National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith A. Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall; Ruth Fine, moderator and senior curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art (retired). In this program, presented on March 17, 2017, eight distinguished artists discuss their careers and relationships as members of the Washington, DC, art world. Panelists are Lilian Thomas Burwell, Floyd Coleman, David C. Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Keith A. Morrison, Martin Puryear, Sylvia Snowden, and Lou Stovall. Ruth Fine, former senior curator, National Gallery of Art, moderated the panel, which was part of a two-day symposium at the National Gallery of Art. The program was organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in collaboration with the Howard University Gallery of Art and was supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.

Anne Pingeot, curator emerita, Musée d'Orsay. Dedicated to Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in the centennial year of his death, Volume 3 of the conservation division's biennial journal Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History focuses on the tremendous wealth of works by Degas in the National Gallery of Art collection. The first to feature the work of a single artist, this issue includes essays by conservators, scientists, and curators. It presents insights into Degas's working methods in painting, sculpture in wax and bronze, and works on paper, as well as a sonnet he wrote to his "little dancer." The Gallery has the third largest collection in the world of work by Degas, comprising 21 paintings, 65 sculptures, 34 drawings, 40 prints, 2 copper plates, and 1 volume of soft-ground etchings. Its extensive Degas holdings and conservation resources have inspired not only groundbreaking Gallery exhibitions—such as Degas, the Dancers (1984), Degas at the Races (1998), Degas's Little Dancer (2014), and Degas/Cassatt (2014

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s, Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The fifth lecture, held April 30, is entitled “Emerson, Raphael, and Light Filtering through Trees.” On March 28, 1833, in Rome, Ralph Waldo Emerson first saw Raphael’s Transfiguration. “What tenderness and holiness beams from the face of the Christ in that Work,” he wrote later that year, avowing that Raphael’s picture was the greatest he had ever seen. Transposed t

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s, Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The title of the sixth and final lecture, held May 7, 2017, is “The Forest of Thought: On the Roof with Robert Montgomery Bird.” Bird, author of the bloodthirsty frontier novel Nick of the Woods (1837), turned late in his life to photography, making pictures in 1852-1853 from the roof of his Philadelphia home. Austere and eerie, Bird’s depopulated photographs of Phil

Mary C. Panzer, historian of photography and American culture. The first exhibition to focus exclusively on photographs made in the eastern half of the United States during the 19th century, East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography showcases some 175 works—from daguerreotypes and stereographs to albumen prints and cyanotypes—as well as several photographers whose efforts have often gone unheralded. Mary Panzer shares the story of one photographer, John Moran (1831-1902), brother to painter Thomas Moran, in this lecture held on May 14, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art. John Moran belonged to a network of Philadelphia-based amateur artists, historians, scientists, and collectors who recognized photography as a fine art in the years before the Civil War. Moran also appreciated the art of the newly developed stereograph. After 1865 the art of John Moran “disappeared” into collections of prints and historic documents, while Philadelphia photographers continued to lead the coun

Yuriko Jackall, assistant curator, department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art. When Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon, arrived in the United States in 1815, he brought with him his exquisite collection of 18th-century French paintings. Put on public view, the works caused a sensation, and a new American taste for French art was born. Over the decades, appreciation of French 18th-century art has fluctuated between preference for the alluring decorative canvases of rococo artists such as François Boucher and Jean Honoré Fragonard and admiration of the sober neoclassicism championed by Jacques Louis David and his pupils. To celebrate the exhibition opening of America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting on May 21, 2017, Yuriko Jackall shares some of the best and most unusual examples held by American museums. On view through August 20, 2017, these 68 paintings tell their stories on a national stage: Who were the collectors, curators, museum directors, and dealers responsible for bri

Philippe Bordes, professor emeritus of art history, Université Lyon 2. Museums today give the painter Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) the same preeminent recognition that he enjoyed during his lifetime, as the creator of a commanding neoclassical style and a persuasive Napoleonic imagery. For about a century after his death, however, he was mostly rebuked by collectors and critics. In this lecture held on June 11, 2017, in conjunction with the exhibition America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting at the National Gallery of Art, Philippe Bordes accounts for these dramatic shifts in taste and perception. Bordes explains that it is necessary to invoke changing attitudes toward the prestige of antique models and toward an artist whose political concerns found expression in his works. Often at stake were fundamental debates as to what made a work of art attractive and how to construct a history of 18th-century French painting. The highs and lows of the critical reception of David’s paintings are a reminde

