ARTIST TALK
Fiber artist Consuelo Jiménez Underwood discusses her work. Sunday at 3 p.m. Renwick Gallery, 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
americanart.si.edu. Free.
OnExhibit
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s 1817 work “A Branch With Shriveled Leaves,” from “German Master Drawings,” verges on abstraction.
WOLFGANG RATJEN COLLECTION
Connecting old and new worlds
by Michael O’Sullivan
Two exhibitions opened last month at
the National Gallery of Art, one building — and an ocean — apart from each other. More than footsteps separates the East Building’s “American Modernism: The Shein Collection” from the West Building’s “Ger- man Master Drawings From the Wolfgang Rat- jen Collection, 1580- 1900.” The first is, primar- ily, a painting show. It’s tiny, containing only 20 pieces in two small galler- ies. It tells the story of a single century (well, part of one: it covers work from 1913 to 1962). And it’s exuberantly Ameri- can.
On the other side of
Fourth Street, you’ll find 120 drawings spanning more than three centu- ries and filling five rooms. They manifest a distinctly old-world charm. What could these two shows possibly
COLLECTION OF DEBORAH AND ED SHEIN
Marsden Hartley’s “Pre-War Pageant” is the earliest of the Shein Collection works.
have to do with each other? The most re- cent drawing from the Ratjen collection — Leopold Graf Kalckreuth’s “The Artist’s Son Wolf Crouching on the Floor” — was made in 1900. The earliest picture in “Modernism” — Marsden Hartley’s “Pre- War Pageant” (a.k.a. “Paris Days . . . Pre- War”) — was painted in 1913. Those 13
years are a wide gulf. The National Gallery, however, is good
at filling in gaps. As you stroll from one show to the other, you’re more than likely to encounter many, many pictures that help make the connections. Spend a little more time with each show, and with a little careful looking, you may even start to see hidden links — traces of the old in the new, and a foreshad- owing of the modern in the antique — that you might not have noticed before. Here are a couple to look out for: Part of the collection of
Deborah and Ed Shein, Preston Dickinson’s “Still Life No. 1” seems a little out of place in the East Wing show. For one thing, the 1924 canvas depicts easily recognizable objects: a chair draped with striped neckties; linen napkins; a fruit-filled bowl and a knife. Though there are other still lifes in “American Modern- ism,” it takes guesswork to
figure out what they contain. Dickinson’s piece, then, is kind of a throwback: a mostly straightforward pic- ture — with mere touches of abstraction — in an age when many of his peers were throwing verisimilitude out the window. Now take a look at the Ratjen collection.
You find a pair of works there from 1817: “Shriveled Leaves” and “A Branch With
COLLECTION OF DEBORAH AND ED SHEIN
“Still Life No. 1” by Preston Dickinson, part of “American Modernism: The Shein Collection,” is a throwback among modern works.
Shriveled Leaves,” by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Though far from modern — leaf studies were common drawing exer- cises at the time — there’s something dif- ferent about these lovely works. Neither botanical illustration nor, in all likelihood, meant to evoke the symbolism of death, they’re about as close to pure abstraction as you’ll get in the 19th century. Compare the folds of the withered
leaves — beauty for beauty’s sake — with those of Dickinson’s crumpled napkins, and you just might hear echoes of the same distant music, playing across the di- vide of a century.
osullivanm@washpost.com
THE STORY BEHIND THE WORK
One of the most intriguing drawings from
the Wolfgang Ratjen collection is Johann Elias Ridinger’s “The Rhinoceros ‘Miss Clara.’ ”
Made in 1748, it depicts a celebrity of
WOLFGANG RATJEN COLLECTION/PATRONS’ PERMANENT FUND
sorts: a tame female Indian rhino, raised in captivity since infancy, who toured Europe for nearly 20 years under the name Clara, inspiring songs and poems during an appearance in Paris, as well as a fashion craze for wigs styled a la rhinoceros. But the drawing itself is as notable as its
famous subject. When Clara arrived in Rotterdam in 1741, a live rhinoceros had not been seen on the continent in more than 150 years. And the best-known image of the beast was Albrecht Duerer’s 1515 woodcut, made from a secondhand description the artist had heard about what the animal looked like. It included such inaccuracies as a horn in the middle of its back. Known for his eye for animals, Ridinger drew Clara from life during an appearance
in Augsburg, Germany. The gentle, almost sweet portrait is the first accurate rendering of her ever, and a far cry from the fearsome image of the creature that most Europeans had in their imaginations.
Bonus: Don’t miss Ridinger’s amusing drawing of a camel in a companion showcase of German drawings from the National Gallery’s own collection, located immediately adjacent to the Ratjen collection.
— Michael O’Sullivan
AMERICAN MODERNISM: THE SHEIN COLLECTION
Through Jan. 2.
GERMAN MASTER DRAWINGS FROM THE
WOLFGANG RATJEN COLLECTION, 1580-1900
Through Nov. 28.
Both at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW (Metro: Archives). 202-737-4215 (TDD: 202-842-6176).
www.nga.gov.
Hours: Open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: Free.
37
THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2010
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