monday, december 27, 2010 ASKAMY


Time for action, not blame Husband and wife bicker over who should fix the hazardous kitchen drawer. C8


BOOKWORLD


The tug of the criminal life Ian Vasquez’s “Mr. Hooligan” watches a drug runner trying to go straight. C4


Style ABCDE C EZ SU TOP10FILMS


Fockered again Despite a spate of bad reviews, “Little Fockers,” third installment of the Ben Stiller- Robert De Niro series, earned $34 million over a stormy Christmas weekend to top the national box office. C8


WhenI gave Crystal the ring, she burst into tears.


This is the happiest Christmas


weekend in memory.” —Hugh Hefner, 84, on his engagement to Crystal Harris, 24. C3


ADAYATTHECORCORAN


BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST COLLECTOR’SVIEW: The Corcoran Gallery’sMantel Room has been configured in the Salon style of 18th-century Paris, with some of the museum’s best old European paintings crowding all the way up the walls.


Tiny but monumental M


Chardin’s ‘Scullery Maid’ may be a simple subject, but she looms large in our view BY BLAKE GOPNIK


useums are time machines. They let us look at all the pieces of the past they preserve. Sometimes, they also let us look at vintage looking. Last year, when the Corcoran Gallery


of Art rearranged its lovely little permanent collec- tion,afewgallerieswererehungtomimichowartwas looked at formost of the last half-millennium.Many Corcoranworks are nowdisplayed “Salon-style,”with pictures of every size and style, on every subject, stacked up to the ceiling. It doesn’t make it easy to examine every one of them, the way we’re used to doing inbooks andslide talks andspecial exhibitions. But a Salon hang does produce an interesting tussle among the works themselves, as they vie for our attention — the same struggle they would have had


when theywere firstmade and collected. ASalonhangalsochanges thewaywenegotiate the


art: It turns a modern type-A viewer into a leisurely grazer. Looking at this throng of paintings, the ease and poise of an aristocratic collector, at home among his treasures, replaces the eager-beaver art historian in you, fighting forAgrades. Ifnothingelse,aSalonhangalsosaves shoe leather.


Youcansitonthebenchina single gallery andbrowse among dozens ofworks. For every day one recent week, I lounged in the


grand old space the Corcoran calls theMantel Room, where themuseumhas createda Salonwithdozens of its best oldEuropean pictures. Each day thisweek, I’ll bewriting on a singlework that called out tome fromthe crowd.


DAY1:CHARDIN’S LITTLEGIANTESS


Shall we start off taking it easy on ourselves?


Instead of looking up into a far corner of this “salon,” where an obscure work has been “skied,” as the term used to be, we can keep our eyes focused straight ahead, to look at one of the Corcoran’s greatest treasures: Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin’s “The SculleryMaid,” painted in 1738 in Paris and hung in that year’s Salon. (We can only hope it wasn’t skied.) The painting is tiny but potent. It shows a servant girl going about her duties, in a


scullery space filled with an old wooden barrel and a few humble tools of the housekeeper’s trade. What could be more humble, as subject or as art, than this image of a girl scrubbing a pan? When Chardin was


corcoran continued on C2 In a digital-age presidency, books live on


Official papers of a tweeting president still elegantly hand-bound


BY LISA REIN The nation’s bookbinder runs


his index finger over a rough cut of goatskin. He bears down gen- tly, hunting for blemishes. The leather, flown from London to the bindery of the Government Printing Office, has no major flaws. It is fit to enshrine the utterances of the president. “It’s workable,” Peter K. James


pronounces. He will glue the frontispiece, trim and sew the


stacks of pages, attach the endpa- pers styled in silk moire, round and hollow the spine, fasten the boards and smooth, gold-stamp and polish President Obama’s first set of public papers. “You know you’ve got a full


goat here?” jokes James, whose title is head forwarder at the printing office. His job is assem- bling and hand-binding some of the government’s most impor- tant documents and then for- warding them to the finishers. The craft has changed little since the 17th century. “The Public Papers of the Pres-


LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST


FIRST EDITION: Charlene Stevenson and PeterK. James bind Obama presidential papers at theGovernment Printing Office.


ident 2009” will be bound at the White House’s request in Duke


papers continued on C3 TVREVIEW


‘Hardcore Pawn’ returns, with no redeeming value


BY HANK STUEVER If nothing else, the return of


TruTV’s “Hardcore Pawn” is ap- propriately timed to the grim- ness that can sometimes accom- pany the week after Christmas. As trees are dragged out to the garbage and consumers are dragged out to the mall to ex- change unwanted presents and to binge on gift cards, the world sort of resembles one big reality show. “Hardcore Pawn,” in a small


way, reminds us just how much worse things can be when it comes to the ancient arts of transaction, usury and the time- honored disdain between vendor and customer. But that’s also lending far too


much thematic bling to this show. Back for a second season Tuesday night (even though its first season ended mere months ago), “Hardcore Pawn” is a cheap, depressing, even unctu- ous exercise that raises all sorts


tv review continued on C4


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