 In the first survey of British art photography focusing on the 1850s and 1860s, some 100 photographs and 20 paintings and watercolors chronicle the roles photography and Pre-Raphaelite art played in changing concepts of vision and truth in representation. Photography's ability to quickly translate the material world into an image challenged painters to find alternate versions of realism. Photographers, in turn, looked to Pre-Raphaelite subject matter and visual strategies in order to legitimize photography's status as a fine art. As the exhibition will show, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and many lesser known photographers had much in common with such painters as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John William Inchbold, as all wrestled with the question of how to observe and represent the natural world and the human face and figure. This rich dialogue between photography and painting is examined in the exhibition's thematic sections on landscape, portraiture, literary and historical narratives, and modern-life subjects.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/preraphaeliteinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/preraphaelite/slideshow/index.htm (Exhibition Highlights)
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000387863 (Exhibition Catalogue) |
| | |  |  This stunning exhibition of 120 of the finest German drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection showcases major works ranging from the 17th-century baroque and 18th-century rococo to 19th-century romanticism and realism. Passionately assembled by Wolfgang Ratjen (1943–1997) over three decades, the drawings include rare, evocative, and influential examples by Hans von Aachen, Johann Rottenhammer, and Adam Elsheimer; studies for soaring religious ceilings by some of the greatest South German artists, including Cosmas Damian Asam, Matthaus Gunther, and Johann Baptist Enderle; delightful Augsburg designs for rococo prints by Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, Johann Esaias Nilson, and Gottfried Eichler; landscape watercolors by Johann Georg von Dillis and Caspar David Friedrich; architectural watercolors by Balthasar Neumann, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Rudolf von Alt; and an exciting group of realist drawings by Hans Thoma, Adolph Menzel, and Max Liebermann.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/germandrawingsinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/ratjen/slideshow/index.htm (Exhibition Highlights)
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000370926 (Exhibition Catalogue) |
| | | |  The humanist movement of the Renaissance introduced new realms of possibility in the arts and the sciences, including the study of anatomy. Many artists witnessed or participated in dissections to gain a better understanding of the proportions and systems of the body. Artists and physicians also worked together and formed partnerships—Leonardo and Marcantonio della Torre, Michelangelo and Realdo Columbo, and perhaps most famously, Titian and Andreas Vesalius—where the artist's renderings of the anatomist's findings were reproduced and dispersed to a scattered audience through the relatively recent innovation of print.
This exhibition, featuring outstanding examples of anatomy-related material from the collection of rare books in the National Gallery of Art Library, offers a glimpse into the ways anatomical studies were made available to and used by artists from the 16th to the early 19th century. On view are detailed treatises on human proportion and beauty by artists and scholars including Albrecht Dürer and Juan de Arfe y Villafane; drawing and painting manuals by Leonardo, Jean Cousin, and others, which include chapters on proportion and anatomy; and adaptations of anatomical treatises tailored to the needs of working artists by Roger de Piles and Johann Daniel Preissler, among others.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/anatomyeinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/anatomy/anatomy_brochure.pdf (Exhibition Brochure) |
| | | |  Chester Dale's magnificent bequest to the National Gallery of Art in 1962 included a generous endowment as well as one of America's most important collections of French painting from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This special exhibition, the first in 45 years to explore the extraordinary legacy left to the nation by this passionate collector, features some 83 of his finest French and American paintings.
Among the masterpieces on view are Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Forest of Fontainebleau (1834), Auguste Renoir's A Girl with a Watering Can (1876), Mary Cassatt's Boating Party (1893/1894), Edouard Manet's Old Musician (1862), Pablo Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques (1905), and George Bellows' Blue Morning (1909). Other artists represented include Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and Claude Monet.
Dale was an astute businessman who made his fortune on Wall Street in the bond market. He thrived on forging deals and translated much of this energy and talent into his art collecting. He served on the board of the National Gallery of Art from 1943 and as president from 1955 until his death in 1962. Portraits of Dale by Salvador Dali and Diego Rivera are included in the show, along with portraits of Dale's wife Maud (who greatly influenced his interest in art) painted by George Bellows and Fernand Leger.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/daleinfo.shtm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/dale/slideshow/index.shtm (Exhibition Highlights)
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000354032 (Exhibition Catalogue)
Hi-Res | Lo-Res | iTunes | RSS (From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection, 16:00 mins.) |
| | | |  This exhibition explores the advent of modernism a century ago through twenty important paintings, sculptures, and drawings by the first-generation American avant-garde. Among the artists represented are Patrick Henry Bruce, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Man Ray, Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, John Storrs, and Max Weber. All works are from the Edward and Deborah Shein Collection, which is distinguished by its remarkable quality and rigorous focus on early American modernism.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/sheininfo.htm(Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/shein/index.htm (Exhibition Highlights)
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000359563 (Exhibition Catalogue) |
| | | |  Sixteen examples of the fantastic composite heads painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo will be featured in this exhibition, their first appearance in the United States. Bizarre yet scientifically accurate, the unusual heads are composed of plants, animals, and objects. Additional works, including drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, small bronzes, illustrated books and manuscripts, and ceramics, will provide a context for Arcimboldo's inventions, revealing his debt to established traditions of physiognomic and nature studies.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/arcimboldoinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/arcimboldo/arcimboldo_brochure.pdf (Exhibition Brochure)
Watch a Video
Hi-Res| Lo-Res| iTunes | RSS (Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy, 6:30 mins.) |
| | | |  The second in a series of Tower exhibitions focusing on contemporary art and its roots offers a rare look at the black-on-black paintings that Rothko made in 1964 in connection with his work on a chapel for the Menil Collection in Houston. A recording of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971), the haunting music originally composed for that space, accompanies the exhibition in the spacious East Building Tower Gallery.
A new 10-minute film examines the career of Rothko and his development of a style that fused abstract painting with emotional significance. Produced by the National Gallery of Art, the film will be shown continuously in the Tower Gallery.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/rothkotowerinfo.htm(Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/rothkotower/slideshow /index.htm (Exhibition Highlights)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2010/rothkotower/rothko-brochure.pdf (Exhibition Brochure, PDF 248k) |
| | | |  Presenting twenty-two rare photographs and reproductive prints, this exhibition highlights resources for the study of Victorian art and culture from the department of image collections. By the mid-nineteenth century a wide range of art reproductions, made possible by advances in printmaking and photographic processes, were available in Britain. This diverse selection of images documents the work of Victorian artists including Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and George Frederic Watts, as well as significant exhibitions and collections of the period. In examining photography as an emerging medium for documenting and reproducing works of art, this show features the work of five leading nineteenth-century photographers. Photographs range from an early salted paper print by Roger Fenton to later platinum prints by Frederick Hollyer, who photographed the work of Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic movement artists. This exhibition also explores the production and distribution of reproductive prints. During the nineteenth century, prints played an increasingly important role in the popularity and success of many artists, who profited from the sale of reproductions of their work to the burgeoning middle classes.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/preraphaeliteinfo.htm#picturing (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  Verging on invisibility or immateriality, these works can provoke, mystify, or even go unnoticed. The very difficulty of seeing them demands an extraordinary patience in viewing them. Some emphasize the basic properties of their medium, be it photography, drawing, or sculpture, while others make it difficult to tell just what the medium is. Still others play with the distinction between language and image. And yet, in a world inundated with visual information, these works all revive the act of close looking as a source of meaning.
www.nga.gov/collection/ml-nothing.htm (Exhibition Information) |
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