have had their cosmetics and must-haves. The French called the ornate boxes that held them "necessaires."
"You would find tiny little perfume flasks, combs, nail files, tiny scissors," Adlin says. "These are clearly meant for the luxury market and were pieces that could have been owned by Madame de Pompadour or royalty, and were carried by their maids and brought out when the madame would ask for a comb."

Beauty, Style And The Unmentionable

These cosmetic boxes were portable. It wasn't till the late 1700s when finally, someone placed the box on a table and drew up a chair.

"By the mid-1800s, the dressing table has become this sort of extraordinary furniture piece," Adlin says. "It's the beginning of the era of the dressing table that we know of."

Madam de Pompadour, the Mistress of Louis XIV, was her era's style-setter. A painting shows her at her vanity table with her mirror, makeup brush, and compact, wearing a low-cut gown. The preening went on for hours. She'd receive visitors as she put on her makeup.

"She had incredibly good taste, and hired only the most important, the most well-known furniture designers," Adlin says. "She was very cultured, and she created amazing furniture."

The exhibit includes exquisite combs, some decorated with precious gems, some made out of rubber, and some made out of ebony and ivory. But they were not all used for beauty alone.

"The interesting thing about the double-sided combs: the wide tooth is to comb hair, and the narrow end is to comb out the lice," Adlin explains.

The Vanities Of Men

What about men? After all, they groom too, especially their beards. They need tables of their own.
The men's vanities in the exhibit aren't really tables. Men stood to shave, so theirs are narrow cabinets with stacks of drawers for their grooming supplies, topped by a mirror. One glossy modern piece by Raymond Loewy was inspired by Space-Age aesthetics and injection-molded plastics.
"This is the men's shaving stand, and as you see, there's no place to sit," Adlin says. "He combined the historical idea of men's dressing tables with new, contemporary materials, the molded plastic. He has no handles, but the grips on the drawers come out of the molded plastic."

The final piece in the exhibit is a table made by a Korean artist in 2013 out of stone and steel —
materials that recall the beauty boxes of antiquity.

Where does this impulse come from, this need to look at ourselves, at least for a time, to begin the day?

"It is inexplicable, it's innate," Adlin says, laughing. "It's something in our gene pool — in our reflecting gene pool."


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Mexican artist Pedro Reyes received 6,700 weapons from the Mexican government, from which he sculpted instruments.

Pedro Reyes says being Mexican is like living in an apartment where an upstairs neighbor has a leaking swimming pool.
"Just what is leaking," says Reyes, "is hundreds of thousands of guns."

He wants people to think about the availability of guns in the United States, and the impact that has in Mexico.

At the University of South Florida in Tampa, he recently held a series of workshops and a performance, using theater to encourage a discussion about guns. It's called "Legislative Theater," a style of performance pioneered in Latin America in the 1960s to influence social change.

In Tampa, Reyes called his project "The Amendment to the Amendment." Specifically, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms. Reyes asks his actors and the audience to consider if there are possible changes that might improve the amendment
Reyes believes art should address social issues like gun violence, even when they're difficult and controversial. "We have to be allowed to ask questions," he says. "If you are not allowed to ask questions, you are not free."

Reyes also addresses the issue of gun violence in another way, by using guns themselves. His first project began in 2007 in the Mexican city of Culiacan. As part of a campaign to curb shootings, the city collected 1,527 guns. He used them to create art.

"Those 1,527 guns were melted and made into the same number of shovels," he says. "So for every gun now, there's a shovel. And with every shovel, we planted a tree."

Now Reyes is working on a new project. It is one that transforms guns into something more musical.
An exhibition of the work is on display at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum. It's called "Disarm," and consists of guns that have been turned into musical instruments.

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Pedro Reyes says he believes art should address social issues like gun violence, even if the issue is difficult or controversial.


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About Hasan Elahi's TEDTalk

When 's name was mistakenly added to the U.S. government's watch list, he fought the assault on his privacy by turning his life inside-out for the world to see.

About Hasan Elahi

If the Feds come after you, you have options: panic, resist or — if you're interdisciplinary American artist Hasan Elahi — flood them with information. In 2002, Elahi was detained because he was suspected of hoarding explosives in a Florida locker. Even though lie detector tests cleared him, Elahi was subjected to six months of questioning.

He decided to turn the tables by constantly calling and emailing the FBI to notify them of his whereabouts. But the effort grew into an including posting minute-by-minute photos and his location through . Elahi is an associate professor of art at the University of Maryland and he has exhibited at Venice Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, and the Hermitage.


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Mario Tama/Getty Images

Joan Mondale, wife of former U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale died Monday at a hospice care facility near her home in Minneapolis, Minn. She was 83.

Joan Mondale was given a grand platform when her husband was elected Jimmy Carter's vice president in 1976. And she used it.
The avid arts advocate lobbied Congress and the states for more spending on arts programs, and she traveled frequently to museums, theaters and artists' studios on the administration's behalf. She was so passionate that she earned the nickname "Joan of Art" and, in the process of pushing her cause, transformed the role of the second lady.

As Carter's No. 2, Walter Mondale was seen as a trusted adviser and credited with making the office of the vice president more relevant. It was natural that his wife would do the same for her role. Vice presidential aide Al Eisele once said of his boss: "It was important to him
that Joan not just be the vice president's wife, but his partner."

Joan Mondale, herself an avid potter, died Monday afternoon with her husband, sons Ted and William, and other family members by her side, the family said in a statement. She was 83.

"Joan was greatly loved by many. We will miss her dearly," the former vice president said in a written statement.
The family had announced Sunday that she had gone into hospice care, but declined to discuss her illness.

Walter Mondale, then a Democratic senator from Minnesota, was elected Carter's vice president in 1976. Soon after, Carter named Joan Mondale honorary chairwoman of the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, and she used that role to push for arts programs on the administration's behalf.

She also showcased the work of prominent artists in the vice presidential residence, including photographer Ansel Adams, sculptor David Smith and painter Georgia O'Keeffe.

"She was exemplary in using the opportunities public service provided to advance the arts and other issues important to her and many Americans," Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, said in a statement released late Monday.

Her enthusiasm for the cause earned widespread praise in the arts community, including from Jim Melchert, director of the visual arts program for the National Endowment for the Arts during Carter's administration.

"Your rare fire has brightened many a day for more people than you may imagine," Melchert wrote to her after the 1980 Carter-Mondale re-election defeat. "What you've done with style and seeming ease will continue illuminating our world for a long time to come."
Joan Mondale would later take her cultural zeal overseas when her husband was named U.S. ambassador to Japan during President Bill Clinton's administration.

During her husband's ambassadorship, Joan Mondale relished the chance to study Japanese art and give dignitaries clay pots she made as gifts. In her 1972 book, "Politics in Art," Joan Mondale framed a connection between the two.

"Sometimes we do not realize how important our participation in politics is. Often we need to be reminded of our duty as citizens," she wrote. "Artists can do just that; they can look at our politicians, our institutions and our problems to help us understand them better."
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar first met Joan Mondale while working as an intern for the vice president in 1980. Klobuchar still has two coffee mugs on her kitchen table that were made by Joan.

"She was always down to earth," Klobuchar said Monday. "She was just as happy going out to rural farms in Elmore (Minnesota) as she was mixing it up at fancy receptions at the ambassador's residence in Japan."

She was born Joan Adams in Eugene, Ore., on Aug. 8, 1930. She and her two sisters moved several times during childhood as their father, a Presbyterian minister, took new assignments. The family finally settled in St. Paul, Minn., where Joan would earn an undergraduate degree at Macalester College.

It was the same liberal arts school that Walter Mondale attended, but they were a few years apart and didn't meet until 1955, when one of Joan's sisters arranged a blind date. Six months later they were engaged, and they married soon after.

She dabbled in Democratic Party politics as a ward chairwoman, though she focused on her family as her husband built a political career that started with state attorney general. Joan tended to a family that would eventually include sons Ted and William and a daughter, Eleanor, who died in 2011 after a long battle with brain cancer.

When Walter Mondale was tapped to fill the Senate seat vacated by Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey in 1964, the family headed to Washington.

There, Joan Mondale immersed herself in the capital's art scene. She gave weekly tours at the National Gallery of Art and took pottery lessons. Even when her husband was campaigning as Carter's vice president, she tried to keep up with regular ceramics classes.
More recently, she sat on the U.S. Postal Service panel that has a role in selecting stamp designs. She gave up her seat on that committee in 2010.

On Monday, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama noted and praised her many contributions to the arts community.
"Through her contributions to the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities and the Kennedy Center, she passionately advocated for the role of art in the life of our nation and the promotion of understanding worldwide," the Obamas said in a statement.
A service is scheduled for Saturday in Minneapolis.


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Marc Ahr has been painting at the Olympics for the last 22 years.

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The thing about Sochi and the surrounding area, and the sidewalks, and the roads, and the land around the train tracks, is the construction. It is everywhere — in places where some might see it and say, "Wait, it doesn't matter. This will not be on TV. No one important is staying here. Just let it go." Miles away from any venue or lodging or Olympic rings.

When I went up to the slopestyle course to interview an athlete, the sound of the music blaring over the loudspeakers was often drowned out by a bulldozer, making noise just behind the stadium seating.

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It was in this state of construction, preparation, unfinishedness, that I found Marc Ahr, in the village at the Rosa Khutor extreme sports complex. I saw Marc sketching, looking very hip in black jeans, a gray beanie, and a faux-fur-lined leather jacket. He told me he's been sketching and painting Olympics across the world for 22 years now. He did Lillehammer, Nagano, Salt Lake City, Turin and Vancouver, all without pay. He just shows up and starts drawing. This one, Sochi, felt special to him, as Marc has lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the past 10 years. (He's originally from France.)

He was in the midst of finishing up some mountains and adding people to the little village beneath the peaks in his rendering. "I like to add real people to my pictures," he said as he drew. "Real colors, real people."

I asked Marc what he made of all the hoopla surrounding the games, how he dealt with a city still very much under construction just hours before the opening ceremony. I asked what he made of the talk of stray dogs being put down. We talked about his thoughts on the ongoing issue of LGBTQ rights in Russia. Basically, I asked him about all the negative press surrounding these games, which has reached a peak before they've even started.

He answered: "In Russia, everything is impossible, but everything is possible."

For Marc, the games will happen, and they will be good; things are better than they seem, no matter what the press narrative is, or even who wins or loses. "What the hell if they go down the slope one second before, one second after," Marc said. "I don't see the difference. I'm happy to be with people who are happy."

Marc did have some Olympic favorites. He said he most enjoyed drinking with the Japanese. The best transportation was in France. But they all had good and bad, he told me.

And that's the thing for Marc. Throughout all of the criticism of his country ahead of the games, he said every country, everywhere, has good and bad. "Each culture is different," he told me. "Of course we want everything to be our way. If you look through another angle, you will see that some of the things are not as bad as you think."

