Is the American University Museum the District’s most stimulating visual arts venue? It was on Feb. 8, opening night for five spring shows, the most anticipated being “Fred Folsom: Women Smoking and Last Call.”
The joint was packed, much like the Georgia Avenue strip club in Folsom’s 20-foot triptych, “Last Call at the Shepherd Park Go-Go Bar.” Completed in 1987, the year “the Park” shut down, “Last Call” is a dense conglomeration of men with, onstage right of center, a spectacularly built, lushly coiffured blonde wearing only sandals.
The show also features two smaller Shepherd Park murals, one with patrons in mid-brawl in the foreground, oblivious to the naked performer, her skin oddly painted in grays.
The main body of work, however, is Folsom’s recent “Women Smoking” series: 23 paintings of nudes, most pinup style, in retro living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Nearly all have cigarettes going, a few in long holders. In the exhibition text, Folsom recalls of his younger days: “Everyone smoked all the time.” And, he states, adding a note of mortality to the series: “Cigarettes killed my mother at 58 and my sister at 30.”
Some of Folsom’s women drink tea, notably the subject of the wonderful “Cold Tea” of 2008, seated on a cushioned stool with a Japanese screen behind. One drinks coffee. A white-haired senior sips something stronger through a straw at 4 a.m. A heavily built gal holding a glass of beer plays solitaire, her cigarette ash about to drop off the edge of the wood-grained table. Though most are lost in thought, a highly agitated woman fires a revolver at the Fates in a dream (per the title).
A man appears in only one painting, the largest: “Mrs. Gardner’s Study” of 2019, in which a stunning nude, seated, flowers in her ginger hair — not the Isabella Stewart Gardner we know — gazes down at an open book as her butler, pouring tea, looks away and two maids stand against the far wall. Unusually, she holds a pencil.
“Cold Tea,” 2008. Fred Folsom. Photo by Richard Selden.
The depiction of the female nude permeates Western art, as recently discussed in Sebastian Smee’s Washington Post review of “Twentieth-Century Nudes from Tate” at the Worcester Art Museum. In 1863, Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” launched a tradition of shocking viewers by portraying a nude contemporary woman (versus a goddess, an allegorical figure, an ancient heroine or a sultan’s mistress).
Surrealists of the early 20th-century like Paul Delvaux and Balthus became known for painting nude women (girls, in Balthus’s case) in unexpected or illogical settings. Among Hopper’s midcentury paintings of women are several nudes, usually at home or in hotel rooms, but also parading onstage in “Girlie Show” of 1941.
With the revival of representation in the late 1950s and ’60s, after the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, came the return of female nudes and an increasing number of male nudes, painted by both men and women. In many cases, these works challenged the sexist tradition of “the male gaze” (which, oddly, Smee does not mention, though he refers to “psychological and erotic truths”).
Folsom has apparently been mastering the representation of “a female person in the midst of props and geometry” since his mid-’60s student days at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. The surreal quality of his “Women Smoking” paintings — a product of their midcentury settings and his meticulous technique (according to a 1997 City Paper story, Folsom’s favorite artists are Rembrandt, Vermeer and Norman Rockwell) — connects him to Delvaux, Balthus and, in his ironic appropriation of commercial images, a number of more recent painters.
As for “Last Call,” he is quoted as saying: “The situation inside that nightclub was way-weirder than any of my surreal artwork.” On the border of Silver Spring, Shepherd Park is now Nile Ethiopian Restaurant. (For more of its history, see the May 8, 2024, post on the blog Barred in DC.)
Folsom will join the show’s curator, American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, for a gallery talk on Saturday, March 8, at 2 p.m.
The other new shows at the museum, which opened as part of AU’s Katzen Center in 2005, are: “#SerbiaInRealLife,” an installation of eye-catching contemporary works by 12 Serbian artists; “Monumental Washington,” a group of outdoor sculptures by nearly two dozen Washington Sculptors Group members; “Otho Branson: Paintings,” a series, begun in the 1970s, of “post-Washington Color School” works showing grids of colored bands; and “Looking for Mushrooms: Bruce and Jean Conner in Mexico, 1961-62,” a display of delicate graphite and pen drawings, along with a film, “Looking for Mushrooms.”
Other 2 p.m. gallery talks are scheduled for Friday, Feb. 21, on the Branson show; Friday, April 4, on the Conner show; and Saturday, May 3, on the sculpture show.
The Branson show closes on March 30, as does the other exhibition on view, which opened last fall: “A Sight to Behold: The Corcoran Legacy Collection of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Landscape Paintings,” curated by Carolyn Kinder Carr, former deputy director and chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery.
Filling a floor of the three-story museum are accomplished landscapes by painters with names few visitors will recognize (possible exceptions: Arthur Davies, Maurice Prendergast and Edward Redfield).
The Corcoran Legacy Collection was formed after the Corcoran Gallery of Art closed in 2014. The National Gallery of Art, which had the first opportunity to choose, acquired around 7,000 works from the Corcoran’s collection (some now on permanent display, others brought out for special exhibitions). At Rasmussen’s initiative, the American University Museum ended up acquiring about 9,000 works from those remaining.
Longtime figures on the D.C. art scene such as Folsom and Rasmussen no doubt miss the lively Corcoran openings of the late 20th century, said to have been “happenings” with a rare mix of attendees. I can vouch that, in the early 2000s, simultaneous openings at art galleries in and around 1515 14th St. NW made for nights to remember. Over the last few years, dealing with gentrification and the pandemic, many have closed. The few survivors and new arrivals are mostly dispersed.
Seeing the crowd last Saturday, one couldn’t help thinking of the AU Museum’s Rasmussen as a Keeper of the Flame.
Spring Exhibitions
Through May 18
American University Museum at the Katzen Center
4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Wednesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
american.edu/cas/museum