| ON VIEW AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART | | |
|  Gabriel Metsu (1629–1667) is one of the most important Dutch genre painters of the mid-17th century. His ability to capture ordinary moments of life with freshness and spontaneity was matched only by his ability to depict materials with an unerring truth to nature. Although his career was relatively short, Metsu enjoyed great success as a genre painter, but also for his religious scenes, still lifes, and portraits. Featuring some 35 paintings, this exhibition will be the first monographic show of Metsu's work ever mounted in the United States.
www.nga.gov/programs/galtalks/#metsu (Attend a Gallery Talk)
www.nga.gov/programs/music/#june_12_2011 (Attend a Concert)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/metsuinfo.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | |  |  From 1967 through the early 1970s, the Californian artist Lewis Baltz (born 1945) made a series of photographs that focuses on the sides of warehouse sheds, stucco walls, empty billboards, and other geometric forms found in the postwar suburban landscape. He titled these works Prototypes, by which he meant both the industrially made model structures scattered across California and the modern culture that generated them. Never before exhibited as a group, the Prototypes are among the earliest works of art to show the fascinating and disturbing transformation of the American landscape into an unending terrain of anonymous commercial architecture.
In the first exhibition dedicated to this series, some 50 Prototypes will be on view along with sculptures by Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd and prints by Richard Serra—key participants in the avant-garde dialogue that inspired Baltz. In addition, the exhibition will include the 12-panel color work Ronde de Nuit (Night Watch) from 1991 to 1992, a mural-sized tableau of surveillance sites and the people who work in them. Dramatically different in scale and appearance from the Prototypes, Ronde de Nuit reveals the artist's continuing preoccupation with industrially manufactured environments and how they are used to control contemporary society.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/baltzinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/programs/lectures/#pubsymposium (Attend the Symposium: Model Structures: Lewis Baltz Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit) |
| | | |  Nam June Paik (1932–2006) is a towering figure in contemporary art. Born in Korea and trained in Japan and Germany in aesthetics and music, Paik settled in New York in 1964 and quickly became a pioneer in the integration of art with technology and performance. The exhibition features a selection from Paik's estate as well as from the Gallery's own collection. The centerpiece is One Candle, Candle Projection (1988–2000), one of the artist's simplest, most dynamic works. Each morning a candle is lit and a video camera follows its progress, casting its flickering, magnified, processed image onto the walls in myriad projections. Two other closed-circuit works share the main gallery—one involving eggs, the other a bronze Buddha.
The adjoining room features works on paper and a short film about the artist. The exhibition also highlights an important new acquisition: Untitled (Red Hand), 1967 (detail), Gift of the Hakuta Family, which includes a 19th-century Japanese scroll, a flashing bulb, and the artist's handprint. Here—as in so much of Paik's work—tradition and technology, elegance and humor, meditation and irreverence, come together in surprising harmony.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/paikinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
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| | | |  Paul Gauguin's sumptuous, colorful images of Brittany and the islands of the South Seas are some of the most appealing paintings in modern art. They will be represented among nearly 120 works by Gauguin in the first major look at the artist's oeuvre in the United States since the blockbuster National Gallery of Art retrospective of 1988–1989, The Art of Paul Gauguin.
Organized by Tate Modern, London, in association with the Gallery, Gauguin: Maker of Myth brings together self-portraits, genre pictures, still lifes, and landscapes from throughout the artist's career. It includes not only oil paintings but also pastels, prints, drawings, sculpture, and decorated functional objects. Organized thematically, the exhibition examines Gauguin's use of religious and mythological symbols to tell stories, reinventing or appropriating narratives and myths drawn both from his European cultural heritage and from Maori legend.
Gauguin (1848–1903) was the ultimate global traveler, sailing in the South Pacific and living in Peru, Paris, Martinique, and Tahiti, among other places. The exhibition features many of his iconic paintings, on loan from around the world—ranging from scenes of religious life near the artist's colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany to the colorful, exotic canvases depicting the people and the tropical flora and fauna of the islands of French Polynesia, where he moved to escape European civilization. In Tahiti, he immersed himself in its fast-disappearing Maori culture to invest his art with deeper meaning, ritual, and myth, a fusion that continues to mesmerize audiences worldwide.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/gauguininfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2011/gauguin/gauguin_brochure.pdf (Exhibition Brochure, PDF 406k)
www.nga.gov/programs/film/#exhib_films (Exhibition Film)
www.nga.gov/programs/audio/index.shtm#gauguin (Take an Audio Tour)
www.nga.gov/programs/galtalks/#gauguin (Attend a Gallery Talk)
www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg82/gg82-main1.html (Online Tour: Paul Gauguin)
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000357996 (Exhibition Catalogue)
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| | | | | | |  Hendrick ter Brugghen's Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene from the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College will grace the walls of the National Gallery of Art in the West Building from January 21 through May 15, 2011. The painting, hailed as Ter Brugghen's masterwork, will hang near the National Gallery's magnificent Bagpipe Player in Gallery 44 in a special focus show that celebrates two of the artist's most luminous and lyrical compositions. Although these paintings belong to different genres, they reveal the sure fluidity of brush, exquisite color harmonies, and sophisticated compositional orchestration for which Ter Brugghen is renowned.
