Modigliani

My friend Joel dragged me out to an art gallery and lunch today. There are probably 50 free art galleries and museums in D.C., and he had to pick one with a $14 admission charge. Oh, well, it's the last weekend of the Modigliani exhibit at the Phillips Collection, so that's what we went to see.

Modigliani has this interesting, stylized long nose and blue eyes combination he seems always to use for faces in his sculpture and in his paintings. It's kind of neat seeing just one of the paintings with that modern look. The sculptures reminded me a bit of the statues at Easter Island, as they were all very long and narrow. One room of the exhibit, though, was a series of probably two dozen portraits of various people, all with that same stylized, long nose....all staring at you......it was eerie....kind of a Twilight Zone moment. In another room, I found a series of three portraits of an art patroness, painted at different times, but all looking so much the same with the stylized nose and eyes and little tiny bow mouths.....I can't imagine the woman thinking these were flattering portrayals of her, so I have no clue why she continued to pay for them.

The museum was crowded (so much for the conventional wisdom that everybody leaves town on holiday weekends), and to make matters worse, the museum offered an audio tour of Modigliani, so all these people were wandering aimlessly holding a device to their ear that looked like a cordless telephone handset.

I actually liked the permanent collection better, I think. The museum seems to specialize in the post-impressionists, and probably the permanent collection represented the actual art purchases by the building's original resident around the turn of the 20th century back when all those artists were young, unknown bohemians. I was also struck by how many of the paintings in the collection were very very similar to renowned works by the same artist--in fact, there were a few I had to double-take. I guess the artists were on a theme, and these were earlier versions before they finally hit on their masterworks.

Art today is so lacking. I can't imagine what people will be looking at in 2105, seeing what we were buying of quality in 2005.