National Gallery Of Art | Audio

Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. In The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights. The Art of Rivalry follows these eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. In this lecture held on December 4, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Smee

Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan For the public symposium held on November 19, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Alex Potts explains how new exhibition spaces and the experimental staging of work at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and Virginia Dwan’s bicoastal galleries gave Edward Kienholz an opportunity in the early and mid-1960s to realize his large-scale tableaux. The powerful effect these works had on the viewer was not just formal, as in minimalist art, or simply a result of their often-provocative, in-your-face presentation, but was also related to deep undercurrents of socially and politically charged content. Eventually this set the tableaux at odds with the prevailing climate of the American art world and its increasingly systematic bracketing of a politics of content in favor of a politics of form. Virginia Dwan’s active promotion of some of Kienholz’s more ambitious, highly

Justin Wolff, associate professor of art history, University of Maine In November 1937 Life magazine featured four lithographs by the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) in the article “Four Ways in Which the World May End.” In this lecture from the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held at the National Gallery of Art on October 22, 2016, Justin Wolff analyzes the so-called “End of the World” lithographs, part of the National Gallery of Art collection, in the context of scientific theories about cosmic cataclysm, suspicions that European fascism portended an apocalypse, and Kent’s solidarity with a radical leftism that anticipated capitalism’s disintegration. Wolff considers looking beyond their political meaning to what the lithographs tell us about Kent’s renowned emotional intensity and wanderlust—specifically, what they reveal about his tenacious quest to acquire psychic integrity in barren lands at the ends of the world. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possi

Harry Cooper, curator and head, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. As one of the most important American modernists, Stuart Davis (1892–1964) blurred distinctions between text and image, high and low art, and abstraction and figuration, crafting a distinct style that continues to influence art being made today. Featuring some 100 of his most important, visually complex, jazz-inspired compositions, Stuart Davis: In Full Swing takes a critical approach to the development of Davis’s art and theory, paying special attention to his transformative recycling of earlier works. On November 20, 2016, Harry Cooper introduces the exhibition in celebration of its opening at the National Gallery of Art, where it remains on view through March 5, 2017.

Julia Robinson, associate professor, department of art history, New York University Accounts of postwar art have, until now, positioned Virginia Dwan as a figure of the late 1960s, focusing on her New York gallery (through 1971) and her extramural projects thereafter. But this slant tends to leave Dwan’s carte blanche leadership unexplained, offering no sense of it as something achieved after a lengthy honing of instincts, or as a process that began well before her East Coast chapter. What Dwan offered to her artists, the celebrated attitude of latitude, the many manifestations of so-called negative space, did not come from nowhere, not exactly. For the public symposium held on November 19, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Julia Robinson argues that the challenges of late ’50s Los Angeles—far from the international art world—galvanized Dwan Gallery’s founding years and its outré stance. Learning from scratch, Dwan took

Randall Griffey, associate curator, department of modern and contemporary art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) entered the modernist canon as a result of the abstract paintings he created in Germany in 1914-1915. But the paintings he created of his home state of Maine late in his career beginning in 1937 brought him his greatest acclaim during his lifetime. In fact, Hartley began his career in 1909 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery as a painter of Maine. Previewing a major exhibition to open in March 2017 at the Met Breuer and in July 2017 at the Colby College Museum of Art, Randall Griffey illuminates the painter’s dynamic, rich, and occasionally contradictory artistic engagement with his native Maine. Maine was to Hartley a springboard to imagination and creative inspiration, a locus of memory and longing, a refuge, and a means of communion with previous artists who painted there, especially Winslow Homer. Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on Americ

Pamela M. Lee, Osgood Hooker Professorship in Fine Arts, Stanford University. In 1969 Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson collaborated on their first video together, East Coast, West Coast. Clocking in at twenty-two minutes, the video featured the two artists playing the roles of East Coast intellectual and West Coast hippy respectively, trading perspectives on art and life as a series of bicoastal clichés. Virginia Dwan, Smithson’s most important patron, occupied a singular position relative to the art scenes of Los Angeles and New York. For the public symposium keynote address given on November 18, 2016, in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959 – 1971 at the National Gallery of Art, Pamela M. Lee revisits the history of the Dwan Gallery as a negotiator of two distinct but converging art cultures and the formative role Virginia Dwan played in bringing them closer together.

