Tyler Elementary School Students create storyboards inspired by Franz Marc’s Deer in the Forest I. Photo: James R. Brantley

On May 14 and 16 we wrapped up another successful year of the Art Links to Learning: Museum-in-Residence program with two artists’ receptions for 350 students from Tyler Elementary School and Takoma Education Campus. Students enjoyed seeing their work in the current Young Artists Exhibition and venturing out into the galleries before school’s out for summer!

Natalie Mann, School, Outreach, and Family Programs Coordinator

Takoma Education Campus middle school students settle into the auditorium on May 16. Photo: James R. Brantley

Tyler Elementary School students peruse the Young Artists Exhibition featuring their class’s collaborative artwork. Photo: James R. Brantley

Photos: Sandy Lee

During a recent lunch break, I happened upon a couple of food trucks in Dupont Circle. No big surprise, food trucks are as common as taxicabs. However upon closer inspection of the menu . . .

The Calder Ficelle was indeed a work of art. Forgive me for not taking a picture of it before it was so hastily consumed.

Photos: Jane Clifford

Let me explain. I spent last Saturday, May 11, taking part in the Delegation of the European Union’s EU Open House initiative. As part of this year’s annual celebration of culture, 28 embassies opened their doors to the public free of charge, offering a rare look inside their buildings as well as food, music, and the chance to experience firsthand their rich cultures.

I was lucky to be working behind the scenes as a volunteer at the Royal Netherlands Embassy, promoting the Phillips’s upcoming Van Gogh Repetitions exhibition. The Embassy was a perfect setting in which to inform people of the first exhibition of van Gogh’s work in Washington in 15 years, given that he is not only one of the most celebrated artists in history but also a Dutch national.

Overall it was a wonderful day–the rain held off and nearly 2,700 D.C. residents and visitors came through the doors to learn about the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Dutch art, and culture. To top it off, the Embassy offered complementary stroopwaffles (yum!), Heineken, and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (a division of the Anglo-Dutch Unilever conglomerate, who knew?).

Jane Clifford, Marketing Intern

Our Rothko appears unscathed in this explosive scene from Iron Man 3.

Assistant Registrar Gretchen Martin confirmed Director of Membership Jeff Petrie’s hunch that in Iron Man 3, the Rothko painting hanging on the wall of Tony Stark’s Malibu mansion as he and Pepper Potts are sent flying after a blow up is in fact our Ochre and Red on Red (1954). Spoiler alert? Oh well, it’s in the trailer. You’ll see the Phillips thanked in the credits if you’re one to stay ’till the bitter end. On Thursday, we’ll sacrifice some street parking to help the filming of Captain America. Bringing you the big stars and the big explosions is just part of our work here at the museum. You’re welcome.

View of Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone’s office wall, with images from this fall’s Van Gogh Repetitions exhibition and catalogue. Photo: Liza Key Strelka

Exhibitions at the Phillips are years in the making. Our curators often spend at least 2-3 years researching, compiling checklists, locating artwork, collaborating with other museums and venues, visiting and writing to potential lenders, and writing catalogue text. During that time, they immerse themselves in the exhibition’s subject matter. Oftentimes, their offices become transformed by their work: stacks of reference catalogues piled high, drafts of loan letters and checklists abound, and the images of artworks seem to magically appear on their walls. For this fall’s Van Gogh Repetitions exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Chief Curator Eliza Rathbone printed images of all the “repetitions” we will be featuring in the show and grouped them on one of her office walls, as seen in the image at left. She was able to visualize the similarities and differences between paintings of the same subject matter as she worked on her catalogue entries and began thinking about the exhibition’s layout.

Once the preliminary work is complete, the artworks are secured, and the catalogue text is off to the publisher, the real fun begins. And by “fun”, I mean playing with miniature-sized “maquettes” of the paintings in the show to determine  exhibition design and layout. These small, to-scale images combined with a scaled model of our exhibition spaces allow the curator to visualize gallery layouts and groupings before the works arrive in-house, making for a smoother and more efficient installation process. Not surprisingly, it’s also much safer moving around small cardboard rectangles than priceless paintings.

