In the Art Museum

The Washington street namers didn't show much imagination, but it's easy to find out where you are in the grid once you know which way you're facing. At the corner of 8th Street and F Street stands The Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery: a bit of a mouthful, but a marvellous place to go, particularly on a grey wet day like Sunday May 3rd. Actually it's two separate institutions housed in the same building.

I now wish we'd spent more time in there as we only saw a third of the exhibits; there is no charge for admission. On our arrival up the steps and through the pillars to the entrance lobby we turned right, which brought us to the "American Origins" collection of Colonial Portraits, in the National Portrait Gallery. We saw the faces of the men who had created America, Quakers, philosophers (Berkeley and Paine, for instance), idealists all. A side show in one of the galleries was The Mask of Lincoln displaying images of President Lincoln, young and old. It seems he was a manic-depressive. He certainly had a memorable face. The death-mask was included and I overheard an American chap showing it to his young daughter: "This is what Lincoln looked like at the end of his presidency." Well yes, at the end of everything, really. I'd have given her the grim truth if she'd been my daughter.

Three galleries at the end of the hall were devoted to leaders of both sides in the civil war. To me, not knowing much about it, they seemed to be remarkably similar types, except for John Brown, the abolitionist, who as an old man looked quite zany. I didn't like the ruthless appearance of William T Sherman, a commander in the Union army. General Lee's face however, on the Confederate side, was quite gentlemanly. Makes you think. Another revealing juxtaposition in a different part of the Portrait Gallery was in the photographed faces of the two candidates for the present presidency, enlarged in close-up so that you're confronted by the very pores of their skin. Obama's eyes looked very healthy in close-up; McCain's were bloodshot and seemed tired. The original of the famous portrait of Obama, entitled HOPE, that did the rounds of the Internet, was on display, reminiscent of an icon from the USSR, many admirers standing in front of it and studying it closely. Chris points out that the conservative websites say that it makes him look like Che Guevara.

It's vital to have a Portrait Gallery so that a nation can see where it has come from and where it's going, through the (abnormal!) faces of its most prominent citizens. That Mr Harper and the present Canadian government can't be bothered to support the establishment of a Canadian National Portrait Gallery infuriates me.

The American Art Museum on the other side of the very elegant and spacious Kogod Courtyard, where we sat down for a cup of tea, currently features a special exhibition called 1934, A New Deal for Artists. This is the sort of experience that frustrates me because I know I won't have the chance to go back and see it again, so educational that it merits more than one visit. This was art from the time of The Depression, when all the same, hope was in the air, it seemed. All the paintings were dated either 1933 or 1934, and many of them showed industrial landscapes—a mine in Minnesota, a hydro station in Maine, a coal mine in New Mexico. Work was of the essence, whether represented by an ice house or a lumber mill or an Engine House and Bunkers at a railroad marshalling yard. The artists were fascinated by the patterns and curves created by rails, chimneys or machinery. Docks and skyscrapers recurred among the cityscapes and even a mundane structure like the Underpass at Binghamton, New York became extraordinary after dark to the artist who painted it.

The pictures in the exhibition weren't all of utilitarian subjects. There were some rustic landscapes like the ones nostalgically painted by the British neo-Romantics of that period, one of a farmyard in Vermont, for example, and some more down-to-earth street scenes (St Louis Street Scene, by Joe Jones. A view of slums (Tenement Flats of Los Angeles) wasn't so good as, but had some similarities with, Michael Ayrton's painting of the seven deadly sins, Captive Seven (1949), that one in an Italian setting: all human life was there! More lighthearted, in the 1934 collection, was a geometric painting of racing yachts on the ocean, by G S Foster, and one of Skating in Central Park by Agnes Tait, which has echoes of Breughel the Younger, especially when you notice the shape of the dog in the foreground. At the end of the show hung a painting of the Golden Gate Bridge of San Fransisco, still under construction, by Ray Strong. It hung in the White House for a while, apparently. A symbol of hope, indeed.