 Known today primarily for his role in the development of the electromagnetic telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse began his career as a painter. One of his most important works is on loan from the Terra Foundation for American Art—the newly conserved Gallery of the Louvre (1831–1833). The painting depicts masterpieces from the Louvre's collection that Morse "reinstalled" in one of that museum's grandest galleries, the Salon Carré. He also envisioned the space as a workshop where individuals study, sketch, and copy from his imagined assemblage of the Louvre's finest works, including paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Watteau. Morse depicted himself in front, leaning over his daughter as she sketches, and included friend and author James Fenimore Cooper at left with his wife and daughter.
Executed in Paris and New York, the Gallery of the Louvre was intended to inspire and inform American audiences. The painting was praised by critics, but rejected by the public for having little narrative interest. Crushed by the response, the artist soon ceased painting altogether and turned to his successful experiments with the telegraph and the Morse code.
The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and is organized in partnership with the National Gallery of Art.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/morseinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2011/morse/morseinfo.pdf (Exhibition Brochure, PDF 375K) |
| | |  |  The Capitoline Venus—on loan to the United States for the first time—is one of the best-preserved and most famous masterpieces from Roman antiquity. It derives from the celebrated Aphrodite of Cnidos, created by the renowned classical Greek sculptor Praxiteles around 360 BC. Unearthed in Rome in the 1670s, the Capitoline Venus was given in 1752 by Pope Benedict XIV to the Capitoline Museum—the first art museum in the world open to the general public—and was among the trophies that Napoleon Bonaparte seized after his invasion of Italy and took to Paris in 1797. The sculpture was returned in 1816 and quickly became a highlight for travelers in Europe, including Mark Twain, who was inspired to write the short story The Capitoline Venus.
Organized by Roma Capitale, Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali–Musei Capitolini, and the National Gallery of Art, with the partnership of the Knights of Columbus and the Embassy of the Republic of Italy, Washington
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/venusinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2011/venus/venus.pdf (Exhibition Brochure, PDF 1.28MB) |
| | | |  On June 11, 1776, the Second Continental Congress appointed a committee of five to draft a statement asserting the American colonies' independence from Great Britain. John Adams and the other committee members agreed that Thomas Jefferson should undertake the task. On July 4, after debate and revision, Congress approved the document and soon ordered that the declaration be written large and legibly on parchment for official purposes, and signed by all members of Congress.
The Declaration of Independence traveled with the young government to Philadelphia, New York, and other temporary capitals. After 1800, it was brought to the newly created seat of government in the District of Columbia. James Madison was president when Secretary of State James Monroe spirited the document across the river to Virginia for safekeeping during the British invasion of the capital in August 1814.
By 1820, the parchment scroll was suffering the effects of time and exposure. To preserve its appearance, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned a Washington engraver, William J. Stone, to create a facsimile version on parchment, complete with signatures, to become the official representation of the treasured document. More than three years of work went into the creation of the copperplate, noted by a local newspaper at the time as being "executed with the greatest exactness and fidelity." It is this engraving, two hundred copies of which were distributed to surviving signers, government officials, and others, which provided the image of the Declaration of Independence that has been accepted into the popular consciousness. Today there are only 31 surviving copies of the Stone facsimile. The Stone facsimile is on view near American artist Gilbert Stuart's portraits of Declaration of Independence signers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/declarationinfo.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  The splendors of Italian draftsmanship from the late Renaissance to the height of the neoclassical movement are showcased in an exhibition of 65 superb drawings assembled by the European private collector Wolfgang Ratjen (1943–1997). Works are featured by many of the most important artists of the period, from Giulio Romano to Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Outstanding Venetian examples include those by such artists as Domenico Tintoretto, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Canaletto, whose elegant rendering of the Giovedì Grasso festival in Venice is perhaps his finest surviving drawing.
The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the STIFTUNG RATJEN, Liechtenstein.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/italiandrawingsinfo.htm (Exhibition Information)
shop.nga.gov/nga/category.cgi?item=410000431917 (Exhibition Catalogue) |
| | | |  John Taylor Arms (1887–1953), an American printmaker, believed in the uplifting quality of Gothic art and the power of close observation, skillfully transcribed. Not all of his prints depict Gothic subjects, but all reflect the spirit of an artist whose intense devotion to craftsmanship echoed that associated with medieval artisans. This exhibition presents selected examples from the artist's entire career, from his early New York works to his finest images of European cathedrals.
Born in Washington, Arms began his career as an architect in New York but soon dedicated himself to printmaking. He adapted the meticulous drafting skills required in his architectural practice to the execution of finely wrought prints. Arms tended to create prints in series based on a particular place or subject, from the Italian countryside to French gargoyles. Selections from major series are featured in this exhibition along with independently conceived works. Some 60 prints, copperplates, and drawings are on view, drawn primarily from the Gallery's collection as well as from other lenders both private and public.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/gothicspiritinfo.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.
Organized by The Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition in Washington is made possible through the generous support of the Trellis Fund.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/baltzinfo.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  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/exhibitions/2011/metsu/metsu_brochure.pdf (Exhibition Brochure, PDF 388K)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/metsuinfo.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  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, 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.
The exhibition is made possible by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/paikinfo.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  Alphabets and letters have long beguiled artists, who in modern times have been apt to treat them like found objects, isolated from their workaday contexts and appealing in their own right. Take, for instance, the sensuous Q, upended and repurposed as a beach house by Claes Oldenburg in The Letter Q as Beach House, with Sailboat.
Unlike Marcel Duchamp's 1914 Bottle Rack—considered the first found object or readymade—an alphabet has special potency, linked as it is to sounds, words, and meanings. In this installation, the artists took both fanciful and analytic approaches. James Castle invented his own alphabetic systems and often graced them with the sibilant caption Purse ! Discusses or the abbreviation P ! D. Al Taylor graphed a two-word phrase (and its inversion) by plotting the distance between its component letters. Robert Cumming created an alphabet in shaving cream and captured the letters as they merged into a rapidly dissolving mass. Kim Rugg cut the front page of the Financial Times into individual letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, then rearranged them in alphabetical order—an oddly anachronistic practice that recalls outmoded movable-type printing.
www.nga.gov/collection/ml-alphabet.htm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  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/2011/frozen/frozen_brochure.pdf (Exhibition Brochure, PDF 830K)
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/frozeninfo.shtm (Exhibition Information) |
| | | |  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)
www.nga.gov/podcasts/index.shtm#dale (Watch the video) |
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