Marc acknowledged that Sochi — that Russia — still has some work to do. The construction in these parts might not just be physical. Perhaps the bulldozers and plowed-up ground and unfinished buildings are a metaphor. Things in Russia are changing, at least as far as Marc can see. "Each country is getting there," he told me. "Slowly, and slowly."


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Here's what I remember: The day it happened, I was around 8 years old, which puts me in the second grade. It was definitely a Sunday (because we never went anywhere on Saturdays). My dad had decided to take me to the Museum of Modern Art to see some paintings, and I always liked going places with my dad, it didn't matter where, so we arrived at the lobby, bought our tickets, handed them to a man who tore them in half, like at the movies. Then we took the escalator, walked into a big gallery, and as we were moving through — that's when it happened.

Grabbed By a Dead Man

I was walking behind my dad, trying to keep up, when something on the wall kind of flung itself at me, stopped me short, and (for lack of a better term) grabbed my eyes. I came to a full stop.

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Stephen Sandoval/Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Lillie P. Bliss Collection

It was a woodland scene, a blur of greens, blues and purples, a tumble of rocks in the foreground, tall pines, branching into a blue sky, breaking up into arabesques. It had no people in it, no girls, nothing I recognized. But with a force that felt like a fist, it jerked my head to it — almost as if it were calling out, "You!" — like it knew me. Like it wanted to pull me to it and tell me something — something personal. But what? I had no idea. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. Furniture, pictures, carpets had always stayed in their place, being, after all, things. But not this thing. It had power.

As I moved closer, it tightened its grip. The boulders in the foreground were dark at the edges, light where the sun peeped through. The upper branches broke free and became little dabs of paint, applied in rhythmic strokes. Paint became tree; tree became paint. I knew nothing about painting, zilch about art history, but the crazy energy coming off that canvass felt like it was addressing some puzzle I already had in my head. I couldn't stop looking. I barely moved. My dad, who had turned around wondering where I'd gone, found me standing a few feet from the image, and when he came up behind me, without turning around, I asked him, "What is this?" And he, without looking for a label, answered, "This ... (and it was the first time I ever heard the name) ... is a Cezanne."

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Stephen Sandoval/Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Lillie P. Bliss Collection

How Did Cezanne Do This To Me? I was 8.

To this day I cannot explain what happened to me. The fact that it kept happening — keeps happening, all these (almost) 60 years since — is one of the mysteries of my life. Cezanne produced precarious little worlds that almost, almost, almost lose their balance, but somehow hold themselves together, creating tension, beauty and danger all at once. But why would these crazy dares thrill an 8-year-old? What was it about me that was ready for Cezanne? Because I was so ready. Even in the second grade.

Here's all I can think: that when we are born, we are born with a sort of mood in us, a mood that comes to us through our genes, that will be seasoned by experience, but deep down, it's already there, looking for company, for someone to share itself with, and when we happen on the right piece of music, the right person, or, in this case the right artist, then, with a muscle that is as deep as ourselves, with the force of someone grabbing for a life preserver, we attach. And that's what happened to me that day.

I saw something on a wall that knew what I knew, felt what I felt and wanted me just as badly as I wanted it. When I left the museum I was a different boy. I had been addressed, personally addressed, by an artist whom I could never meet, who didn't speak my language, who had already been dead for 50 years. But I didn't care. His painting pulled me into a conversation I'd apparently been longing to have. It came at me with a force I will never forget and it began very simply. I looked at it. It looked at me, and all it said was, "Me too!" — and Cezanne and I have been talking ever since.

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Courtesy of Sara Krulwich



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It's time again for the show that people love to hate: the Whitney Biennial, an overview of American art. Critics often trash it, but as Karen Michel says, this year's showcase has a few surprises.


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After the Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed in 1934, Diego Rivera recreated this version, named Man, Controller of the Universe, which is on display at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. The story of the original mural's creation and destruction is the focus of a Mexican Cultural Institute exhibition in Washington, D.C.

When Mexican artist Diego Rivera was commissioned in 1932 to do a mural in the middle of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, some might have wondered whether industrialist tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jr. knew what he was getting into.
In 1934, the legendary artist's work was chiseled off the wall.

Now, in Washington, D.C., the Mexican Cultural Institute has mounted a show that tells what happened to Rivera's mural.

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Artist Diego Rivera stands with a copy of the mural he painted at Rockefeller Center that was eventually destroyed.

A. Estrada /Courtesy of Museo Frida Kalho

"Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera's Mural at Rockefeller Center," is a whodunit tale that also illustrates the tensions between art and politics. Exhibition co-curator Susana Pliego says the Rockefeller family was aware of Rivera's leftist politics when it commissioned the work.

"They tried to have pieces of the best artists at the time," Pliego says. "That was why [they wanted it], because of the artistic and commercial value of his work."

Pliego says Rivera got a three-page contract laying out exactly what management wanted.

Rivera was asked to show a man at the crossroads, looking with uncertainty but with hope and high vision to the choosing of a course leading to a new and better future.

"The theme of Rockefeller Center was 'New Frontiers,' so that was a very spiritual way of looking at development and art," Pliego says. She wonders what made the Rockefellers think that Rivera's vision would be the same as theirs.

A Difference Of Vision

"It was a bad decision for everyone, but it's about politics," co-curator Pablo Ortiz Monasterio says. "When you have to take a position, there is no other way out."

Monasterio says the show illustrates the conflict between the rich, powerful family that hired Rivera and the artist's strong political point of view.

Pliego says the original sketch for the mural — and what Rivera agreed to paint — included three men clasping hands in the middle: a soldier, a worker and peasant. "A spiritual union of all the three elements that Rivera thought man — humanity — was composed of," she says.

"Unfortunately, what he painted was different from the sketch," David Rockefeller Sr. told the Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

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An early sketch of the mural shows how it differed from what Diego Rivera painted in Rockefeller Center.

Courtesy of Museo Frida Kahlo

The leftist artist was taunted by those who felt he had sold out, Rivera expert Linda Downs says.

"He was really provoked in New York by leftist organizations and various communist groups that challenged him for painting for Rockefeller," she says.

Then, the World Telegram newspaper ran the headline: "Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Jr. Foots the Bill." Pliego says Rivera then decided to add a portrait of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to the mural.

"He sent his assistants to find a picture of Lenin because, he said, 'If you want communism, I will paint communism,' " Pliego says.

On top of that, according to David Rockefeller Sr., Rivera added a panel that the family felt was an unflattering portrait of his father.

"The picture of Lenin was on the right-hand side, and on the left, a picture of [my] father drinking martinis with a harlot and various other things that were unflattering to the family and clearly inappropriate to have as the center of Rockefeller Center," he said.

"He had these two options," Monasterio says. "He could erase that and solve the problem, but if he didn't, then that would be a scandal; that would be propaganda. So he himself was at the crossroads again."

Rivera had persuaded his patrons to let him paint a fresco — paint on wet plaster instead of on canvas. That meant the work couldn't be moved. After a flurry of letters asking Rivera to replace Lenin and the artist's declaration that he'd rather see the work destroyed than mutilated, Rivera was fired and the work was eventually chiseled off.

A Missing Piece Of History

Downs says the piece would have been stunning had it survived.
"He had this vision of the importance of technology in the future and the hope that there would be a coming together of workers and industrialists and businessmen to further mankind in general," Downs says. "It was a very hopeful mural."
Pliego says the exhibition illustrates a key question: Who owns a work of art?
"For example, like Diego said in a letter," she says, "'If someone buys the Sistine Chapel, does he have the authority to destroy it?' "

The exhibition, "Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera's Mural at Rockefeller Center," reconstructs the story of the mural through reproductions of documents, letters, photographs and Rivera's sketches. It will be on display at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C., through May 17.


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'Chineasy' Animal Characters

These Chineasy illustrations by graphic designer Noma Bar feature Chinese characters in both the traditional (mainly used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and simplified (mainly used in mainland China) writing styles. If the caption does not specify the style, the character's traditional and simplified forms are the same.

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Courtesy of Harper Design

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Growing up in Taiwan, ShaoLan Hsueh stuck out.

She liked writing in Chinese.
"I know all the children hated it, but I was a bit odd in that I loved writing Chinese characters," says Hsueh, the daughter of a Chinese calligrapher.

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ShaoLan Hsueh worked with illustrators to develop pictograms that help readers learn Chinese characters.

Now living in London, she later discovered that the love she had for Chinese language felt like "torture" to her two British-born children. "I found it really challenging to try to convince them that it's really cool to read Chinese," she said. "No one in their environment would be interested or have contact with Chinese-speaking people."

Her solution is a system that helps readers learn Chinese characters through cute illustrations. The pictograms, developed with a team of visual designers, are now published in a new book called Chineasy.

There are tens of thousands of Chinese characters, but learning the 400-plus characters featured in the book is enough to read at a basic level, according to Hsueh, who also presented her language learning system at a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=troxvPRmZm8.

She adds that while learning to read may be challenging to Chinese-language learners, it can provide a deeper understanding of Chinese culture. For example, she points to the character for "female"

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Renoir's On the Shore of the Seine returns to the Baltimore Museum of Art more than 60 years after its theft. Rumor has it Renoir painted the tiny piece on a linen napkin for his mistress. It was stolen from the museum in 1951 and resurfaced in 2012 when a woman tried to sell it, claiming she had bought it at a flea market.

Renoir's On the Shore of the Seine returns to the Baltimore Museum of Art more than 60 years after its theft. Rumor has it Renoir painted the tiny piece on a linen napkin for his mistress. It was stolen from the museum in 1951 and resurfaced in 2012 when a woman tried to sell it, claiming she had bought it at a flea market.

It has the makings of a great mystery: Artwork stolen from a prominent museum, plus the FBI, a beautiful woman and an intrepid reporter. But this isn't fiction, it's a strange, true tale of how a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir has now safely returned home to Baltimore.

At first it was known as the Renoir found at a West Virginia flea market — a woman took the painting to an auction house where they concluded that it was, indeed, On the Shore of the Seine — a Renoir that had been purchased in Paris in 1925 by American art collectors Herbert and Saidie May. In a press release, the auction house said it could sell for up to $100,000.

The flea market story intrigued Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira. He knew that Saidie May was a major donor to the Baltimore Museum of Art, but when he called the BMA, they told him they had no record of the painting. Shapira went to the museum to look through May's papers anyway, just days before the auction opened.

"I found some documents showing that the museum had actually owned this painting and then the museum discovered documents on its own showing that the staff back in the 1950s had actually reported the painting stolen," Shapira says.

It was stolen — possibly in the middle of the night — in November, 1951. Once the Baltimore Museum of Art confirmed the Renoir belonged to them, they immediately contacted the auction house. The auction house contacted the FBI, and the FBI seized the painting.
But that's not all Shapira discovered. His first clue something was amiss in the flea market story was a phone chat he had with the woman's brother.

"He said something along the lines of: 'Oh, yeah, that painting had been in my mother's house for years,'" Shapira says.

It turns out their mother, Marcia Fouquet, was an artist: She "was a painter herself who went to art college in Baltimore at the time of the painting's theft," Shapira says. She was a beautiful woman "who had a certain charm over men."

