National Gallery of Art: Recent Episodes
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art was created in 1937 for the people of the United States of America by a joint resolution of Congress, accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. During the 1920s, Mr. Mellon began collecting with the intention of forming a gallery of art for the nation in Washington. In 1937, the year of his death, he promised his collection to the United States. Funds for the construction of the West Building were provided by The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. On March 17, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the completed building and the collections on behalf of the people of the United States of America.
The paintings and works of sculpture given by Andrew Mellon have formed a nucleus of high quality around which the collections have grown. Mr. Mellon's hope that the newly created National Gallery would attract gifts from other collectors was soon realized in the form of major donations of art from Samuel H. Kress, Rush H. Kress, Joseph Widener, Chester Dale, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, and Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch as well as individual gifts from hundreds of other donors.
The Gallery's East Building, located on land set aside in the original Congressional resolution, was opened in 1978. It accommodates the Gallery's growing collections and expanded exhibition schedule and houses an advanced research center, administrative offices, a great library, and a burgeoning collection of drawings and prints. The building was accepted for the nation on June 1, 1978, by President Jimmy Carter. Funds for construction were given by Paul Mellon and the late Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the son and daughter of the founder, and by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
On May 23, 1999 the Gallery opened an outdoor sculpture garden designed to offer year-round enjoyment to the public. Located in the 6.1-acre block adjacent to the West Building at 7th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W., the garden provides an informal, yet elegant setting for works of modern and contemporary sculpture.
The Collectors Committee, an advisory group of private citizens, has made it possible to acquire paintings and sculpture of the twentieth century. Key works of art have also come to the Gallery through the Patrons' Permanent Fund. In addition, members of the Circle of the National Gallery of Art have provided funds for many special programs and projects. The Sculpture Garden is a gift to the nation from The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation.
Howardena Pindell discusses how social issues and the prospect of societal change impact her art and life. In her artistic practice, Pindell’s work reflects a fascination with gridded, serialized imagery and surface texture. She often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. Even in her more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses to address issues of homelessness, AIDS, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.
Watch the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zcw9iriBvU
Learn more about Howardena Pindell’s work in the Gallery’s collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.10097.html
Pindell’s work “Free, White and 21" is featured in “The Double,” on view July 10–October 31, 2022: https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/the-double-identity-and-difference-in-art-since-1900.html
The Elson Lecture Series features distinguished contemporary artists who are represented in the Gallery's permanent collection. The Honorable and Mrs. Edward E. Elson generously endowed this series in 1992.
Find out more about the Elson Lecture Series on our website: https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/elson.html
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ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
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Clint Smith, Renée Stout, and Hank Willis Thomas present on the role of history and memory in shaping American culture and identity.
This is the third talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies.
Watch the entire video by Hank Willis Thomas titled “A Person is More Important Than Anything Else…,” commissioned by NY Live Arts for the Year of James Baldwin: https://hankwillisthomas.com/WORKS/Video/2
Watch the lecture: https://youtu.be/oM6_4MmmzJU
Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html
Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
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Erica Buddington, Nona Faustine, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers present archival research–based practices that create and uplift missing narratives.
This is the second talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies.
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/36aA_Mg7IZA
Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html
Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
More National Gallery of Art Content: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart Twitter: https://twitter.com/ngadc Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ngadc/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ngadc/_created/ E-News: https://nga.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e894a1837aca4526f7e8a11b3&id=2085ff9475
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Artists Rosana Paulino and Cameron Rowland explore the lasting legacy of slavery in their works of art.
This is the first talk of the three-part series "John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art: Afro-Atlantic Histories," which gathers literary and visual artists to reflect on how art responds to and shapes both official and overlooked narratives wrought by the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies.
Watch the lecture: https://youtu.be/5n90V4Acg_w
Find out more about the John Wilmerding Symposium and Community Celebration: Afro-Atlantic Histories on our website: https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-afro-atlantic-histories.html
Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
More National Gallery of Art Content: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart Twitter: https://twitter.com/ngadc Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ngadc/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ngadc/_created/ E-News: https://nga.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e894a1837aca4526f7e8a11b3&id=2085ff9475
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Chalice Of The Abbot Suger Of Saint - Denis-Audio Description by National Gallery of Art
The Square of Saint Mark’s Venice, Canaletto-Audio Description by National Gallery of Art
Portrait Of My Grandmother, Archibald John Motley Jr.-Audio Description by National Gallery of Art
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, Turner-Audio Description by National Gallery of Art
Still Life With Peacock Pie, Pieter Claesz-Audio Description by National Gallery of Art
Elizabeth Alexander, poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, cultural advocate, and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, discuss their connections to Thomas’s life and work.
This conversation was filmed at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery while Alternative Worlds, a group exhibition featuring the work of Alma Thomas, was on view.
Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy Participate in the video premier, free virtual events, and in-person community events that celebrate the life and legacy of Alma W. Thomas. All events are free; registration is required. https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html
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ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
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Presentations on Thomas’s aesthetic and social environment by Melanee Harvey, Margie Jervis, Marya McQuirter, and Thaïsa Way, followed with discussion moderated by Charles Brock.
Melanee Harvey, assistant professor and coordinator of art history, Howard University, Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor, and American University Feminist Art History Conference session chair; Margie Jervis, artist and scenic designer, Creative Cauldron of Falls Church; Marya McQuirter, independent researcher, writer, curator, and scholar, faculty member, department of history and director of the Public History Collaborative (PHC) at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment at the University Libraries, curator of the dc1968 project, author of the African American Heritage Trail Guide, Washington, DC; and Thaïsa Way, program director of garden and landscape studies, Dumbarton Oaks. Moderated by Charles Brock, associate curator of American and British paintings, National Gallery of Art
Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy Participate in the video premier, free virtual events, and in-person community events that celebrate the life and legacy of Alma W. Thomas. All events are free; registration is required. https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html
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ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
More National Gallery of Art Content: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart Twitter: https://twitter.com/ngadc Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ngadc/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ngadc/_created/ E-News: https://nga.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e894a1837aca4526f7e8a11b3&id=2085ff9475
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The final session of American University’s Feminist Art History Conference, cohosted by the National Gallery, brings together distinguished curators to discuss contemporary issues in museum practice.
Lauren Haynes, Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Asma Naeem, chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Christine Sciacca, associate curator, European art 300–1400 CE, Walters Art Museum; and Christina Yu Yu, Matsutaro Shoriki Chair, Art of Asia, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Moderated by Mikka Gee Conway, chief, diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer and EEO director, National Gallery of Art. Held in collaboration with the National Gallery’s John Wilmerding Symposium on America Art and the traveling exhibition Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful.
In 1952, at age sixty-one, Thomas enrolled in graduate-level art history and painting coursework at American University to pursue “creative painting.” American University offers the Alma Thomas Award to an outstanding student studying painting.
For the Feminist Art History Conference, Melanee Harvey will chair a session titled ACTIVISM: MAKING SPACE and Jonathan Frederick Walz will present a lecture titled "Alma W. Thomas’s Moving Pictures."
Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy Participate in the video premier, free virtual events, and in-person community events that celebrate the life and legacy of Alma W. Thomas. All events are free; registration is required. https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html
Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks
ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
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Presentations on Thomas’s studio art training and involvement with galleries, museums, and universities by Renee Maurer, Nell Irvin Painter, and Rebecca VanDiver, followed with discussion moderated by Steven Nelson
Renee Maurer, associate curator, The Phillips Collection, and coordinating curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; Nell Irvin Painter, artist, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; and Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, Dean's Faculty Fellow (2019–2021), Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities (2020–2021), Vanderbilt University, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor. Moderated by Steven Nelson, dean, the Center (Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art
Celebrate Alma W. Thomas's Legacy Participate in the video premier, free virtual events, and in-person community events that celebrate the life and legacy of Alma W. Thomas. All events are free; registration is required. https://www.nga.gov/learn/adults/john-wilmerding-symposium-community-celebration-alma-thomas.html
Still haven’t subscribed to our YouTube channels? National Gallery of Art ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtUS National Gallery of Art | Talks ►►https://www.youtube.com/NationalGalleryofArtTalks
ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
More National Gallery of Art Content: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart Twitter: https://twitter.com/ngadc Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ngadc/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ngadc/_created/ E-News: https://nga.us4.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=e894a1837aca4526f7e8a11b3&id=2085ff9475
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Introduction by former First Lady Michelle Obama; poetry reading and discussion with Ross Gay; and virtual exhibition tour with Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz.
Ross Gay, poet, gardener, professor, department of English, Indiana University Bloomington, founding board member, Bloomington Community Orchard, co-founder, The Tenderness Project, and Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful catalog contributor; with Seth Feman, deputy director for art and interpretation and curator of photography, Chrysler Museum of Art, and exhibition curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful; and Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs and curator of American art, Columbus Museum of Art, exhibition curator for Alma W. Thomas: Everything is Beautiful, and American University Feminist Art History Conference session presenter
Working at the intersection of event and art, Mark Bradford explores social and political structures through large-scale abstract paintings created out of layered paper. Bradford’s reimagining of modernist art explores how historical analysis and research affect form. Discover how his map-like, multilayered paper collages provide an opportunity to think about power, representation, and marginalized communities.
Learn more about Bradford’s work Legendary in the National Gallery of Art collection: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-ob...
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ABOUT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.
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In her 2021 Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture, Terri Simone Francis reflects on Josephine Baker’s influence within the visual arts and theorizes Baker as both an international cultural figure and an African American film pioneer. Recent restorations of her films of the 1920s and 1930s have allowed her work to be seen in the context of recent cinema and media, indeed almost as recent cinema and media. In Francis’s view Baker exemplifies what author Toni Morrison called a “rememory”—a remembered memory. Francis’s study of Baker addresses absences and silences in film history, and she draws upon Morrison’s concept of rememory and Baker’s career to reconstruct the global beginnings of Black cinema. Ultimately, Francis is concerned with the film histories of the future, in which Black cinema history will be full of new unknowns, and believes that Baker’s authorship can inform new vocabularies of film thinking, film writing, and film feeling.
Watch the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAuXzd-ApuA
In this lecture, released on December 3, 2021, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), discusses her recent research and curatorial practices that affirm Indigenous representations. Dr. Norby shares her vision for and approaches to collecting, presenting, and interpreting Native American art at the Met and beyond.
Watch the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pesVJrxvTlY
In this lecture, released on November 5, 2021, Babette Bohn of Texas Christian University discusses women artists in early modern Italy. Early modern Bologna was exceptional for its many talented women artists. Thanks to a long-standing tradition of honoring accomplished women, several attentive artistic biographers, strong local interest in collecting women’s work, and permissive attitudes toward women studying with male artists who were not family members, Bologna was home to more women artists than any other city in early modern Italy. Bolognese women artists were unusual not only for their large numbers but also for their varied specializations and frequent public success. They painted altarpieces, nudes, mythologies, allegories, portraits, and self-portraits, creating sculptures, drawings, prints, embroidery, and paintings. This lecture challenges some common assumptions about women artists, suggesting productive approaches for future research.
This is the twenty-fifth annual lecture offered by the National Gallery of Art in this endowed series named after Sydney J. Freedberg (1914–1997), the great specialist of Italian art.
Watch he presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYqY9GCQpPM
In this program, award-winning koto player Yumi Kurosawa performs “Sakura” (Cherry Blossom) (traditional Japanese folk song), “Isuzugawa” (Michiyo Miyagi), “Rokudan” (Kengyo Yatsuhashi), Étude no. 3 in E Major, op. 10 (Frédéric Chopin), and her original compositions “Rapture,” “JB Transfer,” “OnedayMonday,” “Journey,” “Inner Space,” “Enchantmentica,” and “Susanoo.” Born and raised in Japan, Yumi Kurosawa began studying the koto at age three. She received first prize at the National Japanese Koto Competition for students in 1989 and 1992, and a scholarship from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan in 1998. Her extensive performances in Japan have included appearances at Suntory Hall in Tokyo and on NHK Broadcast TV. Since 2002, Kurosawa has been based in New York. She has toured in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Russia, and the United States. This concert was recorded at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, May 19, 2019.
In this program, pianist William Chapman Nyaho performs “Dances in the Canebrakes” (Florence Price), “Deep River” from Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, op. 59 No. 10 (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor), “Troubled Water” (Margaret Bonds), “Four Studies in African Rhythm” (Fred Onovwerosuoke), “Flowers in Sand” (Bongani Ndodana-Breen), “Three Jamaican Dances” (Oswald Russell), and Sonata no. 1, op. 22 (Alberto Ginastera). William Chapman Nyaho studied at Saint Peter’s College, Oxford University, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree. He has compiled and edited Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora, a five-volume graded anthology published by Oxford University Press. This concert was recorded at the National Gallery of Art on Wednesday, February 16, 2011.
Program: Between Worlds In this program you will hear mandolin player Avi Avital perform “Prelude and Allegro” (Fritz Kreisler), “Nacyem Nacyem” (traditional Turkish), Allegro Sonata in G Major (Johann Sebastian Bach), “Mi Yitneni Of” (traditional Israeli), Sarabande from Overture in the French Style, BWV 831 (J. S. Bach), “Improvisation” (Itamar Doari), “Giga” from Partita no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (J. S. Bach), folk themes from “Miniatures” based on Georgian folk themes (Sulkhan Tsintsadze), “Romanian Folk Dances” (Bela Bartok), “Sette Canzoni Popolari Spagnole” (Manuel de Falla), Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (Heitor Villa-Lobos), and Concerto in A Minor (Nikolai Budashkin). Acknowledged by the New York Times for his “exquisitely sensitive playing” and “stunning agility,” Grammy-nominated Avi Avital is one of the world’s most exciting and adventurous musicians. He is deeply committed to building a fresh legacy for the mandolin through virtuosic performance in a range of genres and to commissioning new works for mandolin. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, March 6, 2016.
In this program you will hear Spanish guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas perform songs in the joropo and samba styles, including “Five Preludes” (by Heitor Villa-Lobos), “Passeio no Rio” (by Luiz Bonfá), “Alma llanera” (by Pedro Elías Gutiérrez), “Tango en Skaï” (by Roland Dyens), “Un sueño en la Floresta” (by Agustín Barrios Mangoré), selections from West Side Story (by Leonard Bernstein), and “Seis por Derecho” (by Antonio Lauro). Critics have hailed Sáinz Villegas as one of the world’s leading classical guitarists and as a natural ambassador of Spanish culture. Since his auspicious debut with the New York Philharmonic under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Sáinz Villegas has performed in more than 40 countries. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, September 18, 2016.
In this program, you will hear the Fisk Jubilee Singers perform “Way Over in Egypt Land” (arr. John W. Work III), “Run Mourner, Run” (arr. John W. Work III), “Old Time Religion” (arr. Moses Hogan), “There Is a Balm in Gilead” (arr. William L. Dawson), “Poor Man Laz’rus” (arr. Jester Hairston), “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (arr. Paul T. Kwami), “Daniel! Daniel! Servant of the Lord” (arr. Undine S. Moore), “Mr. Banjo” (arr. Moses Hogan), “Let the Church Roll On” (arr. John W. Work III), “Jubilee! Jubilee!” (arr. John W. Work III), “My Lord Is So High” (arr. Noah F. Ryder), “There’s a Meeting Here Tonight” (arr. R. Nathaniel Dett), “Do Lord Remember Me” (arr. John W. Work III), “Rise, Shine for Thy Light Is A-Comin’” (arr. John W. Work III), and “There’s a Great Camp Meeting” (arr. John W. Work III). The Fisk Jubilee Singers are vocal artists and students at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, who sing and travel worldwide. The original Jubilee Singers introduced “slave songs” to the world in 1871 and were instrumental in preserving this unique American musical tradition known today as Negro spirituals. The group broke racial barriers in the United States and abroad in the late nineteenth century and entertained kings and queens in Europe. At the same time, they raised money in support of their beloved university. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, January 17, 2016.
In this program, you will hear the Dalí Quartet perform String Quartet no. 3 in E-flat Major (Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga), String Quartet no. 1, op. 20 (Alberto Ginastera), Four for Tango (Astor Piazzolla), La oración del torero, op. 34 (Joaquín Turina), Puente Trans-Arábico (Ricardo Lorenz), Camerata en Guaguancó (Guido López-Gavilán), Rico Melao: Preludio, Danzón y Cha-cha-chá * (Jorge Mazón).
The Dalí Quartet brings its signature mix of Latin American, classical, and romantic repertoire to stages and audiences of all kinds. The musicians’ passionate energy is poured into everything they do, generating critical and audience acclaim. Their tours include appearances at distinguished chamber music and cultural centers in the United States, Canada, and South America. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, October 15, 2017.
Program: Adío España: Romances, Villancicos, and Improvisations of Spain, circa 1500 Founded in 1980 to perform the instrumental music of Shakespeare’s time, the Baltimore Consort has explored early English, Scottish, and French popular music, focusing on the relationship between folk and art song and dance. Its members’ interest in early music of English and Scottish heritage has also led the group to delve into the rich trove of traditional music preserved in North America. In this program, you will hear the Baltimore Consort perform Morena me llaman (Anonymous Sephardic), Avrix me galanica (Anonymous Sephardic), ¿Qu’es de ti, desconsolado? (Juan del Encina), Levanta, Pascual (Juan del Encina), Recercada La Spagna (Diego Ortiz), Danza Alta (Francisco de la Torre), Ora baila tú (Anonymous), Calabaça, No sé, buen amor (Anonymous), Tu madre cuando te parió (Anonymous Sephardic), Yo me soy la morenica(Anonymous), Tiento (Alonso Mudarra), Triste ‘stava el rey David (Alonso Mudarra), Ríu, ríu, chiu (Anonymous), Una sañosa porfía (Juan del Encina), La mañana de Sant Juan (Diego Pisador), Tres Morillas (Anonymous), Morenica, dame un beso (Miguel de Fuenllana), Di, perra mora (Pedro Guerrero), Sagaleja del Casar (Anonymous), Cucú, Cucú, Cucucú (Juan del Encina), Quinta pars (sobre Ruggiero) (Diego Ortiz), Recercada primera (sobre el passamezzo antiguo) (Diego Ortiz), Recercada segunda (sobre el passamezzo moderno) (Diego Ortiz), Ay, triste que vengo (Juan del Encina), Oy comamos y bebamos (Juan del Encina). This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, December 14, 2014.
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts will focus on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this sixth and final lecture, “Alienation,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 30, 2021, Roberts explores the intricate and often counterintuitive effort of creating matrices for printing (woodblocks, copperplates, etc.) has been a form of invisible labor for centuries. How do we think about the relationship between the time and skill put into the matric and the value of the image in generates? (Or: where does all the time go?) This final lecture investigates the misregistration of time in print, especially in terms of the conflicts—and convergences—between slow and fast media that are frequently staged in contemporary printmaking.
In an improvised musical conversation, jazz bassist Christian McBride introduces himself to David. Connecting over McBride’s walking bass line, they meet David’s friends, splash by the fire hydrant, play stickball. Through David, McBride recalls his own childlike innocence.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/christian-mcbride-roy-decarava-david.html
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Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this fifth lecture, “Interference,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 23, 2021, Roberts explores how the layering of images in printmaking, especially when grids and regular linework are involved, often results in the emergence of interference or moiré patterns. While printers usually work hard to keep these disruptive eruptions at bay, some artists have cultivated them, allowing unruly patterns to emerge from the combination of seemingly rational image layers. Moiré patterns also bring printmaking into conversation with the sound arts, which are built on the same waves, frequencies, and beats that are used to describe print interference.
Program: The Three Cs: Cage, Cowell, Crumb—Pioneers of the Avant-Garde Piano
In this program you will hear the Singaporean pianist Margaret Leng Tan perform The Perilous Night (John Cage), The Tides of Manaunaun (Henry Cowell), Aeolian Harp (Henry Cowell), The Banshee (Henry Cowell), Advertisement (Henry Cowell), and Metamorphoses, Book I (George Crumb). Acclaimed by the New Yorker as a diva in the art of playing the piano, Tan herself is a major force in the American avant-garde who embraces theater, choreography, and performance in her work. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, May 7, 2017.
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this fourth lecture, “Strain,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 16, 2021, Roberts explores how many modern printmaking processes involve passing ink or light through screens or meshes, especially when converting continuous-tone photographs into printable formats. These processes create the conditions in which most exchanges between the ink-world of print and the light-world of photography take place, and also link the practice of making images to a long history of straining, sifting refining, and filtering in material and political realms beyond the art world.
Composer Nathalie Joachim sees her childhood memories in May Flowers. The photograph also evokes the uniquely spiritual experience of recording a church choir in her family’s Haitian village. Joachim has lovingly woven their song into her composition.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/nathalie-joachim-carrie-mae-weems-may-flowers.html
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Program: Solstice: Darkness Is Your Candle In this program you will hear East of the River perform “Groong” (Komitas Vardapet), “Achot Ktana” (Moroccan), “Lama bada” (Andalusian), “Adío Querida” (Sephardic), Sandansko Horo (Bulgarian), Solstice (Shane Shanahan), Petrone (English), Makedonsko Sedenka (Macedonian), Belasicko Horo (Bulgarian), Bučimiš (Bulgarian), “Slide Dance” (Ara Dinkjian), and “Hija Mia” (Sephardic Song). East of the River was founded by internationally renowned recorder players Nina Stern and Daphna Mor. The project explores gems of the European classical repertory together with haunting melodies and virtuosic dances of traditions to the East, arranged and interpreted by musicians whose backgrounds include classical, jazz, and world music. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Saturday, December 21, 2019.
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this third lecture, “Separation,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 9, 2021, Roberts explores how in printmaking, color must be broken down and reassembled through separation, layering, sequencing, and registration. Most color prints are, in essence, piles of broken color: stratified, even geological affairs that bear little relation to the fluid spontaneity that is often associated with color in other media. Thinking through color separation suggests new models of the image as a structure of assembly and risk and opens a space for examining the intersection of print and critical race theory.
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this second lecture, “Reversal,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on May 2, 2021, Roberts explores how every predigital print process produces some form of reversal—the entire history of printing is based on the reversal of information. Making prints thus requires a certain backwardness; the capacity to imagine things from the other side is compulsory. This is especially true for artists using text. An attunement to reversibility allows for unique ways of exploring communication and confrontation in bodily space.
Musician Rafiq Bhatia feels compelled to capture his improvisations—fleeting moments of sound—in recordings. Like sound, light is transient. But James Turrell’s works, which inspired Bhatia’s composition, contain and present light, allowing us to forge a deeper relationship with an ephemeral substance.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/rafiq-bhatia-james-turrell-new-light.html.
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Program: Si Otsedoha (We’re Still Here)
This program features the Cherokee Chamber Singers performing Si Otsedoha (We’re Still Here) (William Brittelle), “Amazing Grace” (Traditional), and “Shoshone Love Song” (“The Heart’s Friend”) (Traditional Native American) with Winston-Salem Symphony musicians and soprano Jodi Burns. Telling the remarkable story of the Eastern Band of Cherokee through powerful vocals that express the tribe’s unique and vibrant history, the chamber singers are from Cherokee High School in Cherokee, North Carolina. Their director is Michael Yannette. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, November 24, 2019.
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. In this six-part lecture series Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, Roberts focuses on printmaking as an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces—a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. In this first lecture, “Pressure,” premiered on the National Gallery’s website on April 25, 2021, Roberts explores how a print is an image transferred, under pressure, between two surfaces in direct physical contact. Every print is the record of a contact event: pressure followed by release. This makes print an especially subtle medium for exploring alternative models of the sensory image and for working through the social continuum of touch, from intimacy to violence.
Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer describes the East Building as a work of art that does what music does: invites you in—to inhabit, explore, and be among others. He responds with pieces that balance pattern and structure with leaving room to wander.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/vijay-iyer-im-pei-east-building.html.
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In this program you will hear the U.S. Army Chorus and Brass Quintet perform Fanfare for a Festival (Ron Nelson), “O Jesu Christ Meins Lebens Licht” (Johann Sebastian Bach), “Ain’t-a That Good News” (William Dawson), “Now Look Away” (Norman Merrifield), “Keep in the Middle of the Road” (Marshall Bartholomew), “Soon-Ah Will Be Done” (William Dawson), selections from the Marriage of Figaro (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), “Simple Gifts” (Aaron Copland), “Buccinate in neomenia tuba” (Giovanni Gabrieli), “My Spirit Be Joyful” (Johann Sebastian Bach), Second Prelude (George Gershwin), “Blue Bells of Scotland” (Arthur Pryor), “Ubi Caritas” (Ola Gjeilo), “Lux Arumque” (Eric Whitacre), “Mansions of the Lord” (Nick Glennie-Smith and Randall Wallace), “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Julia Ward Howe), and “God Bless America” (Irving Berlin).
The U.S. Army Brass Quintet has gained a reputation as one of the most highly respected and sought after groups of its kind. The ensemble has appeared before audiences and dignitaries in 48 states and 14 foreign countries. An element of the U.S. Army Band “Pershing’s Own” in Washington, DC, the U.S. Army Brass Quintet has performed at the White House, presidential inaugurations, and official state ceremonies in the nation’s capital. The chorus has participated in the presidential library dedication ceremonies for Gerald R. Ford, Ronald W. Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and performed in memorial ceremonies honoring significant events in our country’s history including at the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the National World War II Memorial, and the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, March 20, 2016.
Composer/producer Emily Wells sees us as the buffalo: frozen before downfall, but still alive—which is why she includes so much breath in her song. Wells, whose work deals with the climate crisis, looks to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism for lessons.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/emily-wells-david-wojnarowicz.html.
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In this program you will hear the Janoska Ensemble perform “Die Fledermaus Overture a la Janoska” (Overture of the operetta Die Fledermaus); “Those Were the Days” (Dorogoi dlinnoju, Le temps des fleurs, Den langen Weg entlang) (Johann Strauss II/Boris Fomin); “Love’s Sorrow” (Fritz Kreisler/ Sergei Rachmaninoff); “Musette pour Fritz” (Homage for Fritz Kreisler) (František Janoska); “Thais Meditation” (Meditation from the opera Thaïs) (Jules Massenet); Carmen Fantasie (Georges Bizet/ Franz Waxman); “Adios Nonino” (Astor Piazzolla); “Melodie for Melody” (Roman Janoska); “Rumba for Amadeus” (Piano Concerto no. 20 in D minor, KV466, Allegro, Main Theme) (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/František Janoska); “Tarantella vs. Niška Banja” (Introduction et Tarantella, op. 43 / Niška Banja) (Pablo de Sarasate/Serbian Traditional); and “Paganinoska” (Caprice no. 24) (Niccolo Paganini). The four musicians of the Janoska Ensemble are brothers Ondrej, Roman, and František Janoska and their brother-in-law Julius Darvas. Their vision for the modern interpretation of works—the Janoska Style—is both virtuosic and profoundly personal. United by family ties and always rooted in classical music, their repertoire ranges from popular classics to their own compositions and unique arrangements of jazz, pop, and world music. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, March 11, 2018.
Stanley Nelson, documentary filmmaker and cofounder, Firelight Media, and Marcia Smith, writer, film producer, president and cofounder, Firelight Media
In 2000, Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith founded Firelight Media, a nonprofit production company dedicated to using historical film to advance contemporary social justice causes. Through initiatives like the flagship Documentary Lab, Firelight Media’s programming has expanded to mentor, inspire, and train a new generation of diverse young filmmakers committed to elevating underrepresented stories. Firelight also builds impact campaigns to connect documentaries to audiences and social justice advocates. Under Smith’s leadership, Firelight received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2016.
Nelson is a documentary filmmaker whose work combines compelling narratives with rich and deeply researched historical detail, shining new light on both familiar and underexplored aspects of the American past. In addition to honors for individual films, Nelson and his body of work have garnered every major award in the industry, such as the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2002), the National Humanities Medal (2013), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (2016).
As a writer and film producer, Smith has been the recipient of a Primetime Emmy nomination for writing (2003), the Writers Guild Award for best nonfiction writing (2004), the Muse Award for New York Women in Film and Television (2016), and a Luminary Award from BlackStar Film Festival (2019), among others.
In this conversation recorded on September 24, 2020, as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series, Nelson and Smith discuss their own mentors and influences, their collaborative practice, and how Firelight has become a premier destination for nonfiction cinema by and about communities of color.
When her sister was dying, composer Kamala Sankaram was drawn to Mark Rothko’s painting: it both captured her grief and calmed her. That experience influenced Sankaram’s approach to creating a musical score, which she shares in this episode.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/kamala-sankaram-mark-rothko.html.
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Introductory remarks by Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Lonnie G. Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; conversation with artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems, moderated by Sarah Workneh, codirector of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and Q&A joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw
Kaywin Feldman and Lonnie G. Bunch III introduce this artist conversation held on September 17, 2020, as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, A Tribute to David C. Driskell. Moderated by Sarah Workneh, artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Curlee Raven Holton, Keith Morrison, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Jefferson Pinder, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems gather to discuss Driskell’s impact on their own practices as artists and teachers. During a public Q&A, the artists are joined by scholars Valerie Cassel Oliver, Julie L. McGee, and Alvia J. Wardlaw, who prerecorded symposium tributes. This fourth annual symposium was held in partnership with the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. This program was made possible by a grant from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
Program: Viajes Latinos (Latin voyages) In this program you will hear the Sphinx Virtuosi and the Catalyst Quartet perform Libertango (Astor Piazzolla), Metro Chabacano (Javier Álvarez Fuentes), Prélude Ibérique (César Espejo), Bachianas Brasileiras, Aria no. 5 (Heitor Villa-Lobos), La Muerte del Ángel (Astor Piazzolla), Last Round (Osvaldo Golijov), and Finale Furioso from Concerto per Corde, op. 33 (Alberto Ginastera). The Sphinx Virtuosi, led by the Catalyst Quartet, is one of the nation’s most dynamic professional chamber orchestras. Eighteen of the nation’s top Black and Latinx classical soloists—all alumni of the internationally renowned Sphinx Competition—come together each fall to reach new audiences as cultural ambassadors. The New York Times raved about this unique ensemble’s debut at Carnegie Hall in December 2004. Describing the performance as “first-rate in every way,” Allan Kozinn noted that “the ensemble produced a more beautiful, precise, and carefully shaped sound than some fully professional orchestras that come through Carnegie Hall in the course of the year.” This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Saturday, October 8, 2016.
Hip-hop artist Jasiri X looks at Kerry James Marshall’s woodcut almost like he’s looking into a mirror. It captures the experience of a Black man: resilient but restrained from being his authentic self. Jasiri responds to the work through two songs that reflect on his internal struggle.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/jasiri-x-untitled-man.html.
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Teju Cole, artist, curator, novelist, photography critic for New York Times Magazine (2015–2019), and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing, Harvard University, in conversation with Fazal Sheikh, artist and Artist-in-Residence at the Princeton Environmental Institute, Princeton University Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975. The son of Nigerian parents, he was raised in Lagos. He returned to the US to complete a BA at Kalamazoo College in Michigan followed by studies in art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as well as at Columbia University. Cole’s work examines race, gender, migration, culture, and privilege. Born in New York City in 1965, Fazal Sheikh earned his BA from Princeton University in 1987 and has since worked as a photographer documenting the lives of individuals in displaced and marginalized communities. Upon witnessing an increase in xenophobia and authoritarian politics on a global scale, Sheikh turned to Cole for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to a compassionate global community and to the importance of individual courage. Through Cole’s words and Sheikh’s photos in the resulting book, Human Archipelago (Steidl, 2018), we are confronted with fundamental and pressing questions of coexistence. Their work asks us to consider, “Who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me?”
In 2020 Cole and Sheikh created a free, online version of Human Archipelago. Amidst a devastating pandemic and uprisings against racial injustice, its questions are more relevant than ever. In this conversation, recorded on January 19, 2021, Cole and Sheikh discuss their collaborative efforts “to find a new way of speaking to the startling reappearance of some very old problems.”
The National Gallery has been honored to present The Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography since 2016 with the support of the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation. The National Gallery is thrilled to share that the Newman Foundation, which has funded the series annually since its inaugural offering, endowed it with a major gift in 2020 in order to make such conversations available to the public for years to come. We are deeply grateful for the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation’s generosity.
Program: To Travel Is to Live Trio con Brio Copenhagen performs Three Songs from the Hjertets Melodier (Edvard Grieg), Piano Trio in F Major, op. 42 (Niels W. Gade), Piano Trio no. 2 in C Minor, op. 66 (Felix Mendelssohn), and Piano Trio in A Minor, op. 50 (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky). Trio con Brio Copenhagen is considered one of the finest piano trios performing today. Founded in Vienna in 1999, the trio is now based in Copenhagen and tours extensively worldwide. They have gained a reputation for their fresh and contemporary approach to the core repertoire of piano trios. This concert was recorded at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, February 18, 2018.
Nam June Paik used Ommah, Korean for “mother,” as the title of his final video sculpture. For composer and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon, this evokes the mother tongue and the motherland. Through the concept of cultural blood memory, Yoon explores whether we carry the sounds and memories of our people within us. She responds to Paik’s work by bringing together traditional Korean instruments and her own eclectic electronic music.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/bora-yoon-and-ommah.html.
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Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain sees pain, legacy, and enduring hope in this famous photograph of Ella Watson, one of many by Gordon Parks. Performance poet Lady Caress describes it as “the physical form of stolen expectations.” Together, they respond to the iconic photograph with a combination of music and poetry. In the ebb and flow of his composition, DBR hopes to capture the rhythm of Watson’s life—an elegy for someone he longs to have known.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/daniel-bernard-roumain-american-gothic.html.
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Art meets us where we are. For classical pianist and activist Lara Downes, Romare Bearden’s collage parallels her own life and family story: a puzzle full of questions and unfinished business. On her journey inside Bearden’s work, Downes travels backward to explore Black memory. In response to the collage, she brings together different musical sources, overlaying sounds that sit together comfortably at times and create tension at others, giving them the freedom to coexist.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts/lara-downes-and-tomorrow-i-may-be-far-away.html.
Subscribe directly to Sound Thoughts on Art from the National Gallery of Art on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/national-gallery-of-art-sound-thoughts-on-art/id1552618916), Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmdhLmdvdi9jb250ZW50L2RhbS9uZ2F3ZWIvcG9kY2FzdHMvc291bmQtdGhvdWdodHMtb24tYXJ0LnhtbA?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwjo6LeS5-HuAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBA), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/7cyalz9GPgPLAsjy4rJ4hQ?si=4jMH4x8nTY6xdrUUGHn46A), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/show/sound-thoughts-on-art), or your favorite podcast app (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NGAT6207729686).
Joel Fan performs tango for piano: Vem cá, branquinha (Ernesto Nazareth), Chôros no. 5 (Heitor Villa-Lobos), Troubled Water (Margaret Bonds), La nuit du destin (Dia Succari), Sonata no. 31 in A-flat Major, op. 110 (Ludwig van Beethoven), Sonata no. 5, op. 53 (Aleksandr Scriabin), Three Piano Pieces op. 11 (Arnold Schönberg), and Piano Sonata no. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 35 (Frédéric Chopin). Joel Fan is an acclaimed pianist who combines virtuosity with a gift for lyricism. He began his performing career with the New York Philharmonic and has since appeared in recital and with orchestras throughout the world. This concert was recorded at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, June 5, 2011.
The arts can engage all our senses, but it’s in the crossover between them that things really get interesting. When we listen to music, what do we see in our mind’s eye? When we look at a work of art, what do we hear? Sound Thoughts on Art, a new podcast from the National Gallery of Art, explores the intersection of sight and sound.
Hosted by musician and journalist Celeste Headlee, each episode focuses on a work of art in the National Gallery’s collection. Learn about the work and its context and hear a musician respond to that work through sound, creating a dialogue between visual art and music. Sound Thoughts on Art tells the stories of how we experience art and how it connects us.
Find full transcripts and more information about this episode at https://www.nga.gov/music-programs/podcasts.html.
Subscribe directly to Sound Thoughts on Art from the National Gallery of Art on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/national-gallery-of-art-sound-thoughts-on-art/id1552618916), Google Podcasts (https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubmdhLmdvdi9jb250ZW50L2RhbS9uZ2F3ZWIvcG9kY2FzdHMvc291bmQtdGhvdWdodHMtb24tYXJ0LnhtbA?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwjo6LeS5-HuAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBA), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/7cyalz9GPgPLAsjy4rJ4hQ?si=4jMH4x8nTY6xdrUUGHn46A), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/show/sound-thoughts-on-art), or your favorite podcast app (https://feeds.megaphone.fm/NGAT6207729686).
David Bomford (former conservation chair, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and 2018 Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses the importance of Édouard Manet’s The Railway (1873), painted at a pivotal moment both in the artist’s life and for the city of Paris. Identifying the setting and the sitters in the painting as well as Manet’s innovations in painting technique, Professor Bomford shares what makes this painting one he most admires in the collection.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet and PhD in Law candidate, Yale Law School; Candice C. Jones, president and CEO, Public Welfare Foundation of Washington, DC; Richard Ross, artist and Distinguished Research Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara
In a previously recorded conversation, artist Richard Ross; Candice C. Jones, president and CEO of Public Welfare Foundation; and poet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts discuss the role of the arts in eliciting, supporting, perhaps demanding social change. Together, as activists and artists, they unpack the complex interplay between art, institutions, and advocacy. An award-winning memoirist and poet, Betts has written extensively on the American legal and justice system, telling his own stories of injustice and bringing to light those of others. He conceptualized and brought to life—through a joint partnership with Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory and support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—the Million Book Project, which will distribute a curated 500-book collection to 1,000 medium- and maximum-security prisons across every state. “the artifice of justice” is a phrase from Betts’s poem titled “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,” published in Felon: poems. Prior to Jones’s work leading the Public Welfare Foundation, which aims to build a justice system that is community led, restorative, and racially just, she served as director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, pushing major reforms to reduce the number of youth in state custody. Jones, as a White House Fellow, created the strategy that restored access to Pell grants to youth and adults in correctional settings. Award-winning artist Ross created Juvenile-in-Justice, a collection of photographs, interviews, audio documents, and texts created over a dozen years, drawn from the lives of more than 1,000 incarcerated kids. The project humanizes the statistics about children in the justice system and tells their stories. Relying on their experiences, Betts, Jones, and Ross describe how art can facilitate change by shifting the imagination and enabling others to be understood anew. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography.
Mary Kelly, artist and Judge Widney Professor in the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, in conversation with Shelley Langdale, curator and head of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art
Mary Kelly is a conceptual artist and writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. For four decades she has explored ideas concerning identity, sexuality, history, and memory through large-scale narrative installations. Kelly has been a central figure in discussions of feminism in art, and her practice incorporates the personal residue and material processes of daily life that inform her political reflections.
Kelly, who was engaged in feminist theory and the women’s movement, began her critique of conceptualism after moving to London in 1968, at the height of the student movements and civil unrest throughout Europe. Her ground-breaking series Post-Partum Document (1973-1979), which explores the intimate relationship between a mother and her child, caused a media frenzy when it opened at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1976.
In the 1990s, Kelly turned to issues surrounding war, which led to her investigation of the nature of collective memory. During this time, she developed the innovative medium of compressed lint with embedded text that she used to create My James (2008), which the National Gallery of Art acquired in 2018. This outsized postcard (measuring nearly seven feet wide) is from a suite of three, each addressed to one of the American civils rights workers—James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—whom the Ku Klux Klan murdered in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. On June 15, 2020, during the Gallery’s annual Elson Lecture, Kelly presented an overview of her career and discussed her artistic practice with Shelley Langdale.
This presentation was recorded early in the pandemic, which impacted the audio quality.
American film director, writer, and producer Julie Dash is a member of the L.A. Rebellion, a generation of African and African American artists who studied at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. These young filmmakers crafted a new Black cinema—an alternative to the classical Hollywood canon. Dash discusses her early life in New York City and her involvement with the art and politics of filmmaking through her association with the Studio Museum of Harlem, a connection that ultimately led to her participation in the L.A. Rebellion. Her 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust, a fictionalized retelling of her father’s Gullah family roots, became the first full-length film directed by an African American woman to obtain general theatrical release in the United States.
