National Gallery of Art | Audio

August 2014 - Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic, The New York Times, in conversation with Deborah Ziska, chief of press and public information, National Gallery of Art To honor the publication of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, Michael Kimmelman joined Deborah Ziska to discuss the inspiration for and purpose of his latest book. In this conversation recorded on September 24, 2005 at the National Gallery of Art, Kimmelman explains the desire to write about art that had changed his life. The Accidental Masterpiece explores art as life's great passion, revealing what can be learned from works of fine art and their creators. Kimmelman assures the reader that, even though art may seem inaccessible, beauty can be found almost anywhere and everywhere that one is open to the experience of it. The Accidental Masterpiece serves as a kind of adventure or journey, leading to a larger view of life through art.

July 2014 - Christopher Rothko, son of the artist and editor of his father's book, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. "One of the most important artists of the 20th century, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting over the course of his career. Rothko also wrote a number of essays and critical reviews during his lifetime, adding his thoughtful, intelligent, and opinionated voice to the debates of the contemporary art world. Although the artist never published a book of his varied and complex views, his heirs indicate that he occasionally spoke of the existence of such a manuscript to friends and colleagues. Stored in a New York City warehouse since the artist's death, this extraordinary manuscript," probably written around 1940–1941, was finally published in 2005. Titled The Artist's Reality, "this revelatory book discusses Rothko's ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of 'American art,' and much more." In this lecture recorded on June 11, 2005, at the National Gallery of Art, Christopher Rothko, the artist's son, describes "the discovery of the manuscript and the complicated and fascinating process of bringing the manuscript to publication." (Quotations from Yale University Press) Copyright © 2005 by Christopher Rothko

July 2014 - Anthony Alofsin, Roland Roessner Centennial Professor, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin. Anthony Alofsin is recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and as an expert on modern architecture. His research and writing on Wright's first travels to Europe have defined the life and work of the architect in the 1910s. Following his Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship (2003-2004) at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Alofsin returned to present an overview of Wright's contributions to American culture. In this lecture recorded on October 16, 2005, Alofsin describes Wright's architecture as transcendent works of creativity often associated with fine art. America's most well-known architect, Wright produced 450 built projects, thousands of drawings, and numerous ideas for other works; his range extended from household objects to entire communities, modest homes to industrial buildings. He revolutionized how one experiences domestic structures and campaigned to create an architecture that spoke to the nation's identity. Whereas his contemporaries looked to historical styles and European models, Wright's creative life coincided with the search for forms that represented America at its greatest dreams of freedom and individuality.

July 2014 - John Hollander, Sterling Professor of English, Yale University. Works of art are silent; poetry speaks its mind. Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture. Beginning with classical writers, poet and literary critic John Hollander explains that art and literature have developed a wide variety of relationships over the course of 2,000 years. In this lecture recorded on November 4, 2001 at the National Gallery of Art, Hollander specifically explores the ekphrastic relationship between a particular work of visual art or architecture and a particular poem. The word ekphrastic comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, meaning "out" and "speak," respectively—to give voice to the silent work of art by speaking for it, out of it, or, in so many ways, to it. Hollander distinguishes between actual and notional ekphrasis, invocations of actual works of art versus speaking of fictional works that exist only in description. He then reads from works by very different contemporary poets and connects them with corresponding works of art that the poems had in mind or in view.

July 2014 - Henry Adams, professor of American art, Case Western Reserve University. Andrew Wyeth first saw King Vidor's anti-war film The Big Parade when he was eight years old, and its emotional impact was overwhelming. Eventually, this experience inspired his first connected series of works. It became still more important to him in the traumatic aftermath of his father's death. During the course of his life he viewed the film some two hundred times, and many of his most famous paintings, including Christina's World, reenact key moments in the movie. In this lecture recorded on June 15, 2014 at the National Gallery of Art, Henry Adams explores Wyeth's fascination with World War I and The Big Parade, and the ways in which Vidor's path-breaking narrative approach and innovations in film technique encouraged Wyeth to rethink the expressive and philosophical possibilities of painting. This program has been scheduled to coincide with the exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In, organized by the National Gallery of Art, on view only in Washington through November 30, 2014