Fouquet lived in a house in Fairfax, Va. She rented out some of the rooms, and Shapira tracked down some of her former tenants. "Many of them told me in interviews they remember seeing this Renoir hanging in her house for decades," he says.

“ The painting became sort of a prodigal child. No matter how many children you have — and we have 90,000 in this institution — you feel for the one that is lost. So to be able to have it come home is just incredibly meaningful for us.

- Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art

But — as far as Shapira could tell — Fouquet never told anyone how she got it. She died at age 85 in September 2013.The case ended up in court — with the daughter still claiming she bought the painting at a flea market so it belonged to her, and the Baltimore Museum showing evidence of ownership of the stolen Renoir. The judge ruled in the museum's favor. After more than 60 years, the Renoir was returned.

On the Shore of the Seine is tiny, smaller than a sheet of paper. But the miniature landscape — of a sailboat in the distance — is bursting with color. The story goes that Renoir painted it around 1879 on a linen napkin — for his lover. With so much international interest, the painting is getting quite a homecoming.

"The painting became sort of a prodigal child," says Doreen Bolger, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. "No matter how many children you have — and we have 90,000 in this institution — you feel for the one that is lost. So to be able to have it come home is just incredibly meaningful for us.
The exhibition "The Renoir Returns" opens to the public on Sunday. The mystery of who stole the painting in 1951 remains unsolved. As for Marcia Fouquet's daughter, she says she will not appeal the judge's ruling.


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Photographer JeongMee Yoon felt her daughter's life was being overtaken by pink. She illustrated that in her 2006 portrait Seo Woo and Her Pink Things.

JeongMee Yoon/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Jenkins Johnson Gallery

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Susan Stamberg/NPR
Men's suits weren't always so sober. This embroidered, pink silk coat was worn by a Frenchman in the court of Louis XVI in the 18th century.

With sleet, snow and freezing temperatures extending through March, the National Cherry Blossom Festival — which recently kicked off in Washington, D.C. — is decidedly less pink this year. In a few weeks the Tidal Basin will be ringed by rosy, pink blossoms, but until then, we traveled north to Boston, where a show at the Museum of Fine Arts called "Think Pink" explores the history and social impact of the color.

Pink has always been with us, though it was not always as gender-entrenched as it is today. Back in the 1700s, men and women wore pink. Curator Michelle Finamore says a painting in the exhibit gives early evidence.

"It's a late 18th-century portrait of two children, who are both wearing dresses," she explains. "One is a pink brocade satin dress, one is a yellow dress, and they have these pinafores over them, and you can't tell if they're boys or girls."

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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A copy of the Ralph Lauren suit made for Robert Redford in the 1974 film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Finamore can tell by their accessories — they're wearing shoes and hats only boys wore then. But to most of us today, the kids look like girls.

Nearby at the exhibit is a pale pinkish-purple silk coat worn by a Frenchman in Louis XVI's court. Any woman would be tempted to swap her pink Nikes for this gorgeous long coat, embroidered with intricate flowers.

In A Journey Around My Room, published in 1794, French writer Xavier de Maistre puts pink into the male dream-space. He recommends that men have pink and white bedrooms to brighten their moods.

Fast-forward to 1925. Characters in The Great Gatsby speculate about Gatsby's past: "An Oxford man! ... Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit." A version of that pink suit is in the Boston show — Ralph Lauren designed it for Robert Redford in the 1974 movie.

Before Gatsby, a 1918 trade catalog for children's clothing recommended blue for girls. The reasoning at the time was that it's a "much more delicate and dainty tone," Finamore says. Pink was recommended for boys "because it's a stronger and more passionate color, and because it's actually derived from red."

To our 21st century ears, all this men in pink stuff may sound a bit blushy. "It's so deeply entrenched in us and our culture," says Finamore. "We think of pink as such a girlish color, but it's really a post-World War II phenomenon."

When the war ended and the men came home, Rosie the Riveter traded in her factory blues for June Cleaver's pink apron. In the postwar ideal, men reclaimed the workplace, and women stayed home with babies and shiny appliances. Femininity got wrapped in pink, and so did products — from shampoos to fancy fashion.

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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Big, pink flowers bloom on ivory silk in this 1956 dress by Christian Dior.

In 1947, after the shortages and rationing, and straight skirts of war, Christian Dior introduced the New Look. "It is this overtly feminine silhouette," Finamore explains. "You have soft shoulders, a bust line, a wasp waist and voluminous skirts."

The Boston "Think Pink" show has a strapless Dior gown from 1956 — the ivory silk is blooming with large, pink flowers.

Half a century later, photographer JeongMee Yoon was feeling overwhelmed by pink. She posed her young daughter in the middle of all the pink things that she owned and called the photograph Seo Woo and Her Pink Things (which you can see at the top of this page.)

"You barely see the little girl," says Finamore. "She's way back in the far right corner. And in front of her is this vast array of pink Hello Kitties, of pink dresses, of pink dolls, pink notebooks, pink anything you can imagine."

Thanks to marketing, Disney princesses and profits, the color pink has spread like measles. But at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where the "Think Pink" show is on through May 26, Finamore says these days of metrosexuals and shifting gender roles are loosening the color divide. Males are thinking pink again ... but will it ever be the new black?


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A portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin is on display at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas.

Former President George W. Bush worked with many world leaders while in office. Now, he's unveiling 24 portraits he painted of some of them. As Lauren Sullivan of KERA reports, the exhibit will be at his new presidential library.


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Hi Guys,

These are few water color illustrations that we have done for our portfolio,Please give your feedback so that we can improve more if we lacks in something.

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The Corcoran Gallery of Art and its college in Washington, D.C., will be taken over by a university and another gallery. The Corcoran is cherished by many but has had years of financial trouble.

Transcript

Copyright © 2014 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:
It's spring, tourism season here in the nation's capital and we're seeing plenty of visitors stream in. The tour books might steer them to the White House, the Capitol, the Smithsonian museums. Unless you're an art enthusiast, you might not even know about the Corcoran Gallery of Art just a couple blocks from the White House. It's actually one of the oldest art museums in the country and soon it will cease to exist, sort of.
It's being taken over by a nearby university and another gallery. NPR's Elizabeth Blair looks at how a cherished institution lost control of its future.

ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The Corcoran has always had a lot going for it, except for a clear identity. Is it a place to see historic artworks or adventurous new work, a national treasure or a hub for local artists, a school, a museum? Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott says all of the above.

PHILIP KENNICOTT: It's a very quirky institution and it's very much tied to the local arts community.

BLAIR: Quirky and local. Sounds good, says Peggy Loar, the Corcoran's interim director.

PEGGY LOAR: But that hasn't paid the bills.

BLAIR: And the bills are steep, and fundraising, she says, has not kept pace, partly because they're in
Washington, D.C. When the Corcoran goes looking for money, it's up against major federally funded institutions like The Smithsonian and The National Gallery of Art. The Corcoran charges a $10 admission fee. Its neighbors on The Mall are free.

LOAR: Living in the shadow, albeit the beautiful shadow, of all these amazing museums in Washington have meant that it's difficult, because when the public visits during the summer, when people come from all over the country, they're going to go to the free museums first. And so that has always been a problem for the Corcoran, and from the earliest days.

BLAIR: And the Corcoran was early. It was established in 1869, just before the Metropolitan in New York and well before The National Gallery in D.C. Art lover William Wilson Corcoran was born in Washington. He was a banker and a philanthropist who wanted to share his growing collection with the public. Today, one of the Corcoran's most valuable assets is its building, a marble Beaux Arts-style structure with a stunning skylit atrium with 40-foot-high ceilings.

DAVID LEVY: It has one of the greatest museum buildings in the world.

BLAIR: David Levy was the Corcoran's director for 14 years, beginning in the 1990s. He says he's worried about the fate of the building because it needs major renovations.

LEVY: The minute you start touching that building, which is to get the infrastructure of that building straightened out, there will be major ADA problems, Americans with Disabilities Act problems, because that building was built at a time when nobody thought about those things.

BLAIR: The cost of the repairs has been estimated at over $100 million. But that is not the only problem the Corcoran has faced.

LOAR: The model of the Corcoran was no longer sustainable. One of the issues is the fact that it is both a museum and a college.

BLAIR: Now, you would think just the opposite, that museum curators would want the next generation of artists under the same roof. But many art schools around the U.S. have split off from the museums to which they were originally linked. David Levy says that's because as the two organizations grow, there's a turf war that goes on.

LEVY: One of the things about a museum is, if it's doing its job, it will be acquiring more and more and more art. It will require more and more and more space. Meantime, it's got this school with these scruffy kids wandering around downstairs or somewhere in part of the building and the trustees are much more enamored with the black tie openings and all the glitz around the art than the art school, for the most part, and so the art school tends to lose out in the real estate war.

BLAIR: So after years of trying to tackle mounting debt and keep the museum and school together, the Corcoran finally made an agreement that will break them up. Nearby George Washington University will take over the art school. GW will own the building and pay for its renovations. The collection will become the property of The National Gallery of Art. Their curators will decide what to present in the Corcoran building.
The NGA says no art will be sold, admission will be free. The Corcoran name will remain, but Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott says it won't be the same.

KENNICOTT: I think things will be a little more professional, a little more institutional, probably a little more polished and maybe a lot less exciting in the ways that the Corcoran used to manage to whip up.

BLAIR: Others are relieved that this new deal means the building will remain a museum and that The National Gallery's curators are stepping in.

LOU STOVALL: Hooray. Hooray. I was so excited.

BLAIR: Washington-based artist Lou Stovall has had shows at the Corcoran.

STOVALL: Here's an opportunity with The National Gallery hopefully taking the major paintings of the Corcoran, paintings that America has really not seen very much of.

BLAIR: Meantime, students at the Corcoran College of Art and Design are waiting to hear more details on what this means for them.

LAURA THOMAS: It's an interesting time right now to be at the Corcoran.

BLAIR: Laura Thomas came to D.C. from California to study at the Corcoran. In that stunning atrium she and other students are using colored pencils to create a huge new installation mounted on the wall.

THOMAS: I like drawing on the walls. I feel like if it's the last thing I can do at the Corcoran, I will draw on the walls.

BLAIR: The Corcoran, The National Gallery of Art and George Washington University were hoping to make the details of the takeover public this week, but it turns out breaking up an institution as old and diverse as the Corcoran is taking more time than they expected. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.


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In the restored San Gennaro catacombs, mosaics like this are lit with high-tech lighting paid for by grants from big corporations.

Courtesy of the San Gennaro Catacombs

For decades, the streets of Naples have been menaced by the Camorra mafia — stroll the streets of Sanità, an inner-city neighborhood, and you'll overhear pop songs like O Panar e Drog, featuring a singer boasting about buying and using "a breadbasket full" of drugs off Sanità's streets.

But underneath those cobblestones lies a gem of early Christian art: The Catacombs of San Gennaro. Now, a local priest is trying to bring the mafia and the art together.

