Today we decided that we wanted to explore two of the Smithsonian’s less crowded museums, the Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery. This proved to be good choices. We we immediately taken with the first exhibit we saw, paintings from the Depression era. This was one of Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod pictures.
Then we found two wonderful paintings of California we had never seen before. This one shows tenements at the base of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles.
And this one needs no particular explanation.
How had these failed to show up in California history texts?
Another fantastic exhibit was the collection of folk art there. We were immediately struck by this wonderful piece using bottle caps. It gave John an opportunity for a particularly artistic selfie.
The real jewel of this collection is James Hampton’s extraordinary sculpture, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millenium General Assembly. He spent twenty years or more creating this in his garage where it was discovered only after his death.
The National Portrait Gallery is joined to the American Art museum. The courtyard between the buildings was covered over with this stunning ceiling by the famous British artist Norman Foster.
We took a tour here. The guide, a former federal lawyer, was decent enough, but he was more interested in giving us information about the historical figures than in the artistic creativity behind them. So we saw lots of pictures of presidents and heard a good number of stories that I already knew about them. Only the pictures of John Kennedy by Elaine de Kooning were interesting as art, and we were strictly forbidden to take pictures of them as all were on loan from private collectors.
After the tour, we went off to explore on our own. The upper floor of the museum has some portraits of modern and somewhat unexpected people like filmmaker John Waters.
The portraits are taken as well from popular sources like Time magazine covers or record jackets.
After several hours of looking at art we were tired and hungry. We went to nearby Chinatown to look for something to eat. We had some good, if overpriced, dim sum.
It was about five at this point, and all the museums were all about to close. So we decided to head down to the mall and to look at the monuments there. After a fairly long bus ride, we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial. While the steps and the interior were crowded, the rear of the monument provide me with this opportunity for my own moment of Edward Hopper inspired isolation.
John and Abe seemed to be staging a battle of the chins.
The Washington Monument, probably the most iconic structure in the District, was not reflected in its usual reflecting pool. We figured that maybe this was drained for the winter.
Not far from the Lincoln Memorial is the Vietnam War Memorial. The last time we were there this was new and it was moving to see people coming there for the first time. Today it seemed to be just another stop on the middle school field trip circuit.
We were more drawn to the Korean War Memorial, not because it was as artistically satisfying at Maya LIn’s masterpiece, but simply because we had never seen it before. Somehow the pictures of the monument seemed to work better in black and white than in color.
Our final stop of the evening was Ford’s Theater. We figured that we wanted to visit here particularly as we are almost at the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. John is standing here right next to the box, almost completely unchanged from that fateful evening of April 12, 1865.
