Sunday was the opening day of a phenomenal new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, the next big thing now that the Rousseau exhibit is nearing its close. Constable’s Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings is a beautiful show — compulsory if you already like the work of John Constable and highly recommended if the English painter has just never grown on you. This exhibit is on the middle leg of its journey through three…

Written by DCist contributor Genevieve Smith. Tucked away in an upstairs corner at the Phillips Collection, two remarkable little watercolors, barely bigger than postcards, depict early experimentations into abstraction, decades before abstract art would really take hold in Europe. Washes of color dance across the page of Arthur Melville’s Dancers at the Moulin Rouge (at right), but the forms do not so much as hint at the shape of actual dancers. Instead, the bursts of…