In this lecture, released on October 30, 2020, Megan Holmes of the University of Michigan discusses the handled surfaces of panel paintings. Collections of Italian Renaissance panel paintings were in many cases assembled through a process of connoisseurial evaluation. The National Gallery of Art collection is no exception: a number of the paintings passed that evaluative scrutiny in spite of surface damage in the form of intentional scratches—noted in later conservation reports as “vandalism.” Defacement and disfiguration are, in fact, fairly common features of panel paintings, but they are rarely mentioned in art-historical accounts. The paintings, once installed in religious, domestic, and civic spaces in Renaissance Italy, were acted upon and transformed by the people who encountered and used them in their daily lives. The recovery of representational scratches provides a timely opportunity to tell the history of Italian Renaissance art differently, revealing the complex earlier “lives” of paintings in the hands of beholders.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
The 2020 summer series of lectures presented by the education division explores the theme of Staycation. Many of us may be spending this summer close to home, but we can still dream and learn about beautiful places. In these talks, Gallery lecturers will present a tour of six of the world’s great cities.
Few regions of Europe can rival the French Riviera’s combination of magical light, mild climate, colorful landscapes, and living history. Long a magnet for foreign artists—including Monet, Renoir, Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall—the Côte d’Azur and its scenery, people, and traditions have inspired some of modern art’s most iconic paintings and sculptures. In this lecture, recorded on DAY, 2020, senior lecturer David Gariff discusses the historical significance and impact of the French Riviera on 20th-century art, examining the inspiration artists found in locations such as Nice, Saint-Tropez, and Collioure.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
The 2020 summer series of lectures presented by the education division explores the theme of Staycation. Many of us may be spending this summer close to home, but we can still dream and learn about beautiful places. In these talks, Gallery lecturers will present a tour of six of the world’s great cities. Milan, Italy, is very much a tale of two cities—one that looks back to an illustrious past, while the other celebrates its present and reinvents itself for the future. In this first lecture in the series, recorded on July 23, 2020, senior lecturer David Gariff presents a survey of the city’s rich history and explores some of its contributions to politics, economics, religion, art, literature, music, architecture, fashion, and design. Milan’s native-born and temporary residents included at various times Saint Ambrose, Leonardo da Vinci, and Giuseppe Verdi, to name only a few. In 2020, Milan announced an ambitious scheme to carry the city into a new future, stressing sustainability and the reimagining of urban living in a post-pandemic world. This talk examines the dynamic city, from its ancient roots through its contemporary style.
이 그림에서 제임스 맥닐 휘슬러는 여러 가지 흰색 색상을 이용하여 재미있는 공간적, 공식적 관계를 만들어냈습니다. 색상 선정을 제한하고, 색조의 대비를 최소화하고, 각도를 예리하게 왜곡함으로써 형태를 편평하게 하고 형태의 추상적 패턴을 강조하였습니다. 이렇게 극적인 구도의 접근법은 국제 무역 증가로 파리에서 널리 알려지고 있던 일본 판화의 영향을 반영합니다. 휘슬러는 연인인 조애나 히퍼넌을 모델로 똑 같은 모습을 그려내는 것보다 추상적인 디자인을 만들어내는 데 더 큰 관심이 있었습니다. 순수하게 심미적인 방향과 “예술을 위한 예술” 창작에 대한 그의 급격한 지지는 모더니즘의 구호가 되었습니다.
늙은 음악가에는 파리의 잡다한 도시 빈민이 등장합니다. 너덜너덜한 신사 모자를 쓴 넝마주이, 터번을 쓴 남자, 방랑 음악가와 어린 애 셋이 나오는데 한 아이는 아기를 안고 있습니다. 이 사람들은 불확실한 배경에 등장하는데, 이곳은 리틀 폴란드라고 알려진 파리 변두리에 있는 한 슬럼이라고 알려졌습니다. 오스망 남작이 주도하는 파리의 현대화 과정에서 내몰린 사람들을 에두아르 마네가 이토록 대단한 규모로 그려낸 것은 사회 논평의 요소를 도입한 것으로 보입니다. 하지만 인물들 사이의 상호작용 결핍과 설정의 모호성으로 이 작품은 전통적 서술 양식이 빠져 있으며 궁극적인 의미가 난해해졌습니다.
쇼 기념비는 19세기 미국 최고의 조각가로 명성을 얻었습니다. 미술관에 있는 작품은 보스턴에 위치한 원본 청동 기념비에서 주조하여 만든 것입니다. 이 기념비는 북군에 지원하였던 남북전쟁의 첫 흑인 병사 연대 중 하나인 매사추세츠 지원 보병 54연대의 용맹한 활약을 기념하는 것입니다. 이 연대는 1863년 1월 1일 아브라함 링컨이 노예해방을 선언한 직후 모집되었습니다. 위대한 웅변가인 프레드릭 더글라스와 같은 지도자들에게 고무되어 여러 주에서 지원병들이 찾아왔습니다. 더글라스의 아들도 제54연대에 임대하였습니다. 연대장은 헌신된 백인 폐지론 자의 하바드 출신 아들인 25세의 로버트 굴드 쇼였습니다.
윈슬로우 호머는 1866-1867년 유럽으로 긴 여행을 다녀온 뒤, 야외 풍경을 그리는 흥미를 갖게 되었습니다. 이것은 구스타브 쿠르베, 에두아르 마네, 클로드 모네와 같은 현대 프랑스 화가들의 영향이 컸습니다. 미국으로 돌아온 뒤 호머는 스포츠와 레크리에이션의 생동감 넘치는 장면에 관심을 가지게 되었고, 따뜻하고 남북전쟁 후에 더욱 소박하고 순수한 미국에 대한 향수가 만연한 사회에 잘 맞는 매력적인 이미지를 그렸습니다. 바람이 불어오니, 즉 순풍은 국가가 100년을 맞은 해에 완성되었는데 19세기 미국에서 가장 유명하고 사랑 받는 예술적 이미지로 꼽히게 되었습니다.
토마스 콜의 유명한 네 편짜리 연작은 인생의 강을 따라 여행하는 원형적 영웅의 여정을 좇아갑니다. 여행자는 젊음의 포부에 대한 상징인 몽환적 성에 도달하려고 대담하게 분투를 벌입니다. 여행자가 목적지에 다다랐을 때, 언제나 사납게 요동치는 강물은 그를 자연의 노여움과 사악한 악마, 자기 회의의 위협 쪽으로 거칠게 떠밀어 보냅니다. 이 시리즈는 오직 기도만이 여행자를 어두운 운명에서 구원할 수 있음을 암시합니다. 콜의 용감무쌍한 여행자는 발달 단계에서 청소년기에 놓인 미국의 의인화된 모습으로도 이해됩니다. 화가는 명백한 운명을 찾아 과열된 도전에 사로잡힌 사람들에게 심각한 경고를 보내고 있는 것 같습니다. 걷잡을 수 없는 서부개척과 산업화는 인간과 자연 모두에게 비극적 결과를 줄 수 있다는 경고입니다.
1778년 왕립미술원에서 왓슨과 상어가 전시되었을 때 센세이션을 일으켰는데, 부분적으로는 이렇게 끔찍한 주제가 전혀 생소했기 때문입니다. 1749년 14세 브룩 왓슨은 하바나 항구에서 헤엄치다가 상어의 공격을 받았습니다. 이 대단히 충격적인 사건에 대한 존 싱글톤 코플리의 회화 기록에는 선원 아홉 명이 소년을 도우러 달려갔음을 보여주는데, 피로 물든 물은 소년이 오른쪽 발목을 방금 잃었음을 나타냅니다. 불안에 가득 찬 구조자들의 표정과 행동은 허우적거리는 동행에 대한 염려와 함께 자신의 위험에 대해 점점 실감하게 됨을 모두 드러냅니다. 기적적으로, 왓슨은 구조되었고 성공적인 상인이자 정치가로 성장했습니다.
구름 사이로 달빛이 쏟아져내려 하늘과 수면을 비춥니다. 넓은 수면 위에 반사되는 달빛을 그린 두꺼운 임파스토(두껍게 붙어있는 물감)가 하늘의 광채에 견줄 만 하며, 빛의 점진적 변화가 강력하고 현기증 나는 소용돌이를 만들어냅니다. 오른쪽으로는 평저선 선원들과 강을 따라 석탄을 옮기는 시커멓고 바닥이 납작한 평저선들이 횃불의 주황 하양 불꽃과 대비하여 실루엣으로 보입니다. 석탄은 더 큰 선박으로 운반됩니다. 왼편 선박 뒤쪽으로, 화가는 회색 물감과 가느다란 선 몇 개로 저 멀리 보이는 공장과 배들을 암시하였습니다.
편안함과 조화로움의 즐거운 정서가 사진과 맞먹는 선명함으로 이 풍경화 전반에 느껴집니다. 찬란한 햇살과 시원한 그늘이 있는 넓은 공간, 삐뚤삐뚤 늘어선 울타리, 그리고 나무와 초원, 강물의 균형은 실제 공간을 화가가 창의적으로 합성하였음을 보여줍니다. 존 컨스터블의 정확한 붓놀림은 동물과 새, 사람에서 잘 나타나며, 이런 작은 세부 요소에 중요성을 부여합니다. 이 시골 지역 풍경에 대한 화가의 깊고 강렬한 애착은 그의 작품에 지속적인 요소이며, 그의 습작과 스케치북들은 자신의 시골 고향의 회화적 요소에 흠뻑 매료되었음을 보여줍니다.
히에로니무스 보스가 그린 이 패널화는 구두쇠의 영원한 운명이 정해지기 직전, 구두쇠 인생의 마지막 순간을 보여줍니다. 침대 커튼 아래에서 작은 괴물이 고개를 내밀고 구두쇠를 황금 주머니로 유혹하는 한편, 천사 하나가 오른편에서 무릎을 꿇고 창문에 달려있는 십자가상을 영접하라고 촉구합니다. 죽음은 화살을 쥐고 왼쪽으로 들어옵니다. 선과 악의 대조가 그림 전체에 들어 있습니다. 침대 캐노피 위에 있는 악마는 지옥불이 들어있는 랜턴을 들고 있으면서 한 줄기 신성한 빛을 뿜는 십자가와 균형을 이룹니다.
장 자크 루소의 저술에 영향으로, 18세기 자연에 대한 감성적 호감이 이 그림에 스며들어 있습니다. 공원 같은 배경에서, 후작부인의 드레스에 장미 꽃송이들이 장식되어 있고, 부인은 우아함을 의식하며 카네이션을 들고 있습니다. 예술적으로 손질한 헤어스타일과 넓은 챙의 모자는 영국에서 건너온 것으로 보이는 최신 유행을 나타냅니다. 그림의 엷은 톤은 스페인 예술에서 최후기 로코코 양식을 반영하는 한편, 전체적으로 푸른 은회색의 색조는 또한 초기 스페인 거장인 디에고 벨라스케스의 흔적을 보여줍니다. 프란시스코 드 고야는 벨라스케스의 그림을 습작하고 모방하였습니다.
이 위용적인 초상화에서, 프랑스 황제 나폴레옹은 군사 제복을 입고 자기 책상 앞에 서있습니다. 책상 위에는 나폴레옹 법전 한 부가 놓여있습니다. 나폴레옹의 뒤에는 깃펜과 종이가 책상 위에 어지럽게 놓여있고, 거의 꺼질듯한 양초와 벽시계가 오전 4시 13분을 가리키고 있어 나폴레옹이 새 법 조항을 쓰면서 그날 밤을 보냈음을 암시합니다. 나폴레옹의 군사적 기량과 행정능력, 국민의 복지에 대한 그의 헌신을 강조함으로써, 자크 루이 다비드는 황제 권력에 대한 강력한 이미지를 창조하였습니다.
청록색 하늘을 배경으로 불분명한 광원에 비춰져 윤곽선이 드러난 이 그림에서 예수의 수척한 체구가 십자가 위에 축 늘어져 있습니다. 틀어진 발과 손, 가시관, 고통에 찬 표정, 너덜너덜해진 샅바는 예수가 겪은 끔찍한 신체적 정서적 고통을 표현합니다. 그림의 분위기는 사도 요한과 동정녀 마리아, 무릎 꿇고 있는 막달레나 마리아의 비통한 표정과 드러내는 몸짓으로 더욱 고조됩니다. 마티아스 그뤼네발트가 사용한 거슬리는 섬뜩한 색채는 분위기와 성서의 내용을 모두 전달합니다. 예를 들어 어두컴컴한 하늘은 십자가 처형 당시 누가가 묘사한 “온 땅을 덮은 어둠”과 상통합니다.
트리프티카, 즉 세 폭짜리 그림의 왼쪽 폭이었던 것으로 보이는 이 그림은 누가복음에 기술된 수태고지를 그리고 있습니다. 종교적 상징주의는 곳곳에 상세히 나타나 있습니다. 배경에서, 교회의 위쪽 어두운 부분에 있는 벽화와 하나의 스테인드 글래스 창문은 구약을 나타내는 한편, 건물 아래쪽은 삼위일체를 상징하는 투명한 세 개의 창문이 있어 신약을 상징합니다. 구약에서 신약에서 이전하는 개념은 상층에는 로마네스크 양식의 둥근 아치 창문을 사용하고 하층에는 초기 고딕 양식의 뾰족한 아치 창문으로 바꾼 것에서도 나타납니다.
17세기 가톨릭 교리에 따르면, 막달레나 마리아는 회개한 죄인의 한 예였습니다. 그녀는 예수의 가장 헌신적인 추종자가 되었고, 예수는 그녀가 이전에 지은 죄를 사하여 주었습니다. 여기에서 마리아는 테이블에 옆모습이 보이도록 앉아 있습니다. 양초는 이 구성에서 광원인 한편, 이 빛은 성자의 얼굴과 탁자에 놓인 물건에 금빛으로 비춰주어 영적인 의미를 전하기도 합니다. 촛불은 마리아의 왼손 실루엣을 보여주는데, 손은 책 위에 놓인 해결에 얹어있고, 이것은 다시 거울에 비춰집니다. 해결과 거울은 허영심의 상징으로, 인상의 무상함을 암시합니다.
티치아노가 초상화를 그렸을 때 라누치노 파르네세는 열한두 살 정도였습니다. 권세 있는 귀족 가문인 파르네세 집안의 일원으로서, 파르네세는 가톨릭 교회에서 걸출한 경력을 걸었습니다. 14세에 나폴리 대주교가 되었으며, 후에 밀란과 라벤나의 대주교로 봉직하는 등 많은 일을 하다가 겨우 35세의 나이로 죽었습니다. 파르네세는 아직 어린 아이로 어른의 책임을 맡았는데, 티치아노는 너무 크고 무거운 예복이 소년의 작은 어깨에서 흘러내리는 것을 그림으로써 이것을 탁월하게 표현해 냈습니다. 책임지는 자리에 있는 소년의 성격 묘사는 이 이미지에 진한 감동을 줍니다.
이 “겸손의 마돈나”에서, 동정녀 마리아는 천상의 보좌 또는 호화로운 방석에 앉는 대신 땅바닥에 그냥 앉아 있습니다. 화가는 인물들을 넓고 낮은 피라미드 형태로 배치하였는데, 원 안의 공간에 맞도록 했을 뿐만 아니라 공간을 모두 차지하도록 배열하였습니다. 라파엘이 선택한 로마 스타일은 색채와 분위기의 섬세한 화법과 이상적이고 고전적인 풍경 설정에서 장미빛과 연한 파랑과 초록에 둘러싸인 인물들에서 찾아볼 수 있습니다. 평온한 분위기에도 불구하고, 세레 요한에게 십자가를 건네 받는 어린 그리스도의 동작으로 등장 인물 세 명 모두의 시선이 집중되고 있어, 그들은 그리스도가 후에 인간을 위해 희생될 것을 예지한 것처럼 보입니다.
속임수가 있음을 의심하여, 트로이의 신화적 사제인 라오콘은 백성들에게 그리스인들이 성읍 외곽에 놓고 간 목마를 받아들이지 말라고 경고하고, 상자가 비었음을 확인하기 위해 상자를 향해 창을 힘껏 던졌습니다. 이 일로 그는 아테나 여신에게 바쳐진 물건을 모독했다고 신들의 노여움을 삽니다. 엘 그레코는 성난 신들이 보낸 뱀들이 라오콘과 그의 아들을 극도로 괴롭히는 한편 둘째 아들은 아버지 옆에 죽어 있는 장면을 그렸습니다. 오른쪽에 그리다 만 인물들이 누구인지는 모호합니다. 화가는 비틀린 선과 충격적인 색채, 비논리적으로 설정된 공간을 사용하여 누그러지지 않는 파멸의 의식을 투사하였습니다.
로마의 시인 오비드가 쓴 패스티의 한 장면을 그린 이 그림에서, 신들 가운데 주피터, 넵튠, 아폴로가 숲속에서 숲의 님프들과 사티로스들의 시중을 받으며 먹고 마시는 흥청대고 있습니다. 그림 오른쪽에는 생식력의 신인 프리아포스가 자고 있는 님프인 로티스의 드레스를 몰래 들춥니다. 우화에 따르면, 실레노스의 당나귀가 곧 울어대는 바람에 좌절될 것입니다.
지네브라 데벤치는 피렌치의 부유한 은행가의 딸이었습니다. 그녀의 초상화는 미국에 있는 레오나르도 다빈치의 유일한 작품으로 그녀가 16세에 결혼할 무렵 의뢰된 작품일 것입니다. 이 작품은 유화라는 새로운 표현 수단을 시험적으로 사용한 다빈치의 가장 초기 작품 중 하나입니다. 여자들은 집안의 담장에 둘러싸여 내보였던 시절에 다빈치는 그녀를 개방된 배경에 설정해 놓았는데, 풍경은 열려있는 창문을 통해서만 언뜻 보입니다. 정면을 똑바로 보거나 옆모습이 아닌 ¾ 포즈는 이탈리아 초상화법 초기 작품에 속합니다. 그녀를 둘러싸고 있는 노간주나무 잎들은 르네상스 여성의 가장 큰 미덕이었던 순결을 나타내며 노간주나무를 뜻하는 이탈리아어인 지네프로가 그녀의 이름에도 활용되어 있습니다.
피터 파울 루벤스는 17세기의 가장 위대한 거장 중 한 명이며 독실한 가톨릭 신자로서 사실주의와 연극조를 결합하여 강렬한 정서적 반응을 끌어냈습니다. 여기에서, 사자 몇 마리는 우리는 똑바로 응시하여 우리가 다니엘처럼 사자들과 공간을 공유하며 같은 위협을 받고 있음을 암시합니다. 사자들을 실감나는 사실주의로 실제 크기에 가깝게 그림으로써, 루벤스는 이런 직접성을 고조시켰습니다. 사자들의 사실적인 움직임과 기막히게 표현된 털은 루벤스가 브뤼셀의 왕립 동물원에서 직접 관찰하고 스케치한 결과입니다. 극적인 조명과 다니엘이 과장된 감정 표출로 기도하는 자세가 사실성에 추가되었습니다.
렘브란트 판 레인은 일생 동안 수많은 자화상을 물감과 연필로 그리고 판화로 새겼습니다. 변화하는 그의 용모를 서로 비교해 보면서 그의 상태를 짐작해볼 수 있게 합니다. 렘브란트는 오랫동안 성공적인 삶을 살았지만 재정적 파산을 겪은 후인 1659년 이 자화상을 그렸습니다. 그의 거대한 집을 비롯한 자산은 그 전해에 빚을 갚기 위해 채권자에게 경매에 넘어갑니다. 이 후기 작품에서, 관람자의 눈을 꿰뚫어보는 깊숙한 눈빛은 내면의 강함과 위엄을 표현하는 듯 합니다.
이 자화상은 프랑스 브레튼 햄릿 르폴뒤에 있는 한 여관 식당에서 찬장 문짝에 그린 것으로 가장 중요하고 과격한 폴 고갱의 그림에 속합니다. 머리 위에는 광채가 있고, 오른손은 몸에서 분리되어 뱀을 손가락 사이에 낀 모습으로 노랑과 빨강 비정형의 공간에 떠있습니다. 캐리커처의 여러 요소들은 아이러니하고 과격하도록 상반된 굴곡을 더해줍니다. 고갱의 친구들은 이 작품을 못된 캐릭터 스케치라고 불렀습니다.
이 자화상은 빈센트 반 고흐가 프랑스 생레미에 있는 정신병원에 입원해 있는 동안 그린 것입니다. 반 고흐는 화가 작업복을 입고 팔레트와 붓을 들고 작업 중인 자신의 모습을 그리고자 하였습니다. 고흐의 자세와 강렬한 눈빛은 그다지 독특할 것이 없지만, 고뇌에 찬 모습은 역력합니다. 군청색 작업복과 배경이 머리카락과 턱수염의 오렌지색과 극명한 대조를 이루어 고흐의 여윈 모습과 병색이 도는 얼굴을 강조합니다. 광적일 정도로 역동적인 화법은 고통스럽지만 결의에 찬 화가의 모습의 양보 없는 묘사에 의미를 풍부하게 더해줍니다.
미켈란젤로 디 로사라는 이탈리아 소년을 그린 그림으로, 폴 세잔이 1888년부터 1890년까지 이 소년을 그린 네 점의 작품 중 하나입니다. 모든 그림마다 이 젊은이는 똑 같은 새빨간 조끼를 입고 있는데, 이것이 자칫 단조로워 보였을 각 구성에 대담한 악센트를 주고 있습니다. 거친 화법과 부족한 음영으로 이 작품은 현대 미술의 형태를 지닌 한편, 수심어린 듯한 소년의 분위기와 우아한 포즈, 즉 골판을 살짝 틀어 체중을 한발에 싣고 한쪽 팔은 구부려 허리에 손을 대고 있는 자세는, 의식적으로 시대를 초월한 작품성으로 부여하여, 세잔이 흠모한 이탈리아 르네상스 화가들의 초상화를 떠올리게 합니다.
1892년 2월, 클로드 모네는 세 번의 작품 여행 중 첫번째로 루앙으로 떠납니다. 도시의 성당 맞은 편에 방을 구해 스튜디오로 사용하며, 그 성당을 주소재로 일련의 작품을 그립니다. 모네가 매료된 것은 성당 자체라기보다는 불변하는 고딕 양식의 건물 정면 모티브가 날씨와 하루 중 시간에 따라 미묘하고 다채롭게 변화하는 것을 잡아내는 문제였습니다. 거의 2년이 지나는 동안, 모네는 총 30점의 캔버스를 완성하였는데, 그 가운데 28점이 서문을 그리고 있습니다. 루앙대성당은 모네가 1890년대에 완성한 모든 일련의 작품 가운데 가장 야심찬 작품입니다.
위대한 초현실주의 조각가 중 한 명인 알베르토 자코메티(Alberto Giacometti)는 이 조각품과 같은 초기작에서 게임과 놀이의 테마를 통합할 때가 많았습니다. 자코메티가 이 작품에서 사용한 형태는 움직일 수 있는 조각으로 구성된 보드 게임과 비슷해 보이지만 무슨 게임인지는 불분명합니다. 노 모어 플레이(No More Play)에 표현된 “게임”의 모호한 공간과 알 수 없는 규칙은 꿈에서나 볼 수 있는 사물처럼 느껴집니다.
동관은 미술관에서 점점 더 규모가 커지고 있는 근대 및 현대 미술 작품을 소장하고 있습니다. 동관 계획은 1968년에 시작되었지만, 부지는 앤드류 W. 멜론(Andrew W. Mellon)이 1930년대에 지정해 두었습니다. 동관은 1978년에에 일반인에게 개방되었으며, 3년간의 리노베이션 및 갤러리 확장 프로젝트를 거쳐 2016년 다시 개장했습니다. 새롭게 단장한 갤러리를 살펴보시고 전시 중인 작품을 관람하시기 바랍니다.
호랑이의 색상은 파리의 문구점에서 판매하고 프랑스의 초등학교에서 사용되는 유색 검드 페이퍼로 엘스워스 켈리(Ellsworth Kelly)가 만든 습작 콜라주에서 유래했습니다. 켈리는 이 소재를 통해 오브제 트루베(발견된 오브제)에 특히 관심을 나타냈으며, 이는 그의 시각적 세계를 이해하는 핵심입니다. 켈리는 자연 또는 도시 환경의 부정적인 공간에서 추상 형태와 윤곽을 발견했습니다. 이 회화를 그린 기간 동안 켈리는 많은 시간을 들여 유럽의 미술과 건축을 살펴보았습니다. 이 때 그가 관찰한 기하학적 구조에서 호랑이 제작을 위한 간접적인 원자료를 얻었을 것으로 추정됩니다.
조지아 오키프(Georgia O’Keeffe)는 어린 시절에 특히 천남성에 매료되었습니다. 1930년, 오키프는 뉴욕의 레이크 조지에서 흔한 북미 개화 식물을 주제로 6연작 회화를 제작했습니다. 천남성 No. IV 는 동굴처럼 보이는 불염포의 진한 자주색 내부를 배경으로 혀와 같은 형태의 육수화서를 확대하여 묘사했습니다. 오른쪽 상단과 왼쪽 모서리에 녹색 잎과 흐린 하늘이 암시되어 있습니다.
1911년 2월에 완성된 뉴욕은 조지 벨로스(George Bellows)가 뉴욕시의 근대 생활상을 묘사한 야심찬 회화 대작입니다. 벨로스는 뉴욕시의 구체적이고 식별 가능한 장소를 나타내려고 의도하지 않았습니다. 대신, 그는 번화한 상업 지구 몇 곳을 중심으로 도시의 부산한 분위기를 가장 잘 표현할 수 있는 극도로 번잡한 이미지를 상상하여 그렸습니다.
피에르 보나르(Pierre Bonnard)는 1890년경 활동하던 젊은 미술 작가들이 결성한 신비적 경향의 나비파(Nabis)의 일원이었습니다. 이 나비라는 이름은 선지자를 의미하는 히브리어 단어에서 유래되었습니다. 나비파는 자연의 외형을 단순히 묘사하는 것은 생각이 없는 비예술적인 행위로 간주하여 인상주의를 거부했습니다. 보나르는 종종 이 장면과 같이 긴장이 풀린 순간을 포착하고 작품을 통해 다양한 색상 간의 조화를 탐구하고 실험했습니다.
로이 리히텐슈타인(Roy Lichtenstein)이 대중 문화에 등장하는 장면과 양식을 번안한 최초의 작품이 미키, 이것 좀 봐(Look Mickey)일 수 있으며, 이 작품은 1960년 시판된 어린이 만화책 도널드 덕: 분실물 보관소(Donald Duck: Lost and Found)를 번안하였습니다. 리히텐슈타인은 절묘하게 원본 만화의 배경 인물을 생략하고 시점을 90도 회전시키고 색상을 노란색과 파란색 띠로 구성하고 캐릭터의 특징을 단순화하여 보다 통일된 이미지로 바꿨습니다. 양식적으로, 리히텐슈타인은 인쇄 매체, 즉 짙은 검은 색 외곽선, 원색, 당시 저렴한 만화책과 잡지를 제작하는 데 사용되었고 이 작품에서 도널드의 눈과 미키의 얼굴에서 사용된 벤데이 인쇄 공정의 잉크 점 등을 모방했습니다.
추상 표현주의 운동의 대표적 작가 중 한 명인 바네트 뉴만(Barnett Newman)은 회화, 조각, 문학 분야에서 생각을 펼친 지식인이었습니다. 1940년대 중반 그는 캔버스의 단색 필드에 특징적인 수직 요소 또는 "지퍼"를 그려넣은 작품을 처음으로 선보였습니다. 이 회화는 뉴만이 십자가의 길(The Stations of the Cross)이라고 명명하게 되는 회화 14 연작 중 첫 번째 작품입니다. 15번째 회화 Be II는 종결부입니다. 십자가의 길은 제2차 세계대전과 홀로코스트 이후 예술가들이 직면한 “도덕적 위기”를 표현하려는 뉴만의 가장 야심찬 시도였습니다. 그는 묻습니다. "우리는 무엇을 그려야 합니까?"
산과 바다(Mountains and Sea)는 헬렌 프랑켄탈러(Helen Frankenthaler)가 스테인 기법으로 제작한 작품의 완벽한 예입니다. 스테인 기법은 밑칠을 하지 않은 캔버스에 묽게 희석한 물감을 부어 제작하는 과정을 의미합니다. 이 기법은 공간에 부유하는 투명한 색상의 필드를 조성하여 캔버스의 직조와 함께 이미지의 평면성을 강조합니다. 그녀가 색상과 형태를 배열한 방식은 자연 환경을 연상시킬 때가 많고 각 작품은 고유의 시각적 공간과 대기의 존재를 표현합니다.
잭슨 폴록(Jackson Pollock)의 드립 회화 대작은 1948년 발표 당시 반응은 엇갈렸습니다. 이 회화를 제작하기 위해, 폴록은 화실로 쓰던 헛간 바닥에 대형 캔버스를 펼쳤는데, 그 공간을 거의 덮었습니다. 캔버스 주위를 걸어 다니면서 가정용 페인트, 유화, 에나멜, 알루미늄 페인트를 사용하여 만든 물감을 브러시와 스틱에 묻혀 드립하고 붓고 뿌렸습니다. 그는 이렇게 창작 과정에서 매개체 역할을 수행하면서 자신의 작품 안에 존재하는 방식이라고 말했습니다. 그는 캔버스 상단 왼쪽 모서리와 상단의 손자국으로 회화에 “사인”을 했습니다.
모리스 루이스(Morris Louis)의 작품은 본질적으로 색채에 관한 회화입니다. 미술작가 헬렌 프랑켄탈러(Helen Frankenthaler)의 스테인 기법에 크게 영향을 받은 루이스는 이 기법의 가능성을 탐구하여 자신의 추상 회화에서 색채에 새로운 역할을 부여하게 되었습니다. 그는 속건성 아크릴 물감을 묽게 하여 밑칠을 하지 않은 캔버스에 붓고 캔버스나 캔버스를 느슨하게 고정시킨 비계를 움직여 물감의 흐름을 조절합니다. 루이스는 스테인 기법을 통해 브러시워크로 미술작가의 제스처를 강조한 일반적인 추상 표현주의 양식과 달리 개인적인 감정이 표출되지 않은 회화를 제작할 수 있었습니다.
이 작품은 1905년 드레스덴에서 표현주의 그룹 다리파(Die Brücke)의 창립 멤버이자 많은 작품을 남긴 에른스트 루드비히 키르히너(Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)의 초기작입니다. 이 회화에서 키르히너는 아카데믹 회화의 인위적인 공간이 아닌 자연을 배경으로 나체 여인 두 명을 묘사했습니다. 이 작품에서 화가는 대담하고 투박한 형태와 강렬한 색상을 사용하고 있습니다.
관람객의 눈에 이 작품은 추상 조각품으로 보일지 모르지만, 작가 콘스탄틴 브랑쿠시(Constantin Brancusi)는 자신의 작품은 주제 내면의 본질을 드러냈다고 주장했습니다. 그의 작품은 아프리카 조각과 루마니아 민속 조각 전통의 영향을 받았으며, 이를 바탕으로 미술의 본질적인 요소를 추구했습니다. 브랑쿠시는 공간의 새(Bird in Space) 연작을 그의 대표작으로 남을 앙상블로 생각하면서 수년간 제작에 임했습니다. 다른 조각가들과 달리, 브랑쿠시는 대형 작업장이 없고, 혼자서 소재를 준비하고 작품을 제작했으며, 이 작품의 경우에는 직접 석재를 깎고 황동을 연마했습니다.
1944년 아실 고르키(Arshile Gorky)가 제작한 소위 컬러 베일 페인팅 중 한 점인 원 이어 더 밀크위드(One Year the Milkweed)에서 유화 막은 캔버스 전체에 고르지 않게 흘러내렸으며, 무언가를 연상시키지만 흐릿한 형태들이 붓으로 묘사되었습니다. 그림의 전체적인 녹색과 갈색 색조는 풍경을 암시하지만, 풍경임을 확인할 수 있는 형태와 공간의 원근은 없습니다. 대신, 수직으로 떨어지는 드립과 빛과 깊은 색조가 번갈아 표현됨으로써 전체 회화 표면에 동적이고 빛이 반짝이는 효과가 일어납니다.
앙드레 드랭(André Derain)이 런던을 방문했을 때 이 회화를 그렸으며 그 당시 몇 년 전 클로드 모네(Claude Monet)가 그린 회화와 유사한 주제를 묘사했습니다. 그러나 이 장면에 대한 드랭의 색상 선택 및 원근법은 인상파 거장인 모네의 작품과 크게 대조됩니다. 생동감 있고 혼합되지 않은 원색이 특징인 이 회화는 드랭과 앙리 마티스(Henri Matisse)가 창시한 야수파 양식의 전형입니다. 야수파라는 이름은 야수를 의미하는 프랑스어 단어를 따서 붙여졌습니다.
에두아르 뷔야르(Édouard Vuillard)는 1890년경 활동하던 젊은 미술 작가들이 결성한 신비적 경향의 나비파(Nabis)의 일원이었습니다. 이 나비라는 이름은 선지자를 의미하는 히브리어 단어에서 유래되었습니다. 나비파는 자연의 외형을 단순히 묘사하는 것은 생각이 없는 비예술적인 행위로 간주하여 인상주의를 거부했습니다. 줄무늬 드레스를 입은 여인은 뷔야르가 1895년에 타데 나탄슨과 미샤 고데브스카 부부를 위해 그린 작품 5점 중 하나입니다. 그림 속에서 생각에 잠겨 꽃꽂이를 하고 있는 여인은 뷔야르가 아주 찬미했던 빨간 머리의 미샤 부인이 모델일 수 있습니다.
조르주 브라크(Georges Braque)는 파블로 피카소와 함께 1910년경 입체파라는 새로운 양식을 창시한 것으로 유명합니다. 이 회화는 후에 브라크가 입체파 양식을 정물 및 기타 주제를 표현하는 데 적용했던 전형적인 후기 작품입니다. 이 작품에서 탁자의 나뭇결, 배경의 벽지 디자인, 신문지의 활자는 패턴과 질감의 상호 작용을 강조합니다.
이 작품에는 해변에 서서 구름과 승강이를 벌이는 청년이 등장합니다. 지그마르 폴케(Sigmar Polke)는 경구서에 수록된 16세기 독일 목판화에서 적절하게 이 이미지를 차용했습니다. 이미지는 다음 경구에 대한 삽화입니다. "희망은 많은 사람들이 죽음을 향해 자신을 끌어당기는 긴 밧줄이다." 이 경구는 사람들이 운명과 싸우는 것을 상기시켜 줍니다. 그러나 폴케의 표현은 훨씬 덜 암울하며, 심지어 희망을 보여줄 수도 있습니다. 폴케는 입으로 화염을 내뿜는 사람과 원래의 해변 배경을 포함한 원 목판화의 세부를 생략했습니다. 대신, 폴케는 다양한 기하학적 형태로 채워진 자신만의 배경을 그렸습니다.
조안 미첼(Joan Mitchell)은 추상 표현주의의 남성 중심 성 차별주의 세계에서 그녀 자신의 존재를 부각시킨 소수의 여성 중 한 명이 되었습니다. 이 회화에서 백색 배경을 바탕으로 대담하고 생동감 넘치는 선은 미첼의 자발적이고 충동적인 회화 방식을 표현합니다. 그녀는 회화를 구상할 때 미시간 호수에 얽힌 어린 시절 추억을 자주 떠올렸으며, 그 중 일부를 “표현주의 풍경”이라고 불렀습니다. 전적으로 추상회화이기 때문에, 관람자는 감성적으로 그녀의 작품과 자신을 연결시킬 수 있습니다.
제니 홀처(Jenny Holzer)의 텍스트 기반 미술은 대중의 의식을 환기시킵니다. 2005년 그녀는 기밀이 해제되고 중요한 정보가 삭제된 정부 문서를 실크스크린 회화 연작의 소재로 사용하기 시작했습니다. 이 작품은 정보 공개법(Freedom of Information Act)을 통해 미국 정부의 기록에서 구하여 확대한 손자국을 보여주는 회화 6연작 중 한 점입니다. 이라크에서 수감자 학대 혐의로 기소된 군인들의 손자국입니다. 홀처는 전통적인 유화와 리넨을 사용하여 문서를 복제하고 확대함으로써 "사람들이 항상 주목하거나 심각하게 여기지 않는다"고 그녀가 생각하는 정보에 관람자의 주의를 환기시켰습니다.
피에트 몬드리안(Piet Mondrian)은 추상 회화를 통해 보편적인 조화가 자연을 주재한다는 영적 개념을 표현하고자 했습니다. 그의 작품에서 균형 잡힌 비대칭을 조성하기 위해 신중하게 배치된 수평 및 수직 요소는 자연계에서 동적인 평형을 유지하는 상반되는 힘을 나타냅니다. 몬드리안은 다이아몬드형 구성이 절단과 관련된다고 말했는데, 실제로 이 회화에서는 불필요한 부분을 화면에서 절단하는 크로핑 느낌이 강조되었습니다. 캔버스의 가장자리에 의해 절단되어 불완전한 형태는 회화의 실제 경계 너머로 그 절단된 형태가 연장됨을 암시합니다.
도널드 저드(Donald Judd) 작 무제(Untitled)는 받침대 없이 바닥에 배치하여, 관람자의 공간에 직접 전시함으로써, 과거의 조각품과 다른 방식으로 무자비하게 정형화된 틀을 해체했습니다. 입방체 구조는 표현 언어에 호소하는 것이 아니라, 대각선을 따라 이등분하고, 절반은 나머지 절반의 높이를 두 배로 하여 계단을 형성하는 것과 같이 기하학적 논리에 의해 생성됩니다. 저드는 유럽 모더니즘의 지속적인 환상에 대해 비판했으며, 단순히 사물로 존재하는 명료한 형태를 제시했습니다. 가시적인 공간이 아닌 물성을 추구하는 저드는 회화의 전통 원근법에 도전하고 있습니다.
바실리 칸딘스키(Wassily Kandinsky)의 회화는 실제 세계를 일부 재현하지만, 이 작품의 세부 묘사는 분위기를 표현하기 위해 형태를 왜곡하고 변형했습니다. 모호한 형태 및 얇게 바른 채색으로 인해 첫 눈에는 순수 추상화로 보일 수 있지만, 자세히 보면 다수의 형상을 인식할 수 있습니다. 즉흥 No 31(해전)(Improvisation No 31 (Sea Battle))의 중심 주제는 해전에 갇힌 두 척의 범선이며 긴 돛대는 가늘고 검은 선으로 묘사됩니다. 칸딘스키가 다수 제작한 회화 즉흥(Improvisations)의 주제는 계시록의 묵시록적 이미지에서 영감을 받은 것으로 추정됩니다.
곡예사 가족(Family of Saltimbanques)은 파블로 피카소의 초기 작품 중 가장 중요한 회화입니다. 그에게, 떠돌이 서커스 단원들(곡예사, 무용수, 광대)는 소외된 하층 예술가, 즉 그가 동질감을 느낀 일종의 대가족의 비애를 의미했습니다. 그들과 마찬가지로, 스페인 태생 피카소도 파리에서 인정 받기 위해 고군분투했던 초기에는 가난했습니다. 맨 왼쪽, 다이아몬드 무늬 의상을 입은 음울한 어릿광대는 어둡고 강렬한 젊은 미술가 피카소 자신의 얼굴을 하고 있습니다.
오늘날 앙리 마티스(Henri Matisse) 작 콜리우르의 열린 창(Open Window, Collioure)은 부드럽고 서정적인 회화로 보일 수 있지만 작품 발표 당시에는 두터운 붓질과 강렬한 색상이 폭력적인 양식으로 간주되었습니다. 작은 화폭이지만 폭발적인 작품인 이 초기 모더니즘의 아이콘은 야수파의 가장 중요한 회화 중 하나로 유명합니다. 야수파 미술 작가들은 자연 외관의 엄격한 재현을 거부하고 자유로운 색상과 질감을 추구했습니다. 콜리우르의 열린 창은 마티스의 예술 세계에서 새로운 양식의 시작을 나타냅니다.
