When I visited, the galleries of American art were some of the loneliest, and those galleries happen to include one of my favorite rooms in the whole museum. The paintings in Gallery 65, by George Caleb Bingham, John Quidor, Richard Caton Woodville and others, quietly insist that you look beneath their rustic surfaces. But there are few other spaces in the National Gallery where the dissonance between American identity and American reality is so perfectly hidden in plain sight. Every painting in this room, just like every work of art made today, was created at a moment when the future was uncertain and unknowable. The music suggests the permanence of art, the silent violin the ephemerality of our experience of it.

Source: Washington Post March 13, 2020 21:11 UTC