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Paul Gauguin, NAFAE faaipoipo  (When Will You Marry?) 1892  Rudolph Staechelin Collection The Phillips Collection's latest loan exhibition, "Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland," draws upon a pair of collections assembled by two prominent but very different Swiss art collectors. To me, the theme of dualism, pairs and split identities stands out strongly.  The exhibition highlights one of Gauguin's most famous paintings, When are You to be Married ? -- a painting that recently was sold.  (The Staechelin and Im Oberstag collections of modern art are normally on display at the Basel Kunstmuseum. Here's an article for background on the collectors why the paintings are traveling .)  Like so many other paintings by Gauguin, the two women in this infamous painting express two realities, which could represent the split identities within Tahitian society. He painted it during his first stay in Tahiti in 1892. The woman in front is natural, organic, rel...

Sally Mann, Candy Cigarette , 1989 Sally Mann created controversy two decades ago when she published photographs of her three children, Immediate Family . The photos are beautiful, artistic and arresting. The idea of publishing nude pictures of her children is startling, knowing it can and would attract pedophiles.  Did she really think the photos would only attract the photographers and art connoisseurs, as she claims? I would not do the same sharing of my children's private moments, but should I judge her? To me, art is reconciliation.  I look at art to bring opposites together and to negotiate the ambiguities of life, so that is what I am able to find in Sally Mann's work.  She, too, photographed her children to reconcile her need to be a mother without suppressing the artist in her.  They are one and the same. In June Sally Mann spoke at the National Gallery of Art and read excerpts from her book, Hold Still.  She uses language exquisitely, much as she comp...

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Scrapers , 1875  Musée d'Orsay, now on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Right now the National Gallery is having an exhibition of an Impressionist whose reputation has grown over the last 25 years, Gustave Caillebotte.   Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye will be on view until October 4. It's interesting how his first masterpiece, The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the Salon in 1875, but part of the Impressionists' exhibition the next year. The masterful painting granted Caillebotte entry into the Impressionist group. He repaid his dear friends by buying up many of their works and then donating them to the French state after he died.  Many of the paintings he owned are part of Paris' great early modern museum, Musée d'Orsay. It's appropriate that the museum that houses so many Impressionist works is a former train station, since modern trains inspired viewers to observe the transient views of the world that ...

Piero di Cosimo, Giuliano da Sangallo  and Francesco Giamberti.   The two-part painting was on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum recently. An exhibition of Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's recently closed at the National Gallery in Washington a few months ago, and it's taken me awhile to develop and express my understanding of him.   Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence continues a the Uffizi Gallery with a slightly different body of works in Florence, until September 27. It's an interesting look at this quirky painter, someone who was living and working at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Piero di Cosimo's Allegory,  is part of the National Gallery's own collection.  It is seen as an allegory of overcoming one's animal nature.  Many of my students who wrote reviews of the exhibition dealt entirely with his religious paintings, the subjects you expect to see most often in Renaissance art. Like most Renais...

This month a replica of Chauvet Cave -- which holds the oldest known paintings of Paleolithic art --will open to the public in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, Ardèche region of southeastern France. As the April issue Smithsonian Magazine details , the early dating of 32,000 - 30,000 years ago has been analyzed and verified by various means. Stone age humans used this particular cave, and so did hibernating bears! Carbon dating confirms the early date of the charcoal pigments, but the bear bones found inside the cave have also been shown to be from around the same time.  A rock slide that occurred 29,000 years ago covered up the entrance -- keeping out the people and bears until just 20 years ago.   Chauvet Cave was discovered in December 1994. Although the style of art and cultural heritage has continuity with the numerous cave paintings of southwestern France and northeastern Spain, such as Lascaux, there are also species not seen elsewhere, including lions and bears.  The cave artis...

Andrea Pisano, relief from Giotto's Bell Tower in Florence, 14th century One of the things I appreciate most about living in Washington is the quality of its art exhibitions. A National Museum for Women in Arts (NMWA) exhibit,“Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea,” brings some of the best images from Italy in Washington.  This magnificent show dedicated to the mother of Jesus has a Botticelli, two Della Robbias, a Michelangelo and a Caravaggio.  It’s almost better to see it in Washington, DC, than in Italy, because so many of the most beautiful images are brought together in one place.  However, the exhibition is onl y going to be there one more week, until April 12. The exhibition also has a significant number of early Italian sculptures, a stained glass window and even an image made in India.  Paintings and sculptures come from several museums in Florence, Rome, Milan and Paris. The National Gallery of Art in Washington has loaned several pieces to the exhibition, w...

Fred Tomaselli, Woodpecker , 2009, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond gouache, acrylic, photo collage and epoxy resin on wood, 72" x 72"   I love talking about birds in my Art Appreciation classes, though with a focus very different from from the current SAAM (Smithsonian American Art Museum) exhibition, "The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art."  The exhibition's message is about man's relationship to birds, with the accent on environmental issues.  My class talks about birds in flight, to symbolize our human aspirations.  Flying birds remind us that humans can soar even if we don't literally know how to fly. Chris Allen, A Grand View ,  2010, Stone, beads, fetish Photo from Pinterest, Bonin Smith This exhibition and another excellent exhibition called "Bead," at GRACE (Greater Reston Arts Center), honor the minutia of creation in thousands or millions of the small details that make up the birds.  Both exhibitions are breath...