Exhibit highlights local artist’s love of museums — as seen in his paintings of viewers observing classic art

Bradley Stevens’ new solo show at the Zenith Gallery — Museum Studies II: Honoring the Female Perspective — takes viewers on a painted tour of galleries in such familiar DC spaces as the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, as well as more distant spots such as the Seattle Art Museum.

The show — now in its last week — builds on the DC artist’s previous collection, Museum Studies I, which was produced in 2012 and exhibited in 2013. Like its predecessor, Museum Studies II presents a self-referential series in which viewers find themselves mirrored when they encounter paintings of museumgoers contemplating paintings. The act of looking therefore becomes the primary subject of Museum Studies II in scenes that pay tribute to Stevens’ lifelong love of museums and art history.

Stevens has had a prolific career. As a bachelor’s and master’s student at George Washington University in the late 1970s, he participated in the copyist program at the National Gallery of Art, an opportunity written into the institution’s bylaws that allows artists to copy master paintings in the museum. The experience had a lasting impact on Stevens and prepared him for his future practice. Along with producing commissioned portraits of notable leaders in law, science, education and politics, Stevens is a renowned copyist. Today, his work is among the many painting reproductions on display at Monticello, the former home of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Virginia. Stevens also painted the copy of Gilbert Stuart’s famous Lansdowne portrait of George Washington that hangs in Mount Vernon.

Both Museum Studies series honor the gallery spaces where Stevens spent so much time learning as a student and copyist. Each painting in the two series renders the architectural details of museums with loving detail, with light and depth communicated deftly in Stevens’ contemporary realist style. Stevens applies the same attention to his figures and, notably, to the miniature replicas of paintings that populate the gallery walls he depicts. The artist often curates his scenes to include his favorite pieces in a gallery even when they don’t hang in the same room in real life. (Along with the titles of Stevens’ works, each object label in the Zenith show identified the paintings included in a scene.)

These miniatures also illustrate Stevens’ virtuosity, proving not only that he can accurately copy another artist’s work, but that he can do so in exaggerated perspective, such as when a painting is displayed on a wall that does not directly face the viewer.

Museum Studies I and Museum Studies II share these admirable technical attributes while ruminating on the act of observing art. What distinguishes one from the other is that  in his second series, all the gallery visitors Stevens paints are women, which both justifies and complicates the subtitle of the show, Honoring the Female Perspective.

According to the Zenith Gallery press release for the exhibition, Museum Studies II honors women as “the vanguard of art, culture, and progress in these times.” While the paintings do prioritize the female gaze in an institutional space that historically caters to a male one, there is still discomfort in noticing that the women in these paintings are fixed in the role of spectator. Art museums remain a male-dominated space, a fact explored in detail by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Indeed, all of the miniatures in Stevens’ gallery scenes are Western paintings by white men from the 19th century, save for Man in the Cat, an 1898 portrait by American painter Cecilia Beaux, a contemporary of famous portrait artist John Singer Sargent.

Stevens’ decision to focus on 19th-century paintings is interesting in that, intentionally or unintentionally, it adds to the self-reflexive nature of his Museum Studies series. As a contemporary realist painter, Stevens’ proclivity for 19th-century paintings makes sense. The 19th century saw the rise of realism, an artistic movement that documented the rapid technological and social change of the time and deemed everyday subjects to be as important to express in paint as religious and historical scenes. The era also saw women gaining more public freedom, entering the workforce in greater numbers, becoming conspicuous consumers, and, notably, attending the Salon, the official, national art exhibition in France.

With women’s participation in the artistic sphere increasing, some 19th-century painters decided that women observing art was a worthy subject; William Merritt Chase, for instance, painted women examining artwork in his studio. This subject matter was radical in portraying the growing public role of women in society. In 2019, however, the impact of Stevens’ paintings is not as striking.

This is not to devalue the act of looking as passive and uncritical. But the phrase “Honoring the Female Perspective” seems to promise an ethos of women’s authorship that doesn’t come through — in Stevens’ paintings, when the viewer can see their faces, women stare at paintings with blank or inscrutable expressions. The press release overstates the political implications of the series, or at least offers a highly reductive assessment of women’s progress in the arts.

Stevens’ technique and realism are impressive. But to study and depict the museum space is also to question and engage its fraught history and racial, gendered coding.

One of the most striking paintings in Museum Studies II is “Towards the Light,” the only scene that does not feature any artwork. Instead, it depicts a place many DC residents recognize — the rotunda of the National Gallery of Art’s West Building. Stevens depicts his wife sitting on a bench, looking toward the rotunda’s elegant marble columns, while a mother and child walk toward the light in the background of the scene. Stevens describes this painting as a depiction of the museum space as sanctuary, emphasizing the tall, temple-like dimensions of the rotunda and the almost holy light diffusing through the picture. But there is a slight irony to the image. To “go towards the light” is to seek salvation, but as anyone who has visited the National Gallery will know, the mother and daughter appear to be headed toward the museum exit.

While Museum Studies II advertises the female perspective, the essential subject of the show remains the viewer invited to navigate the real and depicted galleries of Stevens’ selected paintings. To do so while recognizing and engaging the questions that may arise ensures a worthwhile artistic experience.

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Museum Studies II: Honoring the Female Perspective opened Dec. 2 at Zenith Gallery at 1429 Iris St. NW and remains on view through Feb. 2. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 6 p.m.