Even though he didn’t make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cut, Rembrandt has an entire line of art supplies and even a toothpaste to his name. Though criticized in his time for his technique of scraping into still-wet paint, Rembrandt has evolved to become one of today’s most widely-known artists. Rembrandt’s work is the subject of the show Strokes of Genius: Rembrandt’s Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery. The exhibit contains 190 pieces by…

A few years ago, Jennifer Tobias, an associate librarian at the Museum of Modern Art, came to my college campus to speak about MoMA’s book collection. She said that the museum kept all the books that artists donated to the collection, and that artists often espoused quite expansive notions of what constitutes a book. One artist, she recalled, even sent in a chair, while another submitted a wooden duck and called it a book. The…

Art collecting and patronage, an art in its own right, is often a very personal enterprise that can reveal a good deal about the collector. Fifteenth and sixteenth century Netherlandish diptych collectors — the subjects of an innovative exhibit at the National Gallery called Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych — literally collected in their own image. A diptych is two panels that are attached with hinges, so they can open and close like…

Not all circuses were created equally. Cirque du Soleil often most closely resembles a play, opera, or dance about a circus, rather than a circus in its own right. Cirque abandons many components of the traditional circus that many people take for granted: you won’t find any animals in here, and all the music is live. Cirque peformances seem to always carry a narrative component that resides somewhere between the surreal and the fairy tale…

Doilies make things look precious, dainty and cute, like snowflakes without the hassle of puddles. They look good on mantels, under candelabra and posh clocks. But doilies made from cheap paper simply look tacky when they frame paintings — exactly the look Marcel Duchamp wanted when he hung the Société Anonyme’s first show in New York in 1920. The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, currently showing at the Phillips Collection, is the first visiting show…

If Hitler had been a gangster, what color tie would he have worn? To some, that inquisitive trajectory is irrelevant and even downright disrespectful. Hitler was not only obsessed by power and violence, but a monster to whom, most would say, we should never extend the benefit of a psycho-history. To Bertolt Brecht, however, the value of an inquiry into Hitler the gangster outweighed the dangers. Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (pictured), now…

When Ruth Duckworth titles her work—a rare occurrence—she uses large names: The Guardian (1992), The Spirit of Survival (1996), The Creation (1984). The other 79 pieces in the show, Ruth Duckworth, Modernist Sculptor, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery are untitled, suggesting that Duckworth is chasing after something unutterable. When she first went to school as a teenager, she announced her desire “to paint like Rembrandt, draw like Dürer, and sculpt like Michelangelo—pretty…

On June 4, 1938, Sigmund Freud fled his home in Vienna after the Nazis arrested and interrogated his daughter, Anna, for five hours. As a Jew, Freud probably would have escaped earlier if not for his ill health (he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and palate in 1922). But it also would have been hard for him to leave his home of 50 years, where he practiced and made his couch famous (pictured)….

Let’s try an experiment. Have a look at Abbott Handerson Thayer’s oil painting, Head (1888-1889), pictured on the right. Free associate, writing down the first ten words that come to mind. Ready? Go! Let’s compare notes. I got: depressed, gloomy, cold, dark, sad, scared, shadowy, lurk, dreary, and black. If one or more of your ten words was beautiful, pretty, cheery, sunny, or ecstatic, it is probably worth applying for an internship at the Freer…

At DCist, we have danced all around the Paul Klee show, Klee and America, at the Phillips Collection. Our classical music man Charles discussed Klee and Gunther Schuller, and we tempted you with the show here, here, and here. It’s finally time to turn a critical eye on Klee’s work itself. Paul Klee could be one of history’s most schizophrenic painters. When he shows up, one might say, sober for work, does his aesthetic stretches,…