It was a beautiful day here in Washington yesterday and the streets on Capitol Hill were empty. So we went for a pleasant walk down onto the Mall (where the crowds were much bigger) and stopped in at the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.
They have a couple of neat exhibits there right now. One is "Warhol's Headlines" -- a fascinating collection of Warhol paintings in which he takes newspaper headlines and turns them into art. His small changes are sometimes amusing and always interesting, but the idea of just copying a newspaper kind of makes you wonder what art really is. Still, he's iconic and it was fun to see so many of his paintings in one place.
A highlight of the visit was the Portuguese tapestries -- a recently restored set of tapestries that recount the conquest of Tangiers in the early 1400s. We'd seen the Bayeux tapestries a few years ago and these were much the same but on a much grander and finer scale (after all they are 300 years later in history!). We could have spent an hour just looking at the 4 of them -- well worth the trip.
And then, surprise! A small room with some more moderns out of the regular collection including some old friends, Monet, Manet and Cezanne. Also a new Mondarian that we hadn't seen before. Quite fun.
We topped the day off with a quick trip to the National Building Museum for their new exhibit on "Unbuilt Washington" -- a collection of drawings and concepts for parts of DC that never got built. A pyramid for the Lincoln Memorial. A Memorial Bridge with medieval towers. An East Capitol street (where we live) with a row of Federal office buildings. Moving the Supreme Court to where National Stadium is now. A real fun walk down "what might have been" lane and well worth the trip.
Add in tapas at Jaleo for dinner and a brisk walk home and what could be a better day?
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