When Don Antonio Loffredo arrived here about a decade ago, he found three levels of frescoes, chapels and cubicles beneath the neighborhood's trash-strewn streets. It's a burial ground that dates to the 2nd century, the largest of its kind in southern Italy. But back then, tourists only wound up in this part of town by mistake.
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Up to 40,000 visitors a year come through the catacombs, up from 5,000 before the restoration.
Courtesy of the San Gennaro Catacombs

Loffredo saw an opportunity. "We took kids with one foot in the streets and one foot in the church, so to speak," he says. Some of them even came from mafia families. "I can say this because your audience is far away," he adds. "It could easily be the case that the sons of a boss are here, and one of them has nothing to do with the mafia".

Loffredo says crime families often feel trapped by a life they were born into, and are eager to find alternatives for their kids. So he put them to work fixing up the seriously neglected catacombs. Mud and dirt covered much of the floor; an old lighting system left much of the artwork in shadows; and a store room had been stuffed with waste and old equipment from a nearby hospital. All of it had to go.

"When we started they were 16-year-olds. Now they're in their 20s, and they're paid because they are entrepreneurs. It's not hard to offer alternatives to crime if you're creative and available," he says. And after fixing up the Catacombs, they went to work in management, the ticket office, and as guides.

In the restored Catacombs, mosaics of jaw-dropping beauty glisten under high-tech lighting, paid for through donations and grants from such corporations as IBM and Vodafone, as well as local foundations. Tombs that once housed the remains of Christian saints and martyrs are carved right into hardened volcanic ash, and look like the inside of a surrealist beehive.

The effect is breathtaking, and ticket sales have increased to the point that the Catacombs help employ roughly 40 people, mostly young. That's 40 jobs in one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the poorest regions of Italy, where youth unemployment is well over 50%.

Like many, tour guide Vincenzo Porzio initially fled Naples in search of work. "I was working in London for one year," he says. "And when this opportunity was open, I rushed here to Naples, just because if you have to use your personal energy, I think it's better you use it for your hometown than for foreign town."

The transformation surrounding the catacombs is remarkable, says Vincenzo Galgano, a former chief prosecutor of Naples. Especially considering the neighborhood's rough reputation. "It was heroin! Heroin has destroyed the poor. Like syphilis in the 1500s. Like the plague. I think Don Antonio has come up with a cure for the social illnesses that afflict the Sanità neighborhood," he says.

The prosecutor was so impressed by the turnaround, he told his staff to nix the gold watch for his retirement a few years ago, and put the money instead towards restoring a San Gennaro fresco. Today, the catacombs have their own restoration studio.

Before the the full-scale makeover, roughly 5,000 visitors came per year. Now it's up to 40,000. Tour guide Porzio says that's had a huge impact on the neighborhood. "Okay, they pay the ticket for the Catacombs, but then they go and get a coffee," he says. "They go and get a pizza. And yesterday I went into a small shop that sells ham and cheese and they said 'Oh Enzo, Can we invent something with the tourists?' So you see how the mentality is changing. They are going out from the ghetto, with the mind. Because they are having a new guest. So just having a new guest is changing the district ... and even the way to do business."

Or, as priest Don Loffredo says about the mafia: don't fight it, cure it, by offering something beautiful in its place.


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John Sloan's Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue hung in the office of Sen. Royal Copeland until his death in 1938. After that, the painting was lost until 2003.

Courtesy of the U.S. GSA Fine Arts Program

At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt enacted a raft of New Deal programs aimed at giving jobs to millions of unemployed Americans; programs for construction workers and farmers — and programs for writers and artists.

"Paintings and sculpture were produced, murals were produced and literally thousands of prints," says Virginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
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The GSA recovered Anne Fletcher's Iris Garden after its then-owner watched an episode of PBS's Antiques Roadshow and realized the painting was actually a WPA piece.

In all, hundreds of thousands of works were produced by as many as 10,000 artists. But in the decades since, many of those works have gone missing — lost or stolen, they're now scattered across the country.

A Transformative Time For American Artists

The biggest New Deal art program was the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Artists could earn up to $42 a week, as long as they produced something.

Mecklenburg says it was a transformative time for the artists: "The idea for an artist to be able to work through a problem, to work through ideas, you know, that's golden. So it was a very special moment, and one that really has not ever been repeated."

To qualify for the work, however, you had to prove yourself as an artist and you had to show you were poor. Mecklenburg spoke to two brothers-in-law who were in the program.

She says, "One of them was saying, you know, you had to prove you were penniless — he said it hurt your dignity. And the other one was so cavalier and devil-may-care about it. He said: Oh, you know, if you thought the relief worker was coming to check out if you had an iron, or anything else that looked like it was of value, you just ran it over to the neighbor's apartment so it looked like you didn't have any possessions at all. It's about as human a story as we've ever come up with in the art world."
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The GSA's Brian Miller holds Andrew Winter's Gulls at Monhegan (click here for a closer look). The painting will be sent to the U.S. Embassy in Croatia as part of the State Department's Art in Embassies program.

Brian Naylor/NPR

Every Recovered Painting Has A Story

Some of the art became famous — such as the murals painted in post offices and other public buildings across the country — but in the 80 years since the New Deal art programs began, many of the works have disappeared.

The General Services Administration, the federal agency in charge of government buildings, has a program to recover the lost art, which remains government property. GSA Inspector General Brian Miller says every recovered painting has a story.

Take, for instance, the seascape Gulls at Monhegan, painted by Maine artist Andrew Winter. "It hung in the [American] embassy in Costa Rica for years," Miller says. "And the ambassador loved it so much that when he left, his staff gave it to him as kind of an unofficial gift. And so it remained in his family and then his granddaughter eventually tried to sell it up in Portland, Maine."

John Sloan's New York City street scene, Fourteenth Street at Sixth Avenue, was also recovered by the GSA. It had hung in a U.S. senator's office and apparently went home with a staffer after that senator's death.

"It's a busy street and there's I guess an [elevated train] that goes over top, and a bustling street with people walking and cars parked and people in all sorts of dress," Miller says. "And this really captures life in New York City"

The painting — appraised at $750,000 — was recovered in 2003 and is now on loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Other pieces have been found at yard sales, antique malls and on eBay. Many are identifiable by tags that say "Federal Arts Program" or "Treasury Department Art Project."
Miller, who is stepping down from his post at the GSA at the end of the week, says the government wants to preserve these scenes of America.

"There are just hundreds of portraits of what American life was like in the '30s and '40s," he says, "and it really captures a piece of America and we want to put it up for America to see."
The GSA has recovered more than 200 works of art so far, and it's looking for leads on the rest.


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In 1910, Lithuanian artist Ben Zion Black painted the interior of Burlington's Chai Adam Synagogue. Much of the painting was destroyed when the building underwent renovations.

Courtesy of the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue

There was a time in Eastern Europe when the landscape was dotted with wooden synagogues, some dating to the 1600s. Inside, the walls and ceilings were covered with intricate painted designs. Almost all of these structures were destroyed during the Holocaust, and with them, a folk art. But in Burlington, Vt., a synagogue mural has been uncovered where it lay hidden for a quarter century.

Aaron Goldberg grew up in a section of Burlington known as Little Jerusalem. His family was among the Jewish immigrants who settled there in the late 1800s, mostly from Lithuania. Goldberg first saw the mural in the 1970s when he was in middle school and accompanied his mother to a carpet store.

"I have a distinct memory of going up to the second floor to look at the carpet rolls and the remnants with my mother and seeing a painting on the back wall," he says. "It was surreal."

The store, it turned out, had once been a synagogue. Shoppers could see rays of sunlight, a crown hovering above a tablet with the Ten Commandments and a throne supported by two lions of Judah — all part of a mural stretching 10 feet high and 18 feet wide. It had been painted in 1910 by an immigrant artist named Ben Zion Black.

Years later, Goldberg and another member of his synagogue learned that the carpet store had been sold and the new owner was going to convert the building into apartments.

"She allowed us about a month to see if we could figure out a plan to get the mural out," he says. "So we called museums, hospitals, colleges, commercial warehouse storage spaces all over the East Coast and we could not locate a space. So we asked her if she would consider walling up the mural."

The owner agreed and for 25 years tenants lived in an apartment not knowing what was behind the walls.

An Exuberant Work Of Art

Two years ago, the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, where Goldberg serves as archivist, started renting the apartment. It tore down the wall that had been erected to protect the mural and hired art conservator Connie Silver to help restore it.
"This is a really exuberant work of art," she says.

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Art conservator Connie Silver points to a section of the mural that's been cleaned of its grime.

Jon Kalish/For NPR

Silver is living in the apartment while she removes a century's worth of grime that accumulated on the mural. Chemical analysis revealed that the mural was covered with an oily varnish to preserve it.
Silver sprays the mural with a special adhesive that bonds the paint to the plaster wall, then dabs at it with scraps of Mylar to press the fragile paint back onto the wall. She says the colors of the mural have been dulled substantially.
"It's going from this kind of golden, unpleasant brown to pistachio green next to bright gold color," Silver says. "This is really a startling change and I was even a little confused because I've never seen these sorts of exuberant colors."
The mural is attached to the wall and part of the roof. At some point, a 3,000-pound hunk of the building will be cut out and moved to the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue less than a mile away.

A Document Of A Jewish Civilization

"I've never confronted, never seen a mural of this type that survives and can be saved," says Samuel Gruber, an architectural historian at Syracuse University. He says the Burlington mural is a valuable artifact because it's a form of folk art no longer being created.

"This is a document of a Jewish civilization, a Jewish culture, a Jewish tradition in art that was vibrant and widespread and accomplished, but today has almost entirely vanished," he says. "It was destroyed in the Holocaust. It's a survivor and for that reason I think we have a special obligation. We have to save it and move it. We have to give it a new life."

If the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue can raise $100,000 in the next couple of months, it hopes to move the mural by the end of the summer. It will be tricky, though: A huge forklift — the kind used to move boats — will transport the artwork. Cleaning and restoration work will be completed after the mural is installed in the synagogue's lobby.


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Johann Zoffany's 18th century painting portrays Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Murray.

Wikimedia Commons

Director Amma Asante found the story behind her new movie, Belle, in a painting: artist Johann Zoffany's 18th century portrait of two beautiful, young English ladies, draped in silks and pearls. The twist? One is biracial.

Belle is based on the real-life story of that woman, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who was the daughter of a Royal Navy captain and the slave he met after capturing a Spanish ship.

As a young girl, Dido's father brought her to the grand country home of his uncle and aunt, who were already raising the daughter — white, of course — of another nephew. They agreed that girl was much in need of a companion like Dido. But instead of bringing Dido up as a servant, they chose to bring her up as a member of the family.

Dido's great-uncle was traditional, but with a progressive bent. As Britain's top judge, he eventually decided a key legal battle involving the slave trade, all while raising his mixed-race niece whom he adored.

Asante, who is herself black, tells NPR's Renee Montagne what makes the painting so remarkable:

"Around the time of the 18th century, we really were — people of color were — an accessory in a painting. We were there rather like a pet to express the status of the main person in the painting, who was always white. And for anybody who's lucky enough to see the painting, what you see is something very, very different. You see a biracial girl, a woman of color, who's painted slightly higher in the painting, depicted slightly higher than her white counterpart. She's staring directly out at the painter, you know, with a very direct, confident eye. ... So this painting flipped tradition and everything that the 18th century told us about portraiture."

