Freer & Sackler Galleries

I visited the Freer & Sackler Galleries twice for their special exhibits. I saw their permanent collections when I visited them four years earlier. My impression of these museums hasn't changed: they're filled mostly with Asian artifacts which generally aren't my thing, and the collections aren't impressive or significant enough to make up for my diminished interest. I liked marginally more the two rooms of American at in the Freer, most filled with paintings by Whistler.

In the regular collection, I enjoyed the handful of Japanese screens and scrolls that show everyday people and everyday life. The best example of this is Autumn at Asakusa and Cherry Blossoms at Ueno Park by Hishikawa Moronobu.

In the museums I also noted again that Japanese do a great job with scary sculptures of strong warriors who guard the Buddha and defeat demons.

None of the special exhibits I saw on my first visit to these museums this year are worth describing in particular.

On the second visit, at the Sackler I saw the special exhibit of Hokusai's series of color woodblock prints involving Mount Fuji. (Usually Mount Fuji is merely in the background.) He's a Japanese artist famous for his "Great Wave" print (a.k.a. Under the Wave of Kanagawa) that everyone has seen. His works aren't my style, but I thought the variety of the scenes--all with one common theme--was neat.

But the scale of that exhibit was nothing compared with the scope of the special exhibit of Buddhist scroll paintings by Kano Kazunobu. In this series of more than fifty large scrolls from his series of a hundred, many scrolls have such vibrant colors and elegant composition that they could be used to convince people that Japanese art can rival the best of Western religious art. Again, not that these are things I particularly like, but I appreciate the quality.

On this second visit to the Sackler, I saw other new exhibits that aren't worth mentioning.

The Freer had two small special exhibits of Hokusai's art: one a series of long painted folding screens and the other a handful of scroll paintings. In both I appreciated the crispness of the painting and the depths of the colors. I'm surprised how much more I like his screens and scrolls than his woodblock work--I guess the medium is important.

In the Freer's exhibit on birds in Chinese painting, I enjoyed learning the symbolism involved in some paintings, where the birds and plants are homonyms in Chinese to a message the artist wished to convey.