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Lectures offered around the Smithsonian tend to bear titles that range from the curiously vague (“Children at Play: An American History”) to the esoterically detailed (“Topics in Museum Conservation Lecture: Hygric Swelling of Stone”). So when a talk came up on “Protective Ornaments: Dressed for Defense” my editor sent me the details, with her own comic, free association:

 “She narrowly escaped harm, when the bullet bounced off her 14-carat diamond.”

With that in mind, I headed over to the lecture, with visions of fiercely militarized gemstones mounted in sharply pronged settings already occupying my thoughts.  And I wasn’t disappointed. Suzanne Ramljak, an art historian and editor of Metalsmith magazine took to a podium at Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery.

Was she suggesting, I wondered, that some latent warrior girl lurks within us when a woman utters the words: “I would just die for that necklace,” or “I can’t live without those earrings”?  Jewelry is not usually considered a life or death matter, she said.

But delving into a photographic survey of historical protective ornaments–think armament like chain mail, helmets, and brass knuckles–spanning from the Stone Age to present day, it was clear that a case could be made that medieval protective gear could be considered a long lost cousin of today’s glitz.  “Not just as accessories, but necessities,” she said.

Early stone necklaces, bracelets and anklets apparently served as a line of defense against animals, prone to attacking appendages. Jewelry adorned with claws and teeth and ornate helmets depicting the heads of ferocious creatures were donned so that their wearers inherited bestial characteristics. Today, people can be found safeguarding themselves with spiritual or superstitious charms like St. Christopher medals and four-leaf clovers.

Ramljak even noted some extreme examples of of “jewelry”–the ankle bracelet-cum-honing-device Martha Stewart wore when under house arrest and a locket designed to hold a potassium iodide pill to be taken in the case of nuclear disaster. 

Check out the defensive and protective possibilities of the jewelry shown in the exhibition, “Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Drutt Collection,” on view at the Renwick Gallery through July 6.

(Photographs courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery.  Esther Knobel, Israeli, born Poland, 1949, “Warrior (Macabi) Brooch,” 1984, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Helen Williams Drutt Collection, © Esther Knobel. Claus Bury, German, born 1946, ”Ring,” 1970, White and yellow gold, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Helen Williams Drutt Collection, © Claus Bury.) 

On Tuesday, I headed over to the weekly sketching session at the American Art Museum, figuring it would give me a chance to brush up on my drawing, something I’ve neglected in the last few years.

About a dozen gathered at the Luce Foundation Center, a three-level storage and study facility with thousands of works of art tucked away in a setting that’s part library, part art gallery.

This week’s session focused on landscapes, and opened with a huddle around a couple of aging sketchbooks by early 20th century painters brought in by Liza Kirwin, a curator at the Archives of American Art. (See some sketchbooks online here)

One was filled with quick pencil drawings by Fairfield Porter suggesting New England landscapes.

The sketches were “very preliminary and spontaneous,” Kirwin explained. “He was trying to get a quick idea of what he’s seeing and maybe he will work it up into a complete painting.”

That’s exactly what visitors were told to do before heading off to sketch landscapes in the collection.

“Imagine you’re using the sketches to create a finished painting. What information would you need to document?” asked Bridget Callahan, an assistant at the Luce Center. “Try to capture the entire composition.”

It sounded easy enough listening to her, but with only an old No. 2 pencil bummed from a coworker and originally pilfered from Omni Hotels, I wasn’t sure how I would do. Some of the half-dozen regulars carried well-worn sketchbooks and sets of artist’s pencils.

Luckily, the group was a mixture of skill levels. Another first-timer confessed she hadn’t sketched in 24 years. And there were pencils, pastels and paper on hand.

I grabbed a stool and plopped down in front of a painting by Thomas Chambers. Its setting looked like a lake in Japan, but the artist actually painted it along the Hudson River.

I focused on the details, trying to get the curve of the dark stone arch and its feathery bushes, the boats and mountains. The rest of the world slipped away as I fell into a meditation.

But when I took a critical look at my drawing, my reverie was destroyed. The more I sketched with my Omni Hotels pencil, the more it turned into a mass of gray only hinting at the colorful painting. The ominous storm clouds were just a mass of chicken scratches. The country estates on the hill, a stack of cardboard boxes.

I moved on to a desert landscape by Tom Lea tinted with the beige and purple of the southwest, but I again ended up with gray mountains and sand. The prickly cactus turned into a pile of donuts sprouting deer antlers.

I switched to colored pencils and tried a pond in New Hampshire, but found I had less control with color. My tree morphed into a giant blob-like insect shaking its fists at the lake. It didn’t matter. I had fun.

When the 45 minutes ran out, the group shared sketches and encouragement. Sketching sessions are held most Tuesdays at the American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Next week’s theme is body parts, which should be interesting.

(Images courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Thomas Chambers, Landscape; Tom Lea, Southwest; Abbott Handerson Thayer, Dublin Pond)

The show that opens today at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975,” is to say the least, colorful.

The galleries literally breathe color. Large expanses of it are spread playfully and aggressively in geometric shapes, or seemingly splashed randomly across enormous canvases that are all hung together as if they are, forgive me, color-coordinated?

Here are paintings infused with the cool colors of winter and spring, followed by the brilliant warm colors of summer and fall. The visitor wandering amidst the milieu is struck by its simple beauty, but can’t help wonder, what does it all mean?

The show’s catalog gives us some help: “What sets the best Color Field paintings apart is the extraordinary economy of means with which they manage not only to engage our feelings but also to ravish the eye. . .”

“Paint application in Color Field abstractions,” the catalog explains, “can seem, depending on our sympathies, either inexplicably magical or almost mechanical.”

