So ... burning man ...

Sometimes carefully laid plans for a weirdly cool Burning Man exhibit at the Renwick followed by a pilgrimage to see the Obama portraits at the National Portrait Gallery turn into a mostly-chatting-and-half-paying-attention-to-the-arty-stuff wander through the Renwick followed by three hours of catching up at (don’t laugh) TGI Friday’s (I SAID DON’T LAUGH) with a long-lost high-school friend who is now a hella-cool adult friend who will corroborate your story that your TGI Friday’s waitress was probably the shittiest waitress ever to work on a Friday or any other day and I seriously can’t remember the last time I’ve ever left a bad tip for anyone and I used to wait tables so I ALWAYS tip extremely generously and Gareth was my first-ever crush and I just had lunch with him but I’m burying this information deep in this blathery run-on sentence so you probably skipped over that part and saved us all a bottomless swamp of paralyzing awkwardness how ‘bout them Hawkeyes I’m on vacation puppies are cute THIS PART IS IN ALL CAPS anyway where was I oh yeah the Burning Man exhibit was truly cool and breathtaking and informative for those of us who until today had no earthly idea what the hell Burning Man is even about and I totally recommend it but we both heartily do NOT recommend the nearby TGI Friday’s (STOP IT WITH YOUR DERISIVE LAUGHING) especially the slimy booth that had a metal plate over the junction box where the sconce had mysteriously been removed Exhibit A: First Selfie and catching up with Gareth was truly an awesome way to end a truly awesome vacation even through we never got to the National Portrait Gallery but we did get a selfie in front of a nearby George Washington bust Exhibit B: Second Selfie don’t worry I told him a long time ago that he was my first-ever crush and his wife has reportedly come to terms with it and is totally not threatened by me OR IS SHE and he swears it’s not awkward anymore but let the record show HE WAS THE FIRST TO BRING IT UP TODAY BUT IT’S TOO LATE THAT SHIP HAS SAILED SO STOP MAKING IT WEIRD GARETH and the Obama portraits will have to wait until next summer but except for our gaspingly inept waitress today this trip has been pretty awesome.

THERE IS SO MUCH GOING ON IN THIS SELFIE!

1. Mike.
2. Oops. I probably should explain that Mike is a friend of mine who has many cats.
3. Oh—and he’s one of my many super-awesome DC friends, and I can’t imagine coming here without seeing him.
4. We toured the National Museum of African American History and Culture—which I have SO MUCH to say about—this afternoon and then had dinner and then took this selfie before we parted ways.
5. But look at that little dot that’s artfully centered at the vanishing point of the streets between us ...
6. It’s the dome of the Capitol!
7. We did that because we’re both artsy and civic-minded.
8. But not because Mike has three cats.
9. THREE.
10. Also: Notice the artful placement of Mike’s head ...
11. IT’S TOTALLY BLOCKING THE STABLE GENIUS HOTEL!
12. You’re welcome.
13. Let’s see: Mike ... unmanly amounts of cats ... totally cool friend ... Capitol with an O ... artful vanishing-point composition ... the hotel that shall not be named ... THREE CATS ... hmmm ... what’s left?
14. Oh yeah: I TOTALLY STABBED A DUDE.
15. I mean with my straw.
16. I mean with the placement of my straw relative to the locations of my iPhone and the orange-shirted dude behind me.
17. So not STABBED stabbed.
18. So don’t call the police.
19. THREE CATS.
20. None of which he brought with him today.

This sunken sculpture garden is my favorite place—which houses my favorite sculpture—in DC

It's hidden in plain sight on the Mall side of the Hirshhorn, and it provides quiet sanctuary—and welcome shade—on molten, touristy days like today. I'm not really sure what started making this sculpture—Rodin's epic "Burghers of Calais"—so particularly meaningful to me. It’s most likely the piece that finally unlocked the aesthetic, artistic and historical secrets of the broader Modernist movement for me when I took a college art-history class: its raw, muscular composition ... its marriage of Realism (which sought to represent human figures as they are instead of idealizing them) and the last dying gasps of Romanticism (the very emotion-wrought idealization that the Realists were striving to overcome) ... its accessibility from any educational and even physical perspective ... it’s just so many things on so many levels, including my newfound levels of understanding the movement. I should state that this dual Realism/Romanticism classification is solely my interpretation of the genres and the transition between them, but you cannot deny that the oversized figures in this sculpture are muscular and handsome and to a large degree idealized while still being rough-hewn, misshapen and out of proportion.