July 2014 - Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings, National Gallery of Art. At the end of the 19th century, Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring sold for a pittance, an unknown work by an artist who was only beginning to achieve recognition. Today it is revered as a great masterpiece, so famous that it is recognizable by its title alone, with the name of its maker being almost superfluous. In this lecture recorded on June 1, 2014, at the National Gallery of Art, curator Arthur Wheelock examines the reasons why this image resonates so profoundly with contemporary audiences.

June 2014 - George T. M. Shackelford, deputy director, Kimbell Art Museum. In this lecture recorded on February 2, 2014, at the National Gallery of Art, George Shackelford discusses Vincent van Gogh's remarkable portraits of himself and others—beginning with his earliest drawings from 1880 after his move to Brussels to his last paintings, completed in 1889. Using Van Gogh's letters in context, Shackelford describes the artist's desire to analyze and fix his own image. He argues that Van Gogh put more of himself, his feelings, and his thoughts into his work than any other artist of the 19th century. Ultimately, Shackelford concludes that Van Gogh's "whole art is that mirror on himself."

June 2014 - Henry Adams, professor of American art, Case Western Reserve University. Although one of the grayest of American cities, Cleveland was one of the earliest places in the country to embrace the colorful, ultra-modernist art of the Fauves and the Blue Rider group—doing so even before the Armory Show in 1913. Much of this activity came about through the activities of the Kokoon Club, whose members formed the city's first radically modern art group, the Cleveland Secession, and also staged an annual masked ball, whose outrageous posters and costumes—or lack thereof—that not only ran afoul of the vice squad but also introduced the entire city to modern art. In this lecture, recorded on June 16, 2014, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Henry Adams explores the emergence of ultra-modern artists in Cleveland, their surprising links with movie posters and commercial art, the ways in which they challenged the artistic and social mores of their time, the demise of this group during the Great Depression, and the lasting impact of this movement on several noted figures in American art, as well as, more widely, on the imagery of American popular culture.

June 2014 - Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth biographer and lifelong friend; reporter, correspondent, editor, and staff writer, Life magazine. Richard Meryman began an enduring friendship with Andrew Wyeth while writing for Life magazine in 1964. Over four decades, he recorded some 600 hours of conversations with Wyeth as well as with family, friends, and neighbors in Pennsylvania and Maine — including Christina Olson, subject of the renowned painting Christina's World. Meryman's book Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-Portrait offers a taste of those recordings, skillfully crafted into five monologues on key themes in Wyeth's work. In this lecture recorded on May 18, 2014, in honor of the exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In, Meryman shares a selection of audio recordings and the process of writing about Wyeth's spoken self-portrait. We hear Wyeth speak vividly of people and places that triggered memories and emotions to which he gave powerful expression in his art. He shares personal experiences and talks about artists who inspired him and why, revealing profound understanding of these influences. The exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, will be on view only in Washington through November 30, 2014.

June 2014 - Felix Monguilot Benzal, docent, Borghese Gallery, Rome, and Kress Interpretative Fellow (2012–2013), National Gallery of Art. In November of 1597, Doménikos Theotokópoulos (known as El Greco, 1541-1614) was commissioned to create a series of paintings for the recently built Capilla de San José (Chapel of Saint Joseph) in Toledo, Spain. Two of these paintings, Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597/1599) and Madonna and Child with Saint Martina and Saint Agnes (1597/1599), were later given to the newly created National Gallery of Art by Joseph E. Widener in August 1942, before its doors opened to the public. In this lecture recorded on March 24, 2014, as part of the Gallery's Works in Progress lecture series, Felix Monguilot Benzal discusses the history of the Chapel of Saint Joseph and the full provenance of the Gallery's two El Greco paintings.

