Phillips Collection

At 25 by 20 inches, Picasso's painting "Woman with Green Hat" is scarcely monumental in size, but it is in grandeur and significance. And it is now on display at the Phillips Collection in Washington.A portrait of Dora Maar, Picasso's model and mistress of the time, the face is so solid that it looks like a piece of sculpture, and the eyes wear a pensive expression as if thinking of something lost. Painted in October 1939, just after the beginning of World War II, the portrait's expression reflects the uncertainty of its time.

As excitement builds for this week's opening of the Summer Olympics, many an armchair athlete may yearn to hop a transcontinental flight to London. But if a trip overseas isn't in the cards right now, why not discover a taste of jolly olde England closer to home? The nation's capital offers its own brand of proper British attractions, dining and lodging, say experts, suitable for even the most discerning Anglophile. "There are actually quite a few similarities between Europe and Washington, D.C., and one can certainly discover elements of British culture close to home," says Georgia Johnson Kicklighter of American Express Travel.

The art of Paul Klee was one of continual invention and relentless experimentation. Every new painting was an investigation into the possibilities of picture-making, every drawing or watercolor a potential starting point for an altogether new direction. Klee never developed a consistent, signature style as do many artists. For him, change itself -- the process of continuous artistic self-reinvention -- was the only stylistic mode worth pursuing. KLEE AND AMERICA / / Through Sept. 10 -- Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., N.W., in Washington -- 202-387-2151

In 1941, 23-year-old Harlem-based artist Jacob Lawrence completed a haunting series of paintings depicting the mass migration of African-Americans that occurred between the two world wars when almost 1 million moved from the rural South to the industrial North. Called The Migration Series, the entire work is on display at Washington's Phillips Collection through Oct. 26. The project was hugely ambitious for a young painter. It consists of 60 separate tempera paintings, each of which is captioned to form a corresponding historically accurate narrative.

Museum shows so often feel like mini-seminars in art history that you almost feel guilty when one comes along that lets you just enjoy spending an hour or so looking at a bunch of really interesting pictures. The exhibition of recent acquisitions that opened this weekend at the Phillips Collection in Washington is that kind of show, one where you don't have to pore over every label and wall text for fear of missing something important. You just stroll through and enjoy the sights along the way. On Exhibit Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects runs through May 28 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. in Northwest Washington.

On the evidence of Milton Avery's career, being a pioneer can be a thankless job. Not that Avery (1885-1965) didn't eventually win a meas- ure of recognition for his high- ly individual art, or for his role as an influential early American modernist. But much of the acclaim heaped on the artist, including the Avery retrospective that opens Saturday at the Phillips Collection in Washington, has come in the decades since his death. Avery has been called an American Matisse for his highly simplified forms and bright, flat colors.

Amedeo Modigliani was brilliant, charming, incredibly self-destructive and wholly original. He fit perfectly the romantic ideal of the misunderstood, alienated artist whose gifts go unrecognized until a premature death from poverty, drugs and disease cements his legend. All these things happened to Modigliani during his brief but brilliant career. Born in 1884 in Livorno, Italy, he moved to Paris in 1906, where for the next decade and a half he lived and loved uproariously among an international avant-garde of symbolists, fauvists, cubists and futurists, none of whom he deigned to join.

In this era of sophisticated cynicism, no critic wants to be caught dead touting yet another impressionist show, unless of course it's to spout something suitably postmodern and dismissive, such as "Impressionist paintings are the world's most overpriced art form, blah, blah, blah." But I'm not gonna do that. The exhibition of impressionist still lifes that opened yesterday at the Phillips Collection in Washington left me feeling unconstrained by the contemporary art world's fashionable consciousness of diminished possibilities.

WASHINGTON -- Living in Paris during the 1920s, four American artists -- Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis and Alexander Calder -- helped to erase the boundaries between the arts and to redefine art itself.Their work is featured in "Americans In Paris," the exceptional exhibit of 103 paintings, photographs and sculptures celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Phillips Collection.In a letter dated April 5, 1922, Man Ray (1890-1976) suggests the innovative spirit that informs his work and most of the work in the exhibit: " I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself.

Renoir to Rothko at the Phillips in WashingtonThe Phillips Collection in Washington presents "Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips," a landmark exhibition of 350 works documenting the evolution of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966) as collector, critic and founder of America's first museum of modern art. The exhibit runs through Jan. 23.The Phillips Collection is located at 1600 21st St. N.W., in Washington. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (Thursday until 7:30 p.m.)

