Howard Kaplan

Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book is one of those books I bought for a child in my life, but was reluctant to hand it over when the fateful day came. The book mesmerized me from the start. The minute I picked it up in the museum shop, I was hooked.

On the evening of March 6, 1865, a ten dollar ticket admitted "one gentleman and two ladies" to President Lincoln's second inaugural ball, held in the very building that is now American Art: the Patent Office Building. Estimates of attendance ranged from 4,000 to 6,000 people.

The ballparks in my old stomping ground of New York are shutting their doors. The newspapers reported the impending closing of Yankee and Shea Stadiums, in the Bronx and Queens, respectively. My dad, who lived in Queens after I left for college, would meet me at Shea Stadium and we'd watch a Mets game together.

My favorite scene in the documentary on Jackson Pollock that recently arrived from Netflix was the one in which the director had the artist paint on a sheet of glass while he filmed from below. I always loved the wild whiplash of Pollock's brushstrokes but seeing it done before my eyes was kind of amazing. He splattered and dripped and it all looked incredibly deliberate. Everything fell into place. Once in a while I've stood before a Pollock, say at MOMA, and heard somebody next to me whisper, "Oh, I can do that," or worse, "My kids can do that." I'm afraid that they can't.

If you're into museums and nighttime (two of my favorite things) you should check out our kids' interactive, Meet Me At Midnight. It's a clever look at our museum after hours and what happens when the lights go out and the objects are pretty much on their own (with the guards, of course!)

Today, I stood in front of Helen Searle's Still Life with Fruit and Champagne and thought, this spread looks pretty good for being nearly 140 years old. Searle, born in Burlington, Vermont in 1830, painted this still life when she was thirty-six.

What would you choose if someone were to ask you to pick an iconic work of art that spoke to you like no other? Apparently, when historian Gary Wills was asked to participate in the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series, he knew immediately that he'd speak about Thomas Eakins's painting, William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River.

April may be the cruelest month, if you believe T. S. Eliot. But it's also National Poetry Month, which may bring down the cruelty level by a notch or two. For me, Walt Whitman is the gold standard of American poets. In the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, he takes the bronze.

"Don't call me a collector," Helen Williams Drutt said recently to an audience at the Renwick Gallery who came to view the exhibition Ornament as Art: Avant-Garde Jewelry from the Helen Williams Drutt Collection, "I consider myself an educator."

The American Art Museum mourns the loss of choreographer Merce Cunningham who died on July 26, 2009. This post was published last year as a tribute to Cunningham's creativity and ability to incorporate new methods of expression in his work.

With the Color as Field exhibition in full swing, I went back to take another look, and found myself returning to Sam Francis's painting, Blue Balls from 1960.

Eye Level had a chance to catch up with performance artist (that's short for singer, composer, poet, filmmaker, inventor of unusual instruments, instrumentalist, and photographer) Laurie Anderson ahead of her scheduled talk on March 15 at 4:30 pm in the McEvoy Auditorium at SAAM/NPG (8th and F Streets NW). Anderson will be speaking about Andy Warhol's iconic image Little Electric Chair as part of the American Pictures Distinguished Lecture Series.

In an election year I thought it might be good to take another look (or two) at photographer Nancy Burson's image The President (second version), in which the likenesses of five of our most recent heads of state merge into one, well....larger head.

Fermented Soil (1965) by Hans Hofmann contains such fresh joy and vigor it is hard to believe it was painted by a man in his mid-eighties. It swings like a jazz sextet. Hofmann was right in the swim of what was going on in painting at that moment, and Color Field painting would have been impossible without his contribution.

I always wanted to know more stories about artists in love, and now, the Archives of American Art has an exhibition in its Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery at the Reynolds Center titled A Thousand Kisses: Love Letters from the Archives of American Art. It's a relatively small exhibition, but one that is full of endearing and enduring charm.

Texas-born John Alexander, whose thirty-year retrospective fills the main galleries at SAAM, lived up to his introduction by chief curator Eleanor Harvey as an "incisive, witty, and irreverent" artist. The SRO crowd at Alexander's recent talk appreciated the artist's personal reflections on art as well as his professional advice and inside look at a thirty-year career in the American art world.

It was very late, the sky was as dark as the water. It was summer but there was a chill in the air. Hilda tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Look behind you, the Ryder moon." I turned and there it was, a beautiful yellow-white disk against a blue-black sky.

Washington... Lincoln... Kennedy... and now Colbert. Just in case a writers' strike and a presidential campaign in full swing weren't enough to keep him busy, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert was determined to have his portrait hang in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG).

Sometimes I wonder if it’s the art-watching or the people-watching I seek out in museums.

I visited the tie quilt on no ordinary day in its own life or in the life of the Holen family. On that day in late December all ninety-two of the Holens, who planned their annual family reunion in D.C., to coincide with the exhibition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century quilts, Going West! Quilts and Community. In 1935, their relative Ellen Holen of Nebraska decided to collect ties from the men in her family—her six sons and her husband—and make a quilt.