Brilliant Strokes of Satire

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By Jessica Dawson

Special to The Washington Post
Friday, April 25, 2008

· Make straight for the second-floor displays of Ecuadorean Oswaldo Guayasamín's painting retrospective. There, a quintet of massive canvases boast the heads and trickster hands of scheming fat cats and wizened impotents. Called "Meeting at the Pentagon I-V," the series is a brilliant exercise in satire. The show's other 35 pieces include a few charming high-altitude landscapes and a lot of pictures depicting plight and pain. Guayasamín (1919-1999) witnessed civil war and injustice of all stripes; one late work evokes torture in a triptych mimicking Christ's suffering. Bring Zoloft.

Oswaldo Guayasamín at the Art Museum of the Americas, 201 18th St. NW, Tuesday-Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., 202-458-6016, to May 29;http://www.museum.oas.org.