Museums: Plan a Field Trip
A guide to exhibits coming to local museums this fall.
What happened to Ben Franklin’s three-piece suit?
Last spring the Smithsonian announced that it had added the 230-year-old outfit to its permanent collection at the National Museum of America History. But now the silk getup that Franklin wore as a diplomat in the salons of Paris is nowhere to be seen. Who decided to replace it with the gold damask frock of a Southern aristocrat?
(Harold Dorwin, Smithsonian/ ) - Benjamin Franklin, with his unadorned clothes and speech, and his fur cap, quick wit, and humble charm, came to symbolize for many what it meant to be an American during the Revolutionary War. In Paris to help negotiate an alliance with France, Franklin stood out at the court of Louis XVI with plain clothing such as this silk suit.
Why is the Hirshhorn Museum displaying Jean Dubuffet’s ‘The Soul of Morvan,” a gnarled little man made of grape wood and vines mounted on a slag and tar base, but not the same artist’s “Butterfly-Wing Figure,” a collage made from, yes, butterfly wings and considered by some to be one of the collection’s most charming items?
Why isn’t Johannes Vermeer’s tiny but dazzling “The Girl With the Red Hat” on view now at the National Gallery of Art?
Walking across the National Mall, you’re tempted to think that architects and legendary collectors shaped Washington’s museums, and they did. But curators, who make the thousands of this-but-not-that judgments, who pluck one work from the storage vaults and send another away, shape them even more.
Together, the city’s curators have something like 140 million things to choose from but no more than 1 percent of these are on view. Most of the rest are in exile, awaiting a chance to return.
Light sensitivity keeps many things in the closet. Works on paper — watercolors, drawings, etchings, photographs, maps, documents — deteriorate. At the Corcoran Gallery, for example, the rule is that a photograph on display for six months must go back in storage for six years. The museum, like many others, has a space devoted to photographs, but the pictures are constantly changed.
The story’s the same with Franklin’s clothes; light has already faded them from the original plum to a husky brown. The suit can be shown only for a few months at a time, so when it goes back into storage, curators rotate in another garment from the same period.
Curators don’t have a lot of wiggle room in choosing how long such objects can be displayed.
When it comes to the most famous works, curators don’t have much leeway either. People who go to the Phillips Collection expect to see Jean Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” which shows rosy-cheeked revelers at a café on the Seine. One of the most famous pictures in Washington, it never goes into storage. The same goes for the Wright Brothers airplane, the Hope Diamond and the National Gallery of Art’s jewel-like paintings by Vermeer. (The National Gallery occasionally loans its Vermeers to other museums, which is why “The Girl With the Red Hat” isn’t up.)
And some items almost never get out of storage. The Freer and Sackler Galleries, which hold the Smithsonian’s collection of Asian art, own lots of pottery shards. They’re invaluable for scholars, but not much to look at.
Between “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and the rarely seen shards is a vast array of objects in the middle — items worth showing off but not musts. That’s where curators earn their keep.
Delaware artist Ron Meick’s work is on exhibit at Washington Printmakers Gallery.
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A seed library commissions artists to design heirloom packaging for its packets
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The show at Post’s Hillwood mansion lets visitors immerse themselves in the intricacies of luxurious living.
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In a Women in the Arts show, Ringgold’s ’60s works still challenge us to see — and celebrate — color.
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Combined with previous gift, it is the Museum of African American History and Culture’s largest donation.
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Three-day installation aims to honor victims and survivors, protest global conflict
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A Phillips Collection exhibition surveys the French painter’s unruly, colorful and ultimately humane works.
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At the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art, a discussion of black women and health, hair and heritage.
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Northern Virginia artist Ethan Rochmis’s Watergate Gallery show is mainly ink drawings of horizontal lines.
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The gallery’s Clark Sickle-Leaf Carpet sells for more than $33 million, shattering expectations.
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The Eisenhower Memorial Commission introduced an online educational component to its project.
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The museum focuses on the French artist's still lifes, painted between 1928 and 1945.
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Memorable sets and props from the Will Ferrell film will go on display, just in time for the release of "Anchorman: The Legend Continues" in December.
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Interactive exhibition will include props and costumes from the 2004 cult hit, just in time for the sequel.
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