I’m going with magical. The 40 paintings by such major figures as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, on display through May 26, as viewed on a cold, dreary day (with deadlines looming) combined to offer a genuine lift in spirit.

Color Field artists were essentially a dotted line over from abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. The color painters, spurred on by the development of acrylic paints, were washing or staining their untreated canvases with an all-over expansiveness of color, to create paintings of radiant hues.

This is the first retrospective of the Color Field artists and many of the paintings are from private collections, and therefore, rarely seen in public.

If March shows up like a lion tomorrow, the paintings in this show are guaranteed to cheer you.

(Jules Olitski, Cleopatra Flesh, 1962, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of G. David Thompson, 1964, copyright The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art resource, NY, copyright Jules Olitski/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

When Ellen Holen started stitching her sons’ old neckties into a colorful silk quilt some seven decades ago on a central Nebraskan farm, she was probably just being practical, not trying to create a work of art. After all, it was during the Great Depression and she had 10 children — they couldn’t afford to waste much.

If she were alive today, Ellen would probably be startled to see her quilt on display in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery as part of the traveling exhibit Going West! Quilts and Community, which features rare quilts pieced together by pioneering women on the American prairie during the 19th and early 20th century. (more…)

John Alexander is an artist who packs a painterly punch. The power of his vivid, expressive imagery solicits a breath-taking effect, especially in a gallery hung with 40 of his big, bold paintings and 27 of his elegant works on paper.

Tomorrow, December 20, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) opens the first major, full-scale retrospective encompassing the artist’s three-decade career.

John Alexander (b. 1945), says Eleanor Harvey SAAM’s chief curator, “has a passion for paint.” His paintings are a bright profusion of energy and vitality, many of them laced with humor and irony.

In his 1989 “Venus and Adonis,” a naked couple is in bed; each figure is backlit by a strange, eerie blaze that threatens to engulf them. They are either engaged in a heated argument or consumed by a fiery passion. Is this a disintegrating marriage or a dangerous liaison?

The titles of his works on paper are subtly narrative. A gnarled vulture casts a dazed glance at the viewer. The work is entitled “Aging Rock Star.” Is it a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of Keith Richards?

Many of his artworks are accompanied by Alexander’s cogent, thoughtful commentary. His views on politics, religion and the human condition form a third body of work, an illustration in words.

In text posted with his 2002 watercolor “Marabou Stork,” he notes: “Not one day since I was born, has the landscape gained an inch. Every single day habitat is lost, and species are vanishing at an alarming rate.”

“John Alexander’s life-long fascination with the natural world,” observes SAAM’s director Elizabeth Broun, “connects his work with subjects of deep meaning throughout America.”

“John Alexander: A Retrospective” is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through March 16, 2008.

(John Alexander, Dancing on the Water Lilies of Life, 1988, Oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. Claude Albritton and the Museum League Purchase Fund © John Alexander)

It was Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), a founding member of the Hudson River School, who taught us to appreciate nature, and to hike and bike and canoe through all of its rugged splendor. Without him and his companions, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and William Cullen Bryant, we might be still battling a fear of beastly creatures that roamed the dark and terrifying forests—Rodents of Unusual Size, oh my!

“Durand was the first to give us the idea of the landscape as an escape,” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where 57 Durand works go on view on Thursday through January 6, 2008.

Before Durand, nature, dark and dreary, was mostly depicted as tamed, cultivated or captured—landscapes were gentle pastoral scenes of farm, village, steeple and pasture. (Durand, too, painted his share of these.)

But by the middle of the century, Durand literally upended that notion, turning the canvas vertical—the better to craft towering forests and majestic mountains. From the 1840s to the 1870s, Durand spent many months each year on sketching expeditions that ranged from New York to New England, usually with other artists or members of his family. Raw, splendid nature, the stuff of westward expansion, became a kind of a paradise, a place for introspection and communion. A sensibility, says Harvey, that carries forward today.

Hudson Trail Outfitters and REI owe this guy big.

(Courtesy of SAAM: Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855, Oil on Canvas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges, by his children, 1895; Asher B. Durand, Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the Catkills, New York, ca. 1856, Oil on canvas, The New-York Historical Society Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria Durand Woodman, 1907.20)

The name didn’t ring any bells.

The scholars and collectors attending the opening of “Earl Cunningham’s America” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum all knew of this artist and his work. But for us Ordinary Joes, this guy’s body of work was a major discovery.

Or perhaps we were all just suffering the end-of-vacation blues. Because to admire a Cunningham is to fall for coastal scenes of nostalgic idylls and fanciful visions. The brightly colored paintings are embellished with Viking ships and 19th-century schooners, all looking as naturally a part of the surrounds as a robin in the garden at springtime.

“Wishful memories,” is how curator Virginia Mecklenburg characterized the 50 folk art paintings on view. Cunningham made them over a lifetime of travels along the Eastern seaboard from Edgecomb, Maine, where he was born in 1893 to St. Augustine, Florida, where he tragically took his own life in 1977.

His name is new to us now largely because he hated to sell his works. He called them “his brothers and his sisters.” He ran a curio shop on St. George Street in St. Augustine and anyone even broaching the subject of purchasing one of his paintings was likely to have been tossed from the shop.

One stubborn admirer, Marilyn Mennello from Winter Park, Florida, managed to convince Cunningham to sell just one work. And after his death, Mennello spent decades finding, collecting and assembling a body of his works–the core of the exhibition now on view at SAAM.

For admirers following now in Mennello’s footsteps, take heart, there may be more of them out there. A quick check on eBay, though, and the only Earl Cunningham there is a Reggae artist. Not the same guy.

(Courtesy of the collection of Mr. Ross L. Silverbach)