June 2014 - Livia Stoenescu, visiting assistant professor, University of Houston-Clear Lake. Recorded on March 22, 2014, at the National Gallery of Art, this symposium explores the art and legacy of Doménikos Theotokópoulos (known as El Greco, 1541-1614). The 400th anniversary of the artist is being celebrated by exhibitions and programming throughout 2014. Born on the Greek island of Crete, El Greco spent the majority of his adult life in Toledo, Spain, and became known as the Greek from Toledo. An international panel of El Greco scholars provides an in-depth study of the artist's career, focusing on his early years in Greece and Italy and his renowned work completed in Toledo. The Gallery is also presenting an exhibition titled El Greco: A 400th Anniversary Celebration from Washington Area Collections, on view from November 2, 2014, through February 16, 2015. This program was coordinated with and supported by SPAIN arts and culture.

June 2014 - Hollis Clayson, Samuel H. Kress Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt's art is reexamined in this lecture recorded on May 14, 2014 at the National Gallery of Art. Professor Hollis Clayson argues for new approach to understanding Cassatt's signature mother-and-child paintings and her early black-and-white intaglio prints set in her Paris apartment library. The "monstrosities" in question arose from often overlooked aspects of the artist's radically inventive art. This program was held in conjunction with the Degas/Cassatt exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art, the sole venue, from May 11 to October 5, 2014.

June 2014 - Naomi Lyons and Jeremy Cox, trustees, Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation; and Ksenya Gurshtein, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art. For the last five years, Jeremy Cox and Naomi Lyons have been building an online catalogue raisonné of American artist Frederick Sommer (1905-1999), whose work explored an unusually broad array of subjects ranging from disorienting landscapes and macabre aspects of the natural world to surreal arrangements of found objects and virtual abstractions. Ksenya Gurshtein curated the exhibition A World of Bonds: Frederick Sommer's Photography and Friendships, on view at the National Gallery of Art from June 16 through August 4, 2013. Drawn largely from the Gallery's collection, which includes significant works gifted by the artist himself in 1995, the exhibition showcased not only the beauty and diversity of Sommer's striking images but put them in dialogue with the work of artist-friends who helped shape his vision. As a supplement to this temporary onsite exhibition, Gurshtein created a scholarly digital introduction to Sommer and his 35 photographs in the collection as a permanent feature of the Gallery's website. In this lecture recorded on March 31, 2014, as part of the Gallery's Works in Progress lecture series, Lyons, Cox, and Gurshtein reflect on their reasons for and experiences with using digital formats to produce scholarship, considering the ways in which they influence the knowledge available about a given artist, open up new ways of approaching and conveying a particular artist's sensibility, and affect our experience of analog art.

May 2014 - Livia Stoenescu, visiting assistant professor, University of Houston-Clear Lake. Recorded on March 22, 2014, at the National Gallery of Art, this symposium explores the art and legacy of Doménikos Theotokópoulos (known as El Greco, 1541-1614). The 400th anniversary of the artist is being celebrated by exhibitions and programming throughout 2014. Born on the Greek island of Crete, El Greco spent the majority of his adult life in Toledo, Spain, and became known as the Greek from Toledo. An international panel of El Greco scholars provides an in-depth study of the artist's career, focusing on his early years in Greece and Italy and his renowned work completed in Toledo. The Gallery is also presenting an exhibition titled El Greco: A 400th Anniversary Celebration from Washington Area Collections, on view from November 2, 2014, through February 16, 2015. This program was coordinated with and supported by SPAIN arts and culture.

May 2014 - Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings, National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery of Art houses one of the most celebrated collections of Dutch paintings in the world. Over the past several years, the Gallery has been updating its out-of-print catalogue of 17th-century Dutch paintings in preparation for publishing it anew online. In this lecture recorded on March 23, 2014, at the National Gallery of Art, this, the inaugural publication in the Gallery's Online Editions series, is discussed and demonstrated by the Gallery's curator of northern baroque paintings, and the curatorial, technical, and publishing team behind this innovative program initially funded by the Getty Foundation.