National Gallery Of Art | Audio

October 2011 - Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London. In 1994 two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner were stolen from a public gallery in Frankfurt, Germany, while on loan from the Tate in London. In this podcast recorded on September 15, 2011, at the National Gallery of Art Sandy Nairne reveals his own involvement, as then director of programs at the Tate, in the pursuit of the pictures and in the negotiation for their return. Nairne shares this story in his new book, Art Theft and the Tate's Stolen Turners, also examining other high-value art thefts and trying to solve the puzzle of why thieves steal well-known works of art that cannot be sold, even on the black market.

October 2011 - Caroline Elam, editor, The Burlington Magazine, London. In this Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art, recorded on November 11, 2001, Caroline Elam explains the historical actualities of Michelangelo's relationship with the Medici and its effect on his reputation. Unwilling to remain under the authority of Medici dukedom and the republican government in Florence, Michelangelo lived outside his native city for 30 years until his death in 1564. During this absence from Florence, Michelangelo became the greatest living artist in Italy and the preeminent embodiment of an ideal Tuscan cultural supremacy. His status as a Tuscan icon was due in part to Medici propaganda. Duke Cosimo I recognized the importance of cultural politics in controlling the state and needed Michelangelo to that end. Elam explores how Michelangelo was unusually successful at resisting this propaganda, as well as the complexity of his own political beliefs and allegiances.

October 2011 - William R. Rearick, professor emeritus, University of Maryland. Following the disastrous Venice floods on November 4, 1966, the Venice Committee of the International Fund for Monuments was established to restore and preserve the artistic heritage of the city. In 1971 Sydney J. Freedberg and John and Betty McAndrew established Save Venice Inc., an American branch of the Venice Committee. Following Freedberg's death in 1997, Save Venice Inc. decided to restore a painting in his honor. Supper at Emmaus (1513), in the Church of San Salvador, was chosen for this project; restoration began in January 1998. In this podcast recorded on November 22, 1998, at the National Gallery of Art, Professor William R. Rearick discusses the ensuing process of attribution from Bellini to Carpaccio, including fitting the painting into the arc of Carpaccio's career.

October 2011 - James S. Ackerman, professor emeritus of the history of art and architecture, Harvard University Leonardo da Vinci was the only artist of his time to have an intense interest in science. Evident in his sketchbooks, this interest led to his detailed biology and nature studies. In this podcast recorded on November 14, 1999, as part of the Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art series, Professor James S. Ackerman discusses how Leonardo occupied himself by expressing the forces of nature, not just the experience of nature. Leonardo established art as a communication of visual experience and as a means to discover both nature and invention. As Leonardo said, "Painting compels the mind of the painter to transform itself to the very mind of nature to become an interpreter between nature and art."

October 2011 - Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, poet, cofounder of Film Comment and the New America Cinema Group, and founder of Anthology Film Archives; Ken Jacobs, filmmaker, distinguished professor of cinema, S.U.N.Y. Binghampton, and founder of the Millenium Film Workshop; and M. M. Serra, filmmaker and executive director, Film-Makers' Cooperative. Fifty years ago, more than two dozen filmmakers wrote the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group/Film-Makers' Cooperative a communal, collaborative organization founded on the principles of "self-sufficiency and free expression through the art of cinema." In celebration of the organization's formal incorporation on July 14, 1961, the National Gallery presented a series of five programs of films from the Co-op's impressive catalogue and hosted filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, and executive director M. M. Serra in July 2011.

October 2011 - Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Little is known about the formative years of Michelangelo's career. Professor Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt discusses the myths of Michelangelo's early life generated by his biographical authors. Citing Vasari and Condivi's narratives, Professor Brandt tracks Michelangelo's professional infancy, revealing cover-ups of the setbacks, mistakes, and failures that plagued his early artistic career. Rather than deceitful omissions, Professor Brandt thinks of them "like other myths, as narratives reconstructed in each epoch to serve their narrators." Recorded on November 23, 1997, at the National Gallery of Art, this program is the inaugural lecture in the Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art series.