1927년 할렘 르네상스의 핵심 인물인 제임스 웰든 존슨(James Weldon Johnson)은 그의 대표작 신의 트롬본: 흑인 설교 시 7편(God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse)을 출판했습니다. 각 설교 시에는 당시 할렘에 정착한 젊은 아프리카계 미국인 미술 작가 아론 더글러스(Aaron Douglas)의 삽화가 수록되었습니다. 몇 년 후, 더글라스는 삽화를 대형 유화로 번안하여 그리기 시작했습니다. 최후 심판의 날(The Judgment Day)은 8연작 중 마지막 작품입니다. 중앙에는 강한 천사 가브리엘이 지구와 바다를 딛고 서 있습니다. 대천사는 나팔을 불어 지구의 국가들을 소환하여 심판합니다.
큰 파도에 묘사된 푸른 하늘, 햇볕에 피부가 그을린 사람들, 광대한 바다는 차분한 분위기를 조성합니다. 그러나 회화의 세부를 살펴보면 처음에 느꼈던 평온한 분위기에 의문을 갖게 됩니다. 텅 빈 바다 한가운데 부표가 작은 캣 보트를 마주하고 있습니다. 경고 벨을 울려서 육안으로 볼 수 없거나 임박한 위험을 알리는 용도의 부표는 불길한 장면에서 등장합니다. 폭풍을 예고하기도 하는 푸른 하늘의 권운은 임박한 위험에 대한 느낌을 배가합니다.
이 조각품은 아메데오 모딜리아니(Amedeo Modigliani)가 많은 회화에서 길쭉한 얼굴과 아몬드형 눈으로 인물을 표현한 그의 독특한 인물화 양식을 반영합니다. 모딜리아니는 1909년부터 1914년까지 조각에 집중했으며, 1920년 35세에 결핵으로 사망했습니다.
알렉산더 칼더(Alexander Calder)의 모빌 대작이 동관 아트리움의 공기 흐름에 따라 움직입니다. 모빌의 이러한 움직임은 칼더가 주로 사용하는 소재인 용접 강철이 아닌 알루미늄으로 제작했기 때문에 가능합니다. 조각가는 모터 설치를 고려했었지만 최신 경량 소재를 사용함으로써 모터가 필요없게 되었습니다. 모빌의 날개 길이는 26미터(85피트)를 넘지만 총 중량은 417kg(920파운드)으로 강철로 만든 것보다 2톤 더 가볍습니다.
에바 헤세(Eva Hesse)는 전통적으로 아름다운 조각으로 간주하는 것을 제작하고 싶지 않았습니다. 그녀는 금속이나 석재와 같은 조각에 사용되는 전통 소재를 거부하고 대신 섬유, 석고, 라텍스 등 더 유연한 소재를 선호하며, 이 습작에서는 라텍스를 사용했습니다. 이 작품은 불확정 최종 작품에 대한 여러 습작 중 하나였으며, 8장의 유사한 배너로 구성되어 있으며 현재 호주 국립미술관(National Gallery of Australia)에서 전시 중입니다. 헤세는 이 작품을 “회화도 아니고, 조각도 아니고.... 실제로 걸려있는 회화예요”라고 묘사했습니다.
제2차 세계대전 후 회화가 처음부터 다시 시작되어야한다고 생각하던 장 뒤뷔페(Jean Dubuffet)는 미술 교육을 받지 않은 미술, 특히 어린이 또는 독학 미술가들로부터 영감을 얻어, 작품을 수집하고 이를 아르 브뤼(art brut), 즉, 다듬지 않은 미술 또는 날 것 그대로의 미술이라고 지칭했습니다. 건물 정면(Façades d’immeubles)에서, 뒤뷔페는 자신만의 아르 브뤼를 보여 주었습니다. 뒤뷔페는 미술 시간에 배웠던 기법인 착색된 바탕에 흑색 물감을 칠한 후 긁어 내는 기법을 사용하여 어린이의 눈으로 본 파리의 거리 풍경을 자세히 묘사했습니다. 그러나 신중하게 구성된 격자 구도와 인상적인 유화 벽의 전면(allover) 구조는 뒤뷔페가 모더니즘 미학에 대해 잘 알고 있었음을 입증합니다.
1980년대부터 케리 제임스 마샬(Kerry James Marshall)은 미국 흑인의 삶을 축복하고 표현하기 위해 다양한 매체와 재현 모드를 사용해 왔습니다. 위대한 미국(Great America)은 중간 항로를 통해 미국에 끌려와 노예가 된 아프리카인들의 파악하기 조차 힘는 트라우마에 대한 대서사 회화입니다. 활기 넘치는 언어(WOW), 어둡고 유령으로 가득 찬 놀이공원 터널로 들어가는 배에 탄 흑인들과 밝은 색상의 이미지는 관람자의 눈을 사로잡습니다. 오른쪽 상단의 흘수선 위 단발 머리. 단어 즐거움(FUN)은 지워졌습니다. 작가가 말했던 것처럼 제목은 암시적으로 묻습니다. "흑인을 위해 미국이 위대해졌던 때는 언제였을까요?"
재스퍼 존스(Jasper Johns)는 추상 표현주의자들의 “개인적인 표현이 강렬한 제스처 회화”의 뒤를 이어 1950년대에 주목할 미술작가로 등장했습니다. 존스는 쿨하고, 외견 상 무심하고, 종종 불가사의한 방식으로 알아보기 쉬운 물체를 묘사한 것으로 유명했습니다. 존스는 거의 항상 자신의 작품의 원 소재를 기존 이미지나 “생각 속에 이미 익숙한 것”에서 선택했습니다. 초기 작품에서 그는 상업용 스텐실, 표적, 미국 국기 및 미국 지도에서 따온 숫자 또는 형체와 같이 널리 알려진 모티프를 선택했습니다. 이와 같은 작품에서 표현된 도드라진 표면 질감은 존스가 회화와 조각 사이의 밀접한 관계를 인식하고 있음을 입증합니다.
더블 아메리카(Double America)의 아래 글자는 검은 색을 칠한 면이 관람자를 향하고, 단어 America는 거꾸로 배치되어 있으며, 흰색 네온 “그림자”는 벽에 반사됩니다. 윗줄의 글자는 검은 색을 칠한 면이 벽쪽을 향하므로 관람자는 글자 뒤의 조명을 볼 수 있습니다. 이러한 왜곡된 시각의 배열은 미국 최초의 흑인 대통령 선거와 두 번의 전쟁에 대한 미국의 참전을 둘러싼 정치적 혼란을 상기시켜 줍니다.
백남준은 서울 태생이며 일본, 독일, 뉴욕에서 성장기를 보내고 거주했습니다. 그는 비디오 등 미술의 새로운 매체를 사용한 선구자였습니다. 이 작품에서 백남준은 19 세기 일본 족자에 자신의 손자국을 찍고 족자 뒤에 깜박이는 붉은 조명을 배치했습니다. 전통 미술 형식과 현대 기술의 병용은 백남준 작품의 특징이 되었습니다.
마르셀 뒤샹(Marcel Duchamp)은 회화와 조각에 대한 전통적인 방식과 기본적인 가정을 거부했습니다. 값싸고 쉬운 미국식 복제 아이디어에 매료된 뒤샹은 뉴욕에 살면서 의류 산업에서 차용한 용어인 기성품, 즉 레디메이드에 적합한 발견된 오브제로 작품을 제작하기 시작했습니다. 그는 전시회에서 때때로 이러한 평범한 사물을 있는 그대로 자신의 서명만 추가하여 전시함으로써 미술계에 충격을 주었습니다. 이 작품의 제목은 프랑스식(French) 및 창(Window)이라는 단어에서 문자 n을 생략하고 조성한 펀(pun), 말장난으로 파리 아파트에서 흔히 볼 수 있는 이중 창과 제1차 세계대전으로 남편을 잃고 최근 미망인이 된 여성을 지칭한 것입니다. 뒤샹은 이 미니 창문을 직접 제작하지 않고 미국인 목수에게 디자인을 위탁했습니다.
Terence Washington, departments of academic programs and modern art, National Gallery of Art
Between the late 19th and the mid-20th centuries, white Americans conducted thousands of lynchings, using these extrajudicial killings to intimidate non-whites and mete out what they considered to be justice. Increasingly, photographs were taken of lynchings and spectators and were distributed to extend the effect of the mobs’ violent tactics. A 1930 photograph by Lawrence Beitler (1885–1960) of a lynching in Marion, Indiana, inspired the song “Strange Fruit” and contributed to the anti-lynching movement in the United States. Terence Washington examines the photograph and the events surrounding the lynching, taking the blurry figure in the photograph’s foreground as a point of departure to discuss the mechanisms of American white supremacy.
Kimberly Drew, writer, curator, and activist; Alicia Hall Moran, artist, composer, and mezzo-soprano; and Imani Uzuri, composer, librettist, and 2019-2020 Hutchins Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University
Edgar Degas's (1834–1917) renowned images of the Paris Opéra are among the most sophisticated and visually compelling works he created. Celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Opéra’s founding, Degas at the Opéra presents approximately 100 of the artist’s best-known and beloved works in a range of media. In celebration of this exhibition on June 17, 2020, Kimberly A. Jones, curator of 19th-century French paintings, welcomes Kimberly Drew, Alicia Hall Moran, and Imani Uzuri to discuss the influence of opera on contemporary artists’ practices. Their conversation expands upon an Office magazine interview conducted by Drew about the possibilities of opera as the architecture for Black cultural production. Together they explore the medium as historically unapologetic, dramatic, and bold, asserting its potential to set a precedent for all artists. This program coincides with the publication of Drew’s book This Is What I Know About Art.
Julie Carmean, manager of national teacher programs, National Gallery of Art, and Sara Lesk, manager of Art Around the Corner, National Gallery of Art
Using Harvard Project Zero’s Artful Thinking Routines and the Gallery’s collection, Julie Carmean and Sara Lesk transformed research into practice by creating the Gallery’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The MOOC provides pre-service, K–12, and museum educators with a free opportunity to bring critical thinking through art to students around the world. In this conversation, held on January 27, 2020, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series, Julie and Sara present an overview of the history of the project, a glimpse inside the course, and current data from online learners and discuss the project’s future.
Thomas Kren (former associate director for collections, J. Paul Getty Museum and 2016 Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) examines Saint Apollonia Destroys a Pagan Idol, part of an altarpiece by Giovanni d’Alemagna. Kren describes the inherent tension between the artist’s use of pious subjects and the beautiful, at times sensual, representation of the nude. Even as the early Christian saint attacks the pagan statue of Apollo, this painting exemplifies a paradoxical embrace of ancient sculptural and architectural forms that characterized Renaissance art.
Program: An American View: Whitman and the American Pre-Raphaelites. This program was in honor of the exhibition The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists and featured music by Tom Benjamin, William Grant Still, and André Previn. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, May 5, 2019.
Samuel H. Kress, American businessman and philanthropist. The National Gallery of Art was created on March 17, 1937, by a joint resolution of Congress accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. Designed by John Russell Pope, the West Building was made possible by construction funds provided by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. In this speech, recorded during evening ceremonies on March 17, 1941, Kress describes his collection of Italian paintings and sculptures, and gifts these artworks to the Gallery and the people of the United States.
Charles Evans Hughes, 11th chief justice of the United States (1930–1941) and chairman of the National Gallery of Art (1937–1941). The National Gallery of Art was created on March 17, 1937, by a joint resolution of Congress accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. Designed by John Russell Pope, the West Building was made possible by construction funds provided by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. In this speech, recorded during evening ceremonies on March 17, 1941, Chief Justice Hughes describes Mellon’s efforts to create a national art gallery for the people of the United States and introduces Paul Mellon, one of the featured speakers.
Paul Mellon, American philanthropist, art collector, and founding benefactor and trustee of the National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery of Art was created on March 17, 1937, by a joint resolution of Congress accepting the gift of financier and art collector Andrew W. Mellon. Designed by John Russell Pope, the West Building was made possible by construction funds provided by the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. In this speech, recorded during evening ceremonies on March 17, 1941, Paul Mellon presents the completed West Building of the Gallery and the art collection of Andrew W. Mellon to the people of the United States. He describes the realization of his father’s gift, which was made possible by the support of the president and other government officials; acknowledges the generosity of others who supported his father’s vision; and commends the contributions of individuals and craftsmen involved in the building’s construction.
Cecilia Frosinini (Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro, Florence, and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art), explores how Giotto conveys a new painterly language of feeling and devotion that expresses human relationships and bodily presence.
Heidi Applegate, guest lecturer
In this lecture, presented at the National Gallery of Art on December 9, 2019, guest lecturer Heidi Applegate explored the depiction of cats across a wide range of artistic media, genres, and styles in the Gallery’s collection. Throughout history, artists have represented lions as the trusted companions of gods and saints and as a symbol of royalty, courage, and strength. Other feline species—domestic cats in particular—may often represent less noble qualities.
Program: An Ancient Walkabout This program, featuring music by J. S. Bach, Gabriela Lena Frank, Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten, highlighted the chaconne, a musical form which originated in Latin America in the late sixteenth century and has inspired composers ever since. Starting off the program is likely the most well-known chaconne in classical music, the last movement from the Second Violin Partita by Johann Sebastian Bach. The concert concludes with Brittan’s 20th-century Chacony. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, April 14, 2019.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art.
There are many works in the National Gallery of Art which have been inspired by the glorious story of Easter. Paintings and sculptures from the Gallery’s extensive and rich permanent collection illustrate and speak to the significance of this timeless and moving story for artists and their audiences throughout history. On March 18, 2019, senior lecturer David Gariff explores both the spiritual nature of the Easter story through excerpts from the King James Version of the Bible, apocryphal writings, and later interpretations by saints, along with its related visual representations by some of the world’s greatest artists. Prominent paintings and prints by Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, El Greco, Tintoretto, Perugino, and Benvenuto di Giovanni, along with sculptures by Giovanni della Robbia, Pietro Tacca, Alessandro Algardi, and François Duquesnoy are featured in this commemoration of the Easter holiday.
Kellie Jones, Columbia University. In this lecture, presented on November 6, 2019, Kellie Jones, of Columbia University, looks at international conceptual art networks and the making of global community in the late twentieth century. The lecture considers moments in the global reach of performance art in the 1970s in locales from Mexico City to London to Los Angeles, considering projects by artists including Felipe Ehrenberg, Lourdes Grobet, Adrian Piper, Senga Nengudi, and David Lamelas.
Mary Morton, curator and head of French paintings, National Gallery of Art Auguste Renoir rebelled against the standards of the official art world, like other impressionists, pushing the limits of painting and creating his distinct style. But Renoir, in particular, has become an all-too-easy target for museumgoers who find his late female figures contrived and his palette cloying. Marking the centennial of the artist’s death in 1919, Mary Morton counters the anti-Renoir movement by reaffirming the artist’s achievement and lasting significance within the history of Western art in her lecture on December 3, 2019.
Edgar Degas was fascinated by music, opera, and ballet throughout his long career. He was a regular attendee at the old Paris Opéra house on the Rue Le Peletier through his early career, and then at the Garnier Opéra after its opening in 1875. Degas explored every aspect of the world of the opera—from rehearsals to performances, from the practice rooms to the stage. Yet his many paintings of the rehearsal rooms and the operas were never done on the spot; they were the product of his careful study of the ballerinas, singers, and musicians posed in his studio. The leader of the avant-garde group known as the impressionists, Degas always asserted that nothing was less spontaneous than his art. He kept volumes of drawings of figures, from every conceivable angle, that he would return to time and again for compositions throughout his career. He was interested in the body in motion and at rest, often in characteristic (if awkward) positions. Toward the end of his life, when his sight began to fail, Degas substituted brilliant color for the precise draftsmanship of his earlier work. To celebrate the exhibition, on March 13, 2020, Eric Denker, Senior Lecturer, National Gallery of Art, provides an overview of the exhibition.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
Raphael is recognized by many as the foremost figure of the classical tradition in Western painting. Unparalleled in the complexity of his style and the near reverence his art has inspired over the five centuries since his death, few artists are so deserving of commemoration. In the early twentieth century, the mark of a great Italian collection in the United States was to have work by Raphael. No Michelangelo paintings or sculpture were in America’s collections, nor any work by Leonardo da Vinci. However collectors in the United States astutely acquired 14 paintings by Raphael, five of which would become part of the National Gallery of Art’s collection. To celebrate the exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, gave this talk on March 13, 2020. He provides an overview of the exhibition and examines the Gallery’s extraordinary collection of paintings, drawings, and prints by Raphael and his workshop.
Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art In celebration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the Gallery presents 25 prints and drawings in an intimate installation. The works illustrate how Raphael’s art shaped the standard of aesthetic excellence for later artists, connoisseurs, and scholars. The exhibition features four drawings by Raphael: the sheet from which the design of his painting Saint George and the Dragon was transferred; the cartoon for the so-called Belle Jardinière; a detailed representation of the prophets Hosea and Jonah; and a well-known study for part of the frescoes in the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome. Nine drawings by his closest collaborators and followers—Giulio Romano, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Perino del Vaga—are also on view. The exhibition includes 10 engravings, as well as a chiaroscuro woodcut, by the earliest interpreters of Raphael’s designs: Marcantonio Raimondi and his followers Agostino dei Musi and Marco Dente as well as Ugo da Carpi. To celebrate the exhibition opening, on February 21, 2020, Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art, provided an overview of the exhibition.
Led by Diana Greenwald, assistant curator of the collection, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art, and Lynn Russell, head of education, National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art was the first American art museum to invite teams of data scientists and art historians to analyze, contextualize, and visualize its permanent collection data. The Gallery's full permanent collection data was released to six teams of researchers from institutions including Bennington College, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, George Mason University, Macalester College, New College of Florida, University of California, Los Angeles, and Williams College. Questions from curators, conservators, and researchers helped guide this analysis, and teams were encouraged to pursue whichever avenues of inquiry they found most compelling. The study culminated in a two-day Datathon, with teams finalizing their visualizations and presenting their findings at a public event on Friday, October 25, 2019. Special thanks to the Library of Congress LC Labs and Rare Books Division for facilitating access to Library collections as data for this event.
Program: Absolute Art and Jazz between the Wars This program explored the seemingly opposite ideals of absolute art and popular music which found expression in the work of artists and composers in the aftermath of World War I. The works performed include Anton Webern’s Quartet, op. 22, Erwin Schulhoff’s Hot-Sonate., and Bela Bartok’s Contrasts. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, March 3, 2019
Kimberly A. Jones, curator of 19th-century French paintings, National Gallery of Art Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is celebrated as the painter of dancers, a subject that dominated his art for nearly four decades. An exuberant display of rich imagination and keen observation, his renowned images of the Paris Opéra are among the most sophisticated and visually compelling works he created. Celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Opéra’s founding, Degas at the Opéra presents approximately 100 of the artist’s best-known and beloved works in a range of media, including paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Organized with the Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie, Paris, the exhibition is on view at the National Gallery of Art from March 1 through July 5, 2020. BP America is proud to be a sponsor of this Washington, DC, exhibition as part of its support for the arts in the United States. Adrienne Arsht also kindly provided a leadership gift for this exhibition. Additional funding is provided by Jacqueline B. Mars and The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. On opening day, curator Kimberly Jones shares insights on the exhibition, the first to explore Degas’s enduring fascination with the Opéra.
Mary Morton, curator and head of French paintings, National Gallery of Art, and Ann Lofquist, artist
At the National Gallery of Art on February 23, 2020, Mary Morton is joined in conversation with artist Ann Lofquist to discuss the exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870. Singling out particular paintings from the exhibition, Lofquist describes the influence of 19th-century artists, such as Camille Corot, on her own practice of sketching in oil paint outdoors. Like these European painters who were aesthetically energized by the light of Italy, Lofquist spent several years in California after a lifetime of painting in the northeast. The conversation highlights a tradition begun in the late 18th century that extends to contemporary painting.
Mia Fineman, curator, department of photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art 2019 marks 50 years since Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, capturing the attention of viewers worldwide who eagerly awaited the first photographs taken onsite. Photography played a key role in the space race of the 1960s, both as a tool of scientific documentation and as a medium of public relations. In this lecture held on October 20, 2019, in celebration of the exhibitions By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs at the National Gallery of Art and Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator Mia Fineman explores the connections as well as the tensions between these two functions, delving into the fascinating history of lunar imaging.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art Offered in conjunction with the exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870 on view at the National Gallery of Art February 2 – May 3, 2020, senior lecturer David Gariff discusses shifting definitions and visual explorations of weather in European painting. In this lecture, presented on February 26, 2020, at the National Gallery of Art, Gariff investigates how approaches to painting the effects of weather — storms, rain, snow, wind, floods, and cloud formations — slowly transform from symbolic portrayals in religious, mythological, and history paintings to more scientific and empirical depictions of weather, reflecting the influence of the new science of meteorology emerging in the nineteenth century.
Jess Cherry, artist, and education assistant with Art Around the Corner, department of gallery and studio learning, National Gallery of Art; Bryan Funk, artist, and adjunct professor, UDC; Maren Henson, artist, and adjunct professor, George Washington University and Anne Arundel Community College; Giulia Piera Livi, artist, and adjunct professor, Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, and manager, C. Grimaldis Gallery; and Edward Victor Sanchez, artist, and adjunct professor, University of Cincinnati COMPACT ASSEMBLY is an ongoing project showcasing a range of artistic practices from a completely multidisciplinary perspective. This international collective was formed in the city of Baltimore in 2017 and, through time, has evolved to better support and celebrate the work of such a diverse crowd. As part of the Works in Progress series held on November 18, 2019, artists representing the collective reunite to discuss their project goals and the ways in which COMPACT ASSEMBLY breaks away from individual tendencies and seeks to maintain an environment of integration and community engagement.
William Whitaker, senior art services specialist, office of the registrar, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with Molly Donovan, curator of contemporary art, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art Absent context, marks are stubbornly ambiguous things. How, then, do they acquire meaning? Perhaps their meaning lies not in what they signify or represent, but in how the viewer experiences them. On November 18, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress lecture series, William Whitaker and Molly Donovan grappled with this question—and the proposed answer—by examining paintings by Whitaker. Discussing Whitaker’s artistic practice and his goals in mark-making, they challenged the audience to think critically about how meaning is attributed.
Mary Morton, curator and head of French paintings, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with Jane Munro, keeper of paintings, drawings and prints, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and director of studies in history of art, Christ’s College, Cambridge; and Alice Goldet, private collector An integral part of art education in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, painting en plein air was a core practice for avant-garde artists in Europe. Intrepid artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, John Constable, Simon Denis, Jules Coignet, and André Giroux—highly skilled at quickly capturing effects of light and atmosphere—made sometimes arduous journeys to paint their landscapes in person at breathtaking sites ranging from the Baltic coast and Swiss Alps to the streets of Paris and the ruins of Rome. The exhibition True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870 consists of some 100 oil sketches, including several recently discovered works. Drawing on new scholarship, it explores issues such as attribution, chronology, and technique. To celebrate its opening at the National Gallery of Art on February 2, 2020, Mary Morton led a conversation with Jane Munro and Alice Goldet. True to Nature is on view through May 3, 2020.
Richard Mosse, artist, with Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Andrea Nelson, associate curator of photographs, National Gallery of Art Irish photographer Richard Mosse (b. 1980) attempts to capture the complex realities of loss and destruction. Having gained initial recognition and acclaim for his work on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mosse became increasingly frustrated with the constraints of conventional documentary photography. In an attempt to refresh the medium and reengage viewers, Mosse began using a military-grade surveillance camera, focusing on migrants and refugee camps. Locating his subjects and creating images through thermal radiation, Mosse subverts the aggression of the military technology to reveal the hardships of those displaced by war. This work culminated in the 52-minute video Incoming, filmed by Trevor Tweeten with a score by Ben Frost, that vacillates between scenes of the profoundly beautiful and the meditative, the terrifying and the horrific. In conjunction with the installation opening at the National Gallery of Art on November 17, 2019, Mosse discusses this narrative of displacement and migration in a conversation with curators Sarah Greenough and Andrea Nelson. Incoming is on view through March 22, 2020.
Andrew Butterfield, exhibition curator, and president of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts
Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence is the first-ever monographic exhibition in the United States on Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488), the innovative artist, painter, sculptor, and teacher whose pupils included Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, and likely Sandro Botticelli as well. The exhibition examines the wealth and breadth of Verrocchio's extraordinary artistry by bringing together some 50 of his masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and drawing that allow viewers to appreciate how his work in each art form stimulated creativity in the others. Groundbreaking technical research explores Verrocchio's materials and techniques, offering revelations about his artistic choices. Several carefully argued new attributions in different media are proposed in the exhibition. The National Gallery of Art is the sole American venue for the exhibition, and in this lecture, delivered on November 3, 2019, curator Andrew Butterfield provides an overview of Verrocchio’s work.
At the press preview for Degas at the Opéra on Tuesday, February 25, 2020, remarks were given by Mary Streett, senior vice president of U.S. communications and external affairs at BP America, and Kimberly A. Jones, curator of 19th-century French paintings at the National Gallery of Art. They were introduced by Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.
KIMBERLY JONES: //Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is an icon, pure and simple. It is one of the most famous sculptures in the world. There are at least 25 posthumous reproductions of this sculpture, but here we have the original.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: It’s made of beeswax over a metal frame. Degas gave this dancer a cotton bodice, a cotton and silk tutu, and linen slippers. Her human hair is tied back with a silk and linen ribbon. She rests on a wooden base in fourth position with her hands clasped behind her back so as not to flatten her tutu.
JULIE KENT: She’s thinking, she’s listening, she’s resting. And then she’s about to repeat it all, dance again. //She’s taking it all in, and then you can tell, like in five beats from now, she’s gonna close to fifth, plié and start dancing again.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The model is Marie van Goethem. She was known as one of the “little rats of the Opéra” a derogatory term used to describe the many young, working-class students in the dance school at the Paris Opéra. The teenager defiantly holds her head high, chin up.
KIMBERLY JONES: You get the sense of this prepubescent body, the slightly knobby knees, the long, attenuated arms, the thinness and frailty of her body.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Soon after the sculpture was exhibited in 1881, Marie was expelled from the dance school for missing too many practices, and little is known of her life afterward.
KIMBERLY JONES: In some ways, //who she is has been obscured. She is less Marie van Goethem, ballet rat, and more aspiring young dance student. She’s become something more symbolic, someone who is no longer tied to her biography, and has become something more.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: For nineteenth-century critics, this sculpture looked too real, even ugly. They weren’t used to seeing sculpture that looked so lifelike, that wasn’t made out of durable materials like bronze or marble... Today that is what is most appealing. We recognize something authentic in her.
KIMBERLY JONES: And that ultimately was what Degas was most after, the authenticity of the experience is much more important than the details. //Each and every image feels right.
KAWYIN: And let’s have a dancer give us a final thought.
JULIE KENT: I find it very inspiring. I see young ladies like this every day. But she’s there for the world to sort of acknowledge. And inspire. //She’d be a great spokesperson for us.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: This scene shows characters from a somewhat scandalous novel about the fictional Madame and Monsieur Cardinal and their two ballerina daughters.
KIMBERLY JONES: And here in this image, we see the two young girls, in their ballet costumes, //surrounded by a group of men wearing their black suits and black hats.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: These are the season ticket holders at the Paris Opéra.
KIMBERLY JONES: They basically could go anywhere they wanted. And where they usually wanted to go was wherever the ballerinas were.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The novel was written by Degas’s friend, Ludovic Halévy. You may remember seeing his portrait earlier in the exhibition.
Inspired by his observations from behind the scenes at the Opéra, Halévy wrote a series of short stories on the exploits of the Cardinal family. These wildly popular tales were irresistible source material for Degas. He interpreted the subject in monotypes, but they were not intended to illustrate Halevy’s text. For Degas, they were a private endeavor that allowed him to experiment. Degas concentrated on the young ballerinas’ interactions with subscribers.
KIMBERLY JONES: In Halévy’s stories, he puts a decidedly humorous spin on all of this, //But Degas, in his images, oftentimes really helps to underscore the challenges, how vulnerable these young girls are. Here they are much smaller physically; they’re literally cornered by these men who are looming over them. There is an undercurrent of darkness and vulnerability that Degas very subtly captures. //You do get a sense of the predatory nature of the relationship between these young women and these admirers.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas’s use of monotype heightens the stark contrasts. Halls are dimly lit, details are obscured, and the hidden areas of the Paris Opéra are exposed.
KIMBERLY JONES: //Notice, for example, the whiteness of the doorways, the light spilling out. Degas created that by using a rag to wipe away all the ink before he //printed the plate to create this very dramatic, very spontaneous image.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas produced almost eighty monotypes inspired by Halévy’s Cardinal family stories. Some might have been exhibited during his lifetime, but more likely these bold monotypes were largely a personal enterprise, shared only with his closest friends and not seen by the public until after his death.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Two dancers are getting ready for an important examination. On the right, the ballerina performs toe exercises to warm up. The girl on the left, with a blue bow, bends at the waist.
JULIE KENT: She’s straightening out her tights to make sure probably the seam is well-placed in the back, and that her knees are not baggy. Baggy knees were the bane of every dancer’s existence. We’d always be pulling them up, pulling them up, pulling them up.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: In the nineteenth-century Paris Opéra, dance examinations took place twice a year. One was an evaluation of skills and the other a consideration for promotion.
JULIE KENT: You have to be able to execute and deliver and you have to look like it’s a walk in the park. So it’s enormous pressure. You really have to contain yourself, contain your emotions. You can’t show that you’re nervous, you can’t show it because that’s counter to what a performance should be.
KIMBERLY JONES: So much was riding on these examinations, and the young women would prepare themselves very carefully, get their best tutus, they would buy beautiful ribbons, everything to make themselves look as elegant and beautiful as possible.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Just behind these two ballerinas, there are two older women. The woman on the left in a distinctive red checked plaid shawl and black bonnet seems to be tending to the tutu of the dancer bending over. These are the original stage mothers. They looked after their daughters and their interests. By promoting, encouraging, and championing their daughters, they helped them move up through the ranks.
JULIE KENT: The look and feel of Degas’ positions, //what the dancers are focused on, //looks to me completely accurate. I mean I see //these sort of motifs of //looking at your shoes and adjusting your costume and just resting, thinking, to be completely natural and real.
KIMBERLY JONES: The Four Dancers is one of, if not the last great ballet picture that Degas produced. After this point, Degas will turn his attention increasingly towards pastel and charcoal drawing and sculpture; other media, rather than paintings. But here, we see that last great burst of energy.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: When a friend visited in 1899, Degas announced, “I am going to show you some orgies of color that I am doing just now.” It was about this time that Degas created this oil painting, a definite orgy of color. By now, Degas had begun to lose his sight. He continued to paint, but his brushstrokes become broader and his colors brighter.
KIMBERLY JONES: The color palette is vibrant and somewhat lurid, filled with oranges and greens and bright yellows. We see the wonderful shades of green reflected in the dancers’ backs and arms, presumably from the gaslight of the foot lamps, as it is coloring their bodies.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: In this cluster of dancers at the far left, one figure gazes up toward her outstretched arm, while three others adjust the shoulder of their costume as they rotate in different directions. We may be looking at four ballerinas, or perhaps one dancer as she pirouettes in Degas’s mind.
Opposite the dancers, on the far right, we see a backdrop of haystacks, which may be a nod to fellow impressionist Claude Monet.
KIMBERLY JONES: But everything about this is meant to be something outside of reality. And so Degas embraces that notion, that we are not in the real world, but in a world beyond; the world of the stage, the world of the spectacle; and ramps that up to create this wonderful, dreamy image of dancers as they prepare to go onstage and perform before the audience.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: A cluster of four girls at left wear half-tunics, not tutus, as they move across the plain of Sparta, not the stage. Degas was fascinated by the ancient city-state of Sparta. He poured over ancient Greek chronicles that told of a time and a place where regimented exercise was part of education and where girls were taught to dance, sing, run, and throw, alongside boys. At first glance, the link between this early history painting and later pictures of the Paris Opéra may not seem apparent. But Degas considered this his first ballet scene—even though it is not derived from a ballet or theater performance of any type.
KIMBERLY JONES: What Degas seemed really fascinated by, was this notion that for the Spartans, exercise, dance, wasn’t about entertainment, it wasn’t about leisure. It was about discipline. It was about control. It was about honing the body. And for Degas, that is the connection. In the Spartan youths, what he is seeing are dancers.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas began painting this work around 1860. He reworked it for more than twenty years and displayed it prominently on an easel in his studio for guests to see.
KIMBERLY JONES: Why is Degas doing this? Well, it goes back, in many ways, to the subject itself, of [the Spartan youths.
In this painting of ancient figures, Degas is evoking the modern ballerina, the modern dancer who is the greatest of athletes. She might be wearing a tutu but that same sense of focus and determination and discipline to turn her body into the perfect form underlies both images.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: This work is a study, not a drawing to exhibit or sell. The dancers are removed from any context. Here, and in the nearby drawings, we see Degas observing the body in motion.
JULIE KENT: Dancers are obsessed with improvement. Every day, we expect a level of improvement in ourselves. And knowing that you are aspiring for something that you may never attain, that’s the whole point. (Laughs)
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas shared that obsession with dancers. He practiced depicting certain ballet positions and gestures repeatedly until he got them right. At the far right, a dancer bends over, perhaps to massage a sore muscle or put on a slipper. It’s a familiar pose for Degas.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: You might see the same figure in a pastel that you then see later in a painting. Degas often drew with charcoal and pastel on a smooth, transparent tracing paper. Using transparent paper allowed Degas to trace figures from one drawing to another sheet. He could trace the same dancer and place her in different compositions and figure groupings.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The charcoals allowed Degas to make quick studies of movement and they give us a chance to see his working process. Conservator Kimberly Schenck points to evidence of alterations in the figure on the far left.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: He moved her leg several times, you can see little traces of his original lightly applied charcoal marks at the far edge, the heel of her foot, for example.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: In the figure in the middle, there are signs of changes here, too.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: Again, you can see this halo of rubbed charcoal, implying that Degas rubbed away his original lines and redrew the outlines of her arms, especially her left arm, which is in a bent shape. You can see residue of the original lines that he made.
KIMBERLY JONES: Fans were the most definitive symbol of femininity in nineteenth-century France. In the 1870s and beyond, fans developed something of a cult following among artists, who began to explore the decorative potential of the fans.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: French artists and their audiences were fascinated by all things Japanese, following two major exhibitions of Japanese art in Paris. Impressionists like Degas depicted Japanese fans in their works and produced fans themselves. The materials Degas used also point to the Japanese influence. Conservator Kimberly Schenck.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: Some of the fans in the exhibition are paint on silk. He would use gouache, which is basically a thick watercolor, and also thin it down into dilute washes. He, in some cases, would add pastel, sometimes wetting the end of the pastel stick to get an intense deposit of pastel pigment. He, in some of the pastels, would use thin washes of metallic paint.
KIMBERLY JONES: The variety of media that he uses means that they were a constant challenge.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Here, Degas is clearly inspired by the balanced asymmetry typically seen in Japanese design. Note how the unusual curved format made him think carefully about how to organize his composition. He concentrated figures on one side of the fan, counterbalancing them with emptiness on the other side.
KIMBERLY JONES: And as you look at this group of images, you can see just how versatile and varied they really were.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: In the fifth Impressionist exhibition of 1880, an astounding fifty fans were exhibited. Degas produced at least twenty-seven in his lifetime.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Here, Degas shows us the ballerinas as they prepare themselves for their lessons.
JULIE KENT: It’s just exactly what you would see in any dance studio now, any ballet studio. It’s just it looks different because we no longer wear the full sort of costume; the invention of Lycra changed the world (Laughs) so…
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Some of these dancers appear as elements in other compositions. You will see a variation of the girl just right of center who looks down as she reaches back to adjust a green bow. Our gaze follows the figures, whom Degas has placed diagonally across the space.
KIMBERLY JONES: On the left, for example, you see the dancer who’s hunkered down //wearing her red shawl. From there, your eye leads right to the seated figure and the figure who is tying her bow. Your eye then leads to the figures at the far right, of the dancers who were in mid-motion. So there’s this progression from repose to motion, from left to right, from the lower-left corner to the upper-right corner.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas even uses the architectural details of the studio—the dark brown wood paneling of the bottom half of the wall acts like an arrow pointing to the right.
KIMBERLY JONES: Everything about this painting is meticulously and carefully constructed in order to make your eye move across the composition in the way Degas wants you to. It’s very artfully crafted.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The Dance Lesson is the first in a series of what Degas called his “elongated paintings.” Like his decorative fans, these canvases, which are twice as wide as they are high, allowed him to experiment with a new format.
KIMBERLY JONES: Degas continues that exploration of space, and how to arrange forms across this extended space, counterbalancing void and figure, void and mass. He is really ramping up that sense of asymmetry, that there’s always this wonderful seesaw quality going on in all of these images.
JULIE KENT: When a dancer’s taking a bow they are both receiving and giving thanks for the audience, for coming to watch you dance and receiving the appreciation of the audience. But it’s that little pause in the action where if it went very well, you’re sort of having a little celebration (Laughs) moment; if you’re less than satisfied, you’re sort of just getting it together.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: This ballerina stands downstage from her fellow performers, her face and chest lit from the gas footlights below. Despite the backdrop and unusual props and costumes, we cannot link this to any one ballet or opera. Degas almost never gave us a specific scene.
KIMBERLY JONES: Initially Degas started with a much smaller image, literally just showing the dancer. The original image, in fact, cut off right at the top of the woman’s head.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas expanded the image first by adding a strip of paper to the top and right-hand side and then a second time along the top, left, and bottom, creating an almost square format for a more elaborate scene of dancers and men with parasols. Paper conservator Kimberly Schenck.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: When he would build a composition, sometimes he would take a tracing of one drawing and then add strips of paper to that basic composition of maybe another figure, or the scenery behind. And this was a way that he could build up the composition and also make changes as he worked.
KIMBERLY JONES: He did not plan everything out in advance; on the contrary, he is constantly making changes in his compositions, rethinking, reworking, reorganizing, and restructuring the entire composition.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: You can best see the seams where paper was added at far left, just above the elbow of the dancer heading off the stage, and again, in the landscape, to the right of the central male figure. Degas made other revisions, too.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: You can often find evidence of where he slightly shifted the position of a dancer’s arm, or he may have added more figures as he developed the pastel.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: In this case, it is the dancer’s leg. Degas drew it once, and then moved it forward.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The ballet master stands at left instructing a single ballerina. All background distractions are stripped away. This is Degas’s first experiment in monotype. Paper conservator Kimberly Schenck explains the process.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: Monotypes are made by painting oil paint or dilute printing ink onto a smooth metal plate. While the ink is still moist, a sheet of paper is placed on top and both the plate and the paper are run through an etching press, which transfers the image to the paper.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The technique is called monotype because it produces a unique image. An artist could create one good impression, and maybe a second, slightly fainter one from the plate. Degas made adjustments in the ink before the print was made.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: Degas used the end of a brush or another tool to draw the strong outlines, depicting the master’s stick and coat and the dancer’s legs.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: He also added more ink where too much had been removed. Look around the figure of the ballerina to see Degas’s most visible corrections.
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: The round circles of ink at the center of the right edge and below the dancer’s feet are from where Degas added ink with his fingertips. Later, white chalk or white pastel was rubbed onto areas to lighten them, such as in the dancer’s skirt and parts of the background.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas didn’t create this large work alone. He had help from the engraver Ludovic Lepic. In the upper left corner, we see their scrawled signatures, which they had to do backwards on the plate to account for the reversal in the print. Degas often used his monotypes as a base for more complex compositions, drawing or painting on top of the print.