Asante says the painting, and its backstory, offered a unique storytelling opportunity:

"These two girls were aristocrats. You know, they held very high positions in society; their family held a very high position in society. What I saw from the painting was this opportunity, if I got it right, to tell a story that would combine art history and politics."

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2 min 10 sec
Play the video, a skateboarder rides through Christie's warehouse and galleries. But will the new approach attract the sort of collectors who spend millions on a piece of art?


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This famous 1948 photo by Cecil Beaton shows a group of young models in Charles James gowns.



Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art

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James said he named 1932's knit wool Taxi dress because he wanted a woman to be able to get into or out of it in the back of a taxi.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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James pins a suit on a model, possibly Ricki Van Dusen, in 1948.


Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Butterfly gown from 1954.

Cecil Beaton/Metropolitan Museum of Art

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James' wife, Nancy, photographed in the Swan Gown in 1955.


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Austine Hearst, wife of William Randolph Hearst Jr., wears the Clover Leaf gown she commissioned for President Eisenhower's inauguration in 1953. Hearst had to wear something else to the ceremony when James couldn't finish the gown on time.[/LIST]
Thursday in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art officially reopens its fashion galleries after a $10 million, two-year renovation.
Named for Vogue magazine's editor, the Anna Wintour Costume Center features an inaugural exhibit of the work of Charles James, a flamboyant designer considered America's first couturier. This caps days of glamorous events at the Met, including the Costume Institute's benefit gala, presided over by Wintour — with Hollywood stars.

Hundreds of gala gawkers lined up behind the velvet rope on Monday to see stars like Bradley Cooper — in white tie — and Sarah Jessica Parker — in an elaborate ballgown — sweep up the Metropolitan Museum stairs; at the Costume Institute benefit gala, Hollywood dominates.

Earlier that day, in the Egyptian wing, with the soaring walls of the Temple of Dendur as a backdrop, it was string music and air kisses, as designer after designer turned up to honor Anna Wintour and her contribution — $125 million raised for the Institute as a Met trustee. Oscar de la Renta, Alexander Wang, Marc Jacobs and Donatella Versace all paid tribute — with a special guest appearance by Michelle Obama, who told the crowd that "the Met will be opening up the world of fashion like never before. To show that fashion isn't an exclusive club for the few that can attend a runway show or shop at certain stores."
Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann models a copy of the famous Clover Leaf gown.

The newly reconfigured center, Obama said, is for anyone who is curious about the impact of fashion on our culture and history; and she specifically addressed the fashion students present, telling them to be inspired by Charles James and his innovative career. "It's a career that involves, science, engineering, accounting, marketing and so much more. Maybe they'll learn about the math behind Charles James's designs. And they'll think to themselves, maybe I should pay closer attention in geometry," she said.

Harold Koda, the chief curator at the Costume Institute, says it wasn't a question of if, but when the Met would do a serious Charles James retrospective. James was born in 1906 to a British officer and an American heiress; his life went from the end of the Edwardian era to the punk era, from Downton Abbey to the Chelsea Hotel. Christian Dior said James inspired his post-World War II New Look. And Balenciaga said James was not just the most important American couturier, but the best in the world.

"He wasn't a conventional fashion designer," Koda says. "He was an artist. And he approached his metier as an art, and that's not consistent with being a fashion designer."

James was a mercurial genius, best known for elaborately constructed magical ballgowns. He dressed elegant Park Avenue heiresses, and glamor queens like Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Arden and Gypsy Rose Lee. After his wealthy British father cut him off, James absorbed everything from engineering to 15th-century armor — he became a meticulous sculptor of cloth, such a perfectionist, he once spent $20,000 refining a sleeve.

Great Fashion Exhibitions

Chicago History Museum
Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity
Bard Graduate Center, New York City
An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile & Fashion Design, 1915-1928
The Museum at FIT, New York City
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk
RISD Museum, Providence, RI
Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion

If James had a masterwork, it is the Clover Leaf dress from 1953, designed for Austine Hearst, wife of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst Jr. "The Clover Leaf ball gown is something that he meant to be danced in," says Koda. "It weighs 10 pounds! But the physics of it is so carefully disposed over the body that you could literally dance in this huge dress."

Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann — daughter of actor Isabella — has modeled a copy of the dress. "You feel like a paradise bird," she says of the experience. "You kind of always have to have your arms up in a very elegant way. So you feel like a ballerina. So it certainly makes you feel very regal and beautiful — it's actually fantastic because the front part of the clover that comes in is the perfect place for a man to come in a take you and dance with you but anything else is totally impractical. Sitting, kind of hanging out, none of that is possible!"

Fashion-centered exhibitions like the Charles James retrospective have been hugely lucrative for museums: The Met's 2011 blockbuster Alexander McQueen show, "Savage Beauty," was one of the most popular exhibitions in the Met's history — and museums all over the world are discovering the value of a fashion show.

Charles James, interviewed at the end of his life — the video quality is poor but the audio is intact.

Valerie Steele is not surprised. She's the director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Attendance at their exhibitions has doubled in the last decade, she says — but that doesn't mean all designers favor museums. "For a number of fashion designers, they don't want to be shown in museums because they feel that's a cemetery for dead clothes," she says. "They believe that clothing is not art, but it's a part of life. And it should be seen in movement, on the street on pretty girls wearing it."
Charles James did not feel that way — he urged his clients to donate their gowns to a museum, in his case, the Brooklyn Museum. That preserved some of his work, says Steele, but not his reputation. "Unless a designer is still producing perfume, once they are dead they are forgotten amazingly fast. Part of our mission is to try and remind people that there were great figures in the past whose heritage and influence lives on."

Artists were James' last clients, when he was living in three rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, months behind on the rent, making dresses into the night on a board positioned over a bed. He was visited by the likes of Elsa Peretti, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, and many fashion students sought him out. Just months before his death in 1978, James' friend, R. Couri Hay and filmmaker Anton Perich conducted an epic 20-hour interview at the Chelsea in which James assessed his legacy.

"I've remained a myth because people don't see evidence of my work enough," he told them. "And what would you set out to create?" the interviewer asks. "Would you be just creating dresses for museums? Would you want to be creating dresses for people? For the masses?" No, James responds, "Dresses going to museums once they've been created for people. Once it's taken up by the market, it's destroyed by the market."

But James seemed to know he'd have his moment again. And now, he has. The show, "Charles James: Beyond Fashion," is up through August 10 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Anna Wintour Costume Center in New York City.

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Edward Hopper's 1950 Cape Cod Morning is one 70 works on display at the American Art Museum as part of the exhibit "Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection."

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Plenty of collectors want to donate artworks to museums, but the museums don't always welcome them with open arms. "We say 'no thanks' 19 times out of 20," says Betsy Broun, director at the American Art Museum. Sometimes the works aren't museum-quality, other times they don't fit with the museums' philosophy.

But in 1986, representatives from the Sara Roby Foundation called the Smithsonian with an offer it couldn't refuse: paintings by Edward Hopper, Raphael Soyer, Reginald Marsh and many more. They were all collected by Roby, who, in the early 1950s, who took on a mission: to save Realistic art from the maws of Abstract Expressionism. The results of her dedication are on display at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum.

Cape Cod Morning is a classic Hopper from 1950. A woman peers out the window, bathed in sunlight, but framed in darkness. Black shutters frame the window and a black-green forest sits behind the house.

"She's hemmed in — this woman is hemmed in by these sentinel-like dark shutters. Almost as if she's a target," Broun says. There's no way out of this Hopper house. "No steps, no door. ... Hopper is famous for putting fences and barricades up in front of his homes and these are basically homes with no entrance, no exit."

Roby, an amateur painter herself, collected works of all kinds from known and unknown mid-century American painters — Ben Shahn, Saul Steinberg, Mark Tobey, Louise Nevelson.

Roby was very generous, says American Art Museum chief curator Virginia Mecklenburg. Her father made a lot of money in cement in the 1920s and '30s — when all those skyscrapers were going up in Manhattan. In the early '50s, with that money, and guidance from her art teacher Reginald Marsh — an Ashcan School follower who painted seedy New York scenes in the '20s and '30s — plus other advisors, Roby created a foundation to help American art and artists of her day.

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Ashcan School painter Reginald Marsh taught Sara Roby, who was an amateur artist. Above, Marsh's 1951 work, Coney Island Beach.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

"She wanted to do something that counted," Mecklenburg says.

Marsh gave a dinner party for her in New York, and invited art scene movers and shakers — painters, dealers, museum officials. He seated Roby next to art historian Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum. Roby asked his advice — how could her foundation best serve artists and the public.

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Two pensive women share a mysterious, intense moment in Raphael Soyer's 1980 Annunciation.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Legend has it he said: "Well, hell, Sara. If you want to help artists, buy their paintings."

And so she did: almost 200 artworks, by more than 100 artists — a major collection, plus a traveling program to take contemporary American art around the country.

Trained in traditional, realist art, Roby, who died in 1986, wanted to preserve that tradition against the encroachment of Abstract Expressionism. The drips and dribbles of Jackson Pollock, the revolutionary slashes of Willem de Kooning were wow-ing the art world in the '50s, and elbowing Realism out of galleries and museums. So she and her advisors cruised artists' studios, and bought pieces hot off their easels.

In Raphael Soyer's 1980 oil painting Annunciation, a young woman leans against the wall near a bathroom sink. She is shoeless, one bare foot on top of the other. Another stands nearby, wearing a turquoise slip and holding towels.

Both women are pretty — with dark hair, pointed chins — they could be sisters. And they're pensive. The moment is intense. What's going on? "Annunciation." Has one told the other she's pregnant? Had an abortion? Made a mistake? The painting is realistic and mysterious — a puzzle to ponder.

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In Philip Evergood's 1952 Dowager in a Wheelchair, there are visual parallels between the old woman being wheeled in the foreground and the child being wheeled in the background.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Many different stages in a woman's life are painted in Philip Evergood's bright yellow 1952 canvas Dowager in a Wheel Chair. Hemmed in by a yellow New York Checker cab on one side, and a brick building on the other, the aged lady, in elegant long black gloves and good jewelry, peers out at life from under her veiled hat. A pretty young thing rolls her wheelchair down the street. But for Smithsonian director Betsy Broun, the poignant part of the painting is in the distance — a nursemaid pushing a child in a baby carriage.

"So we start being pushed around and we end being pushed around. There's a cycle of life story going on here," she says.
Poignant, funny, the pulse of the city is in this painting. A slice of mid-century existence, as are so many in this show, whether by Hopper, Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield or Jacob Lawrence.

The donation of this collection to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in 1986 was like manna from heaven. It gave the museum works their own budget could not afford. And put them on the map, as a venue for important American artists. All because, as Broun says, an art-loving donor had money and a mission.