Eliza Rathbone laying out maquettes of works that will be featured in Van Gogh Repetitions. Photo: Liza Key Strelka

Recently Eliza, Head of Conservation Elizabeth Steele, and I sat down to begin shaping the design and visitor flow of the van Gogh exhibition in preparation for a meeting with our exhibition designer. Here’s a sneak peek of some of the works that will grace our walls beginning October 12.  Stay tuned for more “sneak peeks” as our design progresses, and we get closer to opening day. We’re looking forward to sharing the real paintings and works on paper with you this fall!

Maquettes of van Gogh paintings. Photo: Liza Key Strelka

Liza Key Strelka, Curatorial Coordinator

Klaus Ottmann performing James Lee Byars’s The Perfect Smile at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, December 2004

In the late 1950s, the young Byars left his hometown of Detroit to live in Kyoto, Japan, where he remained, with interruptions from 1958 to 1968. There he learned to appreciate the ephemeral as a valued quality in art and embrace the ceremonial as a continuing mode in his life and work, which became inseparable. During these formative years, he adapted the highly sensual, abstract, and symbolic practices found in Japanese Noh theater and Shinto rituals to Western science, art, and philosophy. His pursuit of the “perfect” originated from a unique synthesis of Oriental practices, conceptual art, minimalism, and fluxus, infused with aspects of the happening, body art, and installation art. For Byars, perfection was an impossibility, except for the auspicious moment (kairos) where life and death, happiness and tragedy, are one.

In 1994 Byars presented one of his fleeting performances, The Perfect Smile, to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne as a gift with the request that it be exhibited like any other work in its collection. In accordance with his wish, the performance was borrowed and reenacted for the first time since his death, for the retrospective of his works, which I organized in 2004 for the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg. It was performed by me or by the museum’s staff once a day in front of a black wall. The performance consists of a very subtle movement of one’s mouth to indicate the briefest smile possible, before it vanishes.

Two weeks ago, visiting Light Show, an exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery, I was standing in front of three columns of pulsating light by the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, and experienced one of these rare auspicious moments, an evanescent burst of happiness and, yes, love, that lasted no longer than a few seconds as each column grew brighter until it reached an almost religious degree of intensity before slowly fading into darkness.

Cerith Wyn Evans, S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E (‘Trace me back to some loud, shallow, chill, underlying motive’s overspill…’), 2010. Hayward Gallery, London, May 2013. Photo courtesy of Oli Scarff

There are three great themes in James Lee Byars’s work: Life, Love, and Death, but it is Love that is at the heart of Byars’s notion of the Perfect. There are two philosophical concepts of perfect love: in Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis, the love of God is the highest form of knowledge, which is accomplished by the simple act of man loving himself; in Kierkegaard, Abraham’s perfect love of God, expressed by his preparedness to sacrifice his son, is at the core of Kierkegaard’s theory of the leap to faith. In both cases, it is a marriage of love and certitude (knowledge that does not require objective proof) that results in a perfect moment.

Georges Braque, Abstraction, 1920. Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper, 10 7/8 x 13 3/4 in. Acquired 1930. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

Braque will receive a proper fête when our show Georges Braque and the Cubist Still Life, 1928–1945 opens June 8.

Edouard Vuillard, Woman Sweeping, between 1899 and 1900. Oil on cardboard, 17 3/8 x 18 5/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1939

Despite trysts with a number of women, Edouard Vuillard‘s mother was the only woman he ever called his muse.

Augustus Vincent Tack, Allegory – Love and Life (Mother and Child), ca. 1900-07. Oil on canvas mounted on hardboard, 25 x 24 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1919; traded 1924; reacquired by 1959

In the lovely and soft painting above, Augustus Vincent Tack uses the portraits of a mother and child to embody the notions of Love and Life.