KIMBERLY JONES: We see a woman gazing downwards from the opera box. We are below looking up at her. Her face is illuminated by the footlights, giving it this strange ghostly white quality.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas rarely depicted actual audiences but he does here. This woman sits in a loge or opera box. At the Paris Opéra, these elevated enclosures were the only places where women were permitted to sit. The location made them visible, but also gave them a sweeping view of the theater. This woman gazes down at us in more ways than one. She would have been a woman from a well-to-do family.
KIMBERLY JONES: And Degas plays up that kind of psychological distance, showing her aloof and alone in that box, surrounded by shadows, only her pale moon face gleaming out of the darkness.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: There was little novelty within the opera schedule from season to season. The same limited repertoire was performed over and over again.
KIMBERLY JONES: //The operas themselves were very traditional, and repetitive. //So the real allure for most people was going to see who was in the boxes. //It was kind of like a sporting event for the upper classes in Paris, and that wonderful sense of being noticed, and seeing who else was there and who wasn’t there.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Nearby, in the pastel titled Theater Box, Degas changes the viewpoint. He now has us peering over a woman’s shoulder to watch a performance, masterfully condensing the space between the spectator and the spectacle. Take a look and compare
Degas at the Opéra, The Dance Class, begun 1873, completed 1875–1876 by National Gallery of Art
JULIE KENT: You can almost hear the footsteps coming down. There’s some energy and anticipation of the dancers, that their class is coming, and that they’d better hurry.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Behind the staircase on the left, we can see a floor-to-ceiling window. In Degas’s various depictions of dance classes—some of which you can see nearby—these arched windows remain a constant. There is some uncertainty as to when or whether Degas ever stepped foot inside the rehearsal rooms of the Paris Opéra. His season ticket subscription started in 1885 and would have provided access to the backstage and other spaces, but not necessarily the one where the dancers rehearsed. But he obviously knew about its large windows, perhaps from seeing them from the street.
KIMBERLY JONES: By including that very distinctive, very well-known element, Degas heightens the sense of realism so that contemporaries, who had no more access than he did to the rehearsal rooms would have felt at ease, and would have been assured that he was painting what he knew, and that it was completely 100 percent accurate.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: For Julie Kent, the architectural details of Degas’s rehearsal rooms—the columns, staircases, windows—matter less than the overall environment the artist created. She thinks this scene beautifully evokes the staging area where ballerinas would put on their final touches before heading into class.
JULIE KENT: The body language, the constant sort of fidgeting and fussing with making sure that your costume is fitting you correctly, is fitting you to show your advantage, show your shoulders or show your waistline or that it’s not riding up too much so it’s uncomfortable to move your legs, and adjusting your shoes and just all the action and intensity, is right there.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Critics praised Rose Caron as a “peerless tragic actress.” Others were less enthusiastic about her voice, which was once referred to as “wounded.” This is a recording of her from late in her career, in her signature role as Brunehild, the Queen of Iceland, from the opera Sigurd.
Between 1885 and 1892, Degas spent 177 evenings at the Paris Opéra. He was clearly drawn to particular productions and performers. Rose Caron was a favorite. Degas marveled at her elegant and graceful gestures.
KIMBERLY JONES: Here she is shown in evening garb, as she pulls up her glove over her long arm. Degas admired her beautiful arms tremendously; so much so that he wrote a sonnet to her, //which he opens with the line: These arms, noble and long.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: According to his own admission, Degas was passionately in love with Rose Caron. The day after seeing a performance of Sigurd, he wrote to his friend:
ACTOR: DEGAS: “How well she is able to raise her thin and divine arms, holding them aloft for a long time, without affectation, for a long time and then lowering them gently!”
KIMBERLY JONES: Degas’s admiration for Rose Caron is almost certainly the reason why he attended the opera Sigurd at least 37 times; it couldn’t possibly have been the music itself that he found so alluring.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The man leaning on his umbrella at left is Ludovic Halévy, a writer of both fiction and texts for operas, or librettos. Perhaps his best-known libretto was the one he co-wrote for composer Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen. You are hearing music from it now.
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KIMBERLY JONES: Halévy, of course, not only was Degas’s friend, but he was very much his entrée into the backstage world. He introduced him to a number of musicians, composers, dancers. So he is absolutely instrumental in helping Degas to develop those connections and enter into that world and get to know it intimately in a way that the average visitor would not have had opportunity to.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The other figure is slightly hidden from view, bisected by the wooden frame of a stage flat. He wears a similar dark overcoat and top hat. This was, of course, standard dress for men at the time. We’ll see it in several paintings that depict opera subscribers or season ticket holders. These were wealthy gentlemen who, because of their subscriptions, were allowed to lurk backstage and interact with the dancers.
KIMBERLY JONES: This figure, in other times, becomes very ominous and rather predatory. That’s not so much the effect here, but one does wonder if Degas isn’t maybe tweaking Halévy just a little bit, intimating that he is part of that world, even if he is not necessarily one of its more predatory members.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: In the adjacent studies of Halévy you get a sense of Degas’s working methods, as he constantly revised figures, looking for just the right lines. Paper conservator Kimberly Schenck:
KIMBERLY SCHENCK: In these three studies, Degas rubbed out some of the charcoal lines and redrew them. In the figure in the right sketch, you can see the changes in the coattail and then on the left, you can see these dark, bold lines in the front of the figure.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Once he found the line he liked, Degas would use the sketches in other works. He would first trace them, possibly flipping or reversing the direction as necessary, and then insert them into different compositions. See if you can spot Halévy, or similarly attired subscribers, in other works in this show.
KIMBERLY JONES: In the background you see this wonderful sort of shifting and movement of the dancers onstage, who are half cut-off. It’s not about the dancers, it’s about the musicians who are making the music and are here, for once, taking center stage.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The work was a portrait, commissioned by Désiré Dihau, a musician in the opera orchestra and a friend of Degas. Dihau is the single bassoonist sitting at the center of the front row.
KIMBERLY JONES: When Degas sat down to paint his portrait of his friend, he chose this very unconventional approach, showing him in his workplace, showing him doing what he loves and what he was best at, and that was performing music.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas meticulously depicted various instruments—of course Dihau’s bassoon but also edges of violins, a cello, and the neck of a double bass. The composition, however, is pure fiction. In reality, there would have been four bassoonists, not one, seated with the other woodwind instruments behind the strings section. Their backs would have been turned to the audience as they faced the conductor at the edge of the stage.
KIMBERLY JONES: He did drawings of individual elements and then composed it all, allowing his creativity to construct the scene that feels very real, that exults in the reality of the implied image without actually ever being a true event that Degas saw.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Nineteenth-century audiences might have recognized other figures from the Parisian music scene. In a theater box to the left of the stage, we can see the head of a man watching the dancers—he is the composer Emmanuel Chabrier. He’s less well known today but his music had a huge influence on the next generation of French composers, including Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. And over at the far left of the orchestra, the man with the distinctive beard and glasses is cellist Louis-Marie Pilet. His individual portrait is also on view in this gallery.
KIMBERLY JONES: Music was very much a part of Degas’s life. It was very much part of his interior life. Not just the performances that he sought out at the Paris opera, but these more intimate, homebound experiences that were clearly near and dear to him.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: We are not in Paris anymore. A possible clue stands in the corner at left, behind the woman in white: a tropical leafy plant. In 1872, Degas and his brother traveled to New Orleans to visit family—their mother was from the city, a descendant of some of the original French settlers in the Americas.
KIMBERLY JONES: We see here two women who are rehearsing a song while a man who’s rather somber, shadow figure, is playing at the piano. This is not a portrait; it’s not meant to depict specific women, but rather to evoke a kind of musical evening in a private home.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Degas’s American cousins and his sister may have served as models for this painting. Scholars think Degas began this painting in New Orleans where he longed for the Paris Opéra. As he wrote to his friends, “the lack of an opera is veritable torture.” He made do with private soirees such as this one, held in home parlors with the furniture pushed back to create a makeshift stage. They probably reminded him of such gatherings in Paris.
KIMBERLY JONES: Degas knew these very, very well. Every Monday evening in his father’s apartment, there would be a gathering of friends and family and musical performances to entertain them.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Nearby is a painting of one such performance. His father, Auguste De Gas, listens as Spanish musician Lorenzo Pagans sings and plays the guitar. Pagans was a regular performer at these musical Mondays, and Degas gives us a real sense of the intense concentration involved with making and listening to music. Degas liked this portrait so much he kept it over his bed for the remainder of his life.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Look closely: Just between the horse’s front legs are two delicate pink slippers. If not for this one detail, we would never know this is an image of a ballet.
KIMBERLY JONES: In fact, what we see here is Eugénie Fiocre, the ballerina, along with two other dancers who play her handmaidens, as they are sitting probably during a break, during a rehearsal. They’re not actually mid-performance. She looks melancholy. She has a distant gaze. So rather than showing her as this starlet, this] sparkling allure of this beautiful dancer, he shows her remarkably down-to-earth, very accessible and approachable.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Eugénie Fiocre, the seated woman in blue, was a well-known and well-compensated figure in the opera world, who moved among Paris society. In painting her portrait, Degas grappled with how to make this contemporary dancer appear timeless. Always experimenting, he devised a novel approach.
KIMBERLY JONES: The painting is ultimately a very weird hybrid. It is part portrait, it’s part celebrity image, it is part historical document, and part genre scene.
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KAYWIN FELDMAN: The ballet being rehearsed was La Source, or The Spring. You are hearing music from act one. The ballet garnered attention largely for its extravagant stage sets featuring what you see here: rocks, plants, and a real waterfall. And it even included a live horse. Degas captured that spectacle in his painting.
KIMBERLY JONES: So Degas is taking that into account, but it’s really the subject, his sitter, Eugénie Fiocre, this beautiful ballerina who was up-and-coming, who Degas clearly admired so much that he drew her portrait twice, and did another painting of her actually from a photograph. So he was quite the admirer.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Notably absent? Any hint of a theatrical performance. Degas has cropped out the edge of the backdrops, the floodlights, even the stage itself. Instead we focus on Mademoiselle Fiocre.
KIMBERLY JONES: In this painting, which is actually a rare example by Degas in which he shows an actual operatic performance, we see the ballet from the opera known as Robert le Diable.
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KAYWIN FELDMAN: Nineteenth-century French audiences expected to see a ballet scene within their operas. This one is a complicated tale involving a devil’s son, known as Robert le Diable, or Robert the devil, and debauched nuns who are called back from the dead in order to lure Robert to the dark side. You are hearing the score from one of the most electrifying moments in the opera, the “Ballet of the Nuns.” Curator Kimberly Jones.
KIMBERLY JONES: And that’s the scene that Degas shows, this wonderfully dramatic over-the-top scene of the nuns rising from their graves, these ghostly figures swirling about, writhing across the stage. Very dramatic, very romantic.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: The version Degas saw was a box office smash, in large part because of this sensational ballet. Stage directions called it a ‘bacchanal.’ Julie Kent, Artistic Director of the Washington Ballet.
JULIE KENT: When you’re performing on the stage, you see the orchestra. And that’s the road for a dancer, how you move forward is you let the music come into your body and then, you bring it to life. You definitely respond to the orchestra. It’s the most beautiful thing.
KIMBERLY JONES: Degas essentially breaks this painting down into two halves, two registers. The top half shows the performance. In the lower half, however, we are in the orchestra pit, along with the musicians, and we can just make them out. They’re all cast in shadow.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Nearly everyone is concentrating on their instruments or the stage.
KIMBERLY JONES: All except one man in the center; we see him turning away. He’s actually a member of the audience, and he’s looking not at the opera, but actually through his opera glasses looking upwards into the opera boxes, watching someone else.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: This isn’t your last look at the musicians. You’ll see a version of this orchestra again later on this tour.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: Hello and welcome to Degas at the Opéra. I’m Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art.
Edgar Degas was a regular opera goer and particularly loved the ballets performed between acts. He took inspiration from his paintings while watching these performances at the Paris Opéra. In Degas’s life, the Opéra had two homes. The first burned down in 1873, and the second is the magnificent Garnier Opéra house that still stands today. But in some ways, Degas’s opera existed primarily in his mind, based on his experiences as a regular patron and on stories and descriptions from backstage regulars and the ballerinas who modeled in his studio. And it was there, in his studio, where he created these scenes—sometimes real, and sometimes invented—using innovative techniques across all media.
KIMBERLY JONES: And that is what makes Degas such an extraordinary chronicler of the Paris Opéra, because he puts you there even when you couldn’t possibly be there.
JULIE KENT: I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about everything that Degas captures, is the work, the shared work that every dancer puts into their craft, starting at a young age. //But so many of [Degas’s paintings] just feel like the backdrop to my life.
KIMBERLY SCHENK: Degas is known as an experimenter. His touch is so intuitive.
KAYWIN FELDMAN: To tell this story, we offer three different perspectives…from Kimberly Jones, Curator of Nineteenth Century French Paintings here at the Gallery; Julie Kent, Artistic Director of the Washington Ballet and former ballerina with the American Ballet Theater, and Kimberly Schenck, Head of the Gallery’s Department of Paper Conservation.
I hope you’ll enjoy your visit.
Matthew Shindell, curator of planetary science, National Air and Space Museum The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Photography played a significant role both in preparing for the mission and in shaping the cultural consciousness of the event. By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs features works ranging in date from the 19th century to the “space-age” 1960s. The event Photographing the Moon, held on October 3, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, celebrated this exhibition by inviting three curators from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum to give talks on the intertwined histories of photography and space exploration. In the third talk, Matthew Shindell described the development and impact of the field of photogeology, which provided early photography of the earth and moon from airplanes and eventually allowed for mapping and selecting landing sites for human missions to the moon.
Jennifer Levasseur, curator of space history, National Air and Space Museum The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Photography played a significant role both in preparing for the mission and in shaping the cultural consciousness of the event. By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs features works ranging in date from the 19th century to the “space-age” 1960s. The event Photographing the Moon, held on October 3, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, celebrated this exhibition by inviting three curators from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum to give talks on the intertwined histories of photography and space exploration. In the second lecture, Jennifer Levasseur looked at photographs taken in space by people, revealing the ways that images captured by astronauts of the Apollo era have formed the framework for our understanding of human spaceflight today.
David DeVorkin, senior curator of astronomy and the space sciences, National Air and Space Museum The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Photography played a significant role both in preparing for the mission and in shaping the cultural consciousness of the event. By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs features works ranging in date from the 19th century to the “space-age” 1960s. The event Photographing the Moon, held on October 3, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, celebrated this exhibition by inviting three curators from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum to give talks on the intertwined histories of photography and space exploration. To open the event, David DeVorkin presented an illustrated inquiry into the interplay of the eye and hand with the photographic process, looking at developments over the past 150 years and their impact on the Apollo program.
Ray Barker, archivist of special collections/Washingtoniana, DC Public Library; Cynthia Connolly, artist, and booking agent, d.c. space; Claudia Joseph, artist, and booking agent, d.c. space; Rogelio Maxwell, artist, and director and curator (1976–1985), Hardart Gallery; Silvana Straw, poet, writer, performer, and DC’s original Poetry Slam Champion; and Richard Squires, artist, and founder, Museum of Temporary Art Often overshadowed by the presence of national museums, Washington, DC’s independent visual and performance art spaces have nonetheless played a critical role in shaping the cultural life of the city. While many of these local venues no longer exist, the DC Public Library is taking strides to preserve this rich history of a thriving arts community; prominent figures from that community share their experiences in this program presented at the National Gallery of Art on October 19, 2019. Artists Cynthia Connolly and Claudia Joseph speak of their work as booking agents at music venue d.c. space. Rogelio Maxwell, founder of Hardart Gallery, and Richard Squires, founder of the Museum of Temporary Art, discuss the histories of their respective spaces, and DC’s original Poetry Slam Champion, Silvana Straw, who had been featured at these art spaces, contributes a short performance. Finally, the artists join Ray Barker, archivist of special collections/Washingtoniana at the DC Public Library, for a conversation. This program, the second of a multipart series, is held in collaboration with the DC Public Library.
Program: The Keyboard Re-imagined So Percussion performs works originally composed for keyboard instruments including selections from Elliot Cole’s Postludes for Bowed Vibraphone; Vijay Iyer’s Torque; Jason Treuting’s Nine Numbers 4; and Caroline Shaw’s Taxidermy. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, February 10, 2019.
At the press preview for Raphael and His Circle on Tuesday, February 11, 2020, Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art, gave opening remarks and a curatorial tour. Bober also introduced Kimberly Schenck, head of paper conservation, National Gallery of Art, who provided a scientific analysis of the Raphael drawings in the exhibition.
C. D. Dickerson III, curator and head of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art Alonso Berruguete, active on the Iberian Peninsula during the first half of the 16th century, initially trained as a painter before becoming known for his painted sculptures in wood. Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain is the first major exhibition held outside Spain to celebrate Berruguete’s expressive art. The exhibition presents more than 40 works from across the artist’s career, including early paintings and the largest group of his drawings ever to be assembled, along with an unprecedented number of sculptures. These works range from single figures to large sections of multistory altarpieces, or retablos, that combine reliefs, statues, paintings, and architectural details. In this lecture, delivered on October 14, 2019, curator C. D. Dickerson III provides an overview to this exhibition of work by Berruguete, the preeminent sculptor of Renaissance Spain.
Kara Fiedorek Felt, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Held on November 24, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition The Eye of the Sun: Nineteenth-Century Photographs from the National Gallery of Art, the lecture Before the Kodak Girl explores the many roles that women played in nineteenth-century photography. From working in major studios to producing photographs as professionals and amateurs, women were deeply involved in the medium’s first half-century, though histories and collections of photography tend to emphasize only a few extraordinary examples. Kara Felt illustrates the diverse contributions of women—highlighting a selection of known and relatively unknown figures—while discussing the factors enabling, and limiting, their advancement.
Ultimately, the lecture illuminates the emergence of photography as a central interest of the modern woman in the 1890s, when Eastman Kodak launched a highly successful campaign to sell its products through imagery of the independent, camera-toting “Kodak Girl.”
At the press preview for True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870 on Tuesday, January 28, 2020, remarks by Kate Haw, collections, exhibitions, and programs officer, National Gallery of Art, were followed by a tour given by Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art.
USCO, also known as the Company of US or US Company, was a group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, and composers who formed a multimedia collective in 1963. Two of its cofounders—Michael Callahan (b. 1944), an electronics innovator and president of Museum Technology Source, and Gerd Stern (b. 1928), a poet, media artist, and president of Intermedia Foundation—reflect on their lives and the creation of USCO. Callahan and Stern discuss their artistic journeys and initial collaborations, which led to the formation of this innovative and technologically prescient multimedia collective. They provide insight into USCO’s influences and activities during the 1960s. Archival footage and behind-the-scenes access to their visit to the National Gallery of Art in preparation for their performance on March 3, 2019, provide a greater context for understanding USCO’s collaborative spirit, rich history, and art practice.
This video opens with Michael Callahan and Gerd Stern, seated side by side, shown from about the waist up. In the first few minutes, black-and-white and color photographs from previous points in their lives are interspersed with interview footage.
Other footage includes 1966 films of USCO and excerpts from multimedia works entitled Verbal American Landscape and From Hubbub to We Are All One, reprised and performed at the National Gallery of Art in 2019. Verbal American Landscape focuses on signs—street signs, commercial signs, those on buildings, construction and warning signs. The sign images are projected onto a large screen with the use of three slide projectors in a darkened auditorium, and the projected images overlap at the edges. Each image is projected for a few moments before it is replaced by others, sometimes after flickering several times. For instance, at one point, the image to the left shows a sign saying “Hacker” against a blue-gray background, probably a building facade. The sign at center says, “Danger Blasting Area Turn Off” before it is cut off along the bottom edge, so that the final words are lost. The words “Danger” and “Turn Off” are written in crimson; “Blasting Area” is written in pale orange, all against a black background. The sign to the right says, “Construction Pass at Your Own Risk” in red letters against a mustard-yellow background. The lettering on all three signs features large display type of block capital letters. After a moment, these signs flash off the screen and are replaced with others, saying “Do not enter,” “Wrong way,” “Dead end,” “Sweet Temptation,” “Pull,” “Wait,” “Save,” “Love,” and other words and phrases, which are sometimes cut off or incomplete. Some signs include symbols or emblems, such as a heart or neon cowboy.
From Hubbub to We Are All One includes projected images of magazine covers, landscape photographs, and snapshots of individuals and groups of people.
Footage near the end of the video shows preparations for the performance at the Gallery in a large auditorium. At the front of the auditorium, a long table is laid out with a variety of apparatuses used during the performance, including four carousel slide projectors, a small sound mixer, CDs and a CD player, and the original mixed electromechanical and electronic device Callahan designed and built during the 1960s.
Charles Ritchie, artist, and former associate curator, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art In this lecture held on October 27, 2019, in conjunction with the month-long Sketching is Seeing program at the National Gallery of Art, Charles Ritchie presents varied approaches to collecting ideas. For example, do artists fill a sketchbook from front to back or do they open it to an empty space and begin working? Does writing accompany the drawings and how might it relate to the images? Are the drawings and/or writings employed for developing skill, or are they compost for the creation of other works, or does the book document completed works? Using his experience as a keeper of a sketchbook/journal, Ritchie explores the creative practices of some of his favorite artists including Isabel Bishop, Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, Alberto Giacometti, and Edward Hopper, among others, and he touches on formative manuscripts by Emily Dickinson, Jack Kerouac, and Wallace Stevens. The presentation concludes with a meditation on some of the forces at the core of drawing and writing: the desire to remember, the spirit of play and improvisation, and the essential ingredient―curiosity.
Marc Fumaroli (professor emeritus at the Collège de France and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) examines four landscape paintings by Jean Honoré Fragonard from the period 1775/1780: A Game of Hot Cockles, Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and A Game of Horse and Rider. In contrast to the pleasure-seeking pursuits usually identified in these garden scenes, Fumaroli sees fearful apprehension in Fragonard’s ambiguous depiction of natural settings and human expressions.
Sir Nicholas Penny, currently visiting professor, National Academy of Art, Hangzhou; previously director, National Gallery, London (2008–2015); former senior curator of sculpture, National Gallery of Art (2002–2008)
Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence is the first-ever monographic exhibition in the United States on Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488). The National Gallery of Art is the sole American venue of the exhibition that runs from September 15, 2019 through January 12, 2020. Verrocchio was both a draftsman and modeler whose designs were carried out in painting and sculpture by his own hand, but also by pupils and assistants, including Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, and likely Sandro Botticelli. In this lecture held on December 15, 2019, Sir Nicholas Penny argues that Verrocchio was one of the most influential of all European artists because he developed practices that came to be of fundamental importance in subsequent centuries, notably the separate study of drapery, the nude, and expressive heads and hands.
Daniel Schlosberg, with Jessica Aszodi and Russell Rolen This program was a rare performance of two composers, Kurt Weill and Francis Poulenc, known primarily for song juxtaposed in both vocal and instrumental repertoire. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, December 23, 2018.
David Gariff, Senior Lecturer, National Gallery of Art
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, this two-part lecture examines art and photography created during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (from the end of the 19th century to 1922). The Antarctic expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, and Douglas Mawson were the equivalent of NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.
Antarctica was the last place on earth to be discovered and explored. It was, to many, like going to the moon—and, indeed, photographs of the polar landscape resemble images of the lunar surface. Today, locations on the moon attest to the continuing link between the heroic accomplishments of Antarctic explorers and lunar astronauts. “Shackleton,” named after the Antarctic explorer, is an impact crater at the south pole of the moon. And NASA is now working to send American astronauts to the lunar south pole, a place no human has ever gone before.
Artists and photographers, most notably Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, accompanied the various Antarctic expeditions. These artist-explorers made photographs, films, paintings, and drawings that reveal the triumphs and tragedies of first attempts to reach the South Pole. In Part II of this lecture, presented on November 21, 2019, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the artists and photographers who visually documented the Antarctic continent during this heroic age of 20th-century exploration.
David Gariff, Senior Lecturer, National Gallery of Art
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, this two-part lecture examines art and photography created during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (from the end of the 19th century to 1922). The Antarctic expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, and Douglas Mawson were the equivalent of NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.
Antarctica was the last place on earth to be discovered and explored. It was, to many, like going to the moon—and, indeed, photographs of the polar landscape resemble images of the lunar surface. Today, locations on the moon attest to the continuing link between the heroic accomplishments of Antarctic explorers and lunar astronauts. “Shackleton,” named after the Antarctic explorer, is an impact crater at the south pole of the moon. And NASA is now working to send American astronauts to the lunar south pole, a place no human has ever gone before.
Artists and photographers, most notably Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, accompanied the various Antarctic expeditions. These artist-explorers made photographs, films, paintings, and drawings that reveal the triumphs and tragedies of first attempts to reach the South Pole. In Part I of this lecture, presented on November 19, 2019, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the artists and photographers who visually documented the Antarctic continent during this heroic age of 20th-century exploration.
Dylan T. Smith, Robert H. Smith Research Conservator, department of object conservation, National Gallery of Art Between 1464 and 1473, Andrea del Verrocchio created two funerary monuments for the Medici in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence: the tomb of Cosimo the Elder and the tomb of his sons, Piero and Giovanni. These monuments integrate marble, porphyry, and bronze into magnificent designs that were both highly original and technically innovative. In this lecture given on December 10, 2019, conservator Dylan T. Smith presents the results of new technical investigations that offer greater insight into the materials and techniques of the tombs—pivotal works in the career of this Renaissance master. This program is held in conjunction with the exhibition Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence, on view through January 12, 2020.
Gabriele Finaldi, director, National Gallery, London
In his lecture, presented on December 8, 2019, Gabriele Finaldi of the National Gallery, London, discusses Mantegna's particular universe as constructed in stone: carved, cut, polished, and sometimes invented. In his compelling imaginarium, the ancient world is a severe construct of marble, alabaster, and porphyry. He juxtaposes sculpted stone with flesh, creating potent dualities of ancient and modern, eternal and transient, dead and alive. In the skies of his paintings, clouds take on mysterious forms, sometimes rocklike, that want to insinuate themselves into his narratives. This lecture explores how the realms of nature, art, and antiquity are fused into the unique vision of Mantegna's Renaissance world.
Program: Lessons of Darkness This program, featuring music by Ravel, Satie, Lili Boulanger, James Reese Europe, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, commemorated the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day and presented works of composers affected by the war. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, November 11, 2018.
Zach Feldman, contractor, department of film programs, National Gallery of Art The notion of didactic art has been both lauded by the ancient Greeks as a powerful educational technique and dismissed by 19th-century Romantics as overburdened with facticity and morality. In recent decades, however, didactic films and videos have been utilized, in both satire and earnest, within art spaces as a subversive tool to acutely observe and diagnose the conditions of contemporary life. In this lecture, as part of the Works in Progress series, on September 9, 2019, Zach Feldman considers this tool in select nonfiction instructional videos by filmmakers and artists Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl.
Alex Braden, artist, and Emily Francisco, artist, and gallery support specialist, department of media production, National Gallery of Art In this conversation held on November 4, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress series, artists Alex Braden and Emily Francisco discuss how they develop collaborative projects in relation to their independent artistic and curatorial practices. Last year Braden and Francisco created Bipedal Soundscapes, the inaugural Arlington Art Truck activation that involved participants pedaling a stationary bike to power a five-tiered turntable housing vinyl records. Each visitor created their own unique audio experience by controlling the speed of the turntable through their pedaling.
Sarah Hyde, development officer for planned giving, National Gallery of Art Cima da Conegliano was a prolific painter in the Venetian Renaissance known for his bright colors and spatial harmony in his landscapes. While Cima is often compared to his contemporaries, such as Giovanni Bellini, his landscape paintings are particularly poetic, as he anchors his religious subjects in real places. In this lecture held on October 21, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress series, Sarah Hyde investigates Cima’s landscapes within the context of recent scholarship on Venetian landscape painting. Hyde specifically addresses the artist’s depiction of trees to explain his vision of nature.
Lara Langer, 2019 Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow In 1943 Lessing J. Rosenwald gifted roughly 6,000 works on paper to the nascent National Gallery of Art. By the time of his death in 1979, his collection had grown to over 28,000, including nearly 2,400 early modern portrait prints representing Europe’s major leaders, artists, and thinkers. On November 25, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Lara Langer looks at several examples from the Rosenwald collection while discussing the history of collecting portrait prints and their importance in the development of portraiture.
David C. Driskell, artist, curator, and Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park; and Curlee R. Holton, artist and director, David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park
The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora organized the Living Legacy National Speaking Tour to present, celebrate, and document the achievements and legacy of its founder, David C. Driskell (b. 1931). This tour, a series of conversations between Driskell and Curlee R. Holton, highlights his contributions as an artist, scholar, and cultural historian and the contributions of African American artists to the country’s artistic heritage. Driskell has lived through and witnessed firsthand the dynamic historic changes that define America’s contemporary cultural landscape. In addition to Driskell’s singular accomplishments, he is a gifted and inspiring speaker whose personal narrative brings with it an intimate and powerful voice. The National Gallery of Art provided a Washington, DC, venue for the national tour on September 22, 2019.
Kimberly Schenck, head of paper conservation, National Gallery of Art, and Stacey Sell, associate curator of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art
Through the centuries, artists have adopted a variety of approaches to pastel, experimenting with it to achieve exciting and unexpected effects. Featuring approximately 70 exquisite examples drawn entirely from the permanent collection, The Touch of Color: Pastels at the National Gallery of Art traces the history of pastel from the Renaissance to the 21st century and examines the many techniques that artists have developed to work with this colorful and versatile medium. To celebrate the opening on September 29, 2019, Kimberly Schenck and Stacey Sell provide an overview of the works, many of which have never been exhibited before. The exhibition is on view at the National Gallery of Art through January 26, 2020.
Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums On the 180th anniversary of photography’s introduction to the world in 1839, The Eye of the Sun: Nineteenth-Century Photographs from the National Gallery of Art offers an in-depth look at the development of the medium throughout its first 50 years. In this lecture held in conjunction with the exhibition on October 6, 2019, Makeda Best explores the function of slavery and enslaved people in visual narratives about the Civil War. Working through the photography by and associated with the Scottish-born photographer Alexander Gardner and his Washington, DC–based photographic corps, Best compares and contrasts portrayals of slavery and enslaved people and demonstrates how Gardner contextualized chattel slavery within a broader and decades-long discussion about the meaning of American democracy. This program was made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography. The Eye of the Sun is on view from September 8 through December 1, 2019.
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain (former director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Walking Man (1903). Le Normand-Romain describes a history of The Walking Man that reveals much about Rodin’s methods, his deep appreciation of antiquity, and the significance of his art in the evolution of modern sculpture.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art Italian sculpture of the 15th century in Florence and Tuscany, departed from the elegant, decorative style of the earlier Gothic period to reflect a greater admiration for, and understanding of, the strength and structure of the human body. In this respect, Renaissance sculptors emulated the ideals of the ancient Greeks and Romans when depicting contemporary or Christian subjects. Sculptors like Donatello, Desiderio da Settignano, Mino da Fiesole, Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino, Luca and Andrea della Robbia, Jacopo della Quercia, and Verrocchio, revived a classical interest in the human body depicted in full-length figures demonstrating naturalism and ease of movement. Relief sculptures explored new effects of light and atmosphere. Displaying a variety of materials including marble, bronze, wood, terracotta, and ceramic; and a range of processes from carving to modeling to casting, 15th-century Florentine sculpture served a variety of secular and religious purposes. It also became a model for the many talented Italian sculptors to follow, most notably the young Michelangelo. In this lecture presented on October 22, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the rich holdings of 15th-century Florentine and Tuscan sculpture in the Gallery’s permanent collection.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture Series, Celebrating the Old Master Collections of the National Gallery of Art, takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by Italian, French, Dutch, and American artists are featured in this visual tour. New insights and surprising discoveries await, featuring Gallery favorites and recently acquired works. In this first lecture in the series, presented on July 14, 2019 senior lecturer Eric Denker discusses the Gallery’s collection of 17th-century Dutch paintings, one of the most important outside of the Netherlands. The holdings include a distinguished selection of well-known masters, including Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, as well as many superlative works by lesser-known painters of the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Intense competition during this era propelled artists to specialize in specific genres of painting including portraiture, landscape, still life, and scenes of daily life.
Daniel Boomhower, director of the research library, Dumbarton Oaks; Sir Peter Crane, president, Oak Spring Garden Foundation; Nancy E. Gwinn, director, Smithsonian Libraries; Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress; Roger Lawson, executive librarian, National Gallery of Art; David Leonard, president, Boston Public Library; E. C. Schroeder, director, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library; Michael Witmore, director, Folger Shakespeare Library; moderated by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art
On September 25, 2019, the National Gallery of Art hosted eight library leaders from major cultural heritage institutions to discuss how libraries have incorporated innovative thinking to meet traditional challenges and seize new opportunities for audience engagement. This special program was held in conjunction with the fall 2019 meeting of the National Gallery of Art Trustees’ Council and in honor of outgoing Gallery president, Frederick W. Beinecke.
Dianne Stephens, senior educator, National Gallery of Art The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture Series, Celebrating the Old Master Collections of the National Gallery of Art, takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. On August 11, Dianne Stephens, a senior educator at the National Gallery of Art, discusses masterpieces of American furniture from the Kaufman Collection, 1700–1830. These magnificent objects were permanently installed at the National Gallery of Art in October 2012 as a promised gift of the collection formed over five decades by Linda H. Kaufman and the late George M. Kaufman, which includes some of the finest and most elegant examples of American furniture produced in colonial and post-revolutionary America. The Kaufman Collection a significant addition to the decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art and in Washington, and these important pieces of furniture complement and enrich the great American achievements in painting and sculpture in the Gallery’s permanent collection.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture series takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by Italian, French, Dutch, and American artists are featured in this visual tour. New insights and surprising discoveries await, featuring Gallery favorites and recently acquired works. In this seventh lecture in the series, presented on August 18, David Gariff, senior lecturer, discusses the Gallery’s collection of Italian paintings, considered the most important in America and among the finest and most comprehensive in the world. The collection contains works by some of the greatest Italian painters in art history, including Duccio, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Correggio, and Bernardino Luini. All the important regional schools are represented, including Florence, Siena, Venice, and the Lombard tradition in the north. Most important, the National Gallery of Art is home to the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Western Hemisphere—his Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci. In this lecture, Gariff explores the history of central Italian painting from 1300 to 1520 seen through the masterpieces in the Gallery’s permanent collection.
Program: Funeral Music for a Prince and a Queen This program featured funeral music by Heinrich Schütz, Henry Purcell, and Thomas Morley composed for princes and queens. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, October 21, 2018.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture Series, Celebrating the Old Master Collections of the National Gallery of Art, takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by Italian, French, Dutch, and American artists are featured in this visual tour. New insights and surprising discoveries await, featuring Gallery favorites and recently acquired works. In this second lecture in the series, presented on July 21, senior lecturer Eric Denker discusses the Gallery’s collection of Venetian painting. The holdings begin with rare works by Giovanni Bellini, such as his late masterpiece The Feast of the Gods , as well as works by the most important artists to emerge from Bellini’s studio, including Giorgione, Titian, and Carpaccio. Also well represented in the Gallery’s remarkable collection are Venetian paintings from the second half of the 16th century by Tintoretto and Veronese, and the 18th century, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Canaletto.
Heidi Applegate, guest lecturer
The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture Series takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by Italian, French, Dutch, and American artists are featured in this visual tour. New insights and surprising discoveries await, featuring Gallery favorites and recently acquired works. In this fourth lecture in the series, presented on August 4, 2019 guest lecturer Heidi Applegate discusses the Gallery’s collection of American paintings. The American collection has grown from 10 paintings when the West Building opened in 1941 to become the largest of the paintings departments in the museum. Dr. Heidi Applegate gives an overview of how the collection has been assembled over the past seven decades, underscoring the transformative addition in 2014 of paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Oliver Lee Jackson, artist, in conversation with Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art
American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex body of work which masterfully weaves together visual influences ranging from the Renaissance to modernism with principles of rhythm and improvisation drawn from his study of African cultures and American jazz. Held on September 15, 2019, this conversation between the artist and Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, marked the last day of the exhibition Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings. The exhibition presented some 25 paintings created over the past 15 years, many of which were seen publicly for the first time. Jackson’s often large-scale paintings blend figural elements of bodies pointing, kneeling, drawing, and playing instruments with colorful abstract compositions and vigorously worked surfaces. Each painting creates a space and world of its own, captivating viewers and challenging them to spend time with the mesmerizing works.
James Meyer, curator of modern art, National Gallery of Art
In his book The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture, introduced at the National Gallery of Art on September 8, 2019, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with this period and expressions of cultural memories across the globe. He draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine the “long” 1960s―a revolutionary era stretching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s―including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches; paintings; sculptures; photographs; novels; and films. Many of these works are by artists and writers born during this period who are driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art
The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture Series focuses on the outstanding collections of old master paintings in the National Gallery of Art, and also includes a discussion of the extraordinary American furniture from the Kaufman Collection, currently on view on the ground floor of the West Building. Over the decades, appreciation of French eighteenth-century art has fluctuated between preference for the alluring decorative canvases of rococo artists such as François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard to admiration for the sober neoclassicism championed by Jacques-Louis David and his pupils. In this final lecture in the series, presented on August 25, David Gariff, senior lecturer, surveys the history of French art in the eighteenth century from the time of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. In addition to works by Boucher, Fragonard, and David, scenes of daily life by Antoine Watteau, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze are discussed.
Heidi Applegate, guest lecturer
The 2019 Summer Sunday Lecture Series takes a closer look at the many treasures housed in the Gallery’s permanent collection. Works by Italian, French, Dutch, and American artists are featured in this visual tour. New insights and surprising discoveries await, featuring Gallery favorites and recently acquired works. In this third lecture in the series, presented on July 28, guest lecturer Heidi Applegate discusses the Gallery’s collection of British paintings, known for its “Grand Manner” portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, landscapes by John Constable, and seascapes by J. M. W. Turner. Applegate discusses the history of the collection, paintings that have changed over time, and recent acquisitions by John Martin, Richard Parkes Bonington, and John Ward of Hull.
Piffaro, The Renaissance Band This performance celebrated the exhibition Water, Wind, and Waves: Marine Paintings from the Dutch Golden Age at the National Gallery of Art and featured historic songs of the seas. This concert was held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, September 30, 2018.
At the press preview for Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain on Tuesday, October 8, 2019, remarks were given by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art; His Excellency Santiago Cabanas, Ambassador of Spain; and C. D. Dickerson III, curator and head of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art. Following remarks, a tour was given by Dickerson and Mark McDonald, curator of drawings and prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At the press preview for The Touch of Color: Pastels at the National Gallery of Art on Tuesday, September 24, 2019, remarks were given by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art. A curatorial tour was given by Stacey Sell, associate curator, department of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art; and Kimberly Schenck, head of paper conservation, National Gallery of Art.
Sophie Lynford, doctoral candidate in the history of art, Yale University; Diane Waggoner, curator of 19th-century photographs, National Gallery of Art
In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Ruskin (1819–1900), the most influential art critic of the Victorian era, the Gallery presents The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists, an exhibition of some 90 artworks created by American artists who were profoundly influenced by Ruskin’s call for a revolutionary change in the practice of art. A group of artists, architects, scientists, critics, and collectors sympathetic to Ruskin’s ideas formed the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, which sought reform not only in artistic practices, but also in the broader political arena. In a paired lecture delivered at the National Gallery of Art on June 16, 2019, Sophie Lynford and Diane Waggoner described further what Lynford has called the American Pre-Raphaelites’ “comprehensive, multipronged agenda.” By looking beyond painting to the group’s ideas about architecture and photography, Lynford and Waggoner more fully illustrated the philosophy of the American Pre-Raphaelites, whose search for truth had both pictorial and moral stakes.