September 2011 - Christine Mehring, associate professor of art history and director of graduate studies, University of Chicago, and Stephen Vitiello, associate professor of kinetic imaging, Virginia Commonwealth University. Following the lectures is a conversation with Ken Hakuta, executor of the Nam June Paik estate, and Jon Huffman, curator of the Nam June Paik estate. Moderated by Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern and contemporary art, National Gallery of Art. Recorded on September 23, 2011, at the National Gallery of Art, as the exhibition In the Tower: Nam June Paik drew to a close, this symposium considers the work of this pioneer of new media from his earliest explorations of television to his later experiments with sound and video. This exhibition is the third installation for the In the Tower series, which presents work by significant artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The symposium was coordinated with and supported by the Embassy of Korea.

September 2011 - Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Sarah Greenough talks about her new book on the letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Volume One, 1915-1933, in this podcast recorded on September 18, 2011, at the National Gallery of Art. Greenough notes the insights provided by the correspondence on their art, their friendships with many key figures of early twentieth-century American art and culture, and, most especially, their relationship with each other.

September 2011 - Ann Hamilton, artist. On September 16, 2011, Ann Hamilton presented a lecture on her nearly 30-year career as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art. Hamilton has made multimedia installations with stunning qualities and quantities of materials: a room lined with small canvas dummies, a table spread with human and animal teeth, the artist herself wearing a man's suit covered in a layer of thousands of toothpicks. Along the way, she has constantly set and reset the course of contemporary art. Often using sound, found objects, and the spoken and written word, as well as photography and video, her objects and environments invite us to embark on sensory and metaphorical explorations of time, language, and memory. Textiles and fabric have consistently played an important role in her performances and installations�whether she is considering clothing as a membrane or (more recently) treating architecture itself as a kind of skin. The Gallery owns fifteen wor

September 2011 - Nancy Graves and Donald Saff, artists, in conversation with Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. Artists Nancy Graves and Donald Saff, artist and founding director of Graphicstudio, discuss the formation of the Graphicstudio archive at the National Gallery of Art with Ruth Fine in this podcast recorded on October 6, 1991. This program was held in honor of the exhibition Graphicstudio: Contemporary Art from the Collaborative Workshop at the University of South Florida, which was on view from September 15, 1991, to January 5, 1992, and for which Graves completed her most recent work, Canoptic Legerdemain. The archive consists of 140 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and works in other media created by 24 artists who worked in collaboration with Graphicstudio's printers and artisans.

September 2011 - Michael Kahn, artistic director, Shakespeare Theatre Company, in conversation with Eric Denker, lecturer, National Gallery of Art, and Faya Causey, head of the department of academic programs, National Gallery of Art. Although he never traveled to Italy, William Shakespeare set many of his plays there. In this lecture Michael Kahn discusses many of Shakespeare's plays set in Italy, concentrating on The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Harman Center for the Arts on June 21, 2011. This program, recorded on May 22, 2011, was organized in conjunction with the Gallery's exhibition Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals, on view from February 20, 2011, to May 30, 2011.

August 2011 - Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University In a series of six lectures, Michael Fried offers a compelling account of what he calls "the internal structure of the pictorial act" in the revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The accompanying publication, The Moment of Caravaggio, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this audio podcast of the fifth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 12, 2002, Professor Michael Fried discusses how the "violent" birth of the full-blown gallery picture (as seen in Judith and Holoferenes) is figured in Caravaggio's art as beheading or decapitation, an allegory for the act of painting.