Bart Devolder, painting conservator and onsite coordinator, Ghent Altarpiece restoration team, Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA). The Ghent Altarpiece (1432) by Jan and Hubert van Eyck is one of the most iconic works of Western art as it embodies the birth of new skills and vision. Still housed in Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium, the site for which it was created, The Ghent Altarpiece (or Mystic Lamb as it is sometimes referred to) has undergone conservation and restoration treatment overseen by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA, Brussels) since 2012. No one expected this restoration to turn into a revelation: the real Van Eyck had been hidden beneath overpaint for centuries! In this lecture recorded on June 2, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Bart Devolder shares remarkable discoveries from the first phase of treatment, and previews findings from the ongoing second phase. This program is made possible by the Henry and Alice H. Greenwald Endowment Fund for Conservati

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s, Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The first lecture, held on March 26, 2017, “Herodotus among the Trees,” considers the questions: How does life get into art? What were the definitions of life and of art in the United States in the 1830s? How might life and art have met and diverged there and then—for example, in two landscape paintings by Thomas Cole?

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s, Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The second lecture, held on April 2, 2017, The Tavern to the Traveler: On the Appearance of John Quidor’s Art,” focuses on the work of John Quidor. Quidor made fine-art paintings in the 1830s; he also was a sign painter. How are Quidor’s fine-art depictions of Ichabod Crane and Natty Bumppo like tavern signs? Do they appear as such a sign might have to a traveler—as

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s, Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The third lecture, held on April 9, 2017, is entitled “The Aesthetics of Superstition.” According to legend in 1830s Michigan, if you were bitten by a rattlesnake, the skin around the bite would resemble the pattern of the snake’s skin. How might the world then have been imagined as a poisonous pattern that entered into individual bodies? How might art, returning th

Alexander Nemerov, department chair and Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. In the six-part lecture series The Forest: America in the 1830s, Nemerov explores the Hudson River School painters and their contemporaries, focusing on what their art did and did not show of the teeming world around them. The forest serves as a metaphor for the unruly and wooded realms of lived experience to which art can only gesture. The lectures present a fundamentally new account of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), John Quidor (1801–1881), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and other artists and writers of that time. The title of the fourth lecture, held on April 23, 2017, is “Animals Are Where They Are.” A tobacco bag made from the skin of a black-footed ferret, created by an Eastern Plains tribe around 1840, both is and is not a creature that once roamed through the woods. Augmented by leather, festooned by porcupine quills, wool cloth, silk ribbon, bird claws, brass bells and

Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. The Simpson Collection at the National Gallery of Art is one of the few remaining private collections assembled with the participation of artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). The centenary of Rodin’s death offers an occasion to examine the large number of works that Katherine Seney Simpson and John W. Simpson, the first American collectors to meet Rodin, gave to the Gallery in 1942. In this lecture recorded on May 5, 2017, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain provides an overview of the Simpson collection of drawings and sculptures in bronze, marble, terracotta, and plaster, including Rodin’s portrait of Mrs. Simpson. The Gallery has benefitted since from the generosity of other donors, helping to build, as Yale University art historian Charles Seymour Jr. stated, “a first-rate collection” of works by Rodin.

Meredith J. Gill, professor of Italian Renaissance art and chair, department of art history and archaeology, University of Maryland, College Park. To think about angels among the world’s religions is to think about the question of embodiment. As messenger figures, they choose human form, yet they are incorporeal and without gender in their theological essence. Angels have long invited highly abstract and intricate categories of classification, particularly within the medieval university curriculum for which Bonaventure, the “Seraphic Doctor,” and Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor,” wrote foundational texts. Yet angels have also invited the most sublime feats of artistic imagination. In this lecture recorded on April 28, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Meredith Gill discusses several angelic episodes in Renaissance art, such as Tobias and the Angel and the Fall of the Rebel Angels, reflecting on mortal identity and experience in early modern times

