Stylish Self Control

I'm not most people's first choice for going to a museum.

You see, I'm that art geek who can spend six hours looking at art with only a half hour for lunch and a couple of bathroom breaks.

Luckily for me, I happen to know someone who can do the same.

Even better, Moira's an artist, so she can fill me in when I see a term I don't recognize, like casein paint, which we saw a surprising amount of today.

Where to start with a day filled with so much fantastic art that my head is still spinning?

"An American in London: Whistler and the Thames" at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery set the bar incredibly high right off the bat.

Over 80 works - paintings, drawings and prints - detailed the changes going on along London's Thames river during the period Whistler lived there.

Looking at a print, suddenly there was a little boy in front of us holding up a magnifying glass to more closely examine the highly detailed picture.

Sure enough, the gallery had a whole rack of glasses, the better to see the minute detail of Whistler's work, and two of them were soon in our hands.

At one point, after reading about Whistler's second mistress, Moira turned to me and said, "Okay, we need a really great biography of Whistler now."

Don't I know it.

It was almost too much to take in, from his colorful early works to the later impressionistic ones that had the art critics in a tizzy over their near abstraction. And the man's use of color - blue particularly- was nothing short of breathtaking.

After a walk through the Smithsonian Castle garden, we ate lunch in the cafe, inhaling chicken salad with dried cherries and arugula and double chocolate cupcakes while people watching.

My favorite was the woman who looked like a pack animal, her belt strung with a fanny pack, a seat cushion, a bag from the museum's gift shop and on the back, a small stuffed dog. Heaven only knows what was hanging from that belt by the end of the day.

Next stop: National Gallery of Art where we made a beeline for Titian's "Danae," on short term loan from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

The sensual image of Danae awaiting a visit from Jupiter with Cupid at her side was stunning and a reminder that beautiful women have curves.

Walking in to "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In" was like walking into an old beach house; you could practically smell the salty air.

"Wind from the Sea" was the centerpiece of an exhibition where every painting and sketch featured images of windows, spare and elegant and in many cases, open to a gentle breeze causing tattered lace curtains to flutter.

Many paintings showed the bedroom windows of Christina Olsen, the crippled woman who became his model for so many years.

We agreed that the work, sometimes bordering on abstraction, often a study in tonality, proved that while Wyeth was considered old-fashioned in his time because of the emphasis on action painting and abstract expressionism, that was far from the case.

I found it especially fascinating to look at the studies that preceded the paintings to see how he reworked compositions, deleting elements until he'd achieved the most possible with the least number of elements.

Andrew, we hardly knew ye.

Then it was on to our third American of the morning, although this one accompanied by a Frenchman.

"Degas/Cassatt" was a feast for the eyes, covering the period when the older, established French master took the younger American female artist under his wing.

Cassatt's art has such a decidedly female bent - subject, palette, handling - that I couldn't help but respond to it instinctively.

Included was the VMFA Cassatt, "Child Picking Fruit," and we both felt a little local pride at seeing it as part of this landmark show.

If I could have left with one piece, it would have been "Woman Bathing," a color drypoint showing a woman in a striped robe stripped to the waist on a patterned rug surrounded by the bluest of walls.

So feminine, so beautiful.

About "Young Woman Picking Fruit," Degas had written, "No woman has a right to draw like that," a major compliment that only sounds like a sexist remark.

Hands down my favorite Degas was the series "Mary Cassatt at the Louvre," showing Cassatt from behind, dressed stylishly, leaning on a walking stick, the curve of her waist and hip quite provocative.

You can tell from her intent gaze at a painting that this is an educated and intelligent woman who also happens to be very attractive.

And she is, by far, the most feminine of all the women depicted by Degas in the show.

By now our heads were spinning from all the wonderful things we'd seen.

Did we take a break? We did not. Instead, we headed directly to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery for more.

"Modern American Realism" covered the period from 1910 to 1980 and contained a lot of artists who are just now getting the recognition they deserve in addition to the expected Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence and Paul Cadmus.

And, just so you know, there was a lot of casein paint used during those years.

One of the most whimsical was Philip Evergood's colorful "Dowager in a Wheelchair" showing an aged, fat woman being pushed by a nubile, fresh-faced young thing down a bustling city street circa 1952.

No, she did not have a fanny pack or seat cushion strapped to her wheelchair.

It was a stellar show and strong reminder of how many artists were sticking to realism through the years of abstraction and pop art.

Our final museum was the Portrait Gallery for "American Cool," a photography show that attempted to define coolness, defined as "stylish self control."

Some of the photos were just plain extraordinary: Carlos Santana at 25, all soft eyes and full lips; Jimi Hendrix at 25, shot by Linda McCartney, with a sly grin on his face; an atmospheric Allen Ginsburg photo of William Burroughs from 1953.

Some of the galleries had video of the people in the photographs and early footage of Chrissie Hynde reminded me how gorgeous she was in the '80s with her great haircut and comfortable sexuality.

Paul Newman was gorgeous at 34 and Marvin Gaye was intense at the same age. Willie Nelson was downright handsome.

At the end of the exhibit was a list of people who had been considered for the exhibition and deemed not cool enough.Sort of a wannabe list.

The guard made a joke that his name had been mistakenly left off.

And our final exhibit (drum roll, please) was "Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction," an array of mid-century portraits done at a time when portraiture was considered old, dull and very uncool.

These works were anything but.

Here we found a Warhol portrait of Jamie Wyeth, Andrew's son, as well as a Jamie Wyeth portrait of Warhol.

We'd been at this art thing so long today that motifs were starting to repeat themselves.

It was time for happy hour.

Needing to process all that art, we got ourselves to Mockingbird Hill, a sherry and ham bar that welcomed us with sunny stools and a flight of sherries labeled "Dias Baccanalia," a fitting Friday descriptor.

Dias Bacus "Ria Pita" Manzanilla was paired with olives. Grant "La Garrocha" Amontillado, probably my favorite of the three, came with peanuts.

Spanish hand-carved Mangalica was magical ham from a wooly pig, fatty and cured to perfection.

The final sherry - with a hint of cherries and screaming to be an after dinner sipper -was Gonzalez Beass "Christina" Medium Olorosa paired with chunks of walnut brittle.

That's right, Christina sherry. Now art was following us into the bar.

It was time for our art bacchanalia to end and return to Richmond.

Degas knew. No women have a right to take so much pleasure from art.