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When my sister and sister-in-law were here for the holidays, I took them to the National Gallery of Art in downtown Washington, DC.
We first visited the NGA’s East Building, which houses the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art. It opened in 1978 – the year after I moved to Washington:
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One of my East Building favorites is Katharina Fritsch’s “Hahn/Cock,” a 14-foot-tall sculpture of a blue rooster that was installed on the roof terrace of the East Building in 2016. An NGA press release announcing the work’s acquisition describes it as “a cheeky feminist retort to the 19th-century commemorations of male warriors”:
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The NGA’s more traditional West Building – which opened in 1941 – houses art from the 11th through the 19th centuries:
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When we visited the West Building, it was mobbed by people who came to see “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moments,” an exhibition featuring 130 paintings by Cézanne, Monet, Pissarro, and other French impressionists.
The day we were there, the wait to get into that exhibition was 70 minutes. (No thank you!)
So we spent most of our time looking at 19th-century American art, including James McNeill Whistler’s larger-than-life-sized “Symphony in White, No.1: The White Girl,” which depicts Joanna Hiffernan, who was Whistler’s live-in mistress for years:
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We also saw a number of monumental landscape paintings, including Frederic Edwin Church’s “Niagara,” which most critics agree is the greatest of the hundreds of paintings of Niagara Falls:
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My daughters and two of their friends visited Paris last fall. One of the highlights of their trip was a visit to Claude Monet’s house and gardens in Giverney, which draws over half a million visitors each year.
The NGA’s collection included Monet’s painting of the garden at his residence in Vétheuil, a village near Paris where he lived before moving to Giverny:
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Perhaps the best thing about “The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil” was that we didn’t have to wait in line for 70 minutes to see it.
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Daniel Kreps of Rolling Stone described the music video for Lady Gaga’s 2009 hit single, “Paparazzi” as “brimming with cinematic style” but also “a little self-indulgent.”
A little self-indulgent? That may be the understatement of the year.
Click here to watch the “Paparazzi” music video.
Click here to buy the “Paparazzi” recording from Amazon.
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