National Gallery of Art | Audio

March 2013 - Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art and director of graduate studies, Yale University; Jason Rosenfeld, distinguished chair and professor of art history, Marymount Manhattan College; and Diane Waggoner, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. In this podcast recorded on February 17, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Diane Waggoner celebrate the opening of the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900, the first major survey of Pre-Raphaelite art to be shown in the United States. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of young artists who sought to overturn established traditions of painting and made art that looked to the past for inspiration, but also engaged directly with the bustling modern world of Victorian Britain. The exhibition features some 130 paintings, sculptures, photography, works on paper, and decorative art objects that reflect the ideals of Britain's first modern art movement. Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848–1900 is on display through May 19, 2013.

February 2013 - Charles Ritchie, associate curator of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art While Ellsworth Kelly is best known for crafting pristine, monochrome shapes, he has periodically employed chance as a strategy in composing works. The series of 23 paper-pulp works featured in the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: Colored Paper Images, on view at the National Gallery of Art from December 16, 2012, through December 1, 2013, is a dramatic example of this approach. Wet colored paper pulps were pressed into freshly made sheets of paper, resulting in color bleeds that eroded the precision of his designs. In this lecture recorded on February 10, 2013, Charles Ritchie investigates factors contributing to the success of this project—from Kelly's improvisation on earlier motifs to print publisher Ken