7

THURSDAY

One of the few benefits of my long-ago job in a museum library was the chance to work among fat-priced, Artforum-certified masterpieces: Every day, I sat 10 feet from a portrait of Dora Maar by Pablo Picasso. And every day, I resisted the impulse to zing rubber bands at Dora’s stale-fishpond complexion and flounderlike eyes. The poor girl looked almost as miserable as I felt in that library. I left the job after nine months, thinking that Warhol was right about art being whatever you could get away with. This afternoon, Sally Shelburne of the National Gallery of Art intends to enlighten philistines like me with an open discussion on Picasso. Ask her, for me, why Pablo always favored chicks with asymmetrical faces at noon at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Art Information Desk, 4th and Constitution Avenue NW. Free. (202) 737-4215. (Pamela Murray Winters)