August 2011 - Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University In a series of six lectures, Michael Fried offers a compelling account of what he calls "the internal structure of the pictorial act" in the revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The accompanying publication, The Moment of Caravaggio, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this audio podcast of the sixth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 19, 2002, Professor Michael Fried argues that Caravaggio's art should be understood not simply as a monument to a revolutionary style of pictorial realism, but also as an investigation into the psychic and physical dynamic that went into its making. Fried evokes this dynamic with concepts introduced in earlier lectures, including immersion and specularity, absorption and address, painting and mirroring, and optical and bodily modes of realism�what he calls "the internal structure of the

August 2011 - Scott Burton and George Segal, artists, in conversation with Nan Rosenthal, curator of 20th-century art, National Gallery of Art. In honor of A Century of Modern Sculpture: The Patsy and Raymond Nasher Collection, an exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art from June 28, 1987, to February 15, 1988, Scott Burton and George Segal discussed their work with Nan Rosenthal. The exhibition featured a selection of 70 works of 20th-century sculpture, collected for the Nashers' home in Dallas, Texas, and for installation at a Dallas shopping center and office complex. Held on December 6, 1987, this conversation was the one of the first programs at the Gallery to feature two living artists. Both artists focused on making sculpture for public spaces in the late 1980s--spaces whose users represent a heterogeneous group in respect to their knowledge of art and their taste.

August 2011 - Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University In a series of six lectures, Michael Fried offers a compelling account of what he calls "the internal structure of the pictorial act" in the revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The accompanying publication, The Moment of Caravaggio, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this audio podcast of the fourth lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 5, 2002, Professor Michael Fried explores how two polar entities in Caravaggio's art--absorption and address--lead to the emergence of the gallery picture.

August 2011 - Richard Misrach, photographer To coincide with the exhibition Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception, on view from February 20 to May 7, 2000, Richard Misrach discussed his photographs of desert cantos and other landscapes as following in Watkins' legacy. The lecture took place on March 26, 2000. Misrach distinguished himself in his 30-year career as one of the most accomplished photographers of our time. His passionate and intelligent records of the American West present the chilling details of assaults on the landscape by contemporary civilization, while also eloquently revealing its enduring beauty. Misrach explains that although he was not conscious of Watkins' photographs, which evidence the man-made in Pacific Northwest landscapes and were taken more than a hundred years ago, the profound influence of his work is unmistakable.

August 2011 - Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University In a series of six lectures, Michael Fried offers a compelling account of what he calls "the internal structure of the pictorial act" in the revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The accompanying publication, The Moment of Caravaggio, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this audio podcast of the third lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 28, 2002, Professor Michael Fried argues that Caravaggio's depiction of his figures as so deeply engrossed in what they are doing, feeling, and thinking is revolutionary.

August 2011 - Ed Ruscha, artist. Ed Ruscha discusses his artistic processes and influences, and their relationship to photography, drawing, and pop culture in this podcast recorded on February 13, 2005, at the National Gallery of Art. This lecture marked the opening of Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips�, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha, the first museum retrospective of the artist's drawings. The title of the exhibition refers to a quote from Ruscha about some of his drawing tools (cotton puffs and Q-tips�) and illusionary effects (smoke and mirrors). Featuring 89 works and 6 studio notebooks dated from 1959 to 2002, the retrospective traces Ruscha's career from early pop images of American commercial logos and gas stations to later images depicting words and phrases as subject matter.

August 2011 - Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Professor and director of the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University In a series of six lectures, Michael Fried offers a compelling account of what he calls "the internal structure of the pictorial act" in the revolutionary art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The accompanying publication, The Moment of Caravaggio, is available for purchase from the Gallery Shops. In this audio podcast of the second lecture, originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 21, 2002, Professor Michael Fried addresses Caravaggio's engagement with the act of painting, and contrasts that with specular moments of detachment. Fried argues that this divided relationship lies at the heart of Caravaggio's most radical art.

August 2011 - Pat Steir, artist, and Kathan Brown, founder and director of Crown Point Press, in conversation with Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art. In this podcast recorded on March 25, 1990, at the National Gallery of Art, Pat Steir appears in conversation with Kathan Brown to celebrate the exhibition The 1980s: Prints from the Collection of Joshua P. Smith. Moderated by exhibition curator Ruth Fine, the conversation explores the role that printmaking and the artist's involvement with Crown Point Press have played in her career. Also examined is Steir's use of paintings and drawings to address many of the important visual and conceptual issues of her generation.