reviews

Art and Media and the Fall of the Aesthete Provocateur

Those familiar with the art market in Washington, DC, know the stories. They know the dealers and artists, the history and trends. They know the personalities and the players, the institutions and the experts. And they know all these things not because they were covered in the Washington print media, which, for most of the last thirty years, has largely ignored Washington’s commercial art galleries, but rather because they have an interest in knowing them. They love art; they love people. They love living in a dynamic metropolitan area where everything—art, history, economics, science, religion, politics—informs their living and makes its way into the usually hushed, introspective spaces of the city’s overlooked but outstanding art galleries.

In the late sixties and early to mid-seventies, Paul Richard, working for the Post, and Ben Forgey, reporting for the now defunct Washington Star, wrote about Washington’s remarkable galleries. They reviewed Georgetown galleries such as Jane Haslem Gallery, Lunn Gallery, and Fendrick Gallery. They wrote about Franz Bader Gallery and Mickelson Gallery, both in the downtown area. They also reported on Dupont Circle and “P Street Strip” galleries such as Jefferson Place Gallery, Henri Gallery, Pyramid Gallery, Diane Brown Gallery, Protech Gallery, Gallery Mark, and Middendorf Gallery, among others.

During that time, there was a wonderful symbiosis of ambitious critic and eager dealer. Washington galleries exhibited interesting and important works which Richard and Forgey wrote about, and the attention their reviews helped to generate both inspired and invigorated Washington’s dealers, whose shows sometimes even became the subject of spots on the nightly news. More—and more knowledgeable—lovers and buyers of art visited the galleries; the galleries flourished and grew, not just locally, but also nationally, where their reputations were beginning to approach those of galleries in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

There was a growing sense that Washington’s commercial art galleries were an integral part of cosmopolitan life, that they were interesting and important, and that they worked to tease out and to nourish some part of our inquiring selves that wasn’t yet formulated, and that had yet to decide. This part of ourselves was curious and vital, and came to constitute a kind of human forum where fact and imagination, science and art could engage one another without the narrowing of imperatives or the need for the taking of sides. The exchange was ambiguous and nuanced and evocative and complex—and, wonderfully, it encouraged the emergence and development of the citizen interlocutor who experienced him/herself as an aesthete provocateur.

Thus, commercial galleries enlivened the metropolitan community and became, like the monuments and museums, an essential part of Washington’s collective urban self. The media recognized this phenomenon, and reported it, simultaneously favoring and encouraging the depth, character, and sophistication these galleries brought to cosmopolitan life. Coming at the close of the Vietnam War and the collapse of sixties’ idealism that had by then devolved into little more than commercialized fashion, this period was perceptibly important in Washington to combat the near-pervasive cynicism that had come to dominate so much of American life. After the ravages of protest and poverty, it helped to rouse the city and to get it thinking again.

Richard and the Post followed the movement of galleries to the 7th Street area, where Lunn, Drysdale, Osuna, and others attracted Barbara Kornblatt and David Adamson to a renovated building at 406 7th Street. Margery Goldberg moved her gallery, Zenith, across from 406, and Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) moved into the building next door to 406. Later, when Harry Lunn moved his gallery to New York City, Drysdale took his old spot and Haslem, then located on P Street, moved into Drysdale’s former digs. It seemed a fortuitous arrangement, and for several years it was.

Still, Dupont Circle remained a strong area for galleries with Kathleen Ewing, Marsha Mateyka, Bumgartner Gallery, Robert Brown Gallery, Affrica, Jones Troyer Gallery, Brody Gallery, Addison/Ripley (which subsequently moved to Wisconsin Avenue), Burdick Gallery of Inuit Art, and, later, Conner Contemporary Art, Washington Printmakers Gallery, and Irvine Contemporary.

Then things changed. Poor management claimed the arrangement at 406, and Richard stopped covering the commercial art galleries, focusing instead on museum shows. As for Forgey, with the demise of the Star, he moved to the Post, where he wrote mainly about architecture. For the first time in years, the commercial art scene in Washington went largely uncovered.

After the break up at 406, some galleries moved back to the Dupont Circle area. Drysdale bought Jem Hom’s building on N Street in Dupont Circle and moved her gallery there. Kornblatt closed. Haslem moved to Hillyer Place, off Connecticut Avenue, and Osuna moved to Florida and opened his gallery there. Numark moved into 406 with Adamson. Zenith remained, but WPA closed.

In Georgetown, Maurine Littleton Gallery opened, along with The Ralls Collection, Susan Conway Gallery, Fraser Gallery, Alla Rogers Gallery, Guarisco Gallery, Parish Gallery, District Fine Arts, and George Hemphill Fine Arts, now moved to the 14th Street area.

More recently, the Dupont Circle area has seen Manfred Bumgartner move to New York City, Gallery K and Nancy Drysdale Gallery close, and Robert Brown preparing to move, while a new energy fills the 14th Street and Penn Quarter areas. Hemphill is there, and so, too, are Adamson Gallery and G Fine Art.

But much of this activity has gone unreported in the Washington print media, with the result that the numbers of art lovers have dwindled and the commercial art galleries have been hurt, significantly hurt. Sure, Joanne Lewis and others followed Richard and Forgey, but their coverage tended to focus on the same few galleries and in the same mediocre way. Perhaps the most telling measure of the damage done to Washington’s commercial galleries is this: in the thirty years since they were regularly reviewed in the Washington print media, the number of commercial art galleries in Washington has remained about the same—this while the city has enjoyed a remarkable period of economic growth marked by structural investment, urban restoration, and real estate valuation.

Washington has been hurt as well. Once almost a center for the arts, it has been eclipsed by cities such as Houston, Santa Fe, and Miami, who have embraced the arts and thus garnered worldwide attention for both their art markets and their cities. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the aesthete provocateur is increasingly missing from the public forum, replaced instead by the urban consumer, whose urbane tastes rarely move beyond the dining table, the townhouse, or the sports industrial complex. Art has become a complement to fine living, a status symbol, an investment, and rarely a vehicle for the investigation and interpretation of what it means to be a human being.

Of course, this diminishment of life in Washington could have come about or have been influenced by other or concomitant forces—for example, a cultural shift that has come to view with suspicion art in general and commercial art in particular. There is no doubting that the movement of many galleries towards the spectacle of installation art, often with its overtly calculated political overtones and designs on media attention, has turned away mature art lovers. Or maybe it has something do with the numbers of boomers who, for nearly three decades now, have indulged themselves in nostalgia—and the art of nostalgia (which I shall review in an upcoming installment). Or perhaps it has something to do with the way we live now, favoring flash over substance, drama over inquiry, headlines over analysis.

Maybe the Washington print media has it right after all, and covers what is instead of what might be; possibility and complexity, after all, are cumbersome to the modern traveler who lives by the dictates and menus of various efficiencies. Washington’s aesthete provocateur, for all his/her vitality and refinement, was destined to fall and land in line behind the do-do bird.

Or maybe not. For while the number of Washington’s commercial art galleries has not really increased over the last thirty years, those which remain are unfortunately overlooked but still outstanding. In the months ahead, I hope to feature some of these galleries, and to describe what is extraordinary about them, even if the Washington print media won’t.


John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic