The Painting Partnership of Degas and Cassatt

Welcome to this week's Monday Must-See post. On Mondays, The Prices Do DC will offer an entry about some current exhibit in DC you should see. Sometimes, we will write the post. Sometimes, it will be taken from another publication. But no matter who is the writer, we believe it will showcase an exhibit you shouldn't miss. 

In her novel I Always Loved You, author Robin Oliveira imagines a passionate scene between Edgar Degas — a French artist known for his paintings of dancers — and Mary Cassatt — an American painter known for her scenes of family life. The kiss in the novel is pure fiction, but then again, "nobody knows what goes on in their neighbor's house, let alone what happened between two artists 130 years ago," Oliveira says.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists.

To read more of this post, which 1st appeared in NPR, click here.

After 500 Years, Titian's Danae Can Still Produce a Blush @National Gallery

Welcome to this week's Monday Must-See post. On Mondays, The Prices Do DC will offer an entry about some current exhibit in DC you should see. Sometimes, we will write the post. Sometimes, it will be taken from another publication. But no matter who is the writer, we believe it will showcase an exhibit you shouldn't miss. 

Is Titian’s “Danaë” a dirty picture or an example of great, elevated art? The truth is it’s a little of both.

The painting, which went on view at the National Gallery of Art on Tuesday, is on a four-month loan from Naples’s Capodimonte Museum in celebration of the commencement of Italy’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Painted between 1544 and 1545, it depicts a naked woman lying on an unmade bed, a piece of fabric draped lightly over her thigh in a faint attempt at modesty.

What’s so sexy about the nearly 500-year-old canvas? 

To continue reading this post, which 1st appeared in The Washington Post, click here.

Forget Snakes on a Plane, Now It's Snakes in the Gallery

Demeter in front of a masterpiece he calls jokingly calls "Pass the buck". Photo by Matt McClain/Washington Post

When you think of art, you think of snakes - right? You don't. Well, Bela Demeter does. For 35 years, he was a reptile keeper at the National Zoo. After he retired, he became a docent at the National Gallery of Art. As he wandered around the Gallery giving his guided talks, he realized that the art there contained a lot of reptile motifs. So now, a few times a year, he gives a special walking tour entitled Dragons in Art.

We took the tour yesterday. And we discovered that not only is it about snakes and dragons and toads, it offers equal parts art, myth, religion, science, and history. And, as an added bonus, Demeter infuses his engaging tales with a keen sense of wit.

Demeter admits that he uses snakes and dragons as a luring come-on for his true purpose. "We're really trying to expose you to the arts," he says.

In all, the tour covers 10 galleries and 6 centuries of art.

Mercury

We began in the massive rotunda, examining a statue of the Roman god Mercury. Mercury is often represented holding a caduceus, which has become a symbol for medicine. The caduceus depicts intertwined snakes. But actually, using Mercury's ornament for medicine is a wrong representation, Demeter says.

"Mercury did a lot of things. The Greek and Roman gods, they multi-tasked. Mercury was the god of liars and thieves and merchants - in fact mercantile comes from the word Mercury. But he never had anything to do with medicine," Demeter noted.

"The Romans and Greeks had a profound respect for snakes. The Romans used snakes in their worship and they had priests like our snake-handling ministers of today," he added. "But if you know anything about snakes, they are escape artists." That is why some species of snakes are in different parts of Europe today - they are the direct descendants of escaped snakes carried by the Romans to the lands they conquered.

With the advent of Christianity, however, humans view of snakes took "a decidedly sinister turn," Demeter pointed out. There were 2 reasons for this. First, the Egyptians, who held the Jewish people in captivity, worshipped snakes. In fact, famed Egyptian queen Cleopatra was known as "the serpent of the Nile." Christianity was designed to rebuke the pagan beliefs of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.

And then, of course, there is the fact that the concept of original sin from the Garden of Eden tale is forever intertwined with idea of temptation from a wily, Devil-like serpent.

So for the next few galleries we examined various artists' renditions of the snake in the Garden of Eden. (For an example, look at the picture of the "Rebuke of Adam and Eve" by Italian artist Domenichino, which Demeter jokingly refers to as "Pass the Buck.").

In one of those pictures, an evil-looking cat is in the foreground, staring back at each viewer of the picture. Demeter has a theory about why the cat was included. "I've read the Genesis story and I don't remember any cat," he said with a laugh. "But in the 15th Century, the cat was associated with the Devil. Think about witches and their familiars. Their familiars were never a dog; they were always a cat. In fact, during that time, there was an effort in Europe to kill every cat. By the 1400s, cats were almost extinct. But something else was going on at that time. Europe was swept by a number of plagues. The plagues were carried by fleas that came on rats. And what kills rats - cats. That's something to think about."

Demeter says that such examples point out one of his steadfast beliefs about art. "No art is formed in a vacuum," he says, pointing out that understanding the history, culture, and beliefs of a period in which a piece of art was produced helps you understand and appreciate the art much better,

St. George slaying the dragon

Christian art of ages past also often depicted the battle between virtuous knights such as St. George and evil dragons. "These were really showing the power of the church in subduing evil," Demeter said as we began examining a series of dragon in Christian art.

