ABCDE
Arts&Style
sunday, april 11, 2010
PUZZLE!
Anew
crossword
Debuting today, a brain teaser created by Peter
Gordon. E10
BLOGS AND CHATS washingtonpost.com/style
Interview Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s ghostly fixation. E2 TV previewOn PBS, an Anne Frank movie much closer to reality. E4
Ask Amy, E10 Celebrations, E11 Cul de Sac, E10 Movie Guide, E9 Horoscope, E10 Lively Arts Guide, E9
ROBIN GIVHAN
Threads
A photographer traces memories in her mother’s
closet. E3
PHILIP KENNICOTT
The Mall: If you unbuild it, they will come
David J. Getsy studies works by sculptor Scott Burton, such as this “settee.”
SAVANT- GARDE
David Bindman studies race in art like August Saint-Gaudens’s Shaw Memorial.
Elizabeth Cropper writes on ideas of beauty, as in this work by Agnolo Bronzino.
In a hidden haven in the National Gallery, these anointed experts define art for generations to come
by Blake Gopnik
W
e Washingtonians know the acronyms that give people behind-the-scenes power. We know about the villains of SPEC- TRE — the Special Executive for Coun-
terintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. And we’ve heard of the men from UNCLE— the Unit- ed Network Command for Law Enforcement. But how many of us recognize the secret force that is CASVA? The Central Authority for Spite, Venality and Ag- gression? The Council for Abstinence, Self-control, Vigilance and Altruism? No. More important than ei- ther could be: the Center for Advanced Study in the
Visual Arts. Toiling in the bowels of the National Gallery, CAS-
VA’s intrepid scholars shape what all the rest of us will someday believe about art. We may think we come at pictures with fresh eyes and ideas, but our everyday insights are likely to echo the thoughts, once esoteric and radical, of some long- dead expert. If we look ahead to an art scene 15 or 20 years in the future, we’ll find that its exhibitions, its wall texts, its college primers, its PBS specials — even its newspaper reviews — are likely to depend on re- search being done now by the unsung heroes of CASVA. At any given time there are something like 35 of these operatives, based in Washington or scattered
casva continued on E7
t was about as close to a flash of genuine hostility as you’ll ever see at the National Capital Planning Commission, the oversight group that must sign off on major architectural and design changes in and around the District. The National Park Service’s representative to the April 1 meeting was irked by Judy Scott Feldman, who heads the National Coalition to Save Our Mall. At issue was the placement of an ugly (and apparently permanent) pumping station on the Mall, a service building that would help clean up the brackish waters of the long reflecting pools that run between the Lincoln and World War II memorials. Feldman wants it moved to what she thinks is a more discreet location, but the Park Service believes there is no better place for it than in the trees just north of Independence Avenue, near where the Park Service stables its horses. More interesting than the
I
details of the argument, however, was the appeal of both parties to Holy Writ: the 1901 McMillan Plan, which laid out the basic lines of the current Mall. Feldman argued that the Park Service “dismisses” the importance of the McMillan Plan, while the Park Service’s Peter May rather testily responded that the agency knows and honors the plan very much, thank you. The McMillan Plan was the
product of the City Beautiful movement, which reshaped urban land all across America at the beginning of the last century. Named for Sen. James McMillan, who commissioned the report, the plan called for opening up grand axial vistas
E
AX FN FS LF PW DC BD PG AA FD HO MN MN MS SM
HARRIS & EWING PHOTOS; WASHINGTON POST ARCHIVES
GREEN ZONE:The 1901
McMillan Plan decreed a rigid geometry for the Mall, still in the works in 1935.
on the Mall, defining its edges, building the great temples of government and culture that line its north and south sides, and generally reorienting the city of Washington around what is still known today as the “monumental core.” The drawings produced by the McMillan visionaries — which included legendary figures such as Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Charles McKim, Daniel Burnham — were so gorgeous that they have inspired decades
plan continued on E5
Merrily she rolls along
Angela Lansbury
sings her way to a Sondheim honor
by Peter Marks
new york — To impress a young fellow named Sondheim, Angela Lansbury chose an old standard by Gershwin. She had been living in Los An-
geles, making movies, when a note arrived out of the blue from the playwright Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim’s collaborator on “Gypsy” and “West Side Story.” They had written a new musical, and Laurents wanted to know whether she would audition for them.
By the early 1960s, Lansbury had established herself as a seri- ous actress in Hollywood (“Gas- light,” “State of the Union,” “The Manchurian Candidate”), but a lot of the other jobs were in what she calls “so-so films.” And al- though she’d always been able to carry a tune, she hadn’t imagined herself a potential successor to the likes of Martin or Merman. “I thought, ‘God! I’d never en-
tertained the idea of doing a mu- sical.’ But they came out, and I sang for them.” The song was “A Foggy Day (In
London Town).” To paraphrase Ira Gershwin’s lyrics, it was one of the luckiest days she had known. “Be- cause on the basis of that,” she says, “I went to Broadway.” And so a remarkable life in mu- sicals was launched. Lansbury is sitting in the hom-
ey living room of her little Man- hattan pied-à-terre — an apart-
1964 UPI PHOTO
CLASS ACTRESS: Angela
Lansbury made her debut in the short-lived “Anyone Can Whistle.”
ment north of Times Square that’s so not-grande-dame-ish its balco- ny looks out on a brick wall — as she recalls the meeting that led to her being cast in Sondheim and Laurents’s short-lived 1964 “Any- one Can Whistle.” With her 85th birthday on the horizon, the ac- tress is sharp, precise and endear- ingly maternal: She cheerily bops off to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water for a guest and looks a bit thwarted when he politely de- clines a cookie. On this afternoon, she is re-
flecting on her long association with a composer-lyricist whose works became multiple mile- stones in her durable musical- theater life. Sondheim wrote the first notes she sang on a Broad-
lansbury continued on E8
BILL O’LEARY / WASHINGTON POST
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