Day 24

Spent the morning helping K get set up for a meeting at the Harmon about the upcoming NEA Opera Awards and then started out walking downtown but got caught in a downpour, so ducked into the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of American Art, two great museums in one building. I spent two hours doing all three stories of this block size building. It was built before the Civil War as the country's first patent office and much of the third floor has been left with the original design elements intact. This building was used as a hospital during the Civil War and poet Walt Whitman volunteered here as a nurse and the scene is described in several of his poems. A decade or so ago the Smithsonian sponsored a Beat Generation reunion for all the surviving writers of that group and the several days of seminars, lectures and poetry readings were staged in the space pictured on the left. In the middle of an otherwise boring panel discussion Allen Ginsberg, near death, climbed on a chair and reminded the small audience in attendance about the 'spirit of Walt Whitman' lingering in the building. Ironically, today there is a display only a few feet away from where he spoke that day - a video tape loop of Ginsberg chanting and keeping time with finger cymbals.
In contrast to the high Victorian decor of the third floor, the exhibits of 20th Century American art can be jarring. The piece pictured on the right above is a three dimensional construction titled "De Kooning Breaks Through" by former Nashville artist Red Grooms.