National Gallery of Art | Audio

Alison Luchs, curator of early European sculpture and deputy head of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art. A new art form emerged in fifteenth-century Florence through the genius of Luca della Robbia, exalting the humble material of clay with brilliant modeling and surfaces shining with color that seems to defy time. The first comprehensive exhibition of Della Robbia work in the United States, originating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and taking new form at the National Gallery of Art, shows how three generations of Luca's family of skilled artists and entrepreneurs, responding to international demand, created magnificent sculpture in glazed terracotta. To celebrate opening day on February 5, 2017, Alison Luchs explores the human sensitivity, spirit-lifting color, and technical ingenuity that secure the appeal of Della Robbia sculpture into the twenty-first century. Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence is on view through June 4, 2017.

Jamie Gabbarelli, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art. On January 23, 2017, as part of a Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Jamie Gabbarelli provides a brief history of the Gallery’s recently expanded collection of Renaissance maiolica. As a means to introduce an upcoming exhibition, Gabbarelli highlights and analyzes these refined, beguiling, and brightly colored ceramics in connection with Renaissance prints and illustrated books, which played a key role in the development of ceramics decoration in early modern Italy.

Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art; Joan Jonas, artist; and Jason Moran, pianist and artistic director for jazz, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. On February 4, 2017, pioneering performance and video artist Joan Jonas collaborated with pianist Jason Moran, the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz, in a multimedia piece inspired by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness’s 1968 novel Under the Glacier, which tells the story of a young emissary sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate paranormal activity surrounding a glacier. For this live-performance art experience at the Kennedy Center, Jonas and Moran interacted with one another through narration, painting, video projections, movement, and sound. To celebrate the performance, Jonas and Moran joined Lynne Cooke in this conversation held the following day, February 5, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art. This program was held in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Many of the artists associated with the photographer and gallery director Alfred Stieglitz explored abstract portraiture in the early decades of the twentieth century. These artists included Marius de Zayas, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Stieglitz himself. But beyond a few watercolors made in 1917, Georgia O’Keeffe is not known to have extensively investigated this genre. In this lecture, held on January 22, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Sarah Greenough suggests that O’Keeffe made many more abstract portraits than have been previously identified, which have, as she herself admitted in the early 1970s, “slipped into the world as abstractions.”

Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art, in conversation with Douglas Crimp, art historian, critic, and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and professor of visual and cultural studies, University of Rochester. Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic who profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—a name Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, little is known about Crimp’s own formative experiences before the Pictures Generation. On January 8, 2017, Douglas Crimp joined Lynne Cooke to discuss the publication of Before Pictures. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s.

Tom Nichols, Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. This lecture by Tom Nichols, held on December 9, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, celebrates the publication of Renaissance Art in Venice: From Tradition to Individualism. Nichols describes how the spread of Renaissance values led to the development of artistic invention in Venice. However, this inventiveness continued to relate to ideas of more traditional corporate and public ideal of “Venetian-ness.” Nichols also discusses some of the choices raised by writing a history of Renaissance art in Venice and how these were resolved.

Jane McFadden, department chair of humanities and sciences, ArtCenter College of Design. 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, Jane McFadden describes how Virginia Dwan offered pivotal support to artists expanding the field of sculpture beyond the gallery in the late 1960s. Exploring these early endeavors, McFadden considers what unseen histories might emerge from understanding Dwan as a central collaborator in well-known works of land art. By tracing the resonance of key works like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative beyond established interpretations of site and land art, McFadden draws from the shadows the ghosts and other hallucinatory effects of this historical moment that are difficult to see.

Emily Taub Webb, professor of art history, Savannah College of Art and Design. Supporting her stable of artists and their often-experimental practices remained Virginia Dwan’s primary aim as director of her groundbreaking New York gallery. Along the way, the field-expanding work she promoted required new possibilities for exhibition, both inside and outside the gallery walls, which advanced notions of site and reimagined the function of the gallery itself. 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, Emily Taub Webb explores the contributions that Dwan Gallery made to site-oriented practices—including minimalism, conceptual art, and land art—through close analysis of several exhibitions held between 1967 and 1970.

Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, department of art history, department of cinema and media studies, University of Chicago. In this Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture recorded on December 4, 2016, Tom Gunning presented his research into the influence of the motion picture on both the visual arts and the act of perception. He states that “at the point of transformation from the projected film image to a projected electronic and digital one, we have an opportunity to reflect on what a revolution the moving image has sparked in our collective sense of what a ‘picture’ is. For nearly two centuries, images have moved and thereby introduced new visual relations to time and representation. This discussion searches for the roots and implications of the transformation, one that continues to this day.”

Patricia Fortini Brown, professor emerita of art and archaeology, Princeton University. When we think of Venice, we think of a city in the sea, a city surrounded by water. And yet, before the modern era, the city had no source of fresh water other than the rain from heaven or barges from the mainland. Therein lies the paradox: Venice is in the water and has no water. In this 20th annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art recorded on November 6, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Patricia Fortini Brown addresses how the Venetians dealt with this deficiency of nature by creating a unique genre of public art: the Venetian wellhead. Also addressed are the change and the challenge that came with the expansion of the Venetian empire: the gift of running water and the need to harness it. Again, the Venetians seized the initiative and created fountains that transformed urban spaces from the Terraferma to the Stato da Mar into places of encounter and aesthetic delight.

Artists Joan Snyder and David Reed in conversation with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, distinguished professor of psychology and management and founding codirector of the Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University, and Molly Donovan, curator of art, 1975–present, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes in his well-known theory on flow the total involvement in any highly skilled, challenging activity, when self-consciousness and the sense of time dissolve into pure concentration. The creative process is a perfect illustration of this theory. In the East Building installation Flow: Modern Art from the Collection, the theme of flow can be found in the transit of brushed or poured pigment across objects, canvas, and floor; in the flux of color and composition; in the moving circuitry of words and pictures; and in images of fluidity, water, and migration. The recent renovation of the East Building, which opened many new paths of circulation through the museum, reminds us that flow is equally important for viewers forging new ideas and connections with works of art. In this conversation held on December 11, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Molly Donovan and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi join artists David Reed and Joan Snyder, whose paintings are included in the Flow installation.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., curator of northern baroque paintings, National Gallery of Art. In this lecture held on December 11, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. introduces the exhibition Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, on view through January 2, 2017. More than 90 drawings and 27 paintings by such renowned Golden Age masters as Aelbert Cuyp, Pieter Jansz Saenredam, and Rembrandt van Rijn reveal the many ways Dutch artists used preliminary drawings in the painting process. The immediacy and the true-to-life character of 17th-century Dutch paintings suggest that artists painted them from life. These artists, however, painted scenes in their studios, often using drawings as points of departure. Wheelock examines the surprisingly various ways in which Dutch artists used drawings in the creative process.

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 explores how coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be

Robert Hobbs, Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair, Virginia Commonwealth University, and visiting professor, Yale University. Among twentieth-century artistic styles, minimalism is remarkable for the great number of field theories developed to interpret it. 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, Robert Hobbs analyzes some of the strategies artists employed to avoid interpretation as a primary means for reconsidering minimalism, using Virginia Dwan’s approach to this art as a starting point.

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 charged tableaux — including The Beanery, which she showed in 1965, and the disturbing State Hospital, shown in her exhibition of his concept tableaux in 1967 — testifies to a particularly rich moment in her take-up of new art. Later Kienholz found himself having to shift the installation of ambitious new work from New York and Los Angeles to venues in Europe.