At the National Gallery

By the way, the website for the National Gallery of Art is www.nga.gov. If you go to www.nationalgallery.org, you wind up at the National Gallery of Jordan!

There are a number of exhibits at the National Gallery, and I saw four of them briefly today--the ones in the West Building. None are bad, but if you don't see them, you probably won't miss them.

Briefly, I saw:

The exhibit of Audubon bird prints (handcolored lithographs). They are very striking, but you have seen them before, if only in book reproductions. So, they are not "new". The exhibit is there through March and I may go back and look again, with more care. You can't say anything negative about Audubon; it's just that I have been exposed to them for so long.

The exhibit of Peter Claesz still lives. Claesz lived in Holland in the 17th century and was one of the pre-eminent still life painters, who brought more realism into his paintings than did his predecessors. The exibit closes on December 31, and was the primary reason for my visit today. Still lives have never been very attractive to me and, as still lives go, these seemed pretty ordinary. I expect this is why I had never heard of Claesz before (or at least don't remember hearing of him). And this is the first exhibit of his work in this country, ever. There are 25 tabletops on display. As far as food in Holland goes, the baked goods and the cheeses don't look like they have changed a bit. The meat pies are different (peacock, mincemeat and pheasant are shown), and highly decorative. The olives and nuts look like our olives and nuts. But the fruit is not quite the same, and my guess is that there has been more variation in apples, pears and grapes than in other types of food.

There is an exhibit of 19th century engravings and acquitints by Felix Buhot. He was a perfectionist, who kept altering the plates as additional strikes were made, so there is a lot of almost-duplication in the exhibit. His scenes of urban Paris and the rural French coast are very interesting, but I can't say that the prints themselves are particularly appealing. You have to see this one for yourself and decide. For some, this may be just the ticket. It is there through February 20.

Finally, there is a small exhibit of photography by Nicholas Nixon called "The Brown Sisters". He is married to one of them and has taken pictures of the four sisters, in the same order left to right, every year since 1975. Then, they were in their twenties; now their fifties, and you can see how they age not only year to year (sometimes imperceptible), but over 5, 15 or even 30 years. I found it moderately interesting. But I wouldn't go see it again.

There is a Winslow Homer exhibit and an exhibit of drawings from the Getty Museum that I did not have an opportunity to see. Next time.