The galleries literally breathe color. Large expanses of it are spread playfully and aggressively in geometric shapes, or seemingly splashed randomly across enormous canvases that are all hung together as if they are, forgive me, color-coordinated?
Here are paintings infused with the cool colors of winter and spring, followed by the brilliant warm colors of summer and fall. The visitor wandering amidst the milieu is struck by its simple beauty, but can’t help wonder, what does it all mean?
The show’s catalog gives us some help: “What sets the best Color Field paintings apart is the extraordinary economy of means with which they manage not only to engage our feelings but also to ravish the eye. . .”
“Paint application in Color Field abstractions,” the catalog explains, “can seem, depending on our sympathies, either inexplicably magical or almost mechanical.”
I’m going with magical. The 40 paintings by such major figures as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, on display through May 26, as viewed on a cold, dreary day (with deadlines looming) combined to offer a genuine lift in spirit.
Color Field artists were essentially a dotted line over from abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. The color painters, spurred on by the development of acrylic paints, were washing or staining their untreated canvases with an all-over expansiveness of color, to create paintings of radiant hues.
This is the first retrospective of the Color Field artists and many of the paintings are from private collections, and therefore, rarely seen in public.
If March shows up like a lion tomorrow, the paintings in this show are guaranteed to cheer you.
(Jules Olitski, Cleopatra Flesh, 1962, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of G. David Thompson, 1964, copyright The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art resource, NY, copyright Jules Olitski/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)
The American History Museum, under renovation and due to reopen this fall, now has the typewriter from “Murder She Wrote” and Catwoman’s skin-tight suit.
That’s the result of a cache of recent donations by nine actresses whose pioneering work on stage and screen peaked from the 1920s to 1970s.
These “leading ladies” from classic film, theater and television were all “foundations of 20th-century American entertainment,” says curator Dwight Blocker Bowers.
The museum got quite a haul, including an original script from “The Birds” from Tippi Hedren and Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson giving away her “TV Land Award.”
To get some insight, I called Rose Marie, who donated the black bow she always wore in her hair, playing Sally Rogers on the “Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s. While she still always wears a bow (it’s her trademark), she won’t tell why it’s so important to her.
“It’s a very private personal reason,” she says. “I said I would only give up (the bow) if the Smithsonian wants it.”
But what impressed me most was Rose Marie’s appearance when she was just three-years-old in some of the first talking films in the 1920s as a singing and dancing kid wonder. The clips on YouTube show a little girl with a moptop haircut belting out jazz tunes and scatting with the best of them. Sure enough, Rose Marie also donated her childhood dancing shoes.
While she says that being in the Smithsonian was “the greatest honor an American can get,” she definitely felt that classic actresses deserved a spot there.
Performers “are very important to this country. We taught the country to be entertained, we taught them how to sing, how to dance,” she says. “When the depression was on, for a nickel you could go see a movie and forget your troubles. That is our function.”
It was a swinging good time at the Pyramids this past week and no, we’re not talking about a bluesy New Orlean’s juke joint, we’re talking the real thing, the Great Pyramids of Giza.
“It was the big experience of everyone’s life in the ensemble,” enthused John Hasse, the National Museum of American History’s curator of American music, who said that the event was broadcast on the Arab language news network, al Jazeera.
Called “Jazz on the Nile,” the tour was pegged almost to the day when Louis Armstrong, himself, raised his trumpet and performed in front of the sphinx in 1961. A famous photograph recalls the moment.
The orchestra, conducted by the renowned David N. Baker, professor of music at Indiana University and NEA jazz master, was accompanied by singer Delores King Williams and two swing and tap dancers Chester Whitmore and Shaunte Johnson. Playing a repertoire selected from the museum’s collection of Duke Ellington and Benny Carter, the ensemble hit a note of perfection when it ripped into Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” Whitmore and Johnson in full swing reinacted choreagraphy of the period.
“The audience just went wild” said the museum’s director Brent Glass, “one couple danced in the aisle.”
“It was quite an extravaganza,” said Ken Kimery, SJMO’s executive producer, “we performed at the pyramids and did two concerts in Cairo and finished it off at the Alexandria Opera House.” Band members also conducted workshops with school children. “We bridged the language barrier. We were all speaking just one language,” Kimery said. “Music.”