The figures are six men being led to their death to liberate the French town of Calais in the Hundred Years' War, which adds layers of fascinating historical content onto the reasons I love the work. I find it all at once intimate and epic, unfinished and uneditable, and abstract and representational, the latter of which has always been my preference in art and especially sculpture. So I make a pilgrimage to see it—I even sit in the same shady spot to contemplate it—every time I come to Rehoboth and DC. It's always a beautiful way to rest and rejuvenate and think and remember and see these decades-old friends in relative peace before my vacation ends and I head home.

ArtThrob: The Burghers of Calais

(Original French title: Les Bourgeois de Calais)

1889

Auguste Rodin

Impressionism (1872-1892)

The relatively short-lived period of Impressionism in art was as defined by what it wasn't -- clear lines, plausible composition, realistic depictions of figures and the space they occupied -- as by what it was: impressions of visual perception told through explorations of changing light and color and even through the rough-hewn textures created in paint using varying brush strokes. A radical departure from the longstanding -- though always evolving -- rigors of academic Realism, the fresh ideas of Impressionism on canvas quickly inspired similar reinterpretations of artistic norms in music, literature and sculpture.

Enter François-Auguste-René Rodin.

Classically trained and well-established in creating representational art, Rodin saw Impressionism's dreamy figure studies and craggy, dimensional textures as a vocabulary he could use to render bold ideas, subjective emotions, and plays of shape and light in sculpture. His raw, turbulent works brought new, profound depth to the revolutionary cacophonies that had so far been constricted to the flat canvases of Impressionistic paintings, and his most riveting use of this complex, muscular multi-dimensional language is in his mighty Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to liberate the French town of Calais during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin sculpted the figures with such a masterful mix of romantic realism and primitive rawness that you can see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and arguably unfinished in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions.

French law decrees that no more than twelve original casts may be made of any work by Rodin, which means The Burghers of Calais tells its weighty story in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands resolutely at the entrance to the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building.

I make a point to see my reproduction of the work every summer on my annual pilgrimage to visit friends in Washington, D.C. It stands with other Rodin masterpieces in a relatively austere corner of the sunken sculpture garden behind the Smithsonian's relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum. I usually stop there on my way to the airport at the end of each visit. I walk around the sculpture a few times to take note of specific details Rodin included -- like articulated toes to help propel the walking figures through space -- and specific details he didn't include -- like eyeballs to help the figures see where they're going. Then I sit in my same spot on a little concrete ledge to take in the piece in its weighty enormousness, to contemplate the explosive change Rodin and the Impressionists brought to the way we see and understand and interpret art, and to take comfort in the fact that my Burghers will most likely stand caught in their time and this place, waiting for me year after year every time I come to visit them for as long as I live.

My summers with Rodin

Washington, D.C., is so overflowing with American history that there's a monument to something or someone on practically every corner. The Smithsonian museums are so overflowing with history and culture and gift shops and art that some of it literally spills outside into the sunshine. And part of my annual summer pilgrimage to visit some D.C. friends and road-trip to their Rehoboth beach house is my visit to the sunken sculpture garden behind the relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum, which houses what most people probably see as the oddest examples of Modern art. 

The sculpture garden sits more than a story below street level so it masks all the ambient street noise, but it positively hums with beauty and magic and some of the most delightful -- and delightfully odd -- art that waits there resolutely to nourish any soul. If you're in D.C. and want to visit my little sanctuary, enter from the Mall side and go immediately to your left -- the corner there is populated with the rough-hewn glories of August Rodin, including what is perhaps my favorite sculpture of all time: his mighty Burghers of Calais, which depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to save their city during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin has sculpted their figures so masterfully that you see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and almost primitive in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions. It's everyone's sculpture -- casts of it stand in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands at the entrance of the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building -- and it's my sculpture to admire and fear and share and visit summer after summer, year after year.