At the press preview for Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence on Tuesday, September 10, 2019, remarks were given by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art; Larry Di Rita, Public Policy Executive/Market President, Bank of America; His Excellency Armando Varricchio, Ambassador of Italy; and Andrew Butterfield, guest curator.
Ken Burns, filmmaker, in conversation with David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, trustee of the National Gallery of Art, and chairman of the Smithsonian Institution In documentaries such as The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, and The West, filmmaker Ken Burns has spent 40 years investigating American history and culture. His films tell the American story not only in terms of victories and major historical flashpoints, but also through the lives of individuals and relationships. Burns’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 16 Emmy Awards, 2 Grammy Awards, and 2 Oscar nominations; in September 2008, he was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The National Gallery of Art, in collaboration with the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE), hosted Burns for a conversation with David Rubenstein on April 28, 2019.
At the press preview for The Eye of the Sun: Nineteenth-Century Photographs from the National Gallery of Art on Wednesday, September 4, 2019, remarks by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art, were followed by a tour of the exhibition by Diane Waggoner, curator of 19th-century photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Paul Carter Harrison, playwright and expert in African American theatre, and Quincy Troupe, poet, in conversation with Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex body of work which masterfully weaves together visual influences ranging from the Renaissance to modernism with principles of rhythm and improvisation drawn from his study of African cultures and American jazz. In a paired talk on May 19, 2019 at the National Gallery of Art, Paul Carter Harrison and Quincy Troupe, both writers and friends of Jackson, discussed their parallel pursuits of new avenues for creative thought and action. Harrison shared anecdotes from late-night studio discussions with Jackson, along with explanations of Jackson’s understanding of how his heritage factors into his work. Troupe read from his poetry and talked about the social and artistic environment in St. Louis, Missouri, that produced jazz musicians Miles Davis and Julius Hemphill, as well as the Black Arts Group that supported Jackson’s early work. Harrison and Troupe were then joined by curator Harry Cooper for a brief conversation.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art.
The First World War, known as the Great War, was also the first modern war, claiming millions of lives, in part, by newly invented weapons such as the machine gun, tank, aircraft, and poison gas. The arts of the period present a portrait of the terrible price paid by humanity—the carnage and suffering caused by the war were documented in paintings, sculptures, novels, memoirs, and poems produced both during, and immediately after, the struggle. In this presentation on March 27, 2019, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the responses of artists and writers to the trauma of the First World War, which transcended national boundaries. Paintings, sculptures, and prints by Otto Dix, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Käthe Kollwitz, Fernand Léger, John Singer Sargent, and Natalija Goncharova; poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Anna Akhmatova; and memoirs and novels by Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Robert Graves are discussed against the backdrop of “the war to end all wars.”
John Hobson, staff assistant, department of special projects, National Gallery of Art
The study of Slovene photography has remained intertwined with the medium’s specific relation to pan-Yugoslavian artistic development, generally focusing on the period between 1945 and 1991. In celebration of the National Day of Slovenia, John Hobson expands the current understanding of the development of photography in the Slovene region, breaking from the Yugocentric narrative to present his research on the breadth and complexity of twentieth-century photography created by Slovenians. In this lecture at the National Gallery of Art on June 3, 2019, Hobson discusses the creation of photographic conventions and traditions, as well as transgressions against them, across the twentieth century.
Jeffreen M. Hayes, executive director, Threewalls An outstanding sculptor associated with the intellectual and cultural awakening known as the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage (1892-1962) overcame poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination in pursuit of her goals. Creating new visions of black identity in her work, she was also an activist, campaigning for equal rights for African Americans in the arts. The traveling exhibition Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman and its accompanying catalog is the first to reassess Savage’s contributions to art and cultural history in light of 21st-century attention to the concept of the artist-activist. The exhibition viewing dates are as follows: the Cummer Museum of Art, October 12, 2018-April 7, 2019; the New York Historical Society, May 3–July 28, 2019; the Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, August 24–December 8, 2019; and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, January 19–March 22, 2020. The groundbreaking catalog features illustrations of more than 40 works by Savage, her students, and her contemporaries, archival letters, rarely seen photographs, and an extensive bibliography and essays by Kirsten Pai Buick, Bridget R. Cooks, and Howard Dodson. In celebration of the Washington, DC, book launch on June 23, 2019, exhibition organizer Jeffreen M. Hayes discusses the life, work, and lasting legacy of Savage as an artist and a community builder. This program was proposed and made possible by Darryl Atwell.
Kristen Gonzalez, department of northern baroque paintings, National Gallery of Art
Jacobus Vrel is not exactly a household name. A painter of quiet Dutch genre scenes, he produced some fifty works and quickly fell into obscurity. Composing modest interiors and street scenes, Vrel’s mature paintings predate those of the most celebrated Dutch masters in the 17th century. In fact, many of his works were misattributed to Johannes Vermeer. In this lecture held on April 22, 2019, Kristen Gonzalez discusses the Gallery’s Young Woman in an Interior by Jacobus Vrel and the striking modernity of his genre paintings. In anticipation of a major retrospective exhibition in Munich, Paris, and the Hague next year, Kristen discusses the challenge of studying the enigmatic Vrel and establishing his artistic identity distinct from Vermeer and his contemporaries.
Lorena Bradford, accessible programs, department of education, National Gallery of Art Since it opened to the public in 1978, the East Building has been recognized as one of the National Gallery of Art’s most prized masterpieces. The passing of the building’s architect, I.M. Pei (1917–2019), invited a new look at his building projects around the globe. In a talk given on July 7, 2019, Lorena Bradford situates the commission of the East Building within the context of Pei’s blossoming career and shares some of the challenges Pei and his team faced in developing the final, inspired design. Bradford analyzes the responses of critics, fellow architects, and the public to the East Building both before the completed structure was unveiled and after it opened in 1978, concluding with reflections on Pei’s legacy.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art.
David Smith (1906–1965) is arguably America’s greatest sculptor of the 20th century. His art enlarged the vocabulary of sculpture by employing welding and industrial processes and materials, laying the groundwork for the directness of minimalism and the realization that sculpture could be anything the artist desired. Smith’s oeuvre is a logical outgrowth of earlier 20th-century sculptural trends in cubism, constructivism, and surrealism. However, his work also represents a new paradigm for the language of modern sculpture that reflects the dynamic growth and industrial prowess of the United States after the Second World War. Smith’s confrontation with the process of creation broke the rules and expanded the possibilities of his art form. In part two of this lecture, presented at the National Gallery of Art on March 7, 2019, senior lecturer David Gariff explores Smith’s revolutionary art through a discussion of some of his most important and innovative works, including the Agricola, Tanktotem, Sentinel, Zig, Voltri, and Cubi series.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art.
David Smith (1906–1965) is arguably America’s greatest sculptor of the 20th century. His art enlarged the vocabulary of sculpture by employing welding and industrial processes and materials, laying the groundwork for the directness of minimalism and the realization that sculpture could be anything the artist desired. Smith’s oeuvre is a logical outgrowth of earlier 20th-century sculptural trends in cubism, constructivism, and surrealism. However, his work also represents a new paradigm for the language of modern sculpture that reflects the dynamic growth and industrial prowess of the United States after the Second World War. Smith’s confrontation with the process of creation broke the rules and expanded the possibilities of his art form. In part one of this lecture, presented at the National Gallery of Art on March 7, 2019, senior lecturer David Gariff explores Smith’s revolutionary art through a discussion of some of his most important and innovative works, including the Agricola, Tanktotem, Sentinel, Zig, Voltri, and Cubi series.
Stephen Bann (professor emeritus, University of Bristol, and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses reproductive engravings by Léopold Flameng in publications such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which brought old master and contemporary paintings to a wide audience. Bann argues that the history of reproduction offers insight into how the work of masters, old and new, were received and circulated.
Mollie Berger Salah, curatorial assistant, department of prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. In this lecture on May 6, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Mollie Salah examines the work of color painter Mary Pinchot Meyer who worked contemporaneously with, and in some cases alongside, artists such as Anne Truitt and Kenneth Noland. Meyer’s sole concern is color. Never garish, her balance of tone and hue creates even compositions where color dominates and appears to extend beyond the bounds of the canvas.
Elizabeth Dent, exhibition associate, National Gallery of Art. In 2014 the National Gallery of Art acquired a thirteenth-century French stained glass window from the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Originating in Soissons Cathedral in northern France, the window came into possession of Senator William A. Clark of Montana (1839–1925) around the turn of the century and was installed in the billiard room of his 121-room mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City, popularly referred to as “Clark’s Folly.” In this lecture, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series, on April 15, 2019 Elizabeth Dent discusses the iconography and history of the window, from its original devotional contexts at Soissons to its acquisition by Clark and its role within the decorative scheme of the mansion.
Richard J. Powell (John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s painting Portrait of My Grandmother (1922). Powell describes the arresting power of the artist’s loving portrayal of Emily Simms Motley, a woman born in slavery and hardworking all her long life, asserting its place among the other Jazz Age paintings for which the artist is well known.
Jarob J. Ortiz, is a large-format photographer with the Heritage Documentation Programs of the National Park Service (NPS). In the winter of 2015, the NPS commenced a job search for the next Ansel Adams (1902–1984), the landscape photographer commissioned by the NPS in the 1940s to document nature in US National Parks. Ortiz, a Milwaukee native, was selected out of 5,000 applicants as a staff photographer for the Heritage Documentation Programs. Through recordings from a lecture held on April 18, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, interviews, and an on-location shoot in the Shenandoah, Ortiz illustrates the story of the processes and photographs he has taken while serving in this important role and discusses his journey and experience as a photographer in the field.
At the press event for By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs on Tuesday, July 9, 2019, a tour was given by Diane Waggoner, curator of 19th-century photographs, National Gallery of Art. She was introduced by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Miwako Tezuka, consulting curator, Reversible Destiny Foundation Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019 in conjunction with the exhibition, Miwako Tezuka discussed how the relationship between animals and humans has changed since the premodern era in Japan. Tezuka examined select contemporary artworks and fashion designs from the exhibition and described uniquely contemporary approaches to animals, or in Japanese, dōbutsu—“things that move.”
Federico Marcon, associate professor of East Asian studies and history and director of graduate studies, Princeton University Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Federico Marcon discussed the fascination with animals that was characteristic of early modern Japan. Animals were the main attractions of street shows, theatrical performances, and illustrated fictions and were collected as pets and specimens. According to Marcon, scholars engaged in the study of birds, insects, fish, and beasts, and illustrations played a fundamental role in documenting research, conveying information, and aiding taxonomical precision.
Daniel McKee, adjunct assistant professor and bibliographer, department of Asian studies, Cornell University Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Daniel McKee focused on the importance of historical context in interpreting Japanese art. The first part of his talk demonstrated the value of adding iconography and the circumstances of production to the aesthetic analysis of a single work from the exhibit. The second and main part outlined chronologically the history of animal representations in Japanese painting, finding that social and political interests outweighed the commonly assumed “Japanese love of nature.”
Rory A. W. Browne, director of the academic advising center and associate dean of Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, Boston College Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019 in conjunction with the exhibition, Rory A. W. Browne discussed artistic depictions of unfamiliar animals in Japanese life. People in Japan’s busy cities and agrarian villages longed to see and possess strange and spectacular birds and beasts, whether from inaccessible parts of its far-flung archipelago or from overseas. Visitors and merchants from China, Korea, and the Netherlands often fed that hunger for the exotic with both domesticated and wild animals, whether as tribute and prestige gifts for rulers and aristocrats or as pets traded to all levels of society. In doing so, they changed irrevocably Japan’s perception and knowledge of the natural world and its ecosystem.
R. Keller Kimbrough, professor of Japanese, department of Asian languages and civilizations, University of Colorado, Boulder Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, R. Keller Kimbrough explored the roles and representations of animals in Japanese picture scrolls and illustrated books from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. In particular he addressed a series of questions pertaining to the nature of animals and humans. How should we treat animals, based on what we can learn about them in Japanese illustrated fiction? How might we choose to behave if or when we find ourselves reborn into the animal realm?
Barbara Rossetti Ambros, professor in East Asian religions and department chair, department of religious studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and co-chair, Animals and Religion Group, American Academy of Religions Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Barbara Rossetti Ambros spoke on the variety of roles animals have played in religious rituals in Japan, such as offerings and instruments of divination at Shinto shrines as well as Buddhist mortuary rituals and “life releases,” in which the lives of animals destined for slaughter are saved. Ambros described how religious views of animals influenced human interactions with animals through the example of Buddhist life releases and Kanō Eitai's early nineteenth-century painting of such a ritual. Life releases served as a critique of prevalent social practices toward animals and demonstrated the virtues of compassion and filial piety.
Sarah E. Thompson, curator of Japanese art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the fifth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media. At the symposium held on June 7, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition, Sarah E. Thompson discussed The War of the Twelve Animals, a fifteenth-century narrative handscroll, also known in many later copies, that depicts a war between the Twelve Animals of the East Asian zodiac and the rebel animals led by the tanuki, or “raccoon dog.” According to Thompson, the original work was created at the court of the retired shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and refers to the events of the Oei Disturbance of 1399–1400, with animal characters representing the competing warriors; Yoshimitsu himself is the dragon. This interpretation counters the more common view that animal-to-human comparisons are inevitably negative. While the rebel animals are indeed mocked, the Twelve Animals and especially their leader are glorified, although humorous animal allegory masks any arrogance.
Oliver Lee Jackson, artist; Marty Ehrlich and Oliver Lake, musicians; and Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with A.B. Spellman, poet, music critic, and arts administrator American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935) has created a complex body of work that masterfully weaves together visual influences ranging from the Renaissance to modernism with principles of rhythm and improvisation drawn from his study of African cultures and American jazz. On view from April 14 through September 15, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, the exhibition Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings presents 18 paintings created over the past 15 years, many of which are being shown publicly for the first time. Jackson’s often large-scale paintings blend figural elements of bodies pointing, kneeling, drawing, and playing instruments with colorful abstract compositions and vigorously worked surfaces. To celebrate the exhibition opening, the Gallery hosted Evenings at the Edge performances by the Marty Ehrlich Ensemble and TRIO 3, featuring Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman, and Andrew Cyrille—collaborators of Jackson and the influential Black Artists Group. On April 12, 2019, A. B. Spellman, distinguished poet, music critic, and arts administrator, moderated a post-concert discussion with renowned jazz musicians Ehrlich and Lake, along with Jackson and senior curator Harry Cooper. The conversation explored the relationship between music and the visual arts, ranging from shared experiences in Saint Louis in the 1960s to the present day.
Celeste-Marie Bernier, professor of United States and Atlantic Studies and personal chair in English literature, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh; in conversation with Walter O. Evans, collector
Walter O. Evans has spent decades collecting, curating, and conserving a wide variety of African American art, music, and literature in an effort to preserve the cultural history of African Americans. Part of his collection focuses on the nineteenth-century formerly enslaved statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895). In addition to inscribed books from Douglass’s and his descendants’ libraries and printed editions of his speeches, the collection contains letters, manuscripts, and photographs. Much of the material is of a personal nature: correspondence between family members, family histories, and scrapbooks compiled by Douglass and his children; the scrapbooks, with their personal documents and familial relationships, illuminate Douglass in ways never before seen. In 2018 Celeste-Marie Bernier and Andrew Taylor of the University of Edinburgh published If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection, a guide to the collection born of a longstanding collaboration between the authors and Dr. Evans. Within its pages they have reproduced letters, manuscripts, and photographs from the collection along with transcriptions and commentary that provide an invaluable resource for Douglass scholars. On Friday, April 26, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition In the Library: Frederick Douglass Family Materials from the Walter O. Evans Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Bernier speaks with Evans about the role of his collection in scholarship on Douglass and the preservation of Douglass’s legacy for a new generation of Americans.
Eric Denker, Senior Lecturer and Manager of Gallery Talks and Lectures for Adults, National Gallery of Art
On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this final lecture, “In Situ: Tintoretto in Venice,” held on May 14, 2019, Denker discusses the many masterpieces by the artist scattered throughout Venice. Tintoretto was both a superlative painter and an ambitious entrepreneur. As a native Venetian, he worked for the Republic of Venice, for the church, and for charitable confraternities throughout his long career, often for below-market prices. Without a carefully planned route through Venice it is difficult to understand the trajectory of Tintoretto’s career from his early experimental years to his mature work. This lecture offers a chronological itinerary that begins with the early work in the Accademia Galleries, proceeding to the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, the church of San Cassiano, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and ends in the Ducal Palace.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art
On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this third lecture, “Tintoretto Central: The Scuola Grande di San Rocco,” held on May 7, 2019, Denker discusses the decorations for the charitable confraternity Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which occupied Tintoretto for more than 25 years. In 1564 his painting San Rocco in Glory won the competition for the central ceiling canvas of the Scuola’s board room. His greatest masterpiece, the 40-foot-wide Crucifixion, was painted the following year. In the 1570s he completed the Old and New Testament cycles for the upper level of the Scuola, and in the 1580s he finished the decoration of the ground floor with scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. In all, Tintoretto executed more than 65 paintings for the brotherhood of the Scuola, a remarkable achievement for the humble cloth dyer’s son.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art
On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In this second lecture, “Tintoretto: The Early Work,” held on April 23, 2019, Denker investigates Tintoretto’s formative years as an artist. According to early biographers, Tintoretto only briefly studied with the eminent painter Titian early in his career. The ambitious young son of a cloth dyer drew his inspiration from both the older master’s works and from a variety of younger, more experimental artists during his formative years. Tintoretto’s work was informed both by the example of Pordenone as a kind of anti-Titian mannerist and by the experimentation of younger collaborators, including Andrea Schiavone and Bonifacio dei’ Pitati. By the time Tintoretto was 30, his own painting had reached a new level of sophistication and confidence, as seen in St. Mark and the Miracle of the Slave, which he painted for the Scuola Grande di San Marco in 1548.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer and manager of gallery talks and lectures for adults, National Gallery of Art
On the occasion of the exhibition of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, presents a four-part lecture series examining Jacopo Tintoretto’s work in the context of 16th-century Venetian art, history, and culture. In the first lecture, “Tintoretto in Context: Framing Tintoretto: Sixteenth-Century Venetian Painting,” held on April 16, 2019, Denker discusses Venetian Renaissance painting beginning with Giovanni Bellini, his workshop, and his followers, in the second half of the 15th century. Giorgione and Titian were among his most prominent pupils, developing out of Bellini’s linear style the more atmospheric color, light, and shadow characteristic of Venetian High Renaissance oil painting. Though Titian would dominate the painting of large-scale altarpieces and decorations in Venice during the first half of the 16th century, rivals influenced by contemporary central Italian art appeared in Venice by the 1520s and ’30s. Artists including Pordenone and Andrea Schiavone provided alternative sources of style and imagery for both painters and patrons.
Robert T. Singer, curator and head, department of Japanese art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Artworks representing animals—real or imaginary, religious or secular—span the full breadth and splendor of Japanese artistic production. As the first exhibition devoted to the subject, The Life of Animals in Japanese Art covers 17 centuries (from the sixth century to the present day) and a wide variety of media—sculpture, painting, lacquerwork, ceramics, metalwork, textile, and the woodblock print. A selection of some 315 works, drawn from Japanese and American public and private collections, includes seven that are designated as Important Cultural Property by the Japanese government. The artists represented range from Sesson Shūkei, Itō Jakuchū, Soga Shōhaku, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, to Okamoto Tarō, Kusama Yayoi, Issey Miyake, Nara Yoshitomo, and Murakami Takashi. To celebrate the opening on June 2, 2019, Robert T. Singer introduces the exhibition curated with Masatomo Kawai, director, Chiba City Museum of Art, in consultation with a team of esteemed of Japanese art historians. The Life of Animals in Japanese Art is on view through August 18, 2019
David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner in history
David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom sheds new light on Douglass (c. 1818–1895), particularly the last 30 years of his life, thanks to a trove of letters, manuscripts, and scrapbooks in a private collection that no other historian previously used in any full-length biography. Blight writes that the collection, owned by Walter O. Evans of Savannah, GA, “makes possible many new insights into the final third of Douglass’s life. The younger Douglass—the heroic escaped slave and emerging abolitionist—is better known, in part because of the author’s masterful first two autobiographies. The older Douglass, from Reconstruction to the end of his life in 1895, has never been so accessible or rendered so fascinating and complicated as in the Evans collection.” In this lecture held on June 2, 2019, in conjunction with the exhibition In the Library: Frederick Douglass Family Materials from the Walter O. Evans Collection, Blight shares how this material revealed the full extent of Douglass’s complex personal life. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2019, this biography masterfully weaves together the more popularly known story of Douglass’s life of public activism with his perhaps lesser-known private life to paint a complete portrait of the great American hero.
Anjuli J. Lebowitz, exhibition research associate, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art
In 1902 Booker T. Washington commissioned photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston to record students participating in the curriculum at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Building on her previous projects in Virginia and Paris, Johnston created some of her most complex work to date on the Tuskegee grounds. On April 29, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Anjuli Lebowitz asserts that Johnston’s Learning Dressmaking, Tuskegee Institute, in particular, synthesizes methods of nineteenth-century visual anthropology with discourses surrounding African American citizenship that had been circulating since before the Civil War.
Sarah Battle, program administrator, department of academic programs, National Gallery of Art
By the early 1970s, Washington, DC-based artists like Sam Gilliam, Thomas Downing, and Alma Thomas were associated with the nationally recognized art movement known as the Washington Color School. While Kenneth Young's staining technique and interests in abstraction and color were consistent with his Washingtonian neighbors, critics at the time labeled Young as an abstract expressionist. Recently, however, Young’s work has been more closely discussed within the context of the Washington Color School. In this lecture at the National Gallery of Art on April 8, 2019, Sarah Battle examines Young's educational background, profession, and artistic influences, and discusses the ways in which the artist’s practice aligns within—and outside of—the confines of the Washington Color School.
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life! , Cicada Pleats by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life! , Charger with Lobster and Bamboo Leaves by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life! , Cranes by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Black Bear Plays with Camera by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Aged Monkey by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Eboshi-Shaped Helmet w/ Deer Antlers by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Charger with Carp Ascending Waterfall by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Phoenix by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Dragon and Tiger by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Sacred Horse by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Deer Bearing Symbols by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Good Luck & Long Life!, Welcome! by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, In the Land of the Dead by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Tale of a Strange Marriage by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Kyōgen Monkey Mask by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Monkeys from Frolicking Animals by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Haori With Penguins by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Southern Barbarians by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Horses and Grooms in the Stable by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Suit of Armor like a Tengu by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Charger with Monkey on Turtle by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Kintarō Seizes the Carp, 1885 by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Shaka Passing into Nirvana by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Megu-chan, 2014 by National Gallery of Art
The Life of Animals in Japanese Art: Heroes, Soldiers, & Pranksters, Welcome! by National Gallery of Art
At the press event for The Life of Animals in Japanese Art on Wednesday, June 5, 2019, remarks were made by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art; His Excellency Shinsuke J. Sugiyama, ambassador of Japan; Hiroyasu Andō, president, The Japan Foundation and former ambassador of Japan; and exhibition cocurators Masatomo Kawai, director, Chiba City Museum of Art, and Robert T. Singer, curator and department head of Japanese art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Bruce I. Campbell, artist and copyist at the National Gallery of Art, in conversation with Alexandra Libby, assistant curator, department of northern baroque painting, National Gallery of Art.
Bruce Campbell is one of the longest continuous copyists at the National Gallery of Art, with more than two decades and over two dozen completed works. Campbell's master replicas focus on the High Renaissance, the baroque, and the Hudson River School, to name a few. In this conversation program on March 11, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Bruce Campbell and Alexandra Libby discuss this age-old exercise and study, and link his experience to others engaged in this longstanding practice.
Devin Allen, artist and 2017 fellow, The Gordon Parks Foundation; Eric Gottesman, artist and co-founder, For Freedoms, and assistant professor of art, Purchase College, State University of New York; Rick Lowe, artist, founder, Project Row Houses, and clinical professor of art, University of Houston; Maséqua Myers, executive director, South Side Community Art Center; moderated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art
For artists Devin Allen, Eric Gottesman, and Rick Lowe, art is inextricable from community. As a photographer, Allen’s ethic considers what he owes his subjects; Gottesman’s For Freedoms project uses art to engage with citizenship; and Lowe’s Project Row Houses embrace the art of community development. As director of the South Side Community Art Center, Maséqua Myers orchestrates connections between residents of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and art. The four discuss the stakes of the relationship between artists and communities, as Philip Brookman moderates, in this panel conversation at the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019.
Maséqua Myers, executive director, South Side Community Art Center. The South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) is the last of 110 community art centers started by the Works Progress Administration. Founded in 1940 by a team of artists that included Margaret Burroughs and Eldzier Cortor, SSCAC offered early support and instruction to writers and artists, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Gordon Parks, in fulfillment of its mission to support the work of African American artists and to educate South Side residents on the significance of arts and culture for life. In recognition of the center’s decades of relevance to its Bronzeville neighborhood, in 2017 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure, ensuring SSCAC’s survival for the next generation of Chicago residents. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, SSCAC director Maséqua Myers discusses the center’s legacy and its continued relevance for 21st-century artists and residents in Chicago.
Rick Lowe, artist, founder, Project Row Houses, and clinical professor of art, University of Houston. In its 25-year history, Project Row Houses has grown from 22 houses on a block and a half in Houston’s Third Ward to six blocks and 40 properties. Artist Rick Lowe and his team have, among other things, renovated shotgun houses to provide homes for single mothers, built new structures for affordable housing, reinvigorated a historically black ballroom, and opened spaces for creating and displaying art. On February 8, 2019, as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” Lowe describes the past and future of Project Row Houses and the continuing importance of its founding principle: “That art—and the community it creates—can be the foundation for revitalizing depressed inner-city neighborhoods.”
Eric Gottesman, artist and cofounder, For Freedoms, and assistant professor of art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Eric Gottesman photographs, writes, makes videos, and teaches, using art to explore aesthetic, social and political culture; his work has taken him to countries like Ethiopia and Jordan and to indigenous communities in Canada with projects that have questioned nationhood and investigated local histories. With For Freedoms, “a platform for creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action” founded in 2016 in collaboration with artist Hank Willis Thomas, Gottesman partners with institutions and communities all over the United States to facilitate meaningful political discourse and engaged citizenship through art. Gottesman spoke about his use of art for community-building at the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019.
Devin Allen, artist and 2017 fellow, The Gordon Parks Foundation. In April 2015, widespread protests in Baltimore, Maryland—locally termed the Baltimore Uprising—erupted after an African American man named Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered while in police custody. Photographer Devin Allen, a native of Baltimore, immersed himself in the protests and made images of both civil unrest and community solidarity in his home city. The events in Baltimore corresponded to a larger national frustration around civilians being killed by police; soon, a mere two years after taking to photography, Allen became the third amateur photographer ever to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now” held on February 8, 2019, Allen, a 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow, discussed the ethics of photographing his community and the influence of Parks’s work on his own.
Melanee C. Harvey, assistant professor, department of art, Howard University; Kellie Jones, professor, department of art history and archaeology, and faculty fellow, Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Columbia University; Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University, and Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Laura Wexler, professor of American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and film and media studies, affiliate faculty in ethnicity, race, and migration, co-chair, Women’s Faculty Forum, director, The Photographic Memory Workshop, and primary investigator, The Photogrammar Project, Yale University; moderated by Anjuli Lebowitz, exhibition research associate, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art
Throughout his career, Gordon Parks explored many issues, including segregation, feminism, and nationhood, through writing, photography, and film. Much of Parks’s early photographic output came through his affiliation with government programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Office of War Information. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, art historians Melanee C. Harvey, Kellie Jones, Richard J. Powell, and Laura Wexler discuss Parks’s work for the government and how his photographs participated in a larger social conversation. This panel discussion is moderated by Anjuli Lebowitz.
Laura Wexler, professor of American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and film and media studies, affiliate faculty in ethnicity, race, and migration, cochair, Women’s Faculty Forum, director, The Photographic Memory Workshop, and primary investigator, The Photogrammar Project, Yale University. In 1942, Gordon Parks began working for Roy Stryker, head of the photographic division of Farm Security Administration, or FSA, during which time Parks traveled to Washington, DC, on assignment, documenting life under segregation in the nation’s capital. The next year, the FSA was absorbed into the Office of War Information, which sent Parks to photograph the Tuskegee Airmen. This assignment signaled for Parks a shift from making projects about internal national politics to documenting the war effort, and it had a profound effect on him. In her talk from the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Laura Wexler describes Parks’s experience of segregation in the District and his transition from making. Here Wexler considers whether and how this transition experience might have influenced Parks’s later commitment to photography.
Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University, and Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Archibald Motley’s painting Black Belt (1934) managed to do more than simply capture the ambience and tempo of Bronzeville, a predominantly African American neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Black Belt also made Bronzeville’s performative and transactional nature palpable, especially in the years of the Great Depression and in response to the mass migration of black Americans from the rural south to the urban north. Richard Powell’s talk, given as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, recognizes Motley’s place in the history of African Americans describing their lives and communities in art.
Kellie Jones, professor, department of art history and archaeology, and faculty fellow, Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Columbia University. The African American women in Charles White’s artworks possess tremendous physical capability and rich interior lives. These depictions of women contributed to an artistic conversation around feminism between White, Elizabeth Catlett, Gordon Parks, and others from the 1930s through the 1950s. Even writers and activists engaged with White’s work; activist Esther Cooper Jackson published White’s drawings in her journal, Freedom Ways, as if to illustrate her central idea that the state of American democracy could be seen in the living conditions of the black women. In her talk from the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Kellie Jones describes how White’s contemporaries helped to shape his work and to provide feminist images of black women in the mid-20th century.
Melanee C. Harvey, assistant professor, department of art, Howard University. In a talk focusing on photographic examples of black church iconography from the 1920s through the 1940s, Melanee Harvey compares images of Washington, DC churches by Scurlock Studio photographers with Office of War Information photographs by Gordon Parks. Delivered as part of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Harvey’s talk describes the context and social function of these photographs, considering the repetition of visual themes used to represent African American religious spaces and practices. By deconstructing reductive visual tropes of the black church, Harvey finds diverse experiences within church experience and explores the diverse aesthetic traditions of black religious expression across denominations, regions and historical periods.
Robin Coste Lewis, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence, University of Southern California. In her National Book Award–winning debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, poet Robin Coste Lewis both narrates and investigates the experience of black women across time and geography. To create the section that gave the book its title, Lewis first conducted countless hours of research in museums and compiled the titles and descriptions of works of art and craft (dated between 38,000 BCE and the present) that featured the images of black women. She then rearranged the titles to create what is at once an elegy for the black women in these artworks and an indictment of the violence done in the writing of Western art history. For the keynote lecture of the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, Lewis presented “Boarding the Voyage,” the epilogue to a new edition of Voyage of the Sable Venus, discussing the ways her project blends poetry, art history, and autobiography.
I. M. Pei, architect of the National Gallery of Art East Building, describes his involvement with the building project and its early planning stages, including a trip with National Gallery of Art director J. Carter Brown to visit European museums. He explains the evolution of the building design and the challenges in meeting site and regulatory requirements and gaining the endorsement of government agencies for his design plan. Pei reflects on the relationship between the East Building and the West Building and describes important features of the materials and technology used during the construction of the former. He comments on his relationship with the National Gallery of Art building committee and describes the process of commissioning works of art for the new building. This 87-minute interview is conducted by Gallery archivist Anne G. Ritchie and was recorded on February 22, 1993, for the National Gallery of Art oral history program under the auspices of the Gallery Archives.
Robert Echols, independent scholar, and Frederick Ilchman, chair of the art of Europe department and Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/1519–1594), three institutions—the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia; and the Gallerie dell’Accademia—organized a major exhibition on the Venetian master. Following its term at the Palazzo Ducale, Venice (its only other venue), Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice is on view at the Gallery from March 24 through July 7, 2019. As the first retrospective of the artist in North America, the exhibition features nearly 50 paintings and more than a dozen works on paper spanning the artist’s entire career, ranging from regal portraits of Venetian aristocracy to religious and mythological narrative scenes. Tintoretto has been considered one of the “Big Three” 16th-century Venetian painters, alongside Titian and Paolo Veronese, and works by Tintoretto’s assistants and followers have frequently been misattributed to the master. The exhibition curators, Tintoretto experts Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, are widely responsible for a new and more accurate understanding of Tintoretto’s oeuvre and chronology, first explored in the Museo del Prado’s Tintoretto exhibition in 2007. Echols and Ilchman celebrate the exhibition opening in this introductory lecture held on March 24, 2019.
Nancy J. Troy (Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art at Stanford University and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses Piet Mondrian’s painting Tableau No. IV: Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (c. 1924/1925). Troy describes the history and previous iterations of this diamond composition and the work’s powerful influence within popular and artistic spheres.
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the sixth and final lecture, “End as Beginning: Dynastic Time and Revolution,” delivered on May 12, 2019, Wu Hung examines the end of China’s dynastic history in 1912 through an exploration of the concept of time at this interim moment, the transformation of a person’s body and image, and an emerging modern visual culture that exhibits its newness against the traditional modes of self-representation.
Elizabeth Alexander, poet, essayist, playwright, scholar, and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Manthia Diawara, writer, cultural theorist, film director, scholar, and professor of comparative literature and cinema studies and director emeritus of the Institute of African American Affairs, New York University
Painter Ficre Ghebreyesus (1962–2012) from Asmara, Eritrea, and filmmaker Manthia Diawara from Bamako, Mali, meet metaphorically in this program focusing on their work. Political refugees, activists, scholars, and storytellers, both men settled in the United States and found themselves working odd jobs, joining the African American community of poets and each digging into his own artistic practice. Ghebreyesus’s epic painting The Sardine Fisherman’s Funeral combines symbols, historical references, and iconography from different cultures to express a depth of feeling for the power of the sea. Diawara’s film An Opera of the World (2017), based on the African opera Bintou Were, mines the Malian filmmaker’s own migration experience against the backdrop of recent tragedies among refugees on the Mediterranean Sea. In this post-screening conversation held on March 23, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, Manthia Diawara and Elizabeth Alexander discuss and contrast Ghebreyesus’s painting with Diawara’s filmic inquiry into the power of bearing witness.
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the fifth lecture, “Art of Absence: Voices of the Remnant Subject,” delivered on May 5, 2019, Wu Hung focuses on the moment after the fall of a dynasty and examines its relationship with artistic creation and the construction of art history.
С 80-х годов XX века Керри Джеймс Маршалл использовал различные технологии и изобразительные средства, чтобы воспеть и рассказать о жизни чернокожих в Америке. «Великая Америка» — грандиозная повествовательная картина о непостижимой трагедии обращенных в рабство африканцев, переживших Средний путь. Зрителя привлекают колоритный язык (WOW) и яркость изображения с черными фигурами в лодке, входящей в темный, заполненный призраками туннель парка развлечений. В правом верхнем углу на воде качается одна голова. Слово FUN вымарано. В названии скрыт вопрос художника: «Когда Америка стала великой для черных людей?»
На картине изображен молодой человек, который стоит на берегу моря, пытаясь повелевать облаками. Зигмар Польке взял этот образ из немецкой ксилографии XVI века, которая появилась в книге эпиграмм. Картина иллюстрирует цитату: «Надежда — это длинная веревка, которой многие тянут себя к смерти». Она служит напоминанием о нашей борьбе с судьбой. Тем не менее версия Польке гораздо менее мрачная, возможно, даже обнадеживающая. Художник убрал некоторые детали оригинальной гравюры, в том числе, языки пламени, извергающиеся изо рта человека и первоначальный береговой пейзаж. Вместо этого Польке придумал собственный фон, заполненный разноцветными геометрическими фигурами.
«Горы и море» — прекрасный пример творчества Хелен Франкенталер, демонстрирующий созданную художницей технику размытых пятен: она разливала разведенные краски на незагрунтованный холст. Применяя этот метод, Франкенталер добивалась прозрачности цвета, который будто плавал в пространстве, а переплетения холста подчеркивали плоскостность изображения. Ее сочетания цветов и форм часто напоминают природную среду, и каждая работа создает неповторимое визуальное пространство и атмосферу.
Художник Джаспер Джонс стал известен в 50-х годах XX века благодаря легко узнаваемой индивидуальной манере живописи абстрактных экспрессионистов. Характерным для него является изображение узнаваемых объектов в спокойной, кажущейся отстраненной и зачастую загадочной манере. Джонс почти всегда выбирает материалом для своего искусства уже существующие образы или, как он называл их, «предметы, знакомые нашему разуму». В начале своей карьеры он выбирал широко известные мотивы, такие как цифры и фигуры, полученные из коммерческих трафаретов, мишеней, американского флага и карт США. Фактура поверхности его работ, в частности этой, выделяется из общего ряда, свидетельствуя о том, насколько тесной ощущает Джонс связь между живописью и скульптурой.
Текстовое искусство Дженни Хольцер обращено к общественному сознанию. В 2005 году она начала использовать рассекреченные и прошедшие цензуру правительственные документы в качестве исходного материала для серии шелкографий. Это одна из шести картин, на которых изображены увеличенные отпечатки рук, взятые из документов правительства США, полученных в соответствии с законом «О свободе информации». Отпечатки принадлежат солдатам, обвиняемым в жестоком обращении с заключенными в Ираке. Используя для воспроизведения и увеличения документов такие традиционные материалы, как масляные краски и льняной холст, Хольцер привлекает внимание зрителей к информации, которую, по ее мнению, «не замечали или не воспринимали всерьез».
Нижние буквы «Двойной Америки» составляют слово America вверх ногами с закрашенными черным наружными сторонами, оставляющими «тень» белого неона на стене. Буквы в верхнем ряду окрашены в черный цвет и развернуты к стене, так что зритель смотрит на освещенные спинки букв. В таком искажении перспективы содержится намек на политические баталии, сопровождавшие выборы первого чернокожего президента Америки, и одновременное участие страны в двух войнах.
Барнетт Ньюман, один из великих деятелей абстрактного экспрессионистского движения, был интеллектуалом, который развивал свои идеи через живопись, скульптуру и литературу. В середине 40-х годов XX века он создает свои первые работы с использованием характерных вертикальных элементов, или «молний», пронизывающих однотонные поверхности холстов. Эта картина является первой в серии из 14 работ, которую Ньюман позже назвал «Остановки на Крестном пути» (вместе с кодой в виде 15-й картины, Be II). «Остановки на Крестном пути» были самой амбициозной попыткой Ньюмана разрешить «моральный кризис», с которым столкнулись художники после Второй мировой войны и Холокоста: «Что нам изображать?»
Нам Джун Пэк родился в Сеуле, на территории современной Южной Кореи, но вырос и жил в Японии, Германии и, наконец, в Нью-Йорке. Он стал пионером использования в искусстве новых технологий, включая видео. Для этой работы Пэк видоизменил японский свиток XIX века, добавив отпечаток руки и поместив за ним мигающий красный свет. Совмещение традиционного искусства с современными технологиями стало отличительной чертой работ Пэка.
Ева Гессе не хотела создавать то, что в ее понимании было обычной красивой скульптурой. Она отвергла материалы, традиционно используемые для скульптуры, в частности металл и камень, предпочитая им более гибкие материалы: волокно, гипс и латекс. Последний и был использован для создания этого эскиза. Работа появилась в рамках серии «Contingent», состоящей из восьми подобных панелей, которые сейчас находятся в Национальной галерее Австралии. Гессе описала эту работу следующими словами: «Не живопись, не скульптура... А подвешенная картина».
«Без названия» Дональда Джадда стоит на полу без пьедестала, прямо в пространстве зрителя, без обрамления, как, вероятно, еще ни одна скульптура не выставлялась ранее. Кубическая структура продиктована скорее геометрической логикой, чем обращением к языку экспрессии: деление по диагонали, одна половина вдвое выше другой образует форму ступени. Джадд выбрал своей целью представить альтернативу тому, что он воспринимал как бесконечные иллюзии европейского модернизма. Он выбрал понятную форму, которая может существовать просто как объект. Его стремление к буквальному, а не кажущемуся пространству бросает вызов традиционной перспективе в живописи.