Rachael Z. DeLue, associate professor, department of art and archaeology, Princeton University. The modern American artist Arthur Dove (1880–1946) drew inspiration from the natural world when making his paintings and assemblages, but he also played around with found objects, popular music, sound technology, aviation, farm animals, meteorology, language, and script, including his own signature. The circle motifs that appear persistently across Dove’s art serve to signify and connect these disparate things, creating a vital and unique form of abstraction, one resolutely if paradoxically bound to objective reality and material existence. As Dove himself said, “there is no such thing as abstraction,” preferring the term “extraction” to describe the essential relationship between his work and the world. Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Rachael Z. DeLue discusses some of the chief characteristics of Dove’s extractions, foc

Jane Kamensky, professor of history and Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Looking through the eyes of John Singleton Copley, Jane Kamensky reveals an unknown American Revolution. In this lecture held on October 30, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Kamensky draws from her new book on Copley and his world to untangle the web of principles and interests that shaped the age of America’s founding. Copley’s prodigious talent earned him the patronage of Boston’s patriot leaders, including Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. But the artist did not share their politics, and painting portraits failed to satisfy his lofty artistic goals. When resistance escalated into all-out war, Copley was in London. The magisterial canvases he created there—several of which are now in the National Gallery of Art collection—made him one of the towering figures of the British art scene: a painter of America’s Revolution as Britain’s Ameri

Jennifer Raab, assistant professor, department of the history of art, Yale University. What does it mean to see a work of art “in detail”? Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Jennifer Raab considers broader questions of detail, vision, and knowledge in 19th-century America by looking at a few of Frederic Church’s most famous landscape paintings. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Molly Donovan, associate curator, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. A focus installation on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) will reopen the East Building Tower Gallery after the space's nearly three years of renovation. Inspired by the Gallery's recent acquisition of Kruger's Untitled (Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything) (1987/2014), the exhibition comprises related images of figures in profile over which Kruger has superimposed her striking figures of speech. The distinctive direct address of Kruger's texts (using active verbs and personal pronouns) contrasts with her selected images of passive figures to create arresting conceptual works of great visual power. In this lecture held on October 23, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Molly Donovan introduces the exhibition In the Tower: Barbara Kruger, on view through January 22, 2017.

Wendy Bellion, associate professor, department of art history, University of Delaware. Trompe l’oeil art challenges viewers to make perceptual distinctions between things that look extraordinarily similar. It stages lessons in perception, imitation, and deception while piquing our delight in the pleasures of wit. Drawing upon the National Gallery of Art’s important collection of American still life painting, Wendy Bellion explores the serious fun of illusion in a lecture from the inaugural John Wilmerding Sympsoium on American Art, held at the National Gallery of Art on October 22, 2016. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Mark D. Mitchell, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery. The genre of still life has enjoyed unexpected power in America’s artistic tradition. Its periodic resurgence provides distinct perspective on the nation’s cultural development hewn to individual experience. Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Mark D. Mitchell offers a new look at still life, its meaning in America, and its potential for future study. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made possible by a generous grant from The Walton Family Foundation.

