Last week I choo-choo-trained to Washington, D.C. to scavenge through its bulging bounty of museums. (And also to get all gourmandy and eat at delish restaurants like Josè Andrès’ Mexican palace Oyamel; do order the guac and the tacos.) The US capital boasts like a billion halls of paintings, history, culture, science and more, and I visited seven in two days. Not a world’s record, but I was pacing myself. Huff, puff.
Tops for me was the National Gallery of Art — more on that in a bit. A close second was the transformative and seam-bursting National Museum of African American History and Culture, where everything from slavery and “Sanford and Son” to the Harlem Renaissance and “Harlem Shuffle” are gorgeously limned. Go.
While the National Gallery’s Rembrandts, Turners and Vermeers made me one of those vexing viewers who stands too long in front of a painting, till other patrons wonder crankily What’s he gawping at?, it was a special exhibition that really got me and did what great art can do: split open your world.
The show, “Dorothea Lange — Seeing People,” presents some 100 black and white photographs by the great, socially astute 20th-century shutterbug. Her most enduring photo, part of the show, is probably this one from 1936, “Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)”:
Gaze at that picture. A little harder. Its masterpiece status is unshakable.
Steeped in jagged beauty and more (prematurely) creased flesh than a dozen old folks’ homes, the exhibit “addresses Lange’s innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism,” the museum says.
Alright. Uplifting it’s not. It unfurls a timely, tattered tapestry of naked despair and down-on-your-luck dignity. Yet it’s so filled with shuddering pathos and raw humanity it’s hard not to be moved, shaken, taken.
Lange’s photos are untouched authenticity — keep your Photoshop sorcery — real people with sun-baked skin and hollowed eyes, capturing the American experience of a time, the 1930s to ‘50s, and places, the Dust Bowl to San Francisco. They don’t let you off the hook.
Exhausting, yes, but exhilarating too …
GNASHING. 