I had a spare day in Washington, and went a few museums. I had read about the beeswax room, an installation by in the Phillips Collection by Wolfgang Laib and wanted to see what it would feel like to be in a small closet coated with beeswax. It was interesting, but not transformative. I thought if you were going to go to all that trouble, you might want to make it hexagonal.
Then I went on to the National Museum of Women in the Arts. I enjoyed the Skagen Art Colony exhibit, featuring the work of Anna Archer and her husband Michael. She lived in this remote fishing village in Denmark at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s. Her parents owned an inn. Artists came each summer to paint. Her parents recognized her talent and sent her to art school. She became an accomplished artist, and married another artist. I especially liked the work they painted together of the two of them looking at a painting after a day’s work. He painted her; she painted him. Her later work, when she became more impressionistic was also moving. I especially liked one of light on a wall:
In the other rooms there were a couple of things that caught my eye. One female nude bathing herself by Lotte Laserstien from 1930 that was arresting simply because it was such a contrast to the romantic paintings of this subject by the male impressionists. According to the notes, the model washer tennis instructor. A sort of socialist realism portrait of a Lockheed worker by Edna Reindel from 1942 also caught my eye:
Final stop was the retrospective of Nam June Paik‘s work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. No photos allowed.
As for the cherry blossoms, they were just about over.