"I love donors for their personal vision and passion," Broun says. "They set out to do something with a burning intensity and in fact it's different from the way a regular museum would collect. It's not that we lack passion, but we are not quite as free to pursue some highly idiosyncratic or quirky or personal take on art."

Sara Roby was free and the evidence is on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art through mid-August.

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Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's 1851 painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware" seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Saturday at about 10:30 in the morning, as New York took a turn for the muggy in what turned out to be anticipation of rain, I climbed the steps to the Metropolitan Museum Of Art and rented one of the audio guide units that hang around your neck on an orange strap. I stayed about five hours, wearing out the battery on the audio unit and turning it in for another, wandering from the Egyptian art into the Temple of Dendur, through European sculptures to Arms and Armor and the American Wing, through Oceania, Africa and the Americas. Then upstairs, through the European paintings and the Modern and Contemporary Art; through some of the Asian Art, some of the Near Eastern Art and the Greek and Roman statues.

Somewhere around Athens, it became clear that the curiosity was willing, but the feet were weak.

Saturday night at 8:00, I saw a live performance of The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Ben Acker and Ben Blacker's "staged production in the style of old-time radio." It was packed with comedy podcast royalty and guests, including Paul F. Tompkins, Scott Aukerman, Scott Adsit, Paget Brewster, Wyatt Cenac, Busy Phillips, Zachary Levi, Jonathan Coulton, Paul and Storm, John Hodgman, Marc Evan Jackson, too many funny people to list if we're being perfectly serious as you can now see, and Dick "Yes, That Dick Cavett" Cavett. They performed radio plays about vampires, Martians, time travel, glamorous married people drinking to excess, robot hands, a succubus, and roving bands of invisible stupid wise men. The audience at Town Hall whooped and roared so unreservedly that a lady sitting near me kept sticking her fingers in her ears, overwhelmed.

In between, and all weekend, I read The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco, Julie Salamon's 464-page, more than 20-year-old book – dishy, sad, and fascinating – about the making and flopping of Brian De Palma's film The Bonfire Of The Vanities. In the book, a project that begins with the conviction that adapting Tom Wolfe's novel can only result in the rare film both admirable and popular suffers wound upon wound: an unrealistic schedule, unrelenting industry gossip, a cynical casting change, location debacles (one involving a scene that couldn't be shot as planned in the Temple of Dendur), resistance in the Bronx to stereotypical depictions thereof, enormous egos coexisting about as successfully as a family of elephants in a college dorm room, and the fact that from the beginning, Wolfe's acidic outlook seems utterly incompatible with the desire – and, given the money being spent, the imperative – to make a hit.

At the museum, there is an ivory comb from the Egyptian Predynastic Period. Roughly 3200 B.C., they say. They suggest it might have been part of the accoutrements of someone's funeral more than 5000 years ago; more than 20 times the entire history of the country the museum is housed in. More than 115 times as long as I've been alive. The teeth of the comb are broken off; what remains is a little more than two inches tall and a little less than two inches wide, and those four square inches hold more than 20 individual renderings of animals. The carvings have symbolic significance, but they're also carefully and elegantly done, particularly on a piece so small. The comb played a role, perhaps, in an important ritual, but it's also a beautiful object, like many of the drums and bowls and pieces of blown glass.

The piece was, then, meant to be an offering of the artist's skills, to convey a meaning, to evoke an emotion, and to bring pleasure. So was The Bonfire Of The Vanities. So was The Thrilling Adventure Hour.

Those aren't the only purposes to which these other works are being put: the film was also engineered to make money, of course, perhaps cripplingly so. The live show, while far less damned by its relationship to commerce, is part of the performers' livelihoods particularly in the broad sense, since many of them remain people whose projects might well be described using, at some point, the word "cult." It supports you, the cult, but only sometimes does it keep you in food and shelter. And it demands to be fed in return, of course.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities didn't just aspire to keep people in food and shelter; it aspired to keep people in mansions and private planes. What it doesn't have that The Thrilling Adventure Hour has is an animating love of the material. Everyone involved seemed to have assumed Wolfe's book was capital-G Great, whether or not they had read it, but they began excising its controversial elements – which in this case meant its essential elements – almost immediately. There was so much money, there were so many trailers, there was so much fake rain, there were so many gowns and extras ... but the way Salamon tells the tale, few of them were – maybe nobody was – there for love.

At The Thrilling Adventure Hour, everybody is there for love. They sweat it into the air and the audience inhales it, then directs it back as enthusiasm, and the cycle repeats.

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The Bonfire Of The Vanities, on the other hand, spent tens of millions of dollars, and while the internet will teach you that everything has its adherents, it's not inaccurate to say that nobody cared, particularly if we're rounding to the nearest Hollywood definition of "nobody." It wasn't for lack of attached talent that could deliver with audiences: De Palma had just made The Untouchables, Bruce Willis had just made Die Hard, and Tom Hanks was well on the way to becoming Tom Hanks. It wasn't enough. For all the cynical Hollywood efforts to reduce it to science, audience reaction remains a complex, mystifying dance, and the more it defies all efforts to predict it, the more it underscores that people do respond to artfulness – or at least to something more complex than calculation and deliberate provocation.

There's a painting at the Met called "Madame X," which the artist, John Singer Sargent, sold to the museum after hanging onto it for decades after painting it around 1883. It shows Madame Pierre Gautreau standing in a simple black gown with beaded straps, one of which Sargent originally showed slipping off her shoulder. The painting created, as the audio guide explained it, a scandal. So much so that her name isn't in the title, even though it's known. So much so that he eventually repainted the strap to show it back in place. The suggestion of her slipping strap, together with the expanse of her unadorned pale skin, was an embarrassment.

The actress Beth Broderick has a scene in The Bonfire Of The Vanities in which she pulls off her underwear and hops up onto the glass of a copy machine. It wasn't in the book; it was added for the movie, and at the time, Broderick was dating Brian De Palma. Salamon quotes her explaining that she didn't love playing scenes like this, but for pretty actresses, options were limited. "What you hope and bank on," she said, "is that with your training and your other qualities you'll get a chance to exercise them, if you do this first." As Salamon tells the story, Broderick filmed the sequence for nine hours and wound up "with bruised buttocks and thighs and feelings of humiliation quite unlike anything she'd experienced before in her professional life."

There was a great deal of painting done – for centuries – for wealthy people and for the church. There are works at the Met of pure playfulness and delicacy, but also of compromise and patronage. Even the ancient art reminds you that those who had beautiful things were often those with wealth – wealth with which they were not uncommonly buried, wealth they hoped would help smooth their way to the afterlife.

Even the museum itself is a constant reminder of the relationship between art and business, as walking from gallery to gallery becomes a dizzying sequence of tasteful but conspicuous reminders that you are enjoying this art courtesy of, let's say, Margaret (or John or Peter or William) P. (or S. or D. or L.) Stone (or Anderson or Franklin or Hughes). It's stunning to think just how much money and effort is devoted to making these beautiful things available: there are people whose entire jobs seem to center around making sure no one leans where they shouldn't. I sat and pondered the value of something like Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's painting of Washington crossing the Delaware. It's not for sale. It's 12 feet tall and more than 20 feet wide — what are you going to do with it? Steal it? Fence it? Put it in your basement? What does it mean to assign a value to it at all?

The Thrilling Adventure Hour is part of a growing DIY cultural movement that capitalizes on the cheap distribution capabilities of the internet to make art with fewer resources, and thus fewer compromises. There are sponsors on the podcast, and there is certainly an exchange of money any time you're showing anything in a place like Town Hall. But much of the show's juice comes from social media, from the enthusiasts who are its evangelists. It's often said that live performances are a dialogue between performers and an audience, but that rarely feels more true than it does with a shaggy, funny, made-to-look-easy comedy showcase that will always give more to that live audience than it ever can to anyone else, simply because they're seeing it, and everyone else will only hear it. The mischievous recoveries from small flubs that enrapture the live audience will be snipped out; what remains will be 10 percent more perfect and 10 percent less wonderful. We are the only ones who will ever see it; it will be shared, but it won't be shared, not beyond this room, not exactly.

When you make Bonfire Of The Vanities within the Hollywood system – even within the Hollywood system of 1990, which was before the full effects of Batman could be felt but after it first rattled the earth the year before – you intend to share it with everyone. You intend to make as many people as possible eager to see it and as few people as possible reluctant to see it. De Palma is an artist who came from independent filmmaking and was tasked with making an end-of-year tentpole intended to be an Oscar contender.

The Met has a collection of 19^th century miniature portraits, mostly watercolor on ivory, about the size of snapshots you might frame on your desk at work. They're meticulously done and staggeringly detailed for their size. A few are curiously composed to show just part of a person – one eye, in one case. They were mementos, perhaps something to wear or pull from your pocket to look at someone you loved. They fell out of favor when photography came around. That they contained the touch of an artist, and that they represented the exercise of great skill, didn't keep them from being replaced by what was easier, more real, and eventually much, much cheaper. Not only are we not living in the first era to see improvements in technology create lost arts, but we are nowhere near it.

The Devil's Candy spends a good amount of time with second unit director Eric Schwab, who conceived and executed Bonfire's opening shot – singled out in some reviews as one of the film's few strengths – of New York from the vantage point of a gargoyle, as well as a much fussed-over shot of the Concorde landing against a view of the setting sun and the New York City skyline. The Concorde shot takes about eight seconds on screen; Schwab worked on it for months. It affected his career. A skeptic might tell you they'd probably do it all with computers now. You'd make the sky the way you wanted it, put the plane where you wanted it, and tinker with it the same way you would with a spreadsheet. Like the slicing and splicing of physical film that consumes the editors, exhausting yourself and blowing your budget to arrange real shots using real things the way Schwab was doing – getting the Concorde pilots to land in exactly the right spot at exactly the right instant – may eventually be a lost art just as much as the miniature portraits.

Part of what protects The Thrilling Adventure Hour is its very raggedness; its reliance on simple elements that have been part of art and amusement for thousands of years. Jokes, characters, scenes, music. It's like a folded sheet of very thin paper where you can see through it to the layers underneath — not just to old-time radio, but to Westerns, cartoons, vaudeville, the Globe Theater. It feels hearty because it's so simple. Things like this don't remain the way physical objects do, of course. We can look at a drum that accompanied dance in an ancient civilization, but we don't see the dance. Objects have a certain permanence that makes them beautiful; performance has a certain impermanence that makes it precious.

I stopped for a while in front of a 16^th century boxwood rosary bead from the Netherlands that's two inches across and is carved with elements so tiny they have to have been done with a magnifying glass, as the guide points out. Inside, the figures hold spears the breadth of a hair. While the bead is certainly beautiful, what resonates is the humanity that was poured into it. There is a profound sense of a person or people, precisely because it's such an impractical object, made for the purposes of devotion, but carrying the carver with it. It's impossible not to wonder about the hands that made it and the eyes that peered at it until it was done, and to wonder what that person would make of where the bead is now and of my eyes looking in.