Museum shows so often feel like mini-seminars in art history that you almost feel guilty when one comes along that lets you just enjoy spending an hour or so looking at a bunch of really interesting pictures. The exhibition of recent acquisitions that opened this weekend at the Phillips Collection in Washington is that kind of show, one where you don't have to pore over every label and wall text for fear of missing something important. You just stroll through and enjoy the sights along the way. On Exhibit Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects runs through May 28 at the Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. in Northwest Washington.

The Impressionist exhibit opening today at Washington's Phillips Collection features big names and the marquee draw of 17 Monet paintings. But what makes the show really pleasurable is that it's basically about people at the beach. With contributions from the likes of Monet, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Impressionists by the Sea serves as a reminder of the extent to which art movements depend upon technological and social movements. After railroads were built to coastal towns in northern France in the mid-19th century, vacationing Parisians soon turned humble fishing villages into fashionable resorts.

The raging waters of Niagara Falls, a steam locomotive arriving in New York City, a serpentine dancer clad in diaphanous robes. These and other images fascinated turn-of-the-century Americans not only because of the novelty of their subjects but because they were pictures that moved. Today, we take it for granted that "the movies" are first and foremost theatrical dramas captured on film. But it wasn't always so. The first motion pictures weren't dramas at all but celebrations of the camera's uncanny ability to capture an illusion of movement.

The art of Paul Klee was one of continual invention and relentless experimentation. Every new painting was an investigation into the possibilities of picture-making, every drawing or watercolor a potential starting point for an altogether new direction. Klee never developed a consistent, signature style as do many artists. For him, change itself -- the process of continuous artistic self-reinvention -- was the only stylistic mode worth pursuing. KLEE AND AMERICA / / Through Sept. 10 -- Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St., N.W., in Washington -- 202-387-2151

GOOD FRIENDS HAPPILY GATHER UNDER A restaurant's bright striped canopy on a balmy summer day. The ladies wear silk dresses and stylish hats, the gentlemen suits or sailing outfits with yellow straw boaters. Among them are actresses Ellen Andree and Jeanne Samary, painter Gustave Caillebotte, financier and newspaper editor Charles Ephrussi and the redoubtable Baron Raoul Barbier -- war hero, former mayor of colonial Saigon, indefatigable bon vivant and aficionado of fine racehorses and women.

As late as the 1970s, New York cartoonist Al Capp could still complain that abstract art was "the product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled, to the utterly bewildered." No more. Today, abstraction is ensconced in the pantheon of 20th-century modernist art. Audiences once outraged or puzzled by Picasso's violent distortions and Pollock's artful drips now take them in stride. So two new exhibitions on view in Washington - Sam Gilliam's retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Sean Scully's Wall of Light series at the Phillips Collection - offer an intriguing opportunity to examine quite different paths abstract painting has taken in the hands of contemporary masters born just a decade apart.

The Phillips Collection in Washington presents the first major retrospective of Honore Daumier, the 19th-century painter, sculptor, draughtsman and caricaturist best known for his scathing political cartoons and satirical prints on social themes. The show features 245 works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, sculptureand lithographs that illustrate Daumier's achievement. It opens Saturday and runs through May 14. The Phillips Collection is at 1600 21st St. N.W., in Washington.

The Impressionist exhibit opening today at Washington's Phillips Collection features big names and the marquee draw of 17 Monet paintings. But what makes the show really pleasurable is that it's basically about people at the beach. With contributions from the likes of Monet, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Impressionists by the Sea serves as a reminder of the extent to which art movements depend upon technological and social movements. After railroads were built to coastal towns in northern France in the mid-19th century, vacationing Parisians soon turned humble fishing villages into fashionable resorts.

Amedeo Modigliani was brilliant, charming, incredibly self-destructive and wholly original. He fit perfectly the romantic ideal of the misunderstood, alienated artist whose gifts go unrecognized until a premature death from poverty, drugs and disease cements his legend. All these things happened to Modigliani during his brief but brilliant career. Born in 1884 in Livorno, Italy, he moved to Paris in 1906, where for the next decade and a half he lived and loved uproariously among an international avant-garde of symbolists, fauvists, cubists and futurists, none of whom he deigned to join.

On Friday, October 22, 2004, NATHAN MILLER; beloved husband of the late Jeannette Miller (nee Martick); beloved brother of Samuel J. Miller of Towson, MD; brother-in-law of Linda Miller; adored uncle of Robert J. Miller. Survived by three loving grand nieces. Services at Sol Levinson and Bros., Inc., 8900 Reisterstown Road at Mt. Wilson Lane, on Tuesday, October 26 at 11 A.M. Interment Arlington-Chizuk Amuno Congregation Cemetery, 4300 N. Rogers Avenue. Please omit flowers. Memorial contributions may be directed to Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street NW, Washington, DC 20009-1090 or the University of Maryland History Department, Nathan and Jeannette Miller Lecture Series, College Park, MD.