Ter Brugghen (1588–1629) presumably studied with the Utrecht master Abraham Bloemaert (1556–1661), from whom he learned the fundamentals of painting. Around 1607 he journeyed to Italy to supplement his education, and while in Rome encountered the vivid dramas and theatrical light effects of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Caravaggio's innovative stylistic vocabulary exerted a profound influence on Ter Brugghen. He adopted the Italian's theatrical figures and lighting and became one of the leading Dutch Caravaggists upon his return to Utrecht in 1614.
Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene depicts an episode from the life of Sebastian, a third–century Roman soldier. After refusing to renounce Christianity he was bound to a tree and shot by archers. Irene, along with her maidservant, rescued him, removed the arrows from his flesh, and nursed his wounds. The painting's emotional force results largely from Sebastian's monumental form, but also from Ter Brugghen's skillful orchestration of color and light. The glowing light he cast across the scene gently illuminates Sebastian's near-death pallor and accents Irene's kindly face as she gazes toward the arrows she tenderly removes from Sebastian's side.
The circumstances prompting the creation of this work are not certain. It is probable that Ter Brugghen painted it for a hospital in Utrecht. Saint Sebastian was commonly invoked against the plague, and Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene dates to 1625—near the start of an eight-year epidemic that ravaged the city. Irene was a Christian exemplar of benevolence and virtue, and her example of compassion and piety would have been particularly appropriate for such a setting.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/terbruggheninfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
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| | | |  We often think today of great collections of art, history, or nature as the province of our public institutions, but in the 17th century the idea of a publicly funded museum that would be open to all citizens was almost nonexistent in Europe. From the Middle Ages to the 19th century, rulers, nobles, and wealthy merchants acquired and sold paintings and classical sculpture. As the field of archaeology emerged, many sought and traded classical gems, vases, and numismatics, private libraries grew, and "curiosities" ranging from scientific instruments to mineral, plant, animal, and ethnographic specimens were popular. These collections were private and could include a range of these types of objects, and the museum, often housed in a private residence, was a way to demonstrate an individual's wealth and sophistication.
As such collections expanded, the need to document them arose. Some collectors wrote their own catalogues; others sought noted scholars to catalogue these works and thereby boost their value with their cachet. In the days before photography, artists were commissioned to produce lavish engravings depicting the assembled objects in fine detail. The private collection catalogue soon became as much a luxury object as the items it described, and as collections were dispersed over time, these catalogues often remained the only record of the collections' original contents. They provide scholars today with valuable information about the provenance of works of art, the contexts in which these objects were viewed in the past, and the values held by earlier societies.
The National Gallery of Art Library is fortunate to own a large number of these private collection catalogues, and this focus exhibition seeks to highlight this part of our own collection.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/frozeninfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
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| | | |  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, 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.
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000354032 (Exhibition Catalogue)
Exhibition Highlights(Exhibition Highlights)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/daleinfo.htm (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/fml-nothing.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | | In honor of the exhibitions Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals and Italian Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, 1525–1835 (May 8–November 27, 2011), as well as the Gallery's own stellar collection of Italian masterpieces, Chef Fabio Trabocchi will transform the menu in the Garden Cafe. Returning from New York to DC in 2011 to open the highly anticipated restaurant Fiola in Penn Quarter, Chef Trabocchi will create a menu of signature Italian cuisine for the Garden Cafe, including a buffet as well as a la carte dishes.
www.nga.gov/ginfo/cafes.shtm#garden (Garden Cafe Italia)
View Menus
Buffet and a la Carte Menu (PDF 88k)
Beverages and Desserts Menu (PDF 184k)
Download Recipes
Brodetto di pesce alla Veneta (PDF 112k)
Melanzane alla Parmigiana (PDF 112k)
Lattarolo (PDF 108k) |
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