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Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesKara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part because her murals looked so charming from a distance. Black paper shadow portraits of colonial figures seemed to dance on white gallery walls; but lean in and you'd find your nose pressed up against images of slavery's horrors — mammies, masters, lynchings and sexual violence.

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Visitors wait in line for the Kara Walker exhibit on May 10, opening day. The show was housed in a former Domino Sugar refinery. Inside, visitors described the building as "cathedral-like" and "creepy" and said it smelled like a bakery.

In other words, Walker is used to filling a room. But this spring she was asked to fill a warehouse — the abandoned Domino Sugar factory in New York. It's about to be leveled to make way for condos and offices, but before it goes, Walker was asked to use this cavernous, urban ruin for something special.
Walker took me on a tour of the show a day before it opened. The factory is covered in sugar — it almost looks like insulation or burned cotton candy.

"It's a little bit sticky in some areas ..." she said. "There's sugar caked up in the rafters."
I was so busy trying not to get molasses on my shoes that when I turned the corner, I was stunned. There in the middle of this dark hall was a bright, white sphinx. The effect is the opposite of those white-walled galleries; a dark space and a towering white sculpture made of — what else? — sugar.

"What we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is the head of a woman who has very African, black features," Walker explained. "She sits somewhere in between the kind of mammy figure of old and something a little bit more recognizable — recognizably human. ... [She has] very full lips; high cheekbones; eyes that have no eyes, [that] seem to be either looking out or closed; and a kerchief on her head. She's positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you."

Walker has dreamed up a "subtlety" — that's what sugar sculptures were called in medieval times. They were a luxury confectioners created for special occasions.

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Kara Walker's A Subtlety stretches 75.5 feet long, 35.5 feet tall and 26 feet wide.

To understand where all this is going, you need look no further than Walker's teasingly long title for the show: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."

I know, it's a mouthful. But Walker has this wide smile and as she sweeps her hands around in broad gestures, white tides of sugar dust ripple at the edge of her feet — and she sells it.
"It was very fun and childlike to, you know, have your hands in a bucket full of sugar, or a 50-pound bag of sugar, throwing it out onto the floor," she says.

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Walker's candy boy sculptures started melting fast in the non-climate-controlled factory, and the result looks a lot like blood.

She's doing what she does best: drawing you in with something sweet, something almost charming, before you realize you've admired something disturbing. In this case, that's the horror-riddled Caribbean slave trade that helped fuel the industrial gains of the 18th and 19th centuries; a slave trade built to profit from an insatiable Western market for refined sugar treats and rum.

"Basically, it was blood sugar," Walker says. "Like we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands."

She explains that to make the sugar, the cane had to be fed into large mills by hand. It was a dangerous process: Slaves lost hands, arms, limbs and lives.

"I've been kind of back and forth with my reverence for sugar," Walker says. "Like, how we're all kind of invested in its production without really realizing just what goes into it; how much chemistry goes into extracting whiteness from the sugar cane."

Walker went down a rabbit hole of sugar history, at one point stumbling on some black figurines online — the type of racial tchotchkes that turn up in a sea of mammy cookie jars. They were ceramic, brown-skinned boys carrying baskets. Those were the size of dolls, but Walker's are 5 feet high, some made entirely of molasses-colored candy. Fifteen of them are posed throughout the factory floor, leading the way to her sugar sphinx.
The boys are cute and apple-cheeked, but they're also kind of scary — some of the melted candy looks a lot like blood.

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The candy sculptures have been disintegrating so fast that Walker began throwing pieces of the broken boys into the baskets of the ones that are still standing.

"I knew that the candy ones wouldn't last," Walker says. "That was part of the point was that they were going to be in this non-climate-controlled space, slowly melting away and disintegrating. But what's happened is we lost two of these guys in the last two days or so."

Losing those figures in service of the sugar is the slave trade in a nutshell.

"Also in a nutshell," Walker says, "and maybe a little bit hammer-over-the-head, is that some of the pieces of the broken boys I threw into the baskets of the unbroken boys."

OK, that's not so subtle, but it's also not unusual for Kara Walker. She's dressed in a shiny, oversize baseball jacket emblazoned with the gold face of King Tut on it. I ask her if at a certain point she worries about doing work that is seen as being just about race.

"I don't really see it as just about race," she says. "I mean, I think that my work is about trying to get a grasp on history. I mean, I guess it's just kind of a trap, in a way, that I decided to set my foot into early on, which is the trap of race — to say that it's about race when it's kind of about this larger concern about being."
I tell her it's almost impossible to talk about our history without talking about race. She replies: "There [are] scholarly conversations about race and then there's the kind of meaty, unresolved, mucky blood lust of talking about race where I always feel like the conversation is inconclusive."

Inconclusive, but for artist Kara Walker, ongoing.


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Rufus Reid has played with just about everybody in the mainstream jazz world. His latest project, Quiet Pride, is based on works by the late sculptor and civil rights activist Elizabeth Catlett.

Jimmy Katz/Courtesy of the artist
Bassist and composer Rufus Reid has been playing jazz for half a century. He's worked with just about everyone, from saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz to singer Nancy Wilson and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. He's written a book on bass method and a three-movement work for symphony orchestra.

His latest project takes him in yet another direction. It's called Quiet Pride, and in it, Reid tries to convey in sound the sculptures of the late African-American artist and civil rights activist Elizabeth Catlett.

Reid says he chose five of Catlett's sculptures from a book of her work because they jumped out at him. Though he did not keep pictures of them on the piano for inspiration while he was composing, he remembers each one vividly. Take Catlett's 1981 work "Glory," a bronze bust of a woman's head, for example.

"There's angst in the face, there's power in the face, there's maybe some anger in the face — and yet composure in the face," Reid says.

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Elizabeth Calett's Glory (1981).

GoMedia PR
So: How do you capture that in music?
"You would take maybe something that was fast, something that was angular harmonically, skips in intervals that make you feel uneasy hearing them," he says. "It's not tangible, but I think there's a feeling."

To get his vision across, Reid showed his musicians pictures of Catlett's work. Tanya Darby plays lead trumpet in the ensemble; she says that as a black woman, it was important to be involved in a project honoring another woman of color, whose work radiates passion.

"It was special to me," Darby says, "because, seeing the artwork, you can kind of follow the lineage of African-American history."
Darby says the musicians played differently after they saw Catlett's work.
"All the black-and-white notes that you see on the page, all of a sudden that starts to turn into a lyric, as opposed to just playing notes," she says. "It turns into wanting to tell a story with what's on the page."
Percussionist Francisco Mora Catlett is one of the sculptor's three sons; he says his mother's work speaks to him.

"The expression of her work, especially women, is the beauty of black women — not the stereotype beauty of black women from the cover of a magazine or something like that, but the inherent beauty and the strength and the power of black women," he says. "That's what she found, also, in the Mexican woman — and on a broader scale, the universal aspect, the power of ordinary people."

Elizabeth Catlett spent most of her adult life in Mexico after moving there in 1946 for a fellowship. The US government denied her a travel visa for nine years, declaring her an undesirable alien because she was a suspected communist. Though her work was shown in exhibitions around the world, it was another story in the country of her birth: "I, as an artist, a black woman artist, have been invisible in the art world for years," she told NPR in 2003.

Rufus Reid intends to change that: He has organized several programs at universities, including Louisiana State, that blend his music with her sculpture.

"We had two days of performance with the LSU Jazz Ensemble in the four- or five-hundred-seat hall, and upstairs on the fifth floor they had 17 pieces of Catlett's art on exhibit. It was incredible," he says.
Elizabeth Catlett had a chance to hear an early version of Reid's musical tribute before her death in 2012.
"What I was concerned about was just to get this music up to the level where I where I put her art," Reid says. With Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project, he thinks he's come close.

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In a letter, Mary Cassatt describes working on Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) with Edward Degas. An X-ray of the painting reveals brush strokes unlike Cassatt's regular strokes.

National Gallery of Art

In her novel I Always Loved You, author Robin Oliveira imagines a passionate scene between Edgar Degas — a French artist known for his paintings of dancers — and Mary Cassatt — an American painter known for her scenes of family life. The kiss in the novel is pure fiction, but then again, "nobody knows what goes on in their neighbor's house, let alone what happened between two artists 130 years ago," Oliveira says.

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It's possible that Cassatt's use of unconventional materials inspired Degas' textured surface on Portrait after a Costume Ball (1879).

The Art Institute of Chicago
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists.

"In many ways, [it] is a romance of two like minds who admired one another greatly, and who I believe completely relied on one another for artistic and emotional help," Oliveira says. "Their relationship is a sort of an elevated, intellectual love affair that tied them to one another for the rest of their lives after they met."
They left behind no diaries, no letters. National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones says it was a passionate but platonic aesthetic attraction. "There's no indication that there was anything romantic between the two of them," Jones says.

So what was the relationship between this American in Paris, and a Frenchman, 10 years her senior, who was known and respected in artistic circles?

"It was all about the art, and that kind of laser focus and 100 percent dedication to the art that they really shared," Jones says.

They met in 1877. At 33, Cassatt was studying painting in Paris. At 43, Degas' work was on view around town. "Even before she actually met him she recounts how she had seen one of his pastels in a storefront window and she pressed her nose up against it and was just dazzled by what he was able to do," Jones says. "She knew his art and was thinking this is the direction I should be going in. So he really did change her path."
Oliveira — who did a tremendous amount of research for her novel — says before the Degas dazzle, Cassatt had been trying to master a more traditional approach.

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In At the Theater, Cassatt incorporates metallic paint with gouache and pastel.

Collection of Ann and Gordon Getty

"He helped her switch from the academic style of painting that she had been trying to learn — which was sort of the standard across Paris — and encouraged her along into the impressionist style, the impressionist brush stroke, the use of color and light. The subject matter changed."
Neither Degas nor Cassatt liked the term "impressionism"; to them it implied carelessness, haste. They called themselves "independents" and labored over their work. A year after meeting Degas, Cassatt made a painting that was a real break in her style.

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair is full of Degas' influence. First of all, he brought the girl to Cassatt — she was the child of his friends. In a pretty dress, she sits slumped in a chair, hand behind her head and legs spread apart. She looks bored, exhausted and not at all dainty or proper. Other big blue chairs and a sofa are in the room — "like bumper cars," Jones says. A window in the corner may show Degas' direct influence.

In a letter written long after she made the work, Cassatt told her dealer that Degas came into her studio and worked on the painting with her. Looking for evidence, National Gallery conservator Ann Hoenigswald used X-rays, infrared imaging and magnification to study a diagonal — unusual in a Cassatt background — that builds across the canvas from that rear corner window.

"We looked at it, and indeed the strokes were a little bit different. They were these sharp, small, quick strokes that we weren't seeing anywhere else," Hoenigswald says.

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Degas frequently painted and sketched Cassatt. Above, he captures her at the Louvre, in 1879-1880.

The Art Institute of Chicago

The brushwork of Degas, perhaps. Cassatt's influence on Degas can be seen in a painting with an unusual mixture of media — pastels, oils and metallic paint. Cassatt was the first to use metallic paint on canvas; ordinarily it was for decorating crafts. Jones believes Degas saw Cassatt's metallics and decided to try it himself.

