At Art Basel in Miami a few weeks ago, it rained a lot, and some critics scorned the commercial excess with extra sharpness. For Basel art in Washington on a recent morning, the sun lit the season’s last leaves and intimate galleries showed rarely seen paintings. A room devoted to Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall felt like a Jewish neighborhood, with three Chagall portraits that haven’t been seen in America for 40 years.
Time is short, so no more riddles about Basel: The city where Erasmus died, a chemist took the first LSD trip while riding his bicycle, and the Rhine makes a lazy, looping turn through a landscape of borders has sent more than 60 paintings to the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C. The show, “From Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland, The Staechelin and Im Obersteg Collections” features some of the biggest names in art (including a 20-year-old Picasso’s portrait of “The Absinthe Drinker,” a lady who looks blue in every way), and that room for Chagall and Soutine is worth a lot of effort to see.
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