Isamu Noguchi, Mother and Child, 1930. Ink on paper, 56 1/2 x 35 1/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Bequest of June P. Carey, 1983

In just a few simple strokes of ink on paper, Isamu Noguchi captures the intimacy between mother and child.

(left) Max Weber, Mother and Child, between 1916 and 1923. Lithograph overall: 8 3/4 in x 10 1/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Diane and Norman Bernstein, 2006 (right) Max Weber, Mother and Child, ca. 1919-20, Woodcut print overall: 8 in x 5 1/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Diane and Norman Bernstein, 2006

Max Weber approaches the relationship between mother and child from a number of angles—first through lithograph, then through woodcut—in his multiple renderings of the subject.

Bonnie Harris, Memory of My Mother’s Parlor, not dated. Casein on paper, 13 1/2 x 20 7/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Gift of Marilee Shapiro and Eleanor Harris, 1981

Bonnie Harris, who began painting at age 79, remembers her mother through a familiar and surely intimate setting—her parlor.

Alfonso Ossorio, Perpetual Sacrifice, 1949. Ink, wax, and watercolor on board, 40 x 30 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Paul and Hannah Tillich

Don’t miss this incredible show, closing Sunday. Like me, you might be surprised at what you see. This Ossorio work, Perpetual Sacrafice, for example, stopped me in my tracks. When I first stood before it, I saw LA graffiti, I saw Swoon, I saw tattoo art, I saw comic books; modern, urban, loaded with icons and references. And yet, this is a work from 1949 by the erudite, wealthy, Filipino-American artist and collector Alfonso Ossorio. After you see the show on the third floor, be sure to stop on the second floor, around the corner from the Rothko Room, where you’ll find an installation of Ossorio’s Recovery Drawings, created 40 years later during a hospital stay. Having catalogued a facsimile volume of these drawings, I can say that the energy Ossorio captures in all of his works, from mixed media in the 1940s and ’50s to felt tipped marker in the 1980s, can produce a remarkable sensation in the viewer.

(left) Willem de Kooning, Asheville, ca. 1935. Oil and enamel on cardboard, 25 9/16 x 31 7/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1952 (right) Bradley Walker Tomlin, No. 8, 1952. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 65 7/8 x 47 7/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1955.

Amy Wike: What were some of the things Slow Art Day 2013 participants focused on during the tour?

Lana Housholder: I asked the participants lots of questions, such as: What object or shape did you first notice when looking at this work of art? Why do you think that was the first think you noticed? Do you see movement in this work of art, or does it seem still? Do the colors, lines, and shapes make it seem that way? How? What is the story that you see happening in this work of art? Who are the characters in this story? How many characters are present in this scene? Where is this taking place? What emotions seem to be expressed in the story? What do you see that makes you say that? What’s one word you might use to describe the mood of this painting? What’s one word you could use to describe the subject of this painting?

AW: Did you notice any interesting interpretations from visitors?

LH: Yes. The visitors found objects and shapes in several abstract works of art that I hadn’t seen before. They explained to me why those objects were the first thing they noticed and what drew their eye to them. Visitors also explained to me how certain works would appear differently if they were a different size. For example, Willem de Kooning‘s Asheville would feel much more chaotic and full of movement and intensity if it were larger. It is a relatively small piece in comparison to his other works. This makes the work feel more intimate and less busy, they said.

AW: As tour guide, do you have any additional observations about the experience?

LH: I really enjoyed the experience overall. I loved hearing the thoughts of the visitors and focusing on their interpretations of the art. It was nice that the audience understood the focus of the tour was on the interpretation and act of looking as well as the history surrounding the art and artist. Oftentimes I feel that visitors expect me to give a lecture when in front of a work of art. They want to know content. It was nice to not have that be the only expectation. As Gallery Educators in the Education Department at the Phillips, we are trained to have looking exercises be part of each museum tour. We ask several looking questions at each work of art to get the audience involved in the act of really seeing a piece instead of passively listening to the Gallery Educator. We hope our tours focus on both the content surrounding the art as well as an audience-led interpretation of what is on view.