In fact, Demeter said the great artist Leonardo da Vinci had his own beliefs about depicting dragons in art. "When you are drawing a dragon, you should use as many real parts (of animals) as you can," da Vinci was supposed to have said. "That will make it more terrifying."

Early Dutch painters always included real-life images with highly symbolic meanings in their works. We looked at one Dutch painting that Demeter noted included a frog so realistic that its species can still be identified today. "That's how well the Dutch did their art. It's amazing," Demeter noted.

Frog or toad: Now you should be able to tell

From the paintings, we moved to sculpture, examining first a series by DaRavenna involving Neptune and dragon-like sea monsters. In the same gallery, were incredibly realistic depictions of frogs and toads. Demeter explained how those depictions were so life-like. "They used real models as molds. Now you can't use a live frog. And you can't use a dead frog. So they would stun the frog by putting him in either vinegar or urine," Demeter explained. Of course, that process was painful for the animal. In fact, Demeter pointed out that one of the replicas was actually mislabeled by museum experts. It was called a toad when actually it was a frog. And how did Demeter know. The small statue had its mouth opened in anguish and only frogs open their mouths that way.

Chinese dragon vase

The tour finished in the gallery containing exquisite Chinese porcelain vases. The Chinese have a quite positive view of both dragons and snakes. "They are not mean. They bring good luck. To have been born in the year of the dragon is the best. To have been born in the year of the snake is the second best," Demeter said.

The Chinese have a very involved mythology surrounding dragons. They believe it takes 3,000 years for a dragon to fully form and that they go through many stages during that time. The Chinese also believe that dragons bring rain. Demeter said that there may be a scientific reason for that belief.

"The ancient Chinese were very astute observers of nature. We have found remains of crocodiles in China with a skull of more than 30-feet. Such a crocodile would have been huge. It could have weighed tons - in short, a dragon. Crocodiles are also effected by barometric pressure. When it drops, they move. Thus, it would have been natural to associate them with rain," Demeter said.

"The Chinese were also aware of dinosaur fossils. You put that all together and you can easily see where the dragon mythology comes from," he added.

Love in Art for the Art Lovers in DC

Venus and Adonis by Titian

There are many ways you can show that special person in your life how much he or she means to you around Valentine's Day - a card, candy, flowers, chocolate. But if you live in the DC area and your special someone loves art almost as much as you, you could take them to the National Gallery of Art to hear lecturer David Garriff deliver his Love in Art Gallery walk-and-talk.

Each year, for 2 weeks leading up to Valentine's Day, Garriff takes visitors on a tour of some of the museum's best-known works which display how Italian, Dutch, and French painters used the theme of love in their art.

The best thing about the talk is not only does it teach you a lot about art, but it also makes you contemplate how love and its various depictions have both remained the same and changed over the centuries.

Many of the masterpieces explored in the talk used classic Greek and Roman myths for their source material, and no writer was more in evidence yesterday than Ovid, with his seminal work The Metamorphoses. 

Before beginning the 75-minute tour, Garriff promised an afternoon full of "amorous escapades and adventures" and that promise was fulfilled. We got to see a Roman god, which, as Ovid described it "his rigid member" extended and the female nudes so favored by art patron King Phillip the 2nd of Spain.

Famed symbols of love made appearances. Some were familiar, such as representations of that imp Cupid and his ever-present quiver filled with the arrows of love. Others, such as eggs with holes in them to represent the loss of virginity, were new discoveries.

One of the lecture's more interesting revelations was that while today we give cut flowers to represent our love, in olden times cut flowers in Flemish art were a symbol of decay and inevitable death.

The 10 paintings on the tour covered the gamut of love, from eternal devotion to an imbalance of feelings to 18th Century near-porn.

"Ill Matched Lovers" by Quentin Matsys

For example, in "Ill Matched Lovers" by Quentin Matsys, a lecherous old man fondles a young woman, while the woman steals the man's wallet and slips it to her fool-like accomplice behind her. "Dutch painters always included some type of moral or aphorism in their work and here we are reminded of a couple - 'There's no fool like an old fool' or "A fool and his money are soon parted,'" Garriff noted.

A much more risque picture of love was seen in the French work "The Swing." Here a woman is pushed high in the air by a man presumed to be her husband, while lurking in the bushes and watching is another man presumed to be her lover. At the height of her swing, her legs are spread wide open and her shoe flies off, presenting an open invitation to her hidden lover to engage in a passionate rendezvous later.

Garriff regretfully explained that he usually completed the special love tour with a look at Rodin's 19th Century sculpture "The Kiss". However, the section that houses that masterpiece is now undergoing renovation. In it's time, the Rodin piece was considered shocking. "When it was shown in the United States authorities would not allow men and women in to see it together. The men would go in for half-an-hour , then women only would go in for half-an-hour," Garriff said. "I guess they thought they couldn't control what would happen if they saw the work together."

The lecturer noted that throughout the ages, art has been used as an excuse to view some of the more carnal pursuits. "You could always say - 'I'm not just being prurient; I'm looking at Venus," he said.