Thomas Struth, artist, in conversation with Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, and Andrea Nelson, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Thomas Struth was born in Geldern, Germany, in 1954. He first studied painting with Gerhard Richter at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf before turning to photography in 1976 and becoming one of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s earliest students. In the late 1970s he began to make a series of black-and-white photographs of empty urban environments that established his international reputation. In the late 1980s he conceived another series, the Museum Photographs, where he photographed in some of the world’s most celebrated museums. These large color pictures, often depicting crowds of people, explore the different functions that art fulfills in our modern, secularized world and the ways in which people experience paintings today, including the notion of the museum as a sacred pilgrimage site. As his int

Peter Humfrey, emeritus professor of art history, University of St. Andrews. In this lecture recorded on October 12, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Peter Humfrey surveys the reception of Venetian artist Paolo Veronese in Britain from the early years of the 17th century, when his paintings first began to arrive there, until the end of the 19th century, when some of the finest examples in British private collections began to be exported to the United States. Humfrey focuses on the changing attitudes toward the artist over three centuries, particularly as reflected in the history of collecting. He also considers the pronouncements of critics such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and John Ruskin, and the possible influence of Veronese on English painters.

Paige Rozanski, curatorial assistant, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. In this lecture held on September 26, 2016, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Paige Rozanski sheds light on the discoveries she made during her research at the Dwan Gallery Archives and the Virginia Dwan Archives in preparation for the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971. Rozanski underscores the integral role this material played in planning the exhibition, illustrates how the archives contributed to scholarship, and outlines her approach to writing the chronology and exhibition history published in the exhibition catalog.

Artists Leonardo Drew and Jennie C. Jones with Pamela J. Joyner, collector. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art is widely recognized as one of the most significant collections of modern and contemporary work by African and African Diasporan artists. Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art draws upon the collection’s unparalleled holdings to explore the critical contributions made by artists to the evolution of visual art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Extensively illustrated with hundreds of works in a variety of media, and featuring scholarly texts by leading artists, writers, and curators, Four Generations gives an essential overview of some of the most notable artists and movements of the last century, up to and including works being made today. The collection features major works by artists such as Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, David Hammons, Sam Gilliam, Lauren Halsey, Oscar Murillo, Jayson Musson, Robin Rhode, Zander Blom, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Virginia Dwan, collector, and James Meyer, deputy director and chief curator, Dia Art Foundation. The remarkable career of gallerist and patron Virginia Dwan is featured front and center for the first time in an exhibition of some 100 works, including highlights from Dwan's promised gift of her extraordinary personal collection to the National Gallery of Art. Founded by Dwan in a storefront in Los Angeles in 1959, Dwan's West Coast enterprise was a leading avant-garde space in the early 1960s, presenting works by abstract expressionists, neo-dadaists, pop artists, and nouveaux réalistes. In 1965, Dwan established a gallery in New York where she presented groundbreaking exhibitions of such new tendencies as minimalism, conceptual art, and land. The exhibition traces Dwan's activities and the emergence of an avant-garde gallery in an age of mobility, when air travel and the interstate highway system linked the two coasts and transformed the making of art and the sites of its exhibition. On September 27, 2016, a

Carlos Garaicoa, artist, in conversation with Michelle Bird, curatorial assistant, department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art, and Andrea Nelson, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Carlos Garaicoa Manso (b. Havana, Cuba, 1967) studied thermodynamics before his mandatory military service, during which he worked as a draughtsman. He then attended the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana from 1989 to 1994. Garaicoa takes a multidisciplinary approach in his art to address the social, economic, and political issues that affect our construction of subjectivities and understanding of the contemporary global situation. His work—which uses studies of architecture, city planning, the writing of history, and the tradition of aesthetic forms as a language—articulates a cultural criticism that debates the function of the artistic act and of intellectuals and artists as social agents in the public sphere. His work takes a variety of forms, including installations, vide

Lorna Simpson, artist. Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, Lorna Simpson earned her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1983, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1985. She first gained recognition in the mid-1980s for her large photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history, and memory. With unidentified figures as a visual point of departure, Simpson uses the human form to examine the ways in which gender and culture shape the interactions, relationships, and experiences of contemporary American lives. On September 10, 2016, Simpson delivers the inaugural presentation of the Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography held at the National Gallery of Art. Her work is represented in the Gallery’s collection by Two Pairs, a photogravure published by Graphicstudio, U. S. F., and Untitled (Two Necklines), two gelatin silver prints and 11 engraved plastic plaques. Untitled (Two Necklines) is on vie