Perry Y. Chin, architect, and Susan Wertheim, chief architect and deputy administrator for capital projects, National Gallery of Art. In celebration of the 100th birthday of architect I. M. Pei on April 26, 2017, Susan Wertheim honors Pei’s gift to the nation: his design of the National Gallery of Art East Building. Harmonizing with architect John Russell Pope's neoclassical West Building, the award-winning East Building, which opened in 1978, was designed by Pei in the modern idiom of its time. Magnificently realizing the long-term vision of Gallery founder Andrew W. Mellon and his children, Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the East Building has taken its place as one of the great public structures in the nation's capital. Designed at a crucial point in Pei’s long and productive career, the East Building won the American Institute of Architect’s Twenty-five Year Award in 2004, and Pei, considered a living legend, was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983. Wertheim first discusses Pei’s architect

Jarob J. Ortiz, large-format staff photographer, Heritage Documentation Programs, National Park Service. In winter 2015, the National Park Service (NPS) advertised a job listing in search of the next Ansel Adams (1902-1984), the landscape photographer known for his 1940s NPS commission to document nature as exemplified and protected in US National Parks. The full-time position with the Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) required experience with large-format photography, which provides a higher resolution, is more durable than 35mm film, and allows the photographer more control to render perspective. The HDP administers the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the federal government's oldest preservation program, and its companion programs: the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). Documentation produced through the programs constitutes the nation's largest archive of historical architectural, engineering, and landscape documentation. The HABS/HAER

John A. Tyson, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art. In his classic 1972 Artforum essay, critic Lawrence Alloway described the art world as a network. Taking cues from Alloway’s observation about the nature of art production in the 60s and 70s, John A. Tyson proposes that the era’s portfolios of printed multiples can be understood as networked coproductions. In this lecture recorded on April 3, 2017, as part of the Works in Progress series, Tyson historically contextualizes a selection of collective projects from the National Gallery of Art’s holdings: Walasse Ting’s “1-Cent Life” (1963), the Wadsworth Athenaeum’s “X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters)” (1964), curated by Samuel Wagstaff Jr.; gallerist Leo Castelli’s multimedia “Ten from Leo Castelli” (1968), William Copley’s serial, boxed magazine S.M.S. (February-December, 1968); and, finally, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)’s “The New York Collection for Stockholm” (1973). These portfolios consist of works in a va

Kimberly A. Jones, curator of 19th-century French paintings, National Gallery of Art. Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) was a central figure in the history of early impressionism who worked closely with the renowned artists Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Auguste Renoir (1840-1917). Killed in the Franco-Prussian War just prior to his 29th birthday, Bazille all but vanished from history before his talent could be fully recognized. To celebrate the opening of Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism on April 9, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Kimberly A. Jones provides an overview of the exhibition, the first devoted to the artist in the United States in a quarter century. On view through July 9, 2017, the exhibition examines Bazille’s place within the vibrant avant-garde art scene of Paris in the 1860s and the role he played in the birth of the impressionist movement.

Christina Rosenberger, art historian. The abstract paintings of the American artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004) are often discussed in terms that approach religious devotion: they have been called a form of prayer, a revelation, even “purism in excelsis.” Martin’s carefully crafted works of art are designed to engender great floods of emotion in viewers. But what happens when we strip the rhetoric that surrounds Martin’s paintings away, and consider the art—the thousands of aesthetic choices that the artist made in her pursuit of a form of abstraction that was, to use her term, completely nonobjective? In this lecture held on March 19, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Christina Rosenberger charts Martin’s artistic evolution through careful attention to her form and facture, arguing that Martin’s early work (1947-1961) defines the terms for all of her subsequent artistic production.

Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, commissioner, American Battle Monuments Commission; chairperson, Historic Landmarks Preservation Center; commissioner, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; founder and chair, NYC Landmarks50 Alliance; chair, New York State Council on the Arts; and director, Trust for the National Mall. As the definitive resource on the architectural history of New York City, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City’s Historic Buildings, 6th ed., documents and illustrates the 1,352 individual landmarks and 135 historic districts that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission since its establishment in 1965. Arranged chronologically by date of construction, the book’s entries offer a sequential overview of the city’s architectural history and richness, presenting a broad range of styles and building types: colonial farmhouses, Gilded Age mansions, churches, schools, libraries, museums, and the great 20th-century sk