The tour was sponsored by the Ministries of Culture and Tourism of the Egyptian government and the U.S. State Department.
(Photographs of Director Brent Glass, and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, courtesy of the National Museum of American History)
At a sneak-peek press preview of the Live Butterfly Pavilion at the Natural
History Museum earlier this week, a distinctly handsome specimen sporting
bold, gold spots on its black wings alighted on my chin.
Of the dozen or more reporters crowding into the new 1,200 square-foot steel
and glass pod that houses hundreds of tropical butterflies, the Grecian
Shoemaker butterfly chose me, and I was honored. I put my head back to make
my face a more level surface for my new companion and rather directly,
the exhibition manager Nate Erwin explained, “It’s because you’re sweating.”
And then he added, “It’s attracted to the salt in your, ah, lady’s glow.
That’s why many of the butterflies like the Gatorade. It’s the electrolytes.”
Indeed, I was way overdressed for the 95 degrees F and the 80 percent
humidity maintained inside the new Live Butterfly Pavilion, which opens to
the public today. Winter attire is way out of place here.
The beautifully lit feeding stations and plants and warm summer-like
atmosphere create a kind of surreal experience. It’s as if you’ve entered
another realm. And in fact, you have. This is where Clippers, Morphos, owls,
grey pansies, common sailors, blue glassy tigers, monarchs and sunset moths,
to name a few, will live out their adult life spans gorging themselves on the nectar from plants (grown without pesticides) like jasmine, lantana, verbena and clerodendron, to name a few.
The butterflies can eat all they want, but reproduction, according to USDA regulations, is strictly prohibited. (And any butterfly eggs found will be collected by museum staff.)
The reason: There are more than 30 species in the pod hailing from Central
and South America, North America, and Africa and Asia. If any foreigner were
to escape and reproduce in the wild, this could threaten North American
ecosystems. So all host plants (where butterflies lay eggs) like the pink
ginger that attracts the Owl butterfly and the passionflower and the pipe
vine and the milkweed, are not present in the pavilion.
“Butterflies + Plants: Partners in Evolution” is on the second floor of the museum. The exhibition hall is free, but admission to the Live Butterfly Pavilion is $6 ($5 for children, 2-12). Entrance to the Pavilion will be free on Tuesday on first come, first serve basis.
(Photograph by Chip Clark, courtesy of the National Museum of Natural History)
Maybe there isn’t much spontaneity and romance involved in dating and mating at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, where Cupid consults a studbook and matches animals based on numerous factors—genetics being the most important—instead of leaving it to starry-eyed lovers and controls for optimum breeding environments. But, the game is oddly familiar.
There will be “clingers”
Talk about needy. A male Panamanian golden frog clings to its mate for 120 days—count ‘em 1-2-0 days—in order to breed with her. The species is now extinct in the wild, but the National Zoo is one of six zoos in North America to have a breeding program.
Girls will be catty
Female cheetahs check out males – not vice versa – as they parade down what’s called “lover’s lane” at the National Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center for cheetahs in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. But the females are territorial and like to keep their distance from competitors. Scientists have found that if two females are housed together, one or both will shut down ovulation, preventing any breeding.
Play hard to get
If withholding eggs isn’t playing hard to get, what else is it? But other animals certainly know how to set high standards for the right time and place. The kori bustard, a large African bird, requires the right male-to-female ratio in its midst and a secluded spot in flat, savanna-like terrain to lay its eggs. The National Zoo has been swapping real eggs with a “telemetric” one to learn more. (See the October issue’s “Hatching a New One.”)
Sometimes dessert sounds better than doing the deed
Hercules beetles usually get busy at night, but researchers have found that they often lose interest when in captivity. So what trumps mating? Eating. And the debate between which is better, making whoopee or eating whoopie pie goes on…
Distance can make the heart grow fonder
So maybe there’s no way of proving that their hearts grow fonder, but the Zoo’s female panda and one of their elephants are hoping to prove that long distance relationships can work. Both have been artificially inseminated with sperm from males at different facilities.
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