Corcoran

• Richard Avedon - Portraits of Power
• The Art of Political Cartoon
• Leo Rubinfien - Wounded Cities
• Elena Del Rivero - [Swi:t] Home: A chant, 2001 - 2006
• Plans for the Weekend
• I Was Today at the Corcoran
• Rodin at Corcoran
• Maya Lin and her Systematic Landscapes
• Frederic Edwin Church: Niagara
• Sargent and the Sea
• The Man Who Split the Second
• Edmund Charles Tarbell

Corcoran Gallery greets his visitors with a fantastic sport model of Tatra, from 1933. They are just preparing a huge exhibition dedicated to modernism - the period between 1914 - 1939. The Tatra car is the first exhibit. It was complicated to bring the car inside, the doors had to be pulled out, anyway they made it eventually.

This exhibition will open on March 17th. Meanwhile there are two other exhibitions there. The first one contains some drawings and lithographs belonging to Olga Hirshhorn Collects: works by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, among others.
One drawing of Edward Hopper that I hadn't seen before, and a work by Barnett Newman, The Monument, screenprint in Plexiglas: blue surface ending in two much darker blue vertical bars. Milton Avery also had a drawing there, and Roy Lichtenstein.









Here is a very typical Frank Stella (with a pretty quirk title, A through L Colored Maze)


















One of the drawings of Willem de Kooning is here on the right. I liked much more the delicacy of the drawings of Alexander Calder.




















Just down is one of them, made in 1944, untitled. I was not able to find on the web another drawing of Calder on display at Corcoran, (Mr. and Mrs. JHH, funny and delicate).












A fine surprise for me was this nude by Mel Ramos, Currasow, a lithograph from his Leda and Swan portfolio. Leta was the name of the woman Ramos took as a model and he had the ingenious idea of putting Leta in dialogue with various birds throughout the portfolio. And so Leta became Leda :) I looked then on the web for other works by Mel Ramos and I found some great stuff.




The second exhibition brings us to the classical world: European masterpieces from the gallery's collection. Dutch masters (Rembrandt, Gerrit Dou, Frans Mieris, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Meindert Hobbema, Ruysdael, Cuyp), French masters (Corot, Courbet, Fantin-Latour, Boudin - with a splendid painting of Le Havre, Delacroix, Degas, Eugène Carrière, Daumier, Pissarro, Jongkind, and two other artists whose works I met with for the first time, Jean Jacques Henner with a beautiful Standing Woman, and Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli - the scenography and the colors of his painting, Testing the Fates (dated 1855) reminded me vividly of El Greco), and British masters (Constable, Turner, Raeburn, Reynolds, Gainsborough, along with the American William Merritt Chase).

Here are some of the exhibits:





Corot, Repose













Degas, The Dance Class

















Degas, Cabaret





















Daumier, At the Print Stand


















Boudin, Le Havre



















Sir Henry Raeburn, Mrs. Vere of Stonebyres




















Turner, Boats Carrying Out Anchors to the Dutch Men of War

















Pissarro, The Louvre Morning, Rainy Weather


















(Washington, District of Columbia)

(Hopper)

(Corot)