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Smithsonian boasts mini art

1,122 tiny art works, some as small as a shirt button

Mimi Hegler's 3-by-4-inch painting "Hydrangeas"

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's not unusual to see art aficionados squint to see the details of a painting, but at this exhibit they have to squint just see some of the paintings.

With a magnifying glass, a viewer can make out individual blossoms on Mimi Hegler's "Hydrangeas," a 3-by-4-inch painting that is among 1,122 tiny artworks on view at the Smithsonian Institution's Ripley Center International Gallery.

A filigreed silver box, topped with a magnifying glass, contains the smallest works in the Third Exhibition of Fine Arts in Miniature: three ivory discs the size of shirt buttons, painted in watercolor. One depicts the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. Another portrays the Emperor Shah Jahan who ordered it built, and the third depicts his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, for whom it was built.

There are 516 artists from 16 countries represented at the show, which has pieces varying from landscapes, portraits, still life, watercolor, oil painting and prints to sculpture, enamels, porcelain and scrimshaw.

All are for sale at prices ranging from $100 to nearly $5,000.

Miniatures go back at least to Medieval times, when artists painted pictures on the initial letters of sections in Bibles and other religious manuscripts. Before photography, miniature portraits were the way to keep the image of a significant other in a locket or pouch, or on a desk or dressing table.

John A. Thompson is president of the Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers Society of Washington, which organized the show. He said it takes imagination, vision and knowledge to create miniature art works.

"Only surgery comes close to the virtuosity required of the miniature artist," he wrote in an introduction to the show.

Thompson, a retired Agriculture Department technician, has a piece in the show titled "On the C & O Canal, 1890." It's a miniature oil painting of how the Washington end of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal looked more than a century ago.

Miniature artists like to work on ivory. It's sometimes synthetic ivory since international rules to protect elephants now make the genuine article harder to find. One of the artists in the show used a piece from the tusk of a prehistoric mastodon.

A single judge, history artist Peter Waddell, took them all in during a single morning before the exhibit opened to the public. He awarded the grand prize to Peter Kanis Jr., a Pennsylvania artist, for a picture called "Father." It's a 3-by-4-inch oil painting of an elderly man sitting on a bench and gazing into a crystal ball that he holds in his hand.

The show is on view until July 12. Admission is free.

Posted by thinkum at June 22, 2004 03:10 PM