They worked side by side at times, went to exhibitions together, and Degas often drew and painted Cassatt. A frequent image: Cassatt at the Louvre, painted from the rear — big hat, smart jacket, long skirt, tiny waist, her right hand and arm leaning on an umbrella as if it were a walking stick.

"You have this wonderful juxtaposition of the female curves of her body," Jones says. "The way he has her leaning plays off the swell of her hips and her waist. But you have that powerful arm — and it's this perfect balance of elegance and strength."

Confident and in control, Cassatt owns the space. Degas captured that image of Cassatt in pencil, pastel, prints and paint. Jones says Degas also captured Cassatt in the art he bought.

"He owned more works by Cassatt than [by] any other contemporary artist," she says. "More than Pissarro, Manet, Gauguin."

They remained friends all their lives, although they went their separate artistic ways in later years. Their interests and styles changed. Degas' eyesight failed, as did Cassatt's. But the intensity of their relationship — the early obsessions — shaped each of them, early on.

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Yellowstone serigraphs, circa 1939.

Courtesy of Doug Leen and the Interior Museum
If you've ever been to a national park and stopped off in the gift shop, you may have seen drawings of iconic park sights for sale as posters or post cards. The brightly colored print reproductions showcase the parks' impressive vistas, such as Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser and the Grand Canyon's overlooks.

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Original Grand Teton serigraph, 1938.

Courtesy of Doug Leen and the Interior Museum
The originals of some of those prints are currently on display in an exhibit called "Posterity" at the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. Curator Tracy Baetz explains that the silk screen printed posters — known as serigraph — were done by Works Progress Administration artists for the National Park Service from 1938 to 1941.

"There were 14 original designs; we have six of those originals here," Baetz says. There may have been 1,400 or so originals, but only about 40 are known to survive.

"The first one that they produced was this sort of experimental one in 1938 for the Grand Teton National Park," she says. The poster reads: "Meet the Ranger Naturalist at Jenny Lake Museum" and shows a steep alpine landscape, clear waters and blue skies.

Not much is known about the original artists except that they worked at a Park Service office in Berkeley, Calif. The project ended with the onset of World War II and the posters were all but forgotten until the day a seasonal park ranger named Doug Leen came across one at the Grand Teton National Park.

"We were cleaning out an old shed just nearby and I stumbled on this poster hanging up in this barn literally covered with dust," Leen says. "And we were going to take everything up to the dump, and I looked at this poster that I'd found and realized it was a screen print, so there must be others. And certainly it was a beautiful design and well done and I thought, 'Well perhaps [it's] something I shouldn't put in the burn pile,' so I took it home and thumb-tacked it up on to the wall."

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Grand Canyon serigraph reproduction.

Courtesy of Doug Leen and the Interior Museum

Leen later became a dentist and hung the poster in his Seattle office, all the while wondering whether there were others like it out there. With a little research, he discovered the Park Service archives had black and white photos of posters for other parks. He hired an artist, Brian Maebius, to replicate them, guessing at the original colors, and the reproductions were a hit. Soon, other parks approached him to design retro-styled posters. Eventually, Leen says, the company he started, Ranger Doug's Enterprises, became bigger than his dental practice:

"I've kind of tried to put myself back and, you know, set my watch back to 1938 and try to get inside the heads of these artists," Leen says. "Actually, my biggest compliment is when an art historian calls me up and says, 'Were these printed in the '30s or is this something you've made up? Which is it?' And I've had that happen several times and it's kind of flattering, in a way, because we've hit the mark by going back in time."

At the Interior Museum, curator Tracy Baetz says it's fun to watch visitors admire the old and new posters. "People bring so much of their own personal history with the parks to it and it's not uncommon to hear people come in and point to one and say, 'Oh, that's where we got engaged,' or, 'That's where we had that great family vacation.' "
The exhibit will be on view until spring 2015.



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Joan Brown's 1970 Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat is the first image you see at the National Portrait Gallery's "Face Value" exhibit.

Estate of Joan Brown/Courtesy of George Adams Gallery/National Portrait Gallery
"Walk softly and carry a big fish" was one curator's take on a humorous self-portrait of a tall woman, holding an enormous yellow fish and a paintbrush, with a black cat lurking below.

Bay area artist Joan Brown's image is the first thing you see at a new National Portrait Gallery exhibition called "Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction." Brown's painting, like so many in this Smithsonian show, is powerful and funny.

In a nearby sculpture, Hugh Hefner — the Playboy poo-bah — holds a painted pipe in one hand, and has another pipe — a real one — poking out of his painted mouth. (You can see this 1966 work by Marisol Escobar here.)

Escobar is "always using humor and wit to unsettle us, to take all of our expectations of what a sculptor should be and what a portrait should be and messing with them," says curator Wendy Wick Reaves. "So when she's asked why there are two pipes, she says, 'Well Hugh Hefner has too much of everything.'"

Hefner claimed his life's work was to overthrow American prudery and puritanism with his bosomy bunnies and skimpily clad centerfold cuties. Escobar sculpts him in a comfy red cardigan — a kind of Mr. Rogers sweater. The homey outfit upends our expectations of what a sex merchant would sport.
The flip-side of Hefner is Sylvia Sleigh's 1973 painting The Turkish Bath. Six men sit together — naked, exposed, and looking a bit stoned.

"She is turning the idea of the male artist and the male gaze — which was often trained on women in an objectified way in the past — on its ear," says Brandon Fortune, Chief Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. "She's flipping everything around in a feminist way. ... This is one of the strongest feminist paintings I've ever seen."

Think of all the female nudes you've seen on museum walls. Sleigh's Turkish Bath puts men in similar poses — not worshipping them, the way male artists adore the women they paint, but poking fun at the males.

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In her 1973 work, The Turkish Bath, Sylvia Sleigh challenged the way male artists painted female nudes.

Courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Sleigh was a rebel, as are many of the artists in this show. Curator Wendy Wick Reaves says there was an art revolution underway in the 1950s and '60s. Abstract was the word de jour, but that didn't faze these painters.

"Critics like Clement Greenberg basically said that you can't be a progressive artist and paint the figure," Reaves explains. "And so they decided that was exactly what they were going to do, but they're doing it in a completely different way. And I think the fact that it was so unfashionable at the time really pushed them to reinvent, to reinvigorate the whole concept of how you portray the individual."

The results are on display at this Face Value show — these knock-out portraits make you smile, make you look and make you puzzle. Take, for example, Philip Pearlstein's 1968 portrait of two artists — painter Al Held and sculptor Sylvia Stone, who were husband and wife. Curator Brandon Fortune says they were friends of Pearlstein's.

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Philip Pearlstein "poses his people like objects," says curator Brandon Fortune. In 1968 he painted a portrait of two friends — married artist couple Al Held and Sylvia Stone.

Photograph courtesy of the artist and Betty Cuningham Gallery/Philip Pearlstein

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Andy Warhol was generous when he painted this glamorous portrait of artist Jamie Wyeth in 1976.

Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art

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A man walks past Emile Nolde's "Das Leben Christi" (1911/12, Life of Christ) at the Städel Museum.

Arne Dedert/AFP/Getty Images

I visited the Emil Nolde (1867-1956) exhibition now up at Frankfurt's Städel Museum this past week. Nolde's paintings are small, sketch-like, personal, and serious. They are authentic: one person doing what he obviously needs to do and making no bones about the fact.

I was moved by his religious paintings — almost comic-book like depictions of events in the life of Christ. So direct and explicit in their illustrative power that I found found myself excited by the religious feeling they expressed.

I had never seen most of this work before. I took delight in seascapes painted early on in his career. They were reduced, in the way of Turner, or Rothko, to a fog-like non-structure, a kind of blankness, a blankness that still did the work of picturing.

And so they invite us to ask: what is a picture, anyway? And how do we behold the beach and the sea and the sky when we behold them, as we do, in a picture? These paintings don't just show the sea; they put that showing on display, right next to the evident signs of the artist's brushwork, his choices, the manifest fact that what we see, really, is the product not so much of human labor, as it is of something more like result of a kind of compulsion.

I had that sense at the Städel looking at Nolde's work.

I had a similar feeling at the David Hockney show that was recently up at the de Young museum in San Francisco. The painter as a doodler, the one who just can't stop the pencil, or pen, or brush, or, in the case of Hockney, the thumbs and fingers on his iPad or iPhone.

Not that Nolde's pictures are not composed.

One striking painting depicts a woman performing on a stage. It is an erotic act and she is exposing herself sexually before an audience of staring men. We see the captivated faces of the men; but we don't see what they see. And neither does Nolde. He's on the sidelines, watching people watching her. This picture, which is downright enthralling, directs our attention to watching itself, to wanting to watch, and to the detachment, or even isolation, that sometimes accompanies not only watching, but making paintings, too.

Nolde's work was banned during the Nazi period. In the eyes of fascist authorities, his work was was deemed inferior. His paintings were removed from museums and many of his paintings were included in the notorious "Degenerate Art" exhibiton of 1937. He was prohibited from painting, even in private.

It is painful to stand before some of the very paintings on display at the Städel that Joseph Goebbels and his cohort put on display as examples of degenerate art. Because of the personal nature of this work, the
establishment rejection of the work feels particularly cruel.

But I am glad I didn't know Nolde had been a rather enthusiastic member of the National Socialists himself when I visited the Städel. It might have distracted me from the pictures.

He seems to have been a person of dark, racialist ideas. Of German and Danish extraction, he adopted the name Nolde. It was the name of the town near where he grew up. The exhibition puts this rather vulnerable, objectionable and even pathetic side of the artist very much on view.


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American Art. Above, Eleanor Dickinson sketches model Cory Weldon.

Eleanor Dickinson papers/Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
An artist friend, Virginia Isbell once asked me to pose for a quick pastel sketch in her Paris studio. I was flattered. And amazed to be on that side of a work of art. Never have I been looked at so intently, except by a parent or a lover. I was being fixed, examined, absorbed. And, for all the intensity, there was absolutely nothing personal about it.

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Students participate in a figure drawing class at the Stone City Colony and Art School in 1933.

Edward Beatty Rowan papers/Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
I was an object to be replicated. Her eyes went from my face to her sketchpad, my nose, my eyes, mouth, chin — sketched in pastel in 20 minutes. It was fun. But it felt as if something had been taken from me.

I thought of Matisse and his lifetime of models. In her novel The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead, Alison Leslie Gold portrays the painter reminiscing about his models: Lisette Lowengard, Helene Galitzine, Greta Prozor. Gold says to do their jobs, those women must master the rigors of a pose. They must hold stock still "for hours and hours and hours," she says. "Often in a cold studio. This is a testament to the models who stood there and didn't shiver and try to control their goosebumps."

You can't see the goosebumps, but there are several photographs of Matisse and his models in an exhibit at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, which explores the relationship between artists and their models. The show is culled from artists' papers and records. The women are stark naked. Matisse — ever the gentleman — sits inches away, in a suit, vest and hat. He looks warm.

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