В работе «Смотри, Микки» Рой Лихтенштейн, возможно, впервые использовал сцену и стиль из массовой культуры: детского комикса 1960 года «Дональд Дак: потеря и находка». Лихтенштейн едва заметно изменил оригинал, сделав его более единообразным, опустив фоновые фигуры, развернув угол зрения на 90 градусов, организовав цвета в полосы желтого и синего и упростив черты персонажей. Стилистически Лихтенштейн имитировал печатные издания — толстые черные контуры, основные цвета, а в глазах Дональда и Микки — чернильные точки тангирной печати, которая в то время использовалась для производства дешевых комиксов и журналов.
Главным элементом работы Мориса Луиса является цвет. Под сильным влиянием техники размытых пятен художницы Хелен Франкенталер Луис начал исследовать потенциал этого метода, чтобы переосмыслить роль цвета в своей абстрактной живописи. Он разводил быстросохнущую акриловую краску и выливал ее на незагрунтованный холст, перемещая холст или леса, на которых он был свободно закреплен, чтобы контролировать поток пигмента. Техника размытых пятен позволила Луису достичь обезличенности, в противопоставление преобладающему стилю абстрактного экспрессионизма, где по манере нанесения мазков явно прочитывались жесты художника.
Джоан Митчелл стала одной из немногих женщин, добившихся признания в мужском, сексистском мире абстрактных экспрессионистов. На этой картине смелые, динамичные линии на белом фоне передают спонтанность и импульсивность манеры живописи Митчелл. В некоторых картинах, которые художница называла «экспрессионистскими пейзажами», воплотились ее детские воспоминания об озере Мичиган. Поскольку картины полностью абстрактны, зрителю предлагается прочувствовать их на эмоциональном уровне.
Впервые представленные публике в 1948 году большие, размером с фреску, картины Джексона Поллока, написанные в уникальной «капельной» технике, вызвали неоднозначную реакцию. Для создания этой картины он положил на пол амбара, служившего ему студией, холст, который занял собой почти все пространство. Используя фасадную краску, масляную краску, эмаль и алюминий, он разбрызгивал, наливал и набрасывал пигмент кистями и мастихинами, обходя полотно вокруг. По словам художника, это был его способ остаться в своей работе, выступать в качестве посредника в творческом процессе. В левом верхнем углу и вверху холста он оставил «автограф» в виде отпечатков своих рук.
«Однолетний молочай» — одна из так называемых «цветовых вуалей», написанных художником в 1944 году. Аршил Горки работает в своей «текучей» живописной манере, краска неравномерно смыта с холста, и сквозь нее проступают едва различимые формы. Преобладание зеленых и коричневых оттенков характерно для пейзажной живописи, но на картине нет ни ландшафтных форм, ни эффекта пространственной глубины. Вместо этого вертикально струящиеся капли и чередование светлых и темных тонов создают эффект смещения и мерцания полотна.
Жан Дюбюффе считал, что после Второй мировой войны живопись необходимо начинать с нуля. Так, он обратился за вдохновением к работам непрофессионалов, особенно детей и художников-самоучек, которые он собрал и назвал art brut (грубое, необработанное искусство). В работе Façades d’immeubles («Фасады зданий») Дюбюффе показал свой неповторимый стиль art brut. Используя школьную технику процарапывания черной краски до нанесенного ранее цветного грунта, Дюбюффе создал вид парижской улицы, какой ее может увидеть ребенок. Тем не менее, тщательно продуманная решетчатая структура и техника декоративного покрытия стены свидетельствуют о том, что Дюбюффе был знаком с приемами модернистов.
Через абстракции Пит Мондриан хотел донести свои духовные представления о том, что в природе преобладает универсальная гармония. Горизонтальные и вертикальные элементы его композиций, тщательно выверенные для получения сбалансированной асимметрии, олицетворяют силы противодействия, символизирующие динамическое равновесие природы. Мондриан утверждал, что в композиции с ромбами главное — срезы, и действительно, края воспринимаются как обрезанные. Формы не завершены и обрезаны краем холста, подразумевая, что картина продолжается за пределами физической границы полотна.
Скульптура может показаться абстрактной, однако Константин Брынкуши настаивал, что его работы раскрывают внутреннюю сущность предметов. В своем творчестве скульптор опирался на традиции африканской скульптуры и румынской народной резьбы, а постамент он превратил в неотъемлемую составляющую работы. Брынкуши много лет работал над серией «Птица в пространстве», представляя ее как ансамбль, который станет его самым выдающимся произведением. В отличие от других скульпторов, у Брынкуши не было большой мастерской, он работал со своими материалами самостоятельно, высекая из камня и шлифуя латунь.
Своим творчеством Марсель Дюшан подорвал традиционные представления о живописи и скульптуре. Очарованный американской идеей дешевых и простых реплик, Дюшан начал собирать найденные предметы для своих «редимейдов» — термин, который он позаимствовал из швейной промышленности, когда жил в Нью-Йорке. Он шокировал мир искусства, пытаясь представить эти банальные предметы на выставках, часто даже не меняя их, а просто поставив свою подпись. Название этой работы представляет собой каламбур, образованный отбрасыванием буквы n из слов French Window (французское окно), чтобы получилось Fresh Widow (овдовевшая женщина). Так называли двустворчатые окна, распространенные в парижских квартирах, и женщин, овдовевших во время Первой мировой войны. Дюшан не сам сделал это миниатюрное окно, а заказал его американскому плотнику.
Один из великих скульпторов-сюрреалистов Альберто Джакометти часто включал тему игры в свои ранние работы. Так и в этой скульптуре. Форма, которую использовал художник, напоминает настольную игру с перемещаемыми фигурами, но при этом суть игры непонятна. Неоднозначное пространство скульптурной композиции «Игра окончена» и непостижимые правила этой «игры» создают ощущение потусторонней реальности, словно увиденной кем-то во сне.
Образы на картине Василия Кандинского отдалено напоминают реальные предметы, но детали в ней искажены и создают сильный эмоциональный эффект. Хотя искаженные формы и полноцветные мазки на первый взгляд кажутся совершенно абстрактными, они складываются в узнаваемые образы. Центральным мотивом «Импровизации номер 31 (Морского боя)» является бой между двумя парусниками, чьи высокие мачты выглядят как тонкие черные линии. Выбранный Кандинским сюжет, повторяющийся в ряде его «Импровизаций», вероятно, навеян апокалиптическими образами «Книги Откровений».
Эта работа относится к началу плодотворной карьеры Эрнста Людвига Кирхнера, когда он стал одним из основателей группы экспрессионистов под названием Die Brücke («Мост») в Дрездене в 1905 году. На картине Кирхнер изобразил две обнаженные фигуры в естественной обстановке, а не в ограниченном пространстве академической студии. Эта работа также является примером использования художником смелых, часто грубых форм и ярких цветов.
Сегодня «Открытое окно в Коллиуре» Анри Матисса может показаться нежным и лиричным, но изначально его густые мазки и насыщенные цвета воспринимались как агрессивные. Небольшая, но резонансная работа, ставшая иконой раннего модернизма, считается одной из самых важных картин школы фовизма — группы художников, которые стремились освободить цвет и текстуру от строгих представлений о естественности. «Открытое окно в Коллиуре» знаменует собой начало этого нового подхода в творчестве Матисса.
Эта работа была написана, когда Андре Дерен посетил Лондон и запечатлел те же объекты, что и Клод Моне несколькими годами ранее. Однако цветовая палитра и перспектива Дерена резко контрастируют с творчеством импрессиониста. В этой картине художник использует яркие, чистые цвета, характерные для стиля фовистов (в переводе с французского «дикие»), созданного Дереном вместе с Анри Матиссом.
«Семейство комедиантов» — самая важная работа раннего периода творчества Пабло Пикассо. Для него странствующие комедианты (акробаты, танцоры и шуты) олицетворяли меланхолию обездоленного низшего класса художников, своего рода большую семью, с которой он себя отождествлял. Как и они, испанец Пикассо свои первые годы в Париже провел в бедности, стремясь обрести признание. Слева — задумчивый Арлекин в костюме с ромбами, похожий на самого молодого темноволосого художника с суровым взглядом.
Оттенки для «Тигра» были взяты из учебных коллажей, которые Эльсуорт Келли составлял из цветной гуммированной бумаги, которую продавали в парижских лавках канцелярских товаров и использовали во французских начальных школах. Использование Келли этого материала показывает его особый интерес к технике objet trouvé («найденный объект»), которая является ключом к пониманию его визуального мира. Свои абстрактные формы и контуры Келли находил в негативных пространствах природы и городской среды. В период написания этой картины Келли много времени проводил за изучением искусства и архитектуры в Европе. Геометрические формы, которые он видел, вероятно, косвенно послужили исходным материалом для «Тигра».
Дуглас В 1927 году Джеймс Уэлдон Джонсон, ключевая фигура «Гарлемского ренессанса», опубликовал свой шедевр «Божьи тромбоны: семь негритянских проповедей в стихах». Каждая проповедь-поэма сопровождалась иллюстрацией Аарона Дугласа, молодого афроамериканского художника, недавно поселившегося в Гарлеме. Несколько лет спустя Дуглас начал переводить свои иллюстрации в полноразмерные картины маслом. «Судный день» завершает серию из восьми работ. В центре картины изображена величественная фигура архангела Гавриила, который одной ногой опирается на сушу, а другой — на море. Труба архангела призывает народы земли на суд.
В молодости Джорджия О'Кифф была очарована красотой ариземы. В 1930 году она пишет серию из шести изображений североамериканского цветка на озере Джордж в штате Нью-Йорк. На картине «Аризема трехлистная номер IV» мы видим крупный план похожего на язык спадикса, контрастирующего с темным чернильным капюшоном, напоминающим пещеру. В верхнем правом и левом углах его оттеняют зеленые листья и намек на облачное небо.
Голубое небо, загорелые фигуры и волны до самого горизонта — художник в «Прибое» создает ощущение покоя, и лишь детали картины нарушают эту безмятежность. Мы видим, как буй надвигается на маленькую парусную лодку, затерявшуюся на бескрайних морских просторах. Буй предупреждает о невидимой или неминуемой опасности, что делает его присутствие на картине зловещим. Перистые облака в голубом небе — частые предвестники шторма — усиливают тревожное настроение.
Завершенный в феврале 1911 года «Нью-Йорк» является большим, амбициозным произведением, в котором Джордж Беллоуз запечатлел суть современной жизни в Нью-Йорке. Художник не ставил своей задачей изобразить определенное знакомое место в городе. Он создает собирательный образ оживленного торгового района, наводненного толпой, создавая у зрителя ощущение неистового темпа городской жизни.
Эта скульптура, как и многие картины Амедео Модильяни, отражает характерные для его работ приемы стилизации фигур: удлиненные черты и миндалевидные глаза. С 1909-го по 1914 год Модильяни в основном занимался скульптурами. Он умер от туберкулеза в 1920 году в возрасте 35 лет.
Около 1910 года тесное сотрудничество Жоржа Брака и Пабло Пикассо привело к формированию нового стиля в изобразительном искусстве — кубизма. Эта картина характерна для позднего периода творчества Брака, когда художник использует элементы кубизма при изображении натюрмортов и других предметов. В этой работе волокна древесины стола, узор обоев на заднем плане и текст в газете подчеркивают игру рисунка и фактуры.
Пьер Боннар входил в возникшую в 1890 году полумистическую группу молодых художников, которые называли себя «Наби» (что в переводе с иврита означает «пророки»). Набиды презирали импрессионистов, считая простое воспроизведение окружающего мира в его естестве наивным и недостойным внимания художника. Боннар часто запечатлевает моменты, которым стал случайным свидетелем, такие как этот. В своих работах художник изучает природу цвета и экспериментирует с цветовой гармонией.
Эдуар Вюйар входил в возникшую в 1890 году полумистическую группу молодых художников, которые называли себя «Наби» (что в переводе с иврита означает «пророки»). Набиды презирали импрессионистов, считая простое воспроизведение окружающего мира в его естестве наивным и безвкусным. «Женщина в полосатом платье» — одна из пяти работ, которые Вюйар написал в 1895 году для Таде Натансона и его жены Миси Годебской. Считается, что рыжеволосая Мися, чьей красотой восхищался художник, стала прототипом погруженной в себя женщины, которая расставляет цветы.
Монументальный мобиль Александра Колдера приводят в движение воздушные потоки в атриуме восточного крыла Мобиль движется, так как сконструирован из алюминия, а не сварен из стали, которую Колдер предпочитал для своих работ. Скульптор собирался установить мотор, но использование современных легких материалов избавило его от этой необходимости. Несмотря на то, что наибольший размер скульптуры превышает 26 метров, вся работа весит всего 417 килограммов — это на две тонны меньше, чем если бы она была сделана из стали.
В восточном крыле музея представлена постоянно растущая коллекция произведений современного искусства. Создатель галереи Эндрю Меллон выделил площадку под строительство восточного крыла еще в 30-х годах XX века, однако проектирование здания началось только в 1968 году. Восточное крыло открылось для посетителей в 1978 году и повторно — в 2016-м, после трехлетней реконструкции и расширения галереи. Приглашаем вас совершить увлекательное путешествие по обновленным залам музея и увидеть экспонаты своими глазами.
1980年代から、ケリー・ジェームス・マーシャルはさまざまなメディアや表現方法を駆使してアメリカの黒人社会を称賛し、それに注目を呼ぶための作品を制作してきました。《偉大なアメリカ》は、奴隷にされたアフリカ人たちがアメリカへ運ばれた、「ミドル・パッセージ」とよばれる航路で体験した、知られざるトラウマを物語る大型の絵画作品です。鑑賞者は熱狂を表す「すごい」と言う意味の「Wow」という言葉や、明るい色彩で描かれた、幽霊が待ち受けているテーマパークのトンネルに漕ぎ出す、ボートに乗った黒人たちの様子などに目を奪われます。右上には水面から浮かぶ人の頭が描かれています。楽しいという意味の「FUN」という文字が消されています。作品のタイトルは、マーシャル自身が以前述べた「アメリカが黒人にとって偉大になったのはいつだろうか？」という疑問を暗に投げかけています。
この作品では、海岸に建っている若者が雲を集めようとしています。この作品は、ジグマー・ポルケが16世紀の短い風刺詩に登場する木版画を翻案したものです。作品は「希望は長いロープで、多くがそれによって自らを死に追いやる」ということわざを描いています。それは私たちに運命に逆らうことの難しさを思い出させる言葉です。しかしポルケの描写はまったく絶望的でなく、むしろ希望を感じさせます。彼は原画に描かれた男性の口からはき出された炎や海辺の風景など細部の描写を省き、 代わりにさまざまな色の幾何学の図形で埋め尽くした独自の背景を描きました。
《山と海》は、ヘレン・フランケンサーラーのステイニングの技法の好例となっています。ステイニングとは、下地を塗らずにカンヴァスにそのまま薄めた絵具をたらす技法です。この手法によって、画面に広がる透明の色の部分は空間に浮かんでいるように見え、カンヴァスの布目によって画像の平たんさが強調されています。彼女の色と形の配置は自然の風景を感じさせることが多く、個々の作品はそれぞれ独自の視覚的空間と雰囲気を醸し出しています。
ジャスパー・ジョーンズは1950年代、極めて個人的で、ジェスチャーを重視した抽象表現主義の絵画の登場とともに頭角を現したアーティストです。彼はわかりやすい題材を 冷静に、一見客観的で、そして往々にして不可解な方法で表現したアーティストとして評価されています。ジョーンズはほとんど常に、彼が「心が既に知っているもの」と呼んだ既存の画像から作品の題材を選びました。活動初期の頃、彼は身近な数字や商業用のステンシルの形状、標的、アメリカの国旗や地図などの、多くの人にとって身近なものをモチーフにしました。この作品をはじめ彼の作品に見られる3次元的特徴は、ジョーンズが絵画と彫刻の間に緊密な関係を見いだしていたことをはっきりと物語っています。
ジェニー・ホルツァーによる文字からなるこの作品は､社会の意識に訴えかけます。2005年、ホルツァーは機密解除され編集された公文書を素材に用いて、シルクスクリーンによるシリーズを制作しました。その6つの作品の1つであるこの作品では、情報公開法に基づいて入手したアメリカ政府発行の公文書からとられた手形が拡大されています。指紋はイラクで拘留者を虐待したとして起訴された兵士達のものです。 伝統的な油絵具とリネンを用いて公文書を拡大複製したこの作品で、ホルツァーは彼女が「必ずしも気づかれず、真剣にとられない」と感じていた情報への関心を喚起しています
この《ダブル・アメリカ》の下の文字列は、英語のアメリカを逆さにしたもので、外側の輪郭線が黒く塗られ、白いネオンの「影」が壁に映っています。上の文字列は黒く塗られて裏返っており、こちらに向いているのは照らされた文字の裏側です。このゆがんだ視点は、アメリカ史上初の黒人の大統領の当選と、同時に参戦している二つの戦争を取り巻く政治的混乱を思い起こさせます。
抽象表現主義運動の中心人物のひとりだったバーネット・ニューマンは、絵画や彫刻、執筆において自身の考えを確立した知識人でした。1940年代の半ば、ニューマンは「ジップ」と呼ばれる特徴的な垂直の要素を用いて単色のカンヴァスを区切る、最初の一連の作品を制作しました。この作品は、後に彼が最終作となる15作目の《存在せよ、II》を含め、あわせて《十字架の道行き》と命名した、14点の作品からなるシリーズの最初の作品です。《十字架の道行き》は、第二次世界大戦やホロコーストを受けてアーティストが直面していた、「われわれは何を描いたらよいのだろう？」という疑問、彼が「モラルの危機」と呼んだ疑問に答えようとした、彼のキャリアで最も野心的な作品です。
韓国のソウル生まれのナム・ジュン・パイクは､日本で育ち、その後ドイツへ渡り、最後にニューヨークに移り住みました。彼は動画などの新しいメディアをアートに取り入れた先駆者です。この作品で、パイクは19世紀の日本の掛け軸に自分の手形を押してその後ろから赤い光を点滅させています。伝統的な芸術形態と現代のテクノロジーの両方を作品に取り入れる手法は､パイク作品の特徴となっています。
エヴァ・ヘスが作ろうとしたのは、彼女が考える伝統的な美しい彫刻作品ではありませんでした。彼女は金属や石など伝統的な彫刻の素材を退け、代わりに樹脂や石膏、ラテックスなど、もっと柔軟性のある素材を好んで使用しました。この作品で使用されているのもラテックスです。この作品は《不慮の出来事》のためのいくつかの習作の一つで、その8つの似通った垂れ幕からなる完成作品は、オーストラリア国立美術館に展示されています。ヘスは作品を「絵画でもなく、彫刻でもない…これはつり下げられた絵画なのです」と述べています。
ドナルド・ジャッドのこの作品《無題》は、台座がなく、それまでの彫刻作品にはほとんど前例がなかった容赦ない枠なしの状態で鑑賞者の空間である床に直接立っています。この立体の構造物は従来の芸術的認識に訴えかけるのではなく、幾何学的論理に基づいて作られています。構造物は斜めに区分され、片方はもう一方の2倍の高さになっていて、段差を作っています。ジャッドが狙いを定めたのは、彼がヨーロッパのモダニズムのイリュージョニズムを継承したと考える作品でした。代わりに彼は、この作品で、単にものとして存在する明快な形を提示しています。この作品でジャッドが試みている、見た目の空間ではなく真実の空間の追求は、従来の絵画の遠近法に疑問を投げかけています。
この作品《おい、ミッキー》は、ロイ・リヒテンシュタインが大衆文化のある場面と様式を取り入れて作成した最初の作品と思われます。そのベースとなったのが1960年に発行された絵本『ドナルド・ダック：ロスト・アンド・ファウンド』です。リヒテンシュタインは、絵本の背景の人物を省き、視点を90度変え、色調を黄色と青の帯にまとめ、キャラクターの表情を簡略化するなどして微妙に変化させ、もっと統一された画像を作り上げました。様式としては、太くて黒い輪郭線や原色を使用した色使い、ドナルドの目とミッキーの顔に見られるインクのドットなど、印刷物の様式を模倣しています。このドットは、当時大衆向けの漫画や雑誌で使用されていたベンディ印刷で使われるものでした。
モーリス・ルイスの作品は、色が主題となっています。ヘレン・フランケンサーラーのステイニングの技法に強い影響を受けたルイスは、自身の抽象画において色を新たな方法で生かすため、この技法の可能性を模索し始めました。彼は乾燥の早いアクリル絵具を薄めて生のカンヴァスに垂らし、カンヴァスや、カンヴァスを緩くとめた足場を動かして絵具の流れをコントロールしました。ステイニングの技法により、ルイスは抽象表現で踏襲されていた筆致を通してアーティストの制作行為を強調するスタイルとは対照的に、絵画に非人間的な性質を与えることに成功したのです。
ジョアン・ミッチェルは、挑戦的で女性蔑視の抽象表現主義のジャンルにおいて成功した、数少ない女性アーティストのひとりです。作品の白の下地に描かれた太く生き生きとした描線には、彼女ののびのびとした、衝動的な制作スタイルが表われています。ミッチェルはしばしばミシガン湖での幼い頃の思い出をベースに作品を描き、そのいくつかを「表現主義風景画」と呼んでいました。それらは完全に抽象化されているため、鑑賞者が作品と情緒的なつながり持つことを可能にしています。
ジャクソン・ポロックの壁画サイズのドリップ・ペインティングは、1948年の発表当時、賛否両論を巻き起こしました。この作品で、彼は納屋を改装したアトリエの床を覆い尽くすほど大きいカンヴァスを床に置き、塗装ペンキや油絵具、エナメル、アルミニウムなどを使って、カンヴァスの周りを歩きながら筆や柄から絵具を垂らしたり、こぼしたり､浴びせかけて制作しました。ポロックはこれが制作過程において彼が作品の中に入り込み、媒介者の役割を果たす方法だと語っています。カンヴァスの左上の隅と上部には、彼の手形の「署名」が残されています。
アーシル・ゴーキーが1944年制作した色の幕の絵画と呼ばれる一連の作品のひとつであるこの《1年のトウワタ》では、絵具の幕がカンヴァスを不均等に流れており、不明確ながらも何かを連想させる形が描かれています。画面全体に使用された緑と茶色の色調は風景を思わせますが、風景に見られる特徴は特定できず、奥行きも感じられません。一方、したたった垂直の絵具と濃淡のトーンが画面全体にきらきらとした輝きを与えています。
第二次世界大戦後、絵画は原点に戻って一から作り直さなければならないと感じていたジャン・デュビュッフェは、素人の芸術、特に子供や独学で学んだアーティスト達の作品に発想のヒントを求めました。それを彼は「アール・ブリュット」 、粗野または生の芸術と名付け、収集しました。この《建物のファサード》でデュビュッフェは彼自身の「アール・ブリュット」 を披露しています。表面の黒い絵具をひっかいて色のついた下地の部分を表す、学校の授業で習うような技法をつかい、デュビュッフェは子供の目を通してみているようなパリの通りの風景を表現しています。しかしながら､慎重に配置された碁盤目状の構図や力強く施された表面の絵具などから、彼が現代的な技法を意識していたことがうかがえます。
ピエト・モンドリアンは自身の抽象画を通して､普遍的な調和は自然に宿るという精神的な概念を表現しようとしました。バランスのとれた左右非対称を生み出すために慎重に計算された構図の水平と垂直の要素は、自然界で働く動的平衡と匹敵する反作用の力を表しました。モンドリアンは菱形の構図は切り取ることを意味すると言っていましたが、この作品でもそれが明確に感じられます。描かれた形状はカンヴァスの端で切断され、完全ではありません。それは絵画が物理的な境界を越えてカンヴァスの外へ広がっていることを暗示させます。
この彫刻作品は抽象作品のような印象を与えますが、 コンスタンティン・ブランクーシは彼の作品は主題の内面の本質を明らかにしたものだと主張しています。 彼の作品はアフリカの彫刻とルーマニアの民芸彫刻の伝統をベースにし、さらに台座を作品の一部として取り入れています。《空間の鳥》のシリーズに長年取り組んでいたブランクーシは、シリーズをいずれ彼の最高の功績となる集大成ととらえていました。他の彫刻家とは異なり、ブランクーシは大きな工房をもたず、自ら石を削り､真ちゅうを磨いて、一人で作品を制作しました。
マルセル・デュシャンは、絵画や彫刻への従来のアプローチを特徴づけていた前提に挑んだアーティストです。アメリカの安くて手軽な複製品の考えに魅了されていたデュシャンは、自然物や人工物を彼が「レディ・メイド」と呼んだ自分の作品に取り入れはじめました。その名前は彼がニューヨークに住んでいたときに、ファッション業界からとったものです。彼はこれらのありふれた品々のほとんどを、自分の署名を加えること以外何ら変更することなく展覧会で展示しようとしてアート界に衝撃を与えました。フランス窓を意味する「French Window（フレンチ・ウインドウ）」からnを省いた言葉遊びとなっているこの作品のタイトルは、パリのアパートによくある両開きの窓と、第一次世界大戦で最近未亡人となった女性達の両方にかけています。このミニチュアの窓はデュシャン自身が制作したものではなく、アメリカ人の大工に作らせたものです。
シュルレアリスムの偉大な彫刻家の一人であるアルベルト・ジャコメッティは、活動初期にこの作品のようなゲームや遊びのテーマを頻繁に題材にしていました。ジャコメッティがこの作品で使用した形は、駒を動かして遊ぶボードゲームに似ていますが、そのゲームがどんなものなのかははっきりしません。曖昧な空間と、作品名の《ノー・モア・プレイ》で表現されている知るよしのない「ゲーム」のルールは、作品をまるで夢の中に出てくるようなものに感じさせます。
ワシリーー・カンディンスキによるこの作品は、現実の世界といくらか関連性はあるものの、雰囲気を伝えるため細部は歪曲され、調整されています。輪郭のない淡い色調の形は一見完全に抽象的に見えますが、描かれているモチーフの多くは見分けることができます。《即興 No.31（海戦）》の中心に描かれているのは、戦っている2隻の帆船で、高いマストは細長い黒い線で表されています。カンディンスキの《即興》 シリーズの多くで見られるこの題材は、恐らくヨハネの黙示録の終末論的なイメージから着想を得ていると思われます。
この作品は多くの作品を残したエルンスト・ルートヴィヒ・キルヒナーの初期の作品です。彼は1905年にドレスデンで結成された、ドイツ語で「橋」を意味するブリュッケと呼ばれるドイツ表現主義グループの結成メンバーでした。この作品でキルヒナーは、従来のアトリエの不自然な空間ではなく、自然を背景に二人の裸婦を描いています。作品は、キルヒナーの大胆で、往々にして荒々しい形や鮮やかな色使いの典型を示しています。
アンリ・マティスの 《コリウールの開かれた窓》 は、現代の私たちの目には穏やかで叙情的に移るかもしれません。しかし、作品の発表当時、その太い筆致や鮮烈な色使いは暴力的ととらえられました。小さいながら激しさを感じさせる、初期のモダニズムを象徴するこの作品は、フォービズムの最も重要な作品の一つとして知られています。フォービズムのアーティストたちは、自然の姿の忠実な再現から離れて、自由な色使いや質感を追求しました。《コリウールの開かれた窓》 は、マティス作品における新たな作風の契機となった作品でした。
この作品は、アンドレ ・ドランがロンドンを訪れた時に制作したもので、その数年前にクロード・モネが発表した作品と同じような題材を描いています。しかし、この作品に見られるドランの色調や遠近感は、印象派の巨匠モネのものと明確に異なっています。絵具を混ぜ合わせていない鮮やかな色使いは、ドランがアンリ・マティスとともに確立した、フランス語で「野獣」を意味するフォービズム特有のものです
《サルタンバンクの家族》は、ピカソの初期の作品の中で最も重要な作品です。ピカソは、これらのさすらいの曲芸師や踊り子、道化師などのサルタンバンクたちに、世間から見捨てられ社会の底辺に生きるアーティストたちの悲哀を重ね合わせ、自らをある種の同類と感じていたのです。スペイン生まれのピカソは、パリに移り住んだ最初の数年間、彼ら同様に貧しい生活を送りながら、世間から認められることを目指していました。一番左に描かれた菱形模様の衣装を着た陰気な道化師は、若い頃のピカソの浅黒く真剣な顔をしています。
エルズワース･ ケリーのこの作品の色彩は、当時フランスの文房具屋で売られ小学校で使われていた、色のついたゴム引き紙を使って作成したコラージュの習作がベースになっています。彼がこの素材を使ったことは、ケリーが「ファウンドオブジェ」と呼ばれる自然物や人工物を芸術にとりいれることに深い興味をいだいていたことを示すもので、彼の視覚的世界を理解する鍵となるものです。ケリーは身の回りの自然や都会の風景の空間のなかで見出した抽象的な形や曲線を作品に取り入れていましたが、 この作品の制作中、ケリーはヨーロッパの芸術作品や建築を見ることに多くの時間を割いていました。そうしたことから、直接的ではないものの、彼が目にした幾何学的な構造物がこの作品の土台となっていると思われます。
1927年、ハーレム・ルネサンスの中心人物であるジェームズ･ウェルドン･ジョンソンが彼の代表的な作品『神のトロンボーン：散文による7つの黒人の説教』を出版しました。それぞれの説教の詩には、その頃ハーレムに移り住んだ若きアフリカ系アメリカ人のアーティストのエーロン・ダグラスの挿絵が添えられました。その数年後、ダグラスはその挿絵をベースに大きな油彩作品を制作したのです。《審判の日》は、シリーズ8作品のうちの最後の作品です。中央には、大天使ガブリエルが陸と海にまたがって立っています。ガブリエルはトランペットを鳴らし、陸の国民を召喚するのです。
若いころ武蔵鐙（ムサシアブミ）に魅了されていたオキーフは、1930年ニューヨークのレイク・ジョージで、この北アメリカによくみられる花を題材にした、6つの作品からなるシリーズを制作しました。武蔵鐙、No. 4では、濃い紫の仏炎苞（ぶつえんほう）のくぼみのなかに、舌のような形をした肉穂花序（にくすいかじょ）が拡大されて描かれています。緑の葉と曇り空のような背景は、上部の左右の隅に抑えられています。
《大波のうねり》に描かれた青い海、太陽の光を浴びた人物たち、そして大きな波のうねりは作品に穏やかな印象を与えています。しかし細部をよく見ると、最初の印象に疑問を感じるようになります。ブイは、さえぎるもののない海の風景の中で小型のキャットボートの前に立ちはだかっています。それはまだ見ぬ差し迫った危険に対して警鐘を鳴らすものであり、その存在が場面に不吉な雰囲気を与えています。そして、しばしば嵐の前兆とされる青い空に渦を巻く雲が不安な印象を強めています。
1911年に完成したこの作品《ニューヨーク》は、ベローズがニューヨークの現代生活の本質をとらえた意欲的な大型作品です。彼は、誰にも分かるような特定の場所を描くつもりはありませんでした。その代わりに、いくつもの繁華街を組み合わせた想像上の場所と、ごったがえす群衆の様相を描き、ニューヨークの熱気を効果的に伝えようとしたのです。
この作品には、アメデオ・モディリアーニの多くの絵画作品で見られる細面の顔立ちと、アーモンド形の目を特徴とする、彼特有の人物表現が見られます。モディリアーニは1920年に35歳で結核で死亡する前の1909年から1914まで、彫刻作品を中心に制作を行っていました。
ジョルジュ･ブラックは、1910年パブロ･ピカソとともにキュビズムという新たな様式を確立したアーティストとして有名です。この作品は、キュビズムの要素を静物画やほかの主題に取り入れた、ブラックの後年の典型的な作品です。この作品では、テーブルの木目や背景の壁紙のデザイン、また新聞の文字などが模様と質感の相互作用を引き立てています。
ピエール・ボナールは、1890年ごろ結成された、ヘブライ語で預言者を意味するナビ派と呼ばれる、半神秘的な若手サークルに所属していました。ナビ派は印象派を否定し、自然の姿を単に模写するだけでは、何の考えもなく非芸術的だと考えていました。ボナールはこの作品のようなふとした場面をよく描いており、作品の中で色彩とその調和の実験的な試みを行っていました。
エドゥアール・ビュイヤールは、1890年ごろ結成された、ヘブライ語で預言者を意味するナビ派と呼ばれる、半神秘的な若手サークルに所属していました。ナビ派は印象派を否定し、自然の姿を単に模写するだけでは、何の考えもなく非芸術的だと考えていました。《縞模様のブラウス》は、1895年にビュイヤールがタデ・ナタンソンと彼の妻ミシア･ゴデプスカのために制作した5つの作品のうちの一つです。花を活けながら内観する女性は、ビュイヤールが敬愛していた赤毛のミシアと考えられています
東館のアトリウムでは、アレクサンダー･カルダーの巨大なモビールが気流を受けてゆっくり動いています。この大きなモビールが動けるのは、彼のそれまでの作品で定番だった溶接鋼ではなく、アルミニウムを使ったためでした。カルダーは当初モーターを取り付けることを考えましたが、最先端の軽量素材を使用することでそれは不要となりました。モビールの翼の全長は約26メートルもありますが、重量は約417キロしかなく、鋼鉄製だった場合より2トンも軽いものです。
東館では当館が近年収集に力を入れている近現代美術コレクションを展示しています。この土地は1930年代に当館の創設者、アンドリュー W. メロンによって確保されていましたが、東館の建設計画がスタートしたのは1968年になってからでした。東館は1978年に開館し、2016年に3年の改修・増築工事を経てリニューアルオープンしました。再構成されたギャラリーで、ご自身の感性で展示作品をお楽しみください。
Desde la década de 1980, Kerry James Marshall ha utilizado una variedad de medios y modos de representación para celebrar y hacer visible la vida de la comunidad negra en los Estados Unidos. La gran América es una gran pintura narrativa acerca del trauma incognoscible de los africanos esclavizados que experimentaron el “pasaje del medio” en el Atlántico. Se atrae al espectador por medio de lenguaje exuberante (WOW) y la imagen de vivos colores con las figuras negras en un bote, que ingresa en un túnel de parque temático oscuro y lleno de fantasmas. Una única cabeza sobresale de la línea del agua en la sección superior derecha. La palabra inglesa "fun" (diversión) está oculta. El título pregunta implícitamente, como ha dicho el artista: "¿Desde cuándo América es grande para la gente negra?"
Esta obra presenta a un joven en la orilla del mar intentando tirar de las nubes. Sigmar Polke tomó esta imagen de una xilografía alemana del siglo XVI que aparecía en un libro de epigramas. La imagen ilustraba una cita: “La esperanza es una larga cuerda, con la que muchos tiran de sí mismos hacia su propia muerte”. Sirve como recordatorio de nuestra lucha contra el destino. Sin embargo, la representación de Polke es mucho menos desoladora, quizás incluso ofrece algo de esperanza. El artista eliminó muchos detalles de la xilografía original, entre ellos, la llamarada que salía de la boca del hombre y el paisaje costero original. En su lugar, Polke inventó su propio fondo, lleno de formas geométricas multicolor.
Montañas y mar es un perfecto ejemplo de la técnica de Helen Frankenthaler, que implicaba la creación de obras a través de manchas mediante un proceso en el que vertía pintura diluida sobre lienzos sin imprimación. Este método da como resultado campos de color transparente que parecen flotar en el espacio, y donde el tejido del lienzo pone de relieve el carácter plano de la imagen. Sus disposiciones de colores y formas suelen evocar el entorno natural, y cada obra crea un espacio visual y una atmósfera únicos.
Jasper Johns se posicionó como artista destacado en la década de 1950 tras una época caracterizada por la pintura intensamente personal y gestual de los expresionistas abstractos. Su mérito consta en presentar objetos reconocibles de una manera fría, aparentemente objetiva y a menudo enigmática. Johns casi siempre seleccionaba la materia prima de su arte a partir de imágenes preexistentes, o de lo que llamaba “cosas que la mente ya conoce”. En los primeros años de su carrera, eligió motivos bien familiares, como numerales o formas derivadas de plantillas comerciales, blancos, banderas estadounidenses y mapas de los Estados Unidos. En obras como esta se pone de manifiesto la cualidad táctil de las superficies que creaba, cualidad que evidencia la estrecha relación que el artista percibía entre la pintura y la escultura.
El arte basado en texto de Jenny Holzer involucra a la conciencia pública. En 2005, comenzó a utilizar documentos gubernamentales desclasificados y ocultados por el gobierno como material fuente para una serie de pinturas serigrafiadas. Esta es una de seis pinturas que muestran impresiones de manos agrandadas, tomadas de los registros del gobierno de los Estados Unidos y obtenidas gracias a la Ley de Libertad de Información. Estas manos pertenecen a soldados acusados de perpetuar abusos contra detenidos en Irak. Al utilizar los materiales tradicionales de la pintura al óleo y el lino para reproducir y agrandar los documentos, Holzer llama la atención de los espectadores hacia información a la que la artista cree que “no siempre se le presta atención ni se la toma en serio”.
Las letras inferiores de Doble América presentan la palabra “América” al revés, con los lados que miran hacia afuera pintados de negro, lo que provoca que la “sombra” del neón blanco se refleje contra la pared. Las letras de la hilera superior están pintadas de negro y giradas hacia la pared, por lo que el espectador ve el dorso iluminado de las letras. Esta disposición de perspectivas manipuladas evoca la tormenta política que envolvió a la elección del primer presidente negro de los Estados Unidos, así como la participación contemporánea del país en dos guerras.
Barnett Newman, una de las grandes figuras del expresionismo abstracto, fue un intelectual que desarrolló sus ideas en su pintura, escultura y escritura. A mediados de la década de 1940, creó sus primeras obras utilizando sus característicos elementos verticales, llamados “zips” o cremalleras, para interrumpir los campos monocromáticos de sus lienzos. Esta obra es la primera en una serie de 14 pinturas que Newman llamó Las estaciones del viacrucis (junto a una coda en forma de una 15a pintura, Ser II). Las estaciones del viacrucis fue el intento más ambicioso de Newman por abordar lo que llamó una “crisis moral” a la que se enfrentaban los artistas tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el Holocausto: “¿Qué vamos a pintar?”
Nam June Paik nació en Seúl, en lo que hoy es Corea del Sur, pero creció y vivió en Japón, Alemania y, por último, Nueva York. Fue pionero en el uso de medios nuevos en el arte, incluido el video. Para esta obra, Paik alteró un rollo japonés del siglo XIX añadiendo la impresión de su propia mano y colocando una luz roja parpadeante detrás de él. La yuxtaposición de esta forma de arte tradicional con la tecnología moderna se convertiría en el rasgo distintivo de la obra de Paik.
Eva Hesse no quería producir lo que entendía como una escultura convencionalmente bella. Rechazaba los medios tradicionales utilizados en escultura, como el metal o la piedra, y prefería en su lugar materiales más flexibles, como la fibra, el yeso o el látex, el último de los cuales utiliza en esta pieza de prueba. Esta pieza fue uno de los varios estudios para la obra final titulada Contingente, formada por ocho estandartes similares que hoy cuelgan en la National Gallery de Australia. Hesse la describió como “ni pintura, ni escultura… Es realmente pintura colgada”.
La obra Sin título de Donald Judd se encuentra en el suelo, sin pedestal, directamente en el espacio del espectador, desenmarcada brutalmente de una manera que casi ninguna escultura previa había presentado. La estructura cúbica se genera por lógica geométrica en lugar de por una apelación al lenguaje de la expresión: la obra se ha seccionado a lo largo de la diagonal, una mitad presenta el doble de altura que la otra, lo cual crea una formación similar a un escalón. Judd se rebelaba contra lo que entendía como el ilusionismo continuo del modernismo europeo, presentando en su lugar una forma lúcida que existiría sencillamente como objeto. Su búsqueda del espacio literal en lugar del aparente desafía los términos de la perspectiva tradicional en la pintura.
