Sunday, January 29, 2006

Holiday weekend

guard lionguard lionIt's the Chinese New Year, so this seemed like a great time to go to the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution where they have their National Museum of Asian Art to view their collections of Chinese artifacts, especially their temporary exhibit on Chinese musical instruments as an art form. Naturally, I had to take some pictures.

The Freer Gallery was the first museum of fine arts in the Smithsonian, built back in the 1920s to house the collection of Charles Freer, a railroad tycoon who collected American and Oriental art. A lot of people don't realize that the Smithsonian's fine arts collections are fairly limited, since the major art collections in town are at the Corcoran Gallery and the National Gallery of Art, both of which are separate institutions from the Smithsonian. Where the Smithsonian does shine, however, are in the more esoteric collections outside of the Euro-American mainstream. The Asian collection is world-renowned, including some Chinese bronzes and ceramics which are over 4,000 years old, and a vast quantity of Chinese masterpieces from the first millennium A.D.

Here are some pictures of some of the more interesting pieces of art I saw this weekend. I didn't write down what all of them were, exactly where they were from, or when they were made, but these are all specifically Chinese pieces. So, just enjoy them cause I thought they were pretty.

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Meanwhile, it's been a beautiful weekend in D.C. The temperatures have been in the 50s and 60s, so everyone is running around in short sleeves and shorts.

We're observing all the Chinese New Year traditions. We put up a little Chinese poem in the entry hall. We're not sweeping the floor today. We're not taking garbage out the front door (which in our case means not taking it out at all since we've only one door). And the thing I hate most, I haven't washed my hair all day—I can't wait til tomorrow! The dragon parade in Chinatown isn't til next weekend. We went to dinner tonight, too—more about that later.

The Freer Gallery wasn't all "historical" pieces. Here are some pictures of the installation in the entry lobby of the museum. It's called "Floating Mountains, Singing Clouds," by Mai-ling Hom, and it's a brand-new temporary installlation made from chicken wire.

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Saturday, January 28, 2006

Touring the Renwick

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One of the less visited gems of the Smithsonian Institution here in Washington is an antebellum red brick building with a black mansard roof just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.

Named after the famous architect who designed it (he also created the Smithsonian "Castle" in D.C. and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York), the building originally housed the art collection of William Wilson Corcoran and was the first major building in the U.S. to be built in the Second Empire style. After the large Corcoran Gallery museum was built a block south and the collection moved in 1897, the federal government acquired the building and used it for the U.S. Court of Claims until 1964. After a lengthy restoration, it opened in 1972 as the Renwick Gallery.

The Renwick is used today as one of the buildings for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, displaying permanent and traveling exhibitions of American crafts and decorative arts. The main collection on indefinite temporary display right now is the Catlin Collection.

George Catlin was an early 19th century American lawyer who visited Indian tribes west of the Mississippi all across the Great Plains and painted hundreds of portraits of Indians. Anthropologists today consider them to be an authentic record of period tribal clothing and adornment styles during the early 1830s, when tribal contact with Euroamerican culture had still been fairly minimal.

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Catlin took his paintings on tour in Europe to great public acclaim, and the Renwick's display is designed to resemble the way Catlin showed the paintings in Europe.

The visual impact of hundreds of Indian portraits on the rose-colored walls in the Grand Salon is stunning. Many of these paintings are quite well-known from art books and Indian histories, while others have seldom been seen.

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Not everything in the Renwick is Indians (after all, the Smithsonian does have a whole museum down by the Capitol devoted exclusively to Indians). The temporary galleries downstairs were devoted to a huge retrospective of American silver ware from the traditional to the very contemporary called "Modernism in American Silver." Not just forks and spoons, the exhibit showed unusual tea services, bowls, table and barware, and candelabra from fine private homes, grand hotels, and even Navy battleships. We just barely caught the silver on the last weekend of its exhibition here, and now it has moved to the Dallas Museum of Art.

There's a bit of whimsy in the Renwick's side galleries upstairs, as well, where the permanent collection includes Larry Fuente's "Game Fish," a sailfish made of popular American game pieces such as dominoes, ping-pong balls, dice, poker chips, and Scrabble tiles.

game fish

Sunday, January 22, 2006

West Wing ending

West Wing banner


NBC executives announced today that this will be the final season of The West Wing. I'm saddened by that. Certainly the series could be ponderous and self-important at times, but I loved the writing, and I most especially loved the writing for the presidential speeches—if only the real life White House could get speech writers like that!

It seemed that they were setting the show up to continue in the future with either Jimmy Smits or Alan Alda in the White House after the term of Martin Sheen expired, and then the series could have a potentially perpetual existence, much the same as NBC has done with E.R. and the multitudinous Law and Order series. The untimely and unexpected death of series regular John Spencer last month, who was Jimmy Smits' vice presidential running mate, seems to have thrown NBC for a loop, and they were not able to resolve their creative and plot problems, which is a shame, given how much the writers and producers on that show are paid.

Oh, well. I guess the mantle of television presidential politics will be passed to ABC's excellent series, Commander in Chief.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Dresses

We watched the Golden Globes last night.

Gwenyth Paltrow, who was so stunnningly gorgeous in her pink ball gown when she won her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, then wore that hideous Goth outfit the next year, continues her pattern of accepting the worst possible fashion advice a major starlet could get. I know she's pregnant enough to show and had on a maternity dress, but I've seen better formal dresses at Peas in a Pod! She was in a Victorianesque frau-frock with an Empire waist, there were frilly frumpy ruffles, and there were these tight little shoulder cap sleeves which made the entire dress look as though it were way too small for her. Hideous. Absolutely hideous.

Remember when Catherine Zeta-Jones was so pregnant at the Oscars, everyone was worried she was gonna pop out her little Douglas baby right there on the stage? Well, she managed to look elegant and sexy in a tasteful formal gown. Perhaps she can share the name of her designer with Miss Paltrow.

Poor Gwenyth. Hideous. Absolutely hideous.