For the last, well, forever, Ellen has pointed out that I have not been a very enthusiastic visitor to Art Galleries or Museums, which are places she really likes to visit.
All of my attempts to explain to her that if Epcot had an Art Gallery, I would be glad to go on a regular basis, have fallen on deaf ears. So at long last, I agreed to add to my calendar a monthly target to go to something of cultural value of her choosing. As a codicil, I also had to promise not to refer to this activity as my artsy-fartsy event of the month, so that is out also.
Last Sunday was our first Cultural Enhancement date.
We started by going to the Touchstone Contemporary Art Gallery at 901 New York Ave, NW, http://www.touchstonegallery.com/. It is an artist’s co-op and this last Sunday they evidently had a larger than normal collection of paintings and sculpture.
The Gallery was small, two or three rooms and there were a number of paintings that I actually enjoyed looking at. Ellen, of course, is able to comment on technique and style. I am reduced to two ‘tests’ re my do-I-like-it-test:
- Would I enjoy seeing it again
- Does it ‘evoke’, if that is the right word, some feeling or thought
The second gallery we went to was a gallery run by Charles Krause, at 1300 13th Street NW, Suite 105, located in an apartment complex, http://www.charleskrausereporting.com/index.aspx. The gallery is open from 1pm – 6pm each weekend and otherwise requires an appointment to see.
Krause was a foreign correspondent for the Post, CBS News, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. More recently, he has decided to devote himself to collecting art with a political message and thus the gallery.
When we got there, he buzzed us in and for the next hour or so, we had a personal tour of the artwork and a very interesting discussion of his current exhibit of the works by a Russian Émigré Anatol Zukerman who now lives in the Boston area. Zukerman has strong negative comments to make about both the Russian and American governments, his art is not subtle. However, even though I disagreed with much of it, I found it interesting and powerful.
We also got to learn a lot about an exhibit Krause expects to put on about a painter who left Germany and did many drawings about the Holocaust. The examples he showed us were very powerful indeed.
I suspect that there is little about politics that Charles Krause and I would agree on, but we would concur about the importance of art telling an artist’s story whatever that is. I would recommend the visit to anyone.
In-between the two visits I continued my recent run of mixed luck with restaurants. We decided to eat at the Brasserie Beck, http://www.beckdc.com/, ordering off the brunch menu. I will not provide all of the details of how our waiter evidently regarded us as a really lousy vacation spot only visiting from time to time, how Ellen’s glass had lipstick on it, not hers, and how providing bread before the meal after promising to do so required three requests to have the bread come after (we probably should have less bread anyway). For those interested in details I provided them in the TripAdvisor report.