Mira Mickey es quizás la primera vez que Roy Lichtenstein traspuso una escena y un estilo de una fuente de cultura popular: el libro infantil de 1960 titulado El pato Donald: perdido y encontrado. Lichtenstein alteró sutilmente el original para convertirlo en una imagen más unificada al omitir las figuras del fondo, rotar el punto de vista 90 grados, organizar los colores en franjas de amarillo y azul, y simplificar los rasgos de los personajes. Estilísticamente, Lichtenstein imitaba a los medios impresos: los gruesos contornos negros, los colores primarios y, en los ojos de Donald y el rostro de Mickey, los puntos de tinta del proceso de impresión Benday, utilizado por entonces para producir tiras cómicas y revistas de bajo coste.
La obra de Morris Louis está protagonizada fundamentalmente por el color. Louis se interesó en profundidad por la técnica de manchado de la artista Helen Frankenthaler, y comenzó a investigar el potencial de esta técnica para darle al color un nuevo papel en su pintura abstracta. Para ello, diluía la pintura acrílica de secado rápido y la vertía sobre un lienzo sin imprimar; controlaba el flujo del pigmento moviendo el lienzo o la montura a la que estaba ligeramente sujetado. El manchado le permitía a Louis lograr una cualidad impersonal, en contraste con el estilo expresionista abstracto predominante, que enfatizaba los gestos del artista por medio de la pincelada.
Joan Mitchell se convirtió en una de las pocas mujeres en establecerse en el mundo predominantemente masculino y machista de los expresionistas abstractos. En esta pintura, las llamativas y animadas líneas que vemos sobre el fondo blanco capturan el método pictórico espontáneo e impulsivo de Mitchell. La artista solía inspirarse en recuerdos de su niñez en el lago Michigan para componer sus pinturas. “Paisajes expresionistas” fue el título que eligió para algunas de ellas. Debido a que son totalmente abstractas, se invita al espectador a conectar con sus obras en el plano emocional.
Las pinturas chorreadas de tamaño mural de Jackson Pollock enfrentaron reacciones diversas cuando se expusieron por primera vez en 1948. Para esta pintura, el artista colocó un gran lienzo sobre el suelo de su estudio-granero, cubriendo el espacio prácticamente por completo. El artista utilizó pintura comercial, pintura al óleo, esmalte y aluminio; dejó gotear, vertió y lanzó los pigmentos utilizando pinceles y palos cargados de pintura mientras caminaba al rededor del lienzo. Pollock afirmó que esta era su manera de ser parte de su obra, actuando como un medio en el proceso creativo. “Firmó” la pintura en la esquina superior izquierda y en la sección superior del lienzo con la huella de sus manos.
En Un año el algodoncillo, una de las tantas pinturas denominadas “velo de color” que Arshile Gorky realizó en 1944, las capas de pintura se han lavado de forma desigual por todo el lienzo, y se han añadido con pincel formas evocadoras pero poco definidas. Los tonos verdes y marrones que dominan la pintura sugieren un paisaje, pero no encontramos formas paisajísticas identificables ni recesión espacial. En su lugar, los goteos verticales y la alternancia de tonos claros y oscuros crean un efecto cambiante y reluciente en la totalidad de la superficie pictórica.
Jean Dubuffet sentía que la pintura debía comenzar de cero tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial; buscó entonces inspiración en el arte de los no instruidos, en particular, niños y artistas autodidactas, cuya obra coleccionó y denominó art brut (arte en bruto). En Fachadas de edificios, Dubuffet mostró su propio art brut. Dubuffet adoptó la técnica escolar de raspar pintura negra aplicada sobre un fondo de color, y con ella elaboró una vista de una calle parisina como si fuera desde el punto de vista de un niño. Sin embargo, la grilla controlada con esmero y la pared de pintura imponente que lo cubre todo demuestran la conciencia que tenía el artista de las tácticas modernistas.
Piet Mondrian quería que sus pinturas abstractas expresaran la noción espiritual de que las armonías universales presiden en la naturaleza. Los elementos horizontales y verticales de sus composiciones, calibrados cuidadosamente para producir una asimetría equilibrada, representaban fuerzas opuestas que emparejan el equilibrio dinámico que se despliega en el mundo natural. Mondrian dijo que las composiciones en rombo tenían que ver con el acto de cortar y, de hecho, la sensación de recorte aquí es decisiva. Las formas están incompletas y cortadas por el borde del lienzo, lo que implica un continuo pictórico que se extiende más allá del límite físico de la pintura.
Si bien esta escultura puede parecer abstracta, Constantin Brancusi insistió en que sus obras revelaban la esencia interior de sus temas. Su obra se inspiraba en las tradiciones de la escultura africana y el tallado folklórico rumano, y el artista convirtió el pedestal en un componente integral de la obra. Brancusi trabajó en la serie Pájaro en el espacio durante varios años, y la concibió como un conjunto que coronaría sus logros. A diferencia de otros escultores, Brancusi no contaba con un gran taller; en cambio, trabajaba en solitario con sus materiales, en este caso tallando la piedra y puliendo el latón.
Marcel Duchamp buscaba desafiar las suposiciones básicas que justificaban los enfoques tradicionales en pintura y escultura. Duchamp, fascinado por la idea estadounidense de reproducciones baratas y fáciles, comenzó a apropiarse de objetos encontrados para sus readymades (“ya hecho” en inglés), un término que tomó prestado de la industria de la moda cuando vivía en Nueva York. El artista sorprendió al mundo del arte al intentar mostrar en exposiciones estos objetos corrientes, que a menudo presentaba sin alteraciones excepto por su firma. El título de esta obra es un juego de palabras logrado al eliminar la letra n de las palabras French Window (“ventana francesa” en inglés) para obtener la expresión Fresh Widow (“viuda fresca”). La primera hace referencia a las ventanas dobles tan típicas de los apartamentos parisinos y, la segunda, a las mujeres que habían enviudado recientemente debido a la Primera Guerra Mundial. Duchamp no creó por sí mismo la ventana en miniatura, sino que se la encargó a un carpintero estadounidense.
Alberto Giacometti, uno de los grandes escultores surrealistas, incorporó con frecuencia el tema del juego a sus obras tempranas, como ocurre en esta escultura. La forma que el artista utilizó aquí recuerda a un juego de mesa con piezas movibles; sin embargo, la naturaleza del juego no es evidente. El espacio ambiguo y las reglas del "juego" desconocidas en Ya no jugamos hacen de este un objeto que podría encontrarse en un sueño.
La pintura de Vasili Kandinsky guarda conexión con el mundo real, pero los detalles se han distorsionado y ajustado para representar un cierto estado de ánimo. Pese a que las formas amorfas y las coloridas aguadas de pintura podrían en principio parecer completamente abstractas, componen algunas imágenes reconocibles. El tema central de Improvisación 31 (Batalla naval) es un par de barcos a vela en pleno combate, con sus altos mástiles representados por delgadas líneas negras. Este tema, interpretado por Kandinsky en varias de las Improvisaciones, probablemente se inspirara en la imaginería apocalíptica del Libro de las Revelaciones.
Esta es una de las obras tempranas de la prolífica carrera de Ernst Ludwig Kirchner y pertenece a una época en que el artista fue miembro fundador de un grupo expresionista llamado Die Brücke (El Puente) en Dresde en 1905. En esta pintura, Kirchner ha representado a dos muchachas desnudas en un entorno natural, en lugar de ubicarlas en el espacio restringido de un estudio académico. Esta obra es también un ejemplo del uso que el artista hacía de formas atrevidas, y a menudo toscas, así como de colores vibrantes.
En la actualidad, la obra Ventana abierta, Collioure de Henri Matisse puede parecer agradable y lírica, pero originalmente sus pinceladas gruesas y colores intensos se juzgaron violentos. Esta obra pequeña pero explosiva, icono del modernismo temprano, se considera una de las pinturas más importantes de la escuela fauvista, un grupo de artistas que se centraron en liberar el color y la textura de las estrictas representaciones del aspecto natural. Ventana abierta, Collioure representa el inicio de este nuevo enfoque en el arte de Matisse.
Esta obra fue pintada cuando André Derain visitó Londres y capturó temas semejantes a los que Claude Monet había pintado tan solo unos años antes. Sin embargo, la paleta cromática y la perspectiva utilizadas por Derain en estas escenas muestran un fuerte contraste con las del maestro impresionista. Con sus colores vibrantes y puros, esta pintura es típica del estilo fauvista (nombre tomado de la palabra francesa para denominar a las bestias salvajes), que Derain desarrolló junto con Henri Matisse.
Familia de saltimbanquis es la pintura más importante que Pablo Picasso creó en sus primeros años de carrera. Para él, estos saltimbanquis deambulantes (acróbatas, bailarines y bufones) representaban la melancolía de la abandonada clase de artistas marginales, una suerte de familia extendida con la que se identificaba. Como ellos, el español Picasso pasó penurias durante sus primeros años en París, mientras luchaba por ser reconocido. El arlequín melancólico —con el traje con rombos en el extremo izquierdo— lleva el rostro oscuro e intenso del propio joven artista.
Los colores de Tigre surgieron a partir de estudios en collage que Ellsworth Kelly realizó con un papel engomado de color que se vendía en las papelerías parisinas y se utilizaba en las escuelas primarias francesas. El uso de este material revela el particular interés de Kelly por el objet trouvé (objeto encontrado), que es clave para comprender su mundo visual. Kelly halló sus formas y contornos abstractos en los espacios negativos de su entorno natural o urbano. En el periodo en que esta obra fue pintada, Kelly pasó mucho tiempo admirando el arte y la arquitectura europeos. Las estructuras geométricas que vio probablemente proporcionaron un material fuente para Tigre, aunque sea indirectamente.
En 1927, James Weldon Johnson, una figura clave en el renacimiento de Harlem, publicó su obra maestra, Los trombones de Dios: Siete sermones negros en verso. Cada sermón-poema se encontraba acompañado por una ilustración de Aaron Douglas, un joven artista afroamericano recientemente asentado en Harlem. Varios años más tarde, Douglas comenzó a traducir sus ilustraciones en grandes pinturas al óleo. El día del Juicio Final es la última obra de una serie de ocho pinturas. En el centro, un poderoso ángel Gabriel se encuentra de pie a horcajadas entre la tierra y el mar. Con un sonido de trompeta, el arcángel convoca a los pueblos de la tierra a enfrentar su juicio.
En sus años de juventud, Georgia O'Keeffe sintió una fascinación particular por los aros. En 1930, ejecutó una serie de seis pinturas de la flor de esta planta tan común de Norteamérica en el lago George de Nueva York. Aro n.º IV presenta una vista ampliada del espádice, que posee un formato semejante a una lengua, sobre el interior cavernoso de color púrpura oscuro de la espata. El follaje verde y un atisbo de cielo con nubes se encuentran confinados a las esquinas superiores izquierda y derecha.
El cielo azul, las figuras bañadas por el sol y la vasta extensión de agua ondulada de Mar de fondo otorgan un tono calmo a la imagen; sin embargo, algunos detalles de la pintura cuestionan esta sensación inicial de serenidad. La boya confronta al pequeño velero en medio de un paisaje marino vacío. Su propósito —hacer sonar una campana de alerta ante peligros inminentes o inadvertidos— hace que su presencia en la escena sea amenazante. Las nubes de tipo cirro en el cielo azul, que suelen presagiar la aproximación de una tormenta, refuerzan esta sensación perturbadora.
Nueva York, completada en febrero de 1911, es una pintura ambiciosa y de gran tamaño en la que George Bellows capturó la esencia de la vida moderna en la Ciudad de Nueva York. Bellows no quiso representar un lugar específico ni identificable de la ciudad. En cambio, se inspiró en varios de sus bulliciosos distritos comerciales para crear una amalgama, una imagen imposiblemente repleta de gente, que transmitiera de la mejor manera posible el ritmo frenético de Nueva York.
Esta escultura refleja la distintiva estilización de las figuras característica de Amedeo Modigliani, ya que presenta los rasgos elongados y ojos almendrados que se aprecian en muchas de sus pinturas. Modigliani se dedicó a la escultura aproximadamente desde 1909 a 1914, antes de fallecer de tuberculosis a los 35 años en 1920.
Georges Braque es famoso por haber desarrollado con Pablo Picasso el nuevo estilo del cubismo en 1910. Esta pintura es típica de una etapa tardía en la carrera de Braque, cuando incorporó elementos del cubismo a las naturalezas muertas y otros temas. En esta obra, las vetas de la madera de la mesa, el diseño del papel de pared en el fondo y el texto del periódico ponen de relieve el juego entre dibujos y texturas.
Pierre Bonnard formó parte de un grupo de jóvenes artistas casi místico que emergió alrededor de 1890 y se autodenominó Les Nabis (por la palabra hebrea para “profeta”). Los Nabis rechazaban el impresionismo y consideraban que la simple transcripción del aspecto del mundo natural era un acto irreflexivo y desprovisto de carácter artístico. Bonnard solía capturar momentos espontáneos como este y utilizó su obra para explorar y experimentar con el color y las armonías cromáticas.
Édouard Vuillard formó parte de un grupo de jóvenes artistas casi místico que emergió alrededor de 1890 y se autodenominó Les Nabis (por la palabra hebrea para “profeta”). Los Nabis rechazaban el impresionismo y consideraban que la simple transcripción del aspecto del mundo natural era un acto irreflexivo y desprovisto de carácter artístico. Mujer con vestido a rayas es una de las cinco obras que Vuillard pintó en 1895 para Thadée Natanson y su esposa Misia Godebska. La mujer de aspecto introspectivo a la que vemos aquí ocupándose de un arreglo floral podría representar a Misia, una pelirroja por la que Vuillard sentía gran admiración.
Este móvil monumental de Alexander Calder se mueve únicamente gracias a las corrientes de aire que atraviesan el atrio del Edificio Este. Dicho movimiento es posible debido a que el móvil se ha construido con aluminio en lugar de con acero soldado, que era el material que Calder solía elegir. El escultor consideró la instalación de un motor, pero el uso de materiales ligeros y avanzados hizo que esto no fuera necesario. Pese a que la envergadura de la escultura excede los 85 pies, la obra completa pesa tan sólo 920 libras, 2 toneladas menos que si se la hubiese construido en acero.
El Edificio Este alberga la creciente colección de arte moderno y contemporáneo de la National Gallery. Comenzó a planearse en 1968, aunque el fundador Andrew W. Mellon ya había reservado el terreno en la década de 1930. El edificio abrió sus puertas al público en 1978 y volvió a abrirlas en 2016 tras un proyecto de renovación y ampliación de las galerías que duró tres años. Le invitamos a explorar las galerías renovadas y a establecer sus propias conexiones con las obras expuestas.
Harry Allen, “The Media Assassin” and journalist; Nelson George, filmmaker; Adrian Loving; artist and educator; Miles Marshall Lewis, author of There’s a Riot Goin’ On; Vikki Tobak, author of Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop
On February 17, 2019, the National Gallery of Art hosted a discussion celebrating the ingenuity, dedication, and power of Gordon parks. Local artist and educator Adrian Loving and scholar Vikki Tobak explored the visual influences and legacy of Gordon Parks in photography and film. Parks’s famous photograph A Great Day In Hip Hop (published in XXL Magazine, September 1998)—itself a tribute to Art Kane’s 1958 photograph A Great Day in Harlem—was the touchstone of this discussion, held in association with Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950.
Depuis les années 1980, Kerry James Marshall utilise un éventail de techniques et de modes de représentation pour célébrer et rendre visible la vie des personnes noires en Amérique. Great America raconte la grande histoire du traumatisme inconnaissable des esclaves africains qui ont connu le « Passage du milieu », le voyage transatlantique d'est en ouest. L'attention du spectateur est attirée par le langage exubérant (« WOW ») et les couleurs vives contrastant avec les figures noires, assises dans un bateau qui entre dans le tunnel hanté d'un parc d'attractions. En haut à droite, une tête isolée flotte au-dessus de l'eau. Le mot « FUN » (amusement) est oblitéré. Le titre pose implicitement la question, comme l'a dit l'artiste, « Quand l'Amérique est-elle devenue grande et belle pour les noirs ? ».
Ce tableau présente un jeune homme au bord de la mer qui tente de se battre avec des nuages. Sigmar Polke s'approprie l'image de cette gravure sur bois allemande du XVIe siècle publiée dans un livre d'épigrammes. L'image illustre une citation : « L'espoir est une longue corde avec laquelle beaucoup se tirent vers la mort » – un rappel de nos luttes contre le destin. Cependant la représentation de Polke est bien moins morne, elle exprime peut-être même l'espoir. L'artiste élimine des détails de la gravure originale, y compris des jets de flammes qui sortent de la bouche de l'homme et le décor de bord de mer d'origine. Polke les remplace par son propre fond, peuplé de formes géométriques multicolores.
Mountains and Sea est un parfait exemple de la technique de Helen Frankenthaler, qui crée des œuvres en produisant des taches de couleurs, par un procédé consistant à faire couler de la peinture diluée sur une toile brute non préparée. Cette méthode donne lieu à des étendues de couleurs transparentes qui semblent flotter dans l'espace, la trame de la toile accentuant l'aspect plat de l'image. Ses agencements de couleurs et de formes évoquent souvent l'environnement naturel, et chaque œuvre crée un espace et une atmosphère visuels uniques.
Jasper Johns émerge comme artiste notoire dans les années 1950 à la suite de la peinture fortement personnelle et gestuelle des expressionnistes abstraits. Il est reconnu pour sa représentation d'objets reconnaissables dans un style sobre, apparemment distant et souvent énigmatique. Johns sélectionne presque toujours le matériau premier de son art à partir d'images préexistantes, ce qu'il décrit comme « des choses que l'esprit connait déjà ». Dès le début de sa carrière, il choisit des motifs très courants tels que des chiffres ou des formes dérivés de pochoirs commerciaux, des cibles, des drapeaux américains et des cartes des États-Unis. L'aspect tactile des surfaces dans des œuvres comme celle-ci est frappant et témoigne du lien étroit que Johns perçoit entre la peinture et la sculpture.
L'art de Jenny Holzer prend appui sur du texte et fait appel à la conscience publique. En 2005, elle commence à utiliser des documents gouvernementaux déclassifiés et oblitérés comme matériau de base pour une série de sérigraphies. Voici l'une des six peintures représentant des empreintes de mains agrandies, extraites de documents gouvernementaux américains obtenus grâce à la loi relative à la liberté d'information. Les empreintes sont celles de soldats accusés de violences envers des prisonniers en Irak. Par son utilisation des matériaux traditionnels ( de la peinture à l'huile et du lin) pour la reproduction et l'agrandissement des documents, Holzer attire l'attention du public sur des informations qui, à son avis, « passent souvent inaperçues ou ne sont pas toujours prises au sérieux ».
Les lettres de la ligne inférieure de Double America présentent le mot America tête en bas, avec le côté extérieur peint en noir, ce qui permet « l'ombre » du néon blanc à se refléter sur le mur. Le côté peint en noir des lettres de la ligne supérieure est tourné vers le mur de sorte que le spectateur regarde l'arrière lumineux des lettres. Cet agencement de perspectives déformées évoque le trouble politique causé par l'élection du premier président noir des États-Unis et la participation contemporaine du pays à deux guerres.
Personnalité importante du mouvement de l'expressionnisme abstrait, Barnett Newman était un intellectuel qui élaborait ses idées au travers de sa peinture, de sa sculpture et de ses écrits. Au milieu des années 1940, il crée ses premières œuvres utilisant ses éléments verticaux distinctifs, ou « fermetures Éclair », qui traversent les surfaces de couleur unie de ses toiles. Cette peinture est la première d'une série de 14 toiles que Newman appellera plus tard The Stations of the Cross, « les stations du chemin de croix » (ainsi qu'une coda : une 15e peinture intitulée Be II). The Stations of the Cross est la tentative la plus ambitieuse de Newman pour aborder ce qu'il appelle une « crise morale » à laquelle les artistes font face suite à la Seconde Guerre mondiale et à l'Holocauste : « Qu'allons-nous peindre ? »
Nam June Paik est né à Séoul, en Corée du Sud actuelle, mais a grandi et vécu au Japon, en Allemagne et enfin à New-York. Il est le pionnier de l'utilisation de nouveaux médias, dont la vidéo, en art. Pour cette œuvre, Paik modifie un parchemin japonais du XIXe siècle en y apposant l'empreinte de sa main et en installant une lampe rouge clignotante derrière. La juxtaposition d'une forme d'art traditionnelle et de technologie moderne deviendra la marque de l'œuvre de Paik.
Eva Hesse ne voulait pas créer ce qu'elle considérait comme de la belle sculpture conventionnelle. Elle refusait d'utiliser des matériaux de sculpture traditionnels, comme le métal ou la pierre, et préférait des matières plus flexibles telles que les fibres, le plâtre ou, comme pour cette ébauche, le latex. Il s'agit de l'une des études pour l'œuvre finale Contingent, composée de huit bannières similaires, aujourd'hui exposée à la National Gallery of Australia. Hesse a décrit cette œuvre comme « ni peinture, ni sculpture. [...] C'est tout simplement une peinture suspendue ».
Sans titre de Judd est posé à même le sol sans socle, directement dans l'espace du spectateur. Presque aucune autre sculpture antérieure n'avait été présentée ainsi, sans le moindre cadre. La structure cubique suit une logique géométrique au lieu de faire appel à un langage d'expression : elle est coupée en deux dans le sens de la diagonale et l'une des moitiés est deux fois plus haute que l'autre, ce qui forme une sorte de marche. Judd attaque ce qu'il considère comme l'illusionnisme sans fin du modernisme européen, présentant plutôt une forme nette qui n'existe qu'en tant qu'objet. Sa recherche de l'espace littéral plutôt qu'apparent remet en question les conditions de perspective traditionnelle en peinture.
Look Mickey est peut-être le tableau où Roy Lichtenstein, pour la première fois, transpose une scène et un style issus d'une référence de culture populaire : le livre pour enfants de 1960 Donald Duck: Lost and Found. Lichtenstein modifie légèrement l'original pour en faire une image plus homogène, se passant des personnages en arrière-plan, tournant le point de vue à 90 degrés, organisant les couleurs en aplats de jaune ou de bleu, et en simplifiant les traits des personnages. Au niveau stylistique, Lichtenstein imite les techniques d'impression : contours épais noirs, couleurs primaires et, dans les yeux de Donald et le visage de Mickey, points d'encre Benday, une technique d'impression moins coûteuse alors utilisée pour produire les bandes dessinées en livres et dans les magazines.
L'œuvre de Morris Louis traite essentiellement de la couleur. Profondément influencé par la technique de coloration par taches de l'artiste Helen Frankenthaler, Louis commence à étudier le potentiel de cette technique pour donner un nouveau rôle à la couleur dans sa peinture abstraite. Il dilue sa peinture acrylique (une peinture au séchage rapide) et la verse sur la toile non préparée, contrôlant la progression du pigment en bougeant la toile ou l'échafaudage auquel elle est vaguement agrafée. La technique de tache permet à Louis d'obtenir un aspect impersonnel, contrairement au style expressionniste abstrait dominant à l'époque qui met en valeur les gestes de l'artiste grâce aux coups de pinceaux.
Joan Mitchell est l'une des premières femmes à faire sa place dans le monde macho et sexiste des expressionnistes abstraits. Dans cette peinture, les lignes brutes et vivantes sur fond blanc démontrent la technique de peinture spontanée et impulsive de Mitchell. Elle s'inspirait souvent de ses souvenirs d'enfance du lac Michigan pour ses compositions picturales, qu'elle appelait parfois « paysages expressionnistes ». En raison de leur abstraction totale, le spectateur est invité à envisager ses œuvres au niveau émotionnel.
En 1948, les premières peintures de taille murale de Jackson Pollock qui utilisent la technique de l'égouttement, ou « dripping », suscitent des avis partagés. Pour cette peinture, Pollock étend une grande toile à même le sol dans son atelier (une grange reconvertie), recouvrant presque tout l'espace. Il utilise de la peinture de décoration d'intérieur, de la peinture à l'huile, de l’émail et de l’ aluminium, et il fait goutter (en anglais : drip), gicler ou verse de la couleur avec des pinceaux ou des bâtons dégoulinants tout en marchant autour de la toile. Il disait que c'était sa façon d'être « dans » son œuvre, en agissant comme intermédiaire dans le procédé créatif. Il a apposé sa « signature » dans l'angle en haut à gauche et en sommet de la toile avec l'empreinte de ses mains.
Dans One Year the Milkweed, l'une des peintures dites « voile de couleurs » produites par Arshile Gorky en 1944, des pellicules de peinture ont été lavées inégalement au travers de la toile, tandis que des formes évocatrices mais floues y ont été balayées. Les teintes dominantes vertes et marron suggèrent un paysage, mais il n'y a aucune forme identifiable de paysage et aucun effet de perspective. Des coulures verticales et une alternance de tons lumineux et sombres créent un effet de mouvement et de chatoiement sur toute la surface de la toile.
Ayant le sentiment que la peinture a besoin de revenir à zéro au lendemain de la Seconde guerre mondiale, Jean Dubuffet s'inspire du travail des non initiés, en particuliers des enfants et des artistes autodidactes, qu'il collectionne et appelle « art brut ». Dans Façades d’immeubles, Dubuffet montre son propre « art brut ». En utilisant une pratique scolaire consistant à gratter la peinture noire pour révéler un fond de couleur peint au préalable, Dubuffet crée la vue d'une rue parisienne telle qu'elle pourrait apparaître à un enfant. Cependant, la grille soigneusement contrôlée et le mur compact et imposant de peinture démontre que Dubuffet connaissait les tactiques modernistes.
Dans ses peintures abstraites, Piet Mondrian cherchait à exprimer sa conception spirituelle selon laquelle des harmonies universelles règnent dans la nature. Les éléments horizontaux et verticaux de ses compositions, soigneusement calculées de façon à produire une asymétrie équilibrée, représentent des forces opposées qui évoquent l'équilibre dynamique du monde naturel. Selon Mondrian, les compositions en losange mettent en valeur la coupure, et ce sentiment de recadrage est en effet frappant ici. Les formes sont incomplètes et tronquées par les bords de la toile, suggérant une continuation au-delà des limites physiques de la peinture.
Bien que cette sculpture puisse sembler abstraite, Constantin Brancusi insistait sur le fait que ses œuvres révélaient l'essence profonde de ses sujets. Son travail s'inspire des traditions des sculptures africaines et de la sculpture roumaine populaire, et fait du socle un élément intégrant de l'œuvre. Brancusi passe plusieurs années à travailler sur sa série Oiseau dans l'espace, concevant un ensemble qui s'avérera être le couronnement de son œuvre. Contrairement aux autres sculpteurs, Brancusi n'avait pas un grand atelier. Il travaillait seul sur ses matériaux, en l'occurrence à graver de la pierre et à polir le laiton.
Marcel Duchamp cherchait à défier les hypothèses sous-jacentes aux appréhensions traditionnelles de la peinture et de la sculpture. Fasciné par le concept américain des reproductions faciles et peu onéreuses, Duchamp commence à s'approprier des objets trouvés pour ses readymades, terme anglais qu'il emprunte à l'industrie du prêt-à-porter à l'époque où il vit à New-York. Il choque le monde de l'art en tentant d'exposer ces objets ordinaires, ne montrant souvent aucune altération, si ce n'est l'ajout de sa signature. Le titre de cette œuvre est un jeu de mot où la lettre n des mots French et window est supprimée (French window en anglais signifie « porte-fenêtre », tandis que Fresh Widow se traduit par « tout juste veuve ») et fait référence aux femmes récemment devenues veuves suite à la Première guerre mondiale. Duchamp n'a pas fabriqué la fenêtre miniature lui-même ; il a confié le travail à un menuisier américain.
Giacometti Alberto Giacometti, l'un des grands sculpteurs surréalistes, incorporait souvent des thèmes ludiques dans ses premières œuvres, comme dans cette sculpture. La forme utilisée ici par l'artiste ressemble à un jeu de société, avec des pièces déplaçables, mais ce en quoi le jeu consiste n'est pas clair. L'espace ambigu et les règles inconnues du « jeu » représenté par On ne joue plus donnent le sentiment qu'il s'agit d'un objet que l'on pourrait voir en rêve.
La peinture de Wassily Kandinsky n'est pas sans rapport au réel, mais les détails sont ici déformés et adaptés de façon à exprimer une atmosphère. Bien que les formes indéfinies et les lavis de couleurs semblent parfaitement abstraits a priori, ils composent quelques images reconnaissables. Deux bateaux, motif central d'Improvisation n° 31 (Bataille navale), dont les mâts sont suggérés par de fines lignes noires, sont en plein combat. Le sujet, que l'on retrouve dans plusieurs Improvisations de Kandinsky, a probablement été inspiré par l'imagerie apocalyptique du Livre de la Révélation.
Cette œuvre date du début de la carrière prolifique d'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, lorsqu'il était l'un des membres fondateurs du groupe expressionniste Die Brücke (Le Pont) à Dresde en 1905. Dans ce tableau, Kirchner présente deux nus dans un décor naturel plutôt que dans un espace artificiel d'atelier académique. La peinture illustre également l'utilisation de formes franches, souvent crues, et de couleurs vives par l'artiste.
Aujourd'hui Fenêtre ouverte, Collioure de Henri Matisse peut sembler suave et lyrique, mais à l'époque, ses gros coups de pinceaux et l'intensité des couleurs ont été reçus comme violents. De petite taille mais visuellement explosif, ce tableau emblématique du début du modernisme est désormais reconnu comme l'une des toiles les plus importantes du mouvement fauve, un groupe d'artistes qui cherchaient à libérer la couleur et les textures des représentations aux apparences naturelles. Fenêtre ouverte, Collioure représente la naissance de cette approche dans l'art de Matisse.
À l'époque de ce tableau, André Derain est en visite à Londres et saisit des sujets similaires à ceux que Claude Monet a peints quelques années auparavant. Cependant, la palette de Derain et sa perspective des scènes contrastent fortement avec l'œuvre du maître impressionniste. Arborant des couleurs vives et crues, cette peinture est typiquement fauve, un style qu'il développe avec Henri Matisse.
Famille de saltimbanques est la peinture la plus importante du début de la carrière de Pablo Picasso. À ses yeux, ces saltimbanques vagabonds (acrobates, danseurs, bouffons) représentent la mélancolie de la classe marginalisée et négligée des artistes, une sorte de famille élargie à qui il s'identifie. Comme les membres de cette famille, le peintre espagnol a connu la pauvreté lors de ses premières années à Paris alors qu'il cherchait à être reconnu. L'arlequin triste – au costume à losanges, tout à gauche – a le visage sombre et intense du jeune artiste lui-même.
Les couleurs de Tiger proviennent de collages d'étude élaborés par Ellsworth Kelly à partir d'un type de papier gommé de couleur vendu par les papetiers parisiens et utilisé dans les écoles primaires françaises. L'utilisation de ce matériau révèle l'intérêt de Kelly pour les objets trouvés, un élément clé pour comprendre son univers visuel. Kelly trouvait ses formes et contours abstraits dans les espaces vides de son environnement naturel ou urbain. À l'époque où cette peinture a été réalisée, Kelly passait beaucoup de temps à regarder l'art et l'architecture européens. Les structures géométriques qu'il y voyait sont probablement à l'origine, bien qu'indirectement, de Tiger.
En 1927, James Weldon Johnson, personnage emblématique de la Renaissance de Harlem, publie son chef-d'œuvre, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Chaque sermon, sous forme de poème, est accompagné d'une illustration d'Aaron Douglas, un jeune artiste afro-américain récemment venu vivre à Harlem. Des années plus tard, Douglas commence à traduire ses illustrations en peintures à huile de grand format. The Judgment Day est le dernier d'une série de huit tableaux. Au centre, l'imposant ange Gabriel enjambe terre et mer. Avec sa trompette, l'archange appelle les nations de la terre à se présenter au Jugement.
Étant jeune, Georgia O’Keeffe était particulièrement fascinée par l'arisème petit-prêcheur (jack-in-the-pulpit en anglais). En 1930, elle compose une série de six toiles représentant cette plante à fleurs courante en Amérique du Nord près du lac George à New-York. Jack-in-the-Pulpit n° IV montre un gros plan du spadice, tel une langue, sur le fond violet foncé de l'intérieur caverneux de la spathe. Un feuillage vert et la suggestion d'un ciel couvert encadrent la fleur dans les coins gauche et droit du haut de la peinture.
Le ciel bleu, les personnages exposés au soleil et les rouleaux de Ground Swell donnent une impression immédiate de calme, mais certains détails de la peinture remettent en question ce sentiment initial de sérénité. Le bateau se trouve face à une bouée au milieu d'un paysage marin qui est par ailleurs vide. Son usage – l'avertissement d'un danger invisible ou imminent – rend la scène inquiétante. Les nuages cirrus dans le ciel bleu, souvent annonciateurs d'orage, renforcent cette impression de perturbation.
Achevé en février 1911, New York est un tableau ambitieux de grande taille par lequel George Bellows saisit l'essence de la vie moderne dans la ville de New-York. L’intention de Bellows ici n’est pas de représenter un lieu particulier ou identifiable de la ville. S'inspirant de plusieurs quartiers commerciaux très fréquentés, il imagine une image composite et incroyablement saturée pour mieux donner le sentiment du rythme effréné de la ville.
Cette sculpture, aux traits étirés et aux yeux en amande, possède les caractéristiques des personnages stylisés que l'on retrouve dans de nombreuses peintures d'Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani se concentre sur la sculpture entre 1909 et 1914 environ, avant de mourir de tuberculose à l'âge de 35 ans en 1920.
Georges Braque est connu pour son travail avec Pablo Picasso, les deux artistes ayant ensemble créé le nouveau style du cubisme vers 1910. Cette peinture est représentative d'une période plus tardive de la carrière de Braque au cours de laquelle il incorpore des éléments cubistes à des natures mortes et autres sujets. Ici, le grain du bois de la table, le motif du papier peint au fond et le texte du journal soulignent le jeu de motifs et de textures.
Pierre Bonnard était membre d'un groupe quasi mystique formé vers 1890 par de jeunes artistes qui s'appelaient eux-mêmes Les Nabis (mot hébreu pouvant se traduire par « prophète »). Les Nabis rejetaient l'impressionisme et considéraient la simple représentation des apparences du monde naturel comme irréfléchie et non artistique. Bonnard saisissait souvent des moments intimes, comme ici, et utilisait son travail pour explorer et expérimenter avec les couleurs et leurs harmonies.
Édouard Vuillard était membre d'un groupe quasi mystique formé vers 1890 par de jeunes artistes qui s'appelaient eux-mêmes Les Nabis (mot hébreu pouvant se traduire par « prophète »). Les Nabis rejetaient l'impressionisme et considéraient la simple représentation des apparences du monde naturel comme irréfléchie et non artistique. Femme dans une robe rayée est l'un des cinq tableaux que Vuillard peignit en 1895 pour Thadée Natanson et sa femme Misia Godebska. La femme rousse, pensive, qui arrange ici le bouquet représente peut-être Misia, que Vuillard admirait beaucoup.
Le mobile monumental d'Alexander Calder bouge uniquement au gré de l'air qui circule dans l'atrium du bâtiment est. Le mobile est en aluminium et non en acier – matériau habituellement choisi par Calder – ce qui permet ce mouvement libre. Le sculpteur avait initialement pensé à inclure un moteur, mais l'utilisation de matériaux légers de pointe lui a permis de faire sans. Bien que l'envergure de la sculpture dépasse les 26 m, l'œuvre ne pèse au total que 417 kilos, soit environ 2 tonnes de moins que si elle était en acier.
Le bâtiment est abrite la collection croissante d'art moderne et contemporain. Le projet de construction du bâtiment est commencé en 1968, bien que le site ait été destiné à cet usage par le fondateur Andrew W. Mellon dès les années 1930. Le bâtiment est ouvre au public en 1978 et de nouveau en 2016 après trois ans de rénovations et d'agrandissement des galeries. Nous vous invitons à explorer les nouvelles expositions des galeries rénovées et à laisser votre subjectivité entrer en relation avec les œuvres exposées.
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the fourth lecture, “Miraculous Icons and Dynastic Time: Narrating Buddhist Images in Medieval China,” delivered on April 28, 2019, Wu Hung examines the introduction of Buddhist art during the Period of Division and the reunification of the Sui and the Tang, when “miraculous icons” became a central subject in both historical narrative and art making, and the concept of dynastic time remained, while its meaning and utility underwent constant negotiation between religious and political authorities.
Michael Callahan, electronics innovator, co-founder of USCO, and president, Museum Technology Source Inc.; in conversation with Gerd Stern, poet, media artist, co-founder of USCO, and president, Intermedia Foundation. Moderated by Paige Rozanski, curatorial associate, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art
Founded in 1964, USCO, or The Company of Us, was one of the first art and technology collectives in the United States to create unique and ephemeral performances featuring slide projectors, audiotapes, moving images, oscilloscopes, refracted lenses, and lasers. On March 3, 2019, two of the group's co-founders, Michael Callahan and Gerd Stern, joined together for a film screening, rare performance, and this conversation moderated by Paige Rozanski, curatorial associate from the department of modern art. Drawing upon the influences of technology and religion, USCO utilized everyday materials, new communication apparatuses, and Eastern and Western mysticism to create artworks that bombarded and overloaded the senses. Two films by USCO and Jud Yalkut from 1966 were shown as part of the program: Us Down By the Riverside and Us (aka Building the Tabernacle).
Kwame Alexander, poet, educator, host and producer of the literary variety/talk show Bookish, cofounding director of the LEAP for Ghana initiative, and founding editor of VERSIFY, an imprint of HMH Books for Young Readers, in conversation with artist Kadir Nelson. Moderated by Kevin Merida, senior vice president and editor-in-chief, ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com. In this conversation held on April 6, 2019, at the National Gallery of Art, award-winning artists Kwame Alexander and Kadir Nelson share inspiration and read excerpts from their newly released picture book The Undefeated. Originally performed for ESPN’s website TheUndefeated.com, this illustrated poem is a love letter to black life in the United States. With references to lyrics and lines originally shared by our most celebrated heroes, Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, the poem offers deeper insights into the accomplishments of the past, while bringing stark attention to the endurance and spirit of those surviving and thriving in the present. The Undefeated brings together race, sports, culture, and art. Kevin Merida, senior vice president and editor-in-chief of ESPN’s TheUndefeated.com, moderates the discussion.
Charles Ritchie, artist and associate curator, department of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art As an artist who has worked behind the scenes with the prints and drawings collections of the National Gallery of Art for 35 years, associate curator Charles Ritchie relishes his unique vantage point for watching artists think. He has an intimate view of everything from the sketching, erasing, and refining at the core of drawing, to studying the sequences of proof impressions that record the development of a print. On March 25, 2019, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Ritchie shares how his own drawing, journal keeping, and printmaking have been influenced by what he’s learned. The presentation offers a collection of his observations.
Alex Katz, artist, in conversation with Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927 and educated at Cooper Union. Although he fraternized in the 1950s with the abstract expressionists, Katz never embraced the gestural style popular in New York, clinging instead to some degree of observation. Yet if Katz's work has always celebrated the realism of quotidian life and landscape, it also incorporates the scale and structure of the ambitious abstract painting of his time. In 1968, Katz moved to an artists’ cooperative building in SoHo, where he has lived and worked ever since. Although he is best known for his figure paintings, often set in and around Manhattan, Katz is equally a painter of Maine, where he has summered for decades. Represented by 89 works in the Gallery’s collection, Katz’s career can be traced through generous gifts like Folding Chair (1959) and Isaac and Oliver (2013), and important acquisitions such as Swamp Maple (4:30) (1968). Most recently, he was commissioned to enhance Manhattan’s 57th Street/6th Avenue subway station interior with Metropolitan Faces, a series of his iconic, brightly colored portraits and flower paintings. Katz was also approved to place a series of cutout sculptures of his wife, Ada, on the median of New York’s Park Avenue. In this conversation held on March 9, 2019, as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series, Katz and National Gallery of Art senior curator Harry Cooper discuss the genesis and evolution of Katz’s practice over 50 years.
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the third lecture, “Conflicting Temporalities: Heaven’s Mandate and Its Antitheses,” delivered on April 14, 2019, Wu Hung discusses the art of the Han dynasty, which evolved through complex interactions with a new political ideology and historiography rooted in the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, either by legitimating dynastic power or by challenging it with antithetical visual modes.
At the press preview for Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings on Thursday, April 11, 2019, remarks were made by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art; Michael Stein, global head of government relations, Morgan Stanley; Harry Cooper, senior curator of modern art, National Gallery of Art; and Oliver Lee Jackson.
At the press preview for The American Pre-Raphaelites on Tuesday, April 9, 2019, remarks were given by Linda S. Ferber, museum director emerita and senior art historian at the New-York Historical Society. She was introduced by Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.
Panel discussion with Madeline Caviness, Mary Richardson Professor Emeritus and professor emerita of the history of art, Tufts University; and Ellen Shortell, professor of the history of art, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Remarks by Dominique Lallement, president, American Friends of Chartres. The partial restoration of Chartres Cathedral that took place from 2014 to 2016 focused on the nave, stained-glass windows, and first figures in the ambulatory. Chartres: La lumière retrouvée documents this meticulous process through observation and conversations with numerous restorers, archaeologists, scientists, and architects (Anne Savalli, 2016, subtitles, 54 minutes). On November 25, 2018, the National Gallery of Art hosted the Washington premiere of the documentary, which was introduced by Dominique Lallement, president of the American Friends of Chartres. Afterward, Madeline Caviness and Ellen Shortell joined in conversation to discuss the importance and impact of this renovation, as well as the complexities of this 2-year restoration project. This program is held in collaboration with American Friends of Chartres and the Embassy of France.
Helen Molesworth, writer, scholar, and curator Artist Rachel Whiteread has made casts and drawings for more than 30 years in an effort to define the space between positives and negatives, public and private, manufactured and hand-made objects—always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power. At the National Gallery of Art, an unprecedented and comprehensive survey exhibition of Whiteread’s celebrated career introduces a new generation of audiences to her work, which addresses how we live. To close the symposium held on October 26, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, Helen Molesworth wove themes found throughout the program into extemporaneous remarks before inviting the day’s speakers for a panel discussion. In addition to summarizing the talks, Molesworth mused on ways Whiteread produces work out of paradox. “The endlessness of casting,” according to Molesworth, evokes both loss and fecundity while the artist’s use of household items reproduces and publicizes objects associated with privacy. The symposium ended with a panel discussion among all the speakers.
Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, and Cristina Iglesias, artist Artist Rachel Whiteread has made casts and drawings for more than 30 years in an effort to define the space between positives and negatives, public and private, manufactured and hand-made objects—always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power. At the National Gallery of Art, an unprecedented and comprehensive survey exhibition of Whiteread’s celebrated career introduces a new generation of audiences to her work, which addresses how we live. Through sculptures and site-specific installations both massive and cryptic, artist Cristina Iglesias plunges viewers of her work into an unfamiliar world that seems to predate—and may outlast—recorded time. Her choice of materials troubles the difference between natural and manufactured environments, as do her choices for display; Iglesias installs sculptures made of cement, fibers, or metal in places from world-class museums to the ocean’s bottom. Lynne Cooke joins Iglesias in conversation at the symposium on October 26, 2018, held in conjunction with the Rachel Whiteread exhibition, to discuss intersections between Iglesias’s and Whiteread’s practices and how Iglesias’s sculptures envision a world existing after humans.
Kelli Rae Adams, Tariq O’Meally, and Ada Pinkston, artists Artist Rachel Whiteread has made casts and drawings for more than 30 years in an effort to define the space between positives and negatives, public and private, manufactured and hand-made objects—always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power. At the National Gallery of Art, an unprecedented and comprehensive survey exhibition of Whiteread’s celebrated career introduces a new generation of audiences to her work, which addresses how we live. In these talks delivered as part of the symposium held on October 26, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow Kelli Rae Adams reflected on her own burgeoning creative practice in relationship to that of Whiteread, examining the topics of material, surface, space, and society, and the formal as well as conceptual links among them. For artist and choreographer Tariq O’Meally, Rachel Whiteread's body of work brings to mind the intimacy of the body and its relationship to the permanent impermanence of death. In his talk during the Rachel Whiteread symposium, he discussed Whiteread’s practice and his own in pursuit of such questions as “How do we experience absence?” and “What lies within negative space?” Finally, artist Ada Pinkston conducts an examination of the poetics of space and the artistic will of Rachel Whiteread and other minimal and post-minimal public artworks. Pinkston’s lecture also considers the future aesthetics of public monuments and memorials.
Mari Lending, professor in architectural theory and history, department of form, theory, and history, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and founding member, Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies (OCCAS). Artist Rachel Whiteread has made casts and drawings for more than 30 years in an effort to define the space between positives and negatives, public and private, manufactured and hand-made objects—always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power. At the National Gallery of Art, an unprecedented and comprehensive survey exhibition of Whiteread’s celebrated career introduces a new generation of audiences to her work, which addresses how we live. In this keynote address for the symposium held on October 26, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition, Mari Lending links cast sculptures by Whiteread with 19th-century plaster monuments in theorizing “ghost structures,” which always refer to places and things absent, lost, or distant. She describes how Whiteread’s work—once briefly installed in the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London—invites us to look again at lost objects and to see them anew. Cast representations, Lending says, are “complex and productive rather than simply reproductive.”
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the second lecture, “Reconfiguring the World: The First Emperor’s Art Projects,” delivered on April 7, 2019, Wu Hung introduces an alternative “dynastic history” of art that emerged in the fourth century BCE, and then explores the relationship of the First Emperor’s various art projects, including the legendary Twelve Golden Men and the sculptures in his Lishan Necropolis, to this historic narrative.
Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, University of Chicago. In the six-part lecture series End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time, Wu Hung explores the narratives of Chinese art and their relationship to artistic production while reflecting on a series of questions: How did dynastic time emerge and permeate writings on traditional Chinese art? How did it enrich and redefine itself in specific historical contexts? How did it interact with temporalities in different historical, religious, and political systems? How did narratives based on dynastic time respond to and inspire artistic creation? In the first lecture, “The Emergence of Dynastic Time in Chinese Art,” delivered on March 31, 2019, Wu Hung begins by introducing the concept of dynastic time and its sustained role in narrating the history of Chinese art then traces this narrative mode to the fourth century BCE, when a body of texts associated visual and material forms with a succession of archaic dynasties.
Charles Ross, artist, and James Meyer, curator of art, 1945–1974, National Gallery of Art Using sunlight and starlight as the inspiration for and source of his art, Charles Ross creates large-scale prisms to project the solar spectrum into architectural spaces; focuses sunlight into powerful beams to create solar burn works; and draws the quantum behavior of light with dynamite. He also works with a variety of other media, including photography and video. Ross enables his viewers to experience different facets of the relationship between light and space by staging his works in diverse settings, from one-room installations like his Hanging Islands, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, to his ongoing project Star Axis, a monumental work of land art in the New Mexico desert. In this conversation held on February 24, 2019, in conjunction with the special installation Spaces: Works from the Collection, 1966–1976, Ross discusses his career with Gallery curator James Meyer.
Diana Greenwald, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, departments of American and British paintings and American and modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art. Self-taught artist James Castle (1899–1977) lived in remote rural Idaho until moving to the outskirts of Boise in his thirties. Not only was he isolated geographically, he was also born deaf. For Castle—like many “outsider” artists—past scholarship used biography and his marginalized social status to interpret his work. On December 3, 2018, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Diana Greenwald argues that the progressive integration of visual culture—nationally and globally—is key to understanding this artist’s work. Greenwald considers Castle through the same art historical lens applied to mainstream artists of the period who were similarly engaged with mass-circulated visual culture. Classifying Castle as a pop artist, although one without the pretense to distinguish “high” from “low” visual sources, moves away from the myth-making rhetoric that pervades discussion about outsider artists and makes an important contribution to the literature.
Mary Morton, Curator of French Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Mary Morton discusses the provenance of the Jeanne d’Arc series, commissioned by William Clark and given to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1926. The popular panels hung at the Corcoran until it closed in 2014, when they moved to the National Gallery of Art, where they now hang in a West Building gallery alongside sculptures by Boutet de Monvel’s contemporary Edgar Degas. This lecture was given on December 12, 2018, as part of an expert panel on French medievalism at the turn of the 20th century, examining the particular cases of Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc and book arts, along with the greater phenomenon of medievalism during the Belle Époque.
Elizabeth Emery, Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, Montclair State University Elizabeth Emery explores the French engagement with the medieval period in the years 1870–1914. She examines this French medievalism (the post-medieval engagement with medieval things) through paintings, history textbooks for children, and popular World’s Fair attractions and memorabilia. Through this multimedia presentation she helps contextualize the late 19th-century French passion for medieval motifs that so influenced American visitor Senator William A. Clark that he returned to Washington with many treasures, including Boutet de Monvelʼs Jeanne d’Arc paintings now on display in the National Gallery of Art. This lecture was given on December 12, 2018, as part of an expert panel on French medievalism at the turn of the 20th century, examining the particular cases of Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc and book arts, along with the greater phenomenon of medievalism during the Belle Époque.
Willa Z. Silverman, Malvin E. and Lea P. Bank Professor of French and Jewish Studies at Penn State University and Head of the Department of French and Francophone Studies, Penn State University An atmosphere of intense bibliophilic activity came to define French culture at the turn of the 20th century—promoted, in part, by the activities of upper-bourgeois collectors who considered the printed medium a crucial part of popular conceptions of aesthetics. Silverman considers the bibliophile’s attraction to medieval themes and iconography during this era. As amateurs, publishers, authors, designers, and directors of bibliophile societies, reviews, and small presses, these “new bibliophiles” often worked closely with both authors and artists to create unique volumes bearing the aesthetic influence of symbolism, art nouveau, Japonisme, and the medieval revival. This lecture was given on December 12, 2018, as part of an expert panel on French medievalism at the turn of the 20th century, examining the particular cases of Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc and book arts, along with the greater phenomenon of medievalism during the Belle Époque.
Nora Heimann, Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art at the Catholic University of America Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel (1850–1913) explored the subject of Joan of Arc in several memorable forms, among which are six dazzling paintings in oil and gold leaf (c. 1906–1912). Nora Heimann places the artist's treatment of Joan of Arc in its historic context. She analyzes the stylistic origins of the paintings, their genesis in Boutet de Monvel’s illustrated book Jeanne d'Arc (1896), their relationship to an award-winning monumental mural by the same artist, which disappeared in the early 20th century, and the peregrinations of the six paintings from their commission to their current display at the National Gallery of Art. This lecture was given on December 12, 2018, as part of an expert panel on French medievalism at the turn of the 20th century by examining the particular cases of Boutet de Monvel’s Jeanne d’Arc and book arts, along with the greater phenomenon of medievalism during the Belle Époque.
At the press preview for the three National Gallery of Art exhibitions Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice, and Venetian Prints in the Time of Tintoretto on Tuesday, March 19, 2019, remarks were given by Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art; His Excellency Armando Varricchio, Ambassador of Italy; The Honorable Luigi Brugnaro, Mayor of Venice; Robert Echols, independent scholar; and Frederick Ilchman, chair of the Art of Europe department and Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Following remarks, Echols and Ilchman gave a tour of Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice. Subsequently, John Marciari, Charles W. Englehard Curator and head of the department of drawings and prints, The Morgan Library & Museum, led a tour of Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice, while Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art, led a tour of Venetian Prints in the Time of Tintoretto.
Tim Doud, artist; professor, department of art, American University; cofounder, ‘sindikit; and cofounder, STABLE; in conversation with artists Jonathan Lyndon Chase and Louis Fratino. Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Tim Doud, and Louis Fratino all engage with themes of race, gender, and sexuality while working in the genre of figurative painting. Yet the artists’ idiosyncratic styles also take their paintings beyond categories of identity, challenging normative strategies of representation. In this discussion recorded October 21, 2018, in conjunction with the special installation Bodies of Work at the National Gallery of Art, Doud moderates a conversation with Chase and Fratino about painting techniques and the tropes surrounding figurative work, looking particularly into how their methods explore and expand the practice of modern portraiture.
linn meyers, artist and co-founder, STABLE, in conversation with Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs and curator of American art, The Columbus Museum. Artist linn meyers creates works that reveal the expansive potential of drawing. In monumental installations drawn straight onto the wall and smaller works of ink on panel or mylar, meyers uses simple designs and delicate handling of materials to make rhythm visible in drawings of astonishing detail. That meyers works alone—even on the 400-foot long our view from here, made in 2017 at the Hirshhorn Museum—means these drawings also materialize her extensive labor, recording not only meyers’s skill but also her capability for extreme endurance. With fellow Washington, DC-based artists Tim Doud and Caitlin Teal Price, meyers is a cofounder of STABLE, a local studio complex that provides visual artists with an active, affordable workspace to pursue their profession. In this conversation recorded at the National Gallery of Art on December 9, 2018, meyers and Jonathan Frederick Walz discuss the artist’s practice and institutional collaborations to celebrate the publication of her monograph, linn meyers: Works 2004–2018.
Oscar Fitzgerald, adjunct professor of decorative arts and design history, Corcoran School of Art and Design, George Washington University. Chairs reflect the change of styles over time better than any other form of furniture. They get a lot of use, and when they wear out, owners usually want to replace them with the latest style. On October 15, 2018, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Oscar Fitzgerald traces the evolution of furniture styles from the 17th to the 20th century. Referencing highlights from Masterpieces of American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection, 1700–1830 installed in the West Building, Fitzgerald discusses 17th-century mannerism; baroque, rococo, and neoclassical styles of the 18th century; the Victorian reaction to classical design in the 19th century; and 20th-century modernism, with its rejection and then rediscovery of ornament.
Dawoud Bey, artist Dawoud Bey, born in 1953, has portrayed Americans from marginalized groups with remarkable sensitivity and complexity throughout his 40-year career. When he was eleven, Bey was shocked to see a picture of a young survivor of the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young black girls died in the church and two African American boys were murdered in related violence later that day. Decades later for The Birmingham Project, Bey created sixteen pairs of life-size portraits of present-day residents of Birmingham: one of a young person the same age as a victim in 1963 and another of an adult fifty years older, the child’s age had she or he survived. Representing these unwitting icons of the civil rights movement with ordinary people, the diptychs connect generations and, as Bey explained, make the children “real, tangible. These girls are an abstraction to people — the mythic four girls—we lose sight of their humanity.” On December 16, 2018, as part of the Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography at the National Gallery of Art, Bey discusses his artistic practice and celebrates the publication of his monograph, Seeing Deeply. His work is represented in the Gallery’s collection by four inkjet print diptychs and the video, 9.15.63, which are on view in the exhibition Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project through March 24, 2019.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. This holiday presentation explores the biblical episodes surrounding the birth of Christ as depicted in masterworks from the Gallery’s permanent collection. Gariff examines excerpts from the King James Version of the Bible and investigates the iconography, artistic technique, and historical context of works from the Gallery’s collection, such as paintings by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Giorgione, and Gerard David. This lecture was presented on December 13, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
Emily Ann Francisco, curatorial assistant, department of modern art, and former collection management assistant, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Nearly 2,600 photographs from the Corcoran Gallery of Art were recently accessioned into the National Gallery of Art’s collection. These acquisitions have richly expanded the Gallery’s holdings of photographs from the 1960s to the present, as well as in photojournalism, social documentary photography, and works by groundbreaking early photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge. In this lecture held on December 17, 2018, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Emily Ann Francisco discusses the unique challenges of researching and cataloging this collection and provides a broad survey of its highlights.
John Edmonds, artist, in conversation with Jessica Bell Brown, PhD candidate, department of art and archaeology, Princeton University. In his photographs of queer African Americans, John Edmonds challenges the exclusionary history of art by expanding its roster of subjects, while using its conventions to recognize the humanity and sensuality of his sitters. For his Du-Rag and Hoods series, Edmonds dressed his subjects in culturally specific clothing in photographs that tempered stereotypes associated with streetwear with soft light and demure poses. Art historian and writer Jessica Bell Brown asserts that Edmonds’s portraits “are not rebuttals of stereotypes about black and brown men, nor are they objective ‘documents’ of black life. Rather, they are radical alternative propositions of how we can behold anew.” On September 23, 2018, in conjunction with the exhibition Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project, Bell Brown and Edmonds discuss the possibilities that come with new forms and subjects of portraiture. This program is made possible by the James D. and Kathryn K. Steele Fund for Photography. The special installation of four large-scale photographs and one video from Bey's The Birmingham Project will be on view at the National Gallery of Art through March 17, 2019.
Victor Stoichita (Université de Fribourg and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) discusses Murillo’s Two Women at a Window in terms of the artist’s preoccupation with two relationships: that between the private space depicted in the painting and the public space of the beholder, and that of the viewer and the viewed.
Mason McClew, prints and drawings cataloger for the Corcoran Collection, department of American and modern prints and drawings. Traditionally, print publishers in the United States have been relegated to ancillary positions in art-historical discussions concerning the production of multiples by artists and printers. Mason McClew traces the development of fine art publishing through his experience cataloging the American works on paper recently acquired from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, illuminating little-known, yet influential figures who encouraged consumers to collect prints. In this lecture on November 5, 2018, as part of the Works in Progress Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, McClew discusses the rise of American print publishers in the art market from the Federalist era to the present by contextualizing significant examples from the Corcoran Collection with other notable works in the Gallery’s permanent collection.
Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. During the 1940s American photographer Gordon Parks (1912–2006) grew from a self-taught photographer making portraits and documenting everyday life in Saint Paul and Chicago to a visionary professional shooting for Ebony, Vogue, Fortune, and Life. For the first time, the formative decade of Parks’s 60-year career is the focus of an exhibition, which brings together 150 photographs and ephemera—including magazines, books, letters, and family pictures. Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 is on view at the National Gallery of Art from November 4, 2018, through February 19, 2019. In this lecture held on November 18, 2018, Philip Brookman illustrates how Parks’s early experiences at the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Standard Oil (New Jersey), as well as his close relationships with Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, helped shape his groundbreaking style.
David Ogawa, associate professor of art history, Union College. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is best known as the great master of landscape painting in the 19th century who bridged the French neoclassical tradition with the impressionist movement of the 1870s. Corot’s figure paintings, although constituting a much smaller, less well-known portion of his oeuvre, are of equal importance to the history of art. These works are the focus of the exhibition Corot: Women, on view at the National Gallery of Art through December 31, 2018. Corot also had a long relationship with photography and photographic media, from its growth in the 1850s until his death in 1875. In this lecture held on October 20, 2018, David Ogawa explores Corot's distinct and complex engagement with photographic processes as source material, expressive medium, and an integral part of his artistic legacy.
Heidi Applegate, guest lecturer. Coinciding with the Kennedy Center’s production of the Broadway musical Hamilton, guest lecturer Heidi Applegate surveys works of art featuring Alexander Hamilton in this presentation delivered August 5, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art. The American painter John Trumbull and the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Cerrachi are Hamilton’s best known portraitists thanks to the countless reproductions of their works made after Hamilton’s death. Several other artists also created portraits of Hamilton from life, many of which were replicated during the 19th century. Applegate also discusses portraits of Hamilton’s family members and other founding fathers who were important to Hamilton’s political career, as well as the major posthumous paintings and monuments that helped to secure Hamilton’s legacy.
Stephen J. Campbell, Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor of Art History, Johns Hopkins University. In this lecture, presented on November 4, 2018, Stephen J. Campbell addresses the conflicted reception of the Venetian painter Titian outside his home city during a crucial phase in the formation of his reputation—his achievement of celebrity as a Hapsburg court painter and his inclusion in an emerging canon of Venetian and central Italian artists. While Titian’s production for Hapsburg patrons in Spain and other non-Italian destinations shows him performing as the quintessential artist of the Italian "modern manner," by the mid-sixteenth century his work for sites in Italy pursued a different course: artistic and critical reaction suggests that it was found to be inscrutable or alienating. Campbell’s lecture proposes that this reception resulted from a tacit disavowal on Titian's part of contemporary critical accounts—by Lodovico Dolce, Pietro Aretino, and Giorgio Vasari—that increasingly sought to define his work.
Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken (Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands, and former Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art) brings viewers inside the “rustic paradise” of river landscapes by brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci in the National Gallery of Art collection. While describing their distinct approaches to the subject, Professor van Tuyll shows the pleasure the brothers took in creating these views.
At the press preview for Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 on Tuesday, October 30, 2018, remarks were given by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, and Philip Brookman, consulting curator, both of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. I. M. Pei’s majestic East Building opened in June of 1978 with the express purpose of providing space for both the National Gallery’s rapidly expanding collection of modern art and as a venue for special exhibitions. The East Building has since hosted close to 250 exhibitions of artistic masterpieces from around the world. From the opening exhibition, The Splendor of Dresden: Five Centuries of Art Collecting, through the four floors devoted to Rodin Rediscovered, from The Treasure Houses of Britain to Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, from Art Nouveau, 1890–1914 to Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting, these memorable exhibitions have left an indelible mark on the cultural life of the nation’s capital. This lecture celebrating the 40th anniversary of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, presented by Eric Denker, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art, on August 12, 2018, describes some of the most significant East Building shows in the context of the Gallery’s ongoing exhibition program.
Eric Denker, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Ailsa Mellon Bruce was the only daughter of Andrew Mellon, the founder of the National Gallery of Art, and a patron of the Gallery since 1941. Through direct donation and various funds she was responsible for the Gallery’s acquisition of many major works, including Ginevra de’ Benci by Leonardo. At her death in 1969 she left 153 paintings, primarily by French artists, to the Gallery. For the 1978 opening of the East Building, selected paintings from the collection were shown as a memorial exhibition under the title Small French Paintings from the Bequest of Ailsa Mellon Bruce. In this lecture celebrating the 40th anniversary of the East Building, presented on August 26, 2018, Eric Denker, senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, describes the exhibition—a great favorite among visitors that would continue in various forms for 35 years. The show included jewel-like works by, among others, Corot, Manet, Degas, Boudin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Naoko Takahatake, associate curator of prints and drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Chiaroscuro woodcuts simulate three-dimensional form through their successive impression of relief-cut blocks that define areas of dark and light. This style of printmaking flourished in 16th-century Italy, interpreting works by such masters as Raphael, Parmigianino, and Titian and boasting extraordinary craft as well as often striking palettes. Yet questions remain: exactly how were chiaroscuros created, in what sequence were the blocks printed, and why? In this lecture recorded on October 14, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Naoko Takahatake discusses the chiaroscuro woodcut as one of the most beautiful developments in the history of printmaking. The Chiaroscuro Woodcut in Renaissance Italy is on view through January 20, 2019.
Caitlin Teal Price, artist and cofounder, STABLE, in conversation with John Pilson, photographer, video artist, and senior critic and acting director of graduate studies for fall 2018, Yale University School of Art. Moderated by Lily Siegel, executive director and curator, Greater Reston Arts Center. Caitlin Teal Price presents new work exploring themes of daily routine and ritual in the solo exhibition Green Is the Secret Color to Make Gold, on view September 29 through November 24, 2018, at the Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE). Price is known for her photographs of people; this body of work, however, depicts arrangements of objects—primarily those collected by her young son on walks they regularly take together—in consideration of value and systems of classification. The exhibition also includes Price’s first large-scale drawings. Price, with fellow Washington, DC–based artists Tim Doud and Linn Meyers, is cofounder of STABLE, a local studio complex that provides visual artists with an active, affordable workspace to pursue their profession. In this conversation moderated by Lily Siegel on October 7, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art, Price discusses with artist John Pilson the genesis and evolution of her practice and the common themes in their work.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. The East Building of the National Gallery of Art houses an impressive collection of modern sculptures displayed throughout its many levels. Henry Moore’s Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece, Anthony Caro’s National Gallery Ledge Piece, and the enormous mobile, Untitled, by Alexander Calder were commissioned for the opening of the building in 1978 and are prominently displayed at the entrance and in the atrium. Other large-scale works by Max Ernst, Andy Goldsworthy, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, and David Smith are also found in the atrium. Throughout the upstairs galleries one can trace the history of 20th-century sculpture in parallel with the history of 20th-century painting. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff leads a tour of the Gallery’s modern sculptures in this lecture presented on August 30, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
Program: Music by Mendelssohn and Shostakovich. The Grammy Award–winning Parker Quartet performs Felix Mendelssohn's String Quartet no. 1 in E-flat Major, op. 12, and Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet in F Major, op. 73, in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, March 26, 2017. Founded in Boston in 2002, the Parker Quartet includes Daniel Chong and Ken Hamao on violins, Jessica Bodner on viola, and Kee-Hyun Kim on cello. In addition to serving as the quartet-in-residence at Harvard University, the group has appeared throughout the world at prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, and the Kennedy Center.
Program: Music by Bingen, Sanlikol, and Beethoven. A Far Cry performs Hildegard von Bingen's ignis spiritus paracliti, Mehmet Ali Sanlikol's Vecd, and the third movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet no. 15, op. 132, in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, November 20, 2016. Founded in 2007 by seventeen young professional musicians, A Far Cry has developed an innovative process where decisions are made collectively and leadership rotates among the “Criers.” For each piece, the members elect a group of principals, and these musicians guide the rehearsal process and shape the interpretation. Each program includes multiple works led by different musicians, adding tremendous musical variety to the concerts.
Program: Music by Bach, Takemitsu, and Tadić. The Cavatina Duo performs Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata for Flute and Basso Continuo in E Major, BWV 1035; Tōru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea; and Miroslav Tadić’s Four Macedonian Pieces, in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, February 12, 2012. The artists are guitarist Denis Azabagic and flutist Eugenia Moliner. The duo has captivated audiences with performances in many venues, including Ravinia in Chicago, the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles, the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, and the National Concert Hall of Taipei.
Program: Music by Debussy. Pianist Benedetto Lupo performs Claude Debussy's Images oubliées and both the Images première and the deuxième série, in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, March 25, 2018. The concert celebrated the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death.
Program: Music by Trumbore and Saint-Saëns. Inscape Chamber Orchestra performs Dale Trumbore's All the Folded Wings and Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, with new verses by poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph, in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, April 22, 2018. Inscape Chamber Orchestra was founded in 2004 by its artistic director Richard Scerbo and has established itself as one of the premier performing ensembles in the Washington, DC, region and beyond.
Program: Music by Josquin des Prez and his contemporaries. The National Gallery of Art presented the vocal ensemble Cappella Pratensis on Sunday, March 12, 2017, in a performance commemorating the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death. Cappella Pratensis is directed by Stratton Bull, who has championed the music of Josquin des Prez and the polyphonists of the 15th and 16th centuries. Based in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Duchy of Brabant, the group focuses on historically informed performance practice infused with artistic insight.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Referred to variously as “ABC art” or “primary structures,” minimalism displays the reductive aspects of earlier modernist trends that embraced geometric abstraction in painting and pure geometric forms in sculpture. In direct opposition to their abstract expressionist predecessors, minimalist artists sought to eliminate concepts of self-expression and subjective emotion. Painters and sculptors associated with minimalist practices include Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Mangold. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff surveys the art and theory of minimalism. This lecture was presented on August 28, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art, National Gallery of Art. It is often said that the National Gallery of Art is a collection of collections. All its acquisitions of art are the resultof gifts, whether of art itself or of the funds to acquire art. In the realm of modern art, one of the principal mechanisms of this generosity has been the Collectors Committee, a group of patrons who came together in 1975 to commission and donate major works to help inaugurate the East Building, which opened in 1978. In this lecture held on July 8, 2018, Harry Cooper surveys the gifts made by the Committee since 2008, when he joined the Gallery’s staff. This revealing inside look at the acquisition process demonstrates how dramatically the collection of contemporary works has grown over the past decade.
At the press event for Rachel Whiteread on Wednesday, September 26, 2018, remarks were given by Earl A. Powell III, director, and Molly Donovan, curator of art, 1975–present, both of the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. In all of art history, only one movement dared to predict public and commercial success in its very name. The distinction is appropriate, because pop art was all about commerce and consumption from the beginning. Emerging in mid-1950s Great Britain and soon spreading to the United States, pop was a creature of the postwar boom, when television, advertising, fast food, birth rates, home appliances, and suburban sprawl were quickly changing daily life in the developed world. Works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg reflect a new syntax of imagery drawn from popular culture and mass media, devoid of exalted art historical themes and the personal expression that were hallmarks of abstract expressionist painting. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff considers the wide variety of objects, themes, and working methods that characterized pop art and the way it blurred distinctions between high art and popular culture. This lecture was presented on August 23, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. By the end of the 1950s abstract expressionism had begun to wane. Color-field or hard-edge painters, depending on their approach, adopted the large scale and rich palette of painters like Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Morris Louis poured paint onto huge unprimed canvases, as Pollock did, but in a different way and with different results. Urgent physical gestures gave way to something that looks more like an impersonal force of nature. Louis’s younger colleagues, including Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Sam Gilliam, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Paul Reed, were equally inventive, whether staining unprimed canvas, masking with tape, or crumpling and cinching the canvas to create a space at once optical and physical. Most of these painters lived in Washington, DC, where their originality earned them the name Washington Color School. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff examines a golden age in the history of modern art in Washington, DC. This lecture was presented on August 21, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
Robert P. Kolker, emeritus professor, department of English, University of Maryland, and adjunct professor of media studies, University of Virginia. Stanley Kubrick’s films have occasionally been criticized as seeming cold or distant. The images and the stories they tell, however, speak another narrative of deeply held, ironically expressed passion, a level of feeling that the viewer has to seek out and be open to. In this lecture held at the National Gallery of Art on September 2, 2018, acclaimed film scholar Robert P. Kolker illustrates, through numerous clips, that Kubrick’s films often reference specific works of art. The presentation celebrates Kolker’s publication of The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema, an exploration of how movies work, what they mean, and why they bring us so much pleasure. Reflecting on a lifetime of teaching and writing on these filmmakers, in The Extraordinary Image Kolker offers a deeply personal set of insights on three artists who have changed the way he understands movies.
Molly Donovan, curator of art, 1975–present, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art Rachel Whiteread, the first comprehensive survey of this British sculptor’s 30-year career, features drawings, photographs, architecture-scaled sculptures, archival materials, documentary materials on public projects, and several new works on view for the first time. In this introductory lecture recorded on September 16, 2018, Molly Donovan explains how Whiteread’s sculptures memorialize everyday objects, domestic interiors, and public spaces. Donovan also shares the ways in which Whiteread has effectively recast the memories of these locations and objects to chart the seismic changes in how we live, from the late 20th century and into the 21st. The exhibition is on view through January 13, 2019.
Mary Morton, curator and head, department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is best known as the great master of landscape painting in the 19th century who bridged the French neoclassical tradition with the impressionist movement of the 1870s. In honor of the opening of the exhibition Corot: Women, Mary Morton argues that Corot’s figure paintings, although constituting a much smaller, less well-known portion of his oeuvre, are of equal importance to the history of art, in particular for the founders of modernist painting such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. Dressed in rustic Italian costume or nude on a grassy plain, Corot’s women read, dream, and gaze directly at the viewer, conveying a sense of their inner lives. On September 9, 2018, at that National Gallery of Art, Morton explains how Corot’s sophisticated use of color and his deft, delicate touch applied to the female form resulted in pictures of quiet majesty. Corot: Women is on view through December 31, 2018.
At the press preview for Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project on Tuesday, September 11, 2018, remarks were given by Kara Fiedorek, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art; followed by the artist Dawoud Bey. Speakers were introduced by Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. In the years following the Second World War Europe was exhausted and slow to recover. Historians often speak about a shift in the art world's center of gravity from Paris to New York as the abstract expressionists claimed the spotlight. But the late 1940s and 1950s were a fertile, if troubled, time for art in Europe as well. While the Americans believed that they could start from scratch, inventing new techniques and subjects, the Europeans, who had experienced the horrors of war on their own soil, took a darker view of rebirth. The postwar school of Paris engaged raw materials through the art brut expressions of Jean Dubuffet and the thickly encrusted abstractions of Pierre Soulages and Nicholas de Stael. Jean Fautrier tested the conventional limits of painting by mixing powdered pigments, sand, and plaster to create abstract equivalents of the violent dissociation of body and spirit. The existential anxiety of the moment was perhaps best captured by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who obsessively subtracted clay from his figures until they loomed up like monuments on the point of disappearance. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff discusses European art and artists in the aftermath of the Second World War. This lecture was presented on August 16, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art, August 14, 2018. From the mid-1940s through the 1950s painters in New York imbued their work with a heady new confidence, scale, and energy. Before and during World War II European émigrés poured into New York, including artists Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and the writer and surrealist leader André Breton. Their influence led to the exploration of biomorphic forms, archaic themes, and accidental processes designed to unleash the unconscious, like dripping and scraping. It is in the large canvases of the 1950s, by Jackson Pollock and others, that what one critic called “the triumph of American painting” can really be felt. These paintings increased ambition and introduced new techniques: Pollock’s rhythmic pours and drips, Clyfford Still’s dry palette-knifing, Newman’s masking-taped “zips,” Franz Kline’s chiseled gestures, and Joan Mitchell’s flurries of strokes. This generation of artists revealed new horizons in the practice of painting and the experience of viewing. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the triumph of American painting in postwar America. This lecture was presented on August 14, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
Program: Music by Brouwer and Ginastera. Cuarteto Latinoamericano performs Leo Brouwer’s Third String Quartet and Alberto Ginastera’s Second String Quartet in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, January 29, 2017. Founded in Mexico in 1982, Cuarteto Latinoamericano is one of the world’s renowned string quartets. A leading proponent of Latin American music, the quartet has a discography of more than 80 recordings, including the complete string quartet cycles of Alberto Ginastera and Heitor Villa-Lobos.
At the press preview for Corot: Women on Wednesday, September 5, 2018, remarks were given by Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She was introduced by Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Paul Cézanne sought to systematize the spontaneity of impressionism and to find an analytical way of seeing the world. His paintings express a new vocabulary of art and a new interpretation of the nature of visual experience—moving away from art as purely visual sensation and toward a more cerebral approach. Cézanne’s belief that “there are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other” was taken to heart by the young Pablo Picasso. In 1943, Picasso declared that Paul Cézanne was “my one and only master.” Indeed, with the artistic achievement of Cézanne, modern art would chart a new and challenging course. Senior lecturer David Gariff explores Cézanne’s revolutionary art in this lecture presented at the National Gallery of Art on July 10, 2018.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. The most daring development in early 20th-century modern art was the step into abstraction—the decision to make paintings that were not pictures of the visible world but just . . . paintings. Abstraction elicited both excitement and anxiety. Painters looked to new sources for the kind of structure that direct observation had once provided: music; the logic of geometry; the forces of emotion and spirituality; the material facts of paint and canvas; and scientific developments that revealed new ways to “see” the world, from X-rays to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Artists from several countries hoped that abstraction might become a lingua franca, transcending cultural differences. While that did not quite happen, the energies unleashed by abstraction were far-reaching, as works by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Constantin Brancusi confirm. Abstraction was truly the art of the future. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the birth of abstraction in early 20th-century art. This lecture was presented on August 9, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. The films of Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) display a broad formal range and expressionistic style. The director's devotion to theater and music and his gift for working with an ensemble of actors who routinely probe complex issues of morality, death, and faith are well known. Less often discussed is his debt to the visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. As part of a global celebration of the centennial of Bergman’s birth, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the relationship between the director’s film language and the wider visual arts in this July 29, 2018, lecture at the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. Just as the years before World War I witnessed the birth of abstraction, the war itself brought Dada, equally international movement, but dark and mordant where abstraction was earnest and utopian. The name, plucked from a dictionary in Zurich in 1916, means “rocking horse” in French or “yes yes” in Romanian and Russian. But as the name of a movement it really means nothing at all. Sick of the culture that had produced the carnage of the First World War, Dada challenged every sacred cow, throwing expression and authorship out the window and celebrating chance and absurdity instead. Then surrealism came along to channel the anti-art energies of Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp back into the museum, triggering a wildly successful yet fractious movement that swept Europe between the wars and embraced many media. Artists like Max Ernst, René Magritte, Kay Sage, and Yves Tanguy, to name only a few, would follow the dictum of the movement’s founder, André Breton, and “seek to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality.” As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the chaos of Dada and the revolution of surrealism. This lecture was presented on July 31, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. At the turn of the 20th century Germany and Austria were full of volatile contradictions. They were modernizing rapidly yet maintained deeply conservative values. This was fertile ground for the birth of German and Austrian expressionism, represented by the paintings of Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, and Egon Schiele, among others. A gift from the Arnold and Joan Saltzman Collection has transformed the National Gallery of Art’s holdings of German and Austrian expressionist art. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the vital role that German and Austrian expressionism played in the opening decades of the 20th century. This lecture was presented on July 26, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, and James Benning, artist. On April 29, 2018, curator Lynne Cooke spoke with artist James Benning about his media artwork, including the video installation Stemple Pass, shown in the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, as well as his film measuring change (2016, HD, 61 minutes), screened as part of the film series Avant-Garde to Underground: Outliers and Film, Part 2, in conjunction with the exhibition.
Kimberly A. Jones, curator of 19th-century French paintings, National Gallery of Art. Two of Claude Monet’s paintings of the garden at his home in Vétheuil, France, have been reunited for the first time since they were created more than 100 years ago, thanks to a long-term series of loan exchanges between the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. In celebration of this special installation, Kimberly A. Jones discusses the genesis of the four versions of The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil (1881) and their place within the larger context of Monet’s artistic development during his three-year sojourn at Vétheuil, a period marked by personal tragedy and intense creativity.
Cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan and pianist Noreen Cassidy-Polera perform Johannes Brahms's Cello Sonata in F Major, op. 99, Sulkhan Fyodorovich Tsintsadze's Five Pieces on Folk Themes for Cello and Piano, and Niccolò Paganini's Variations on a Theme of Rossini, in this concert held at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, February 25, 2018. Hakhnazaryan was born in Yerevan, Armenia, into a family of musicians and was mentored by the late Mstislav Rostropovich. Cassidy-Polera is one of the most highly regarded and diverse chamber artists performing today. Her career has taken her to major music centers in the United States, Europe, and Asia, with recent performances at Carnegie Hall, Jordan Hall in Boston, and the Kennedy Center.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. After shattering representational tradition with cubism, which he developed with Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso became the artistic visionary against whom most others measured their creativity throughout the 20th century. Born in Málaga, Spain, in 1881, Picasso attended art schools and aligned his sensibilities with bohemian writers and artists in Barcelona and Madrid. After early work inspired by El Greco, symbolism, and the sinuous curvatures of art nouveau, Picasso began to find his own vision. The art he made from 1905 to 1915 unleashed a torrent of originality culminating in the birth of cubism, among the 20th century’s most revolutionary art movements. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the contributions made to 20th-century modernism by Picasso, Braque, and their peers. This lecture was presented on July 24, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.
David Gariff, senior lecturer, National Gallery of Art. At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, an annual exhibition in Paris dedicated to vanguard art, Henri Matisse showed Open Window, Collioure alongside works by his disciples of the moment, including André Derain, Albert Marquet, and Maurice de Vlaminck. One critic, seeing an academic sculpture in the middle of the room, exclaimed, “Donatello chez les fauves!”–Donatello among the wild beasts!–and the first “ism” of the 20th century was born. Today Fauvist paintings are celebrated as the epitome of pleasure, a virtual vacation to the south of France, where the movement was born in the summer of 1905. As part of the series Celebrating the East Building: 20th-Century Art, senior lecturer David Gariff explores the seminal roles that Matisse, his followers, and the short-lived Fauvist movement played in the development of 20th-century expressionism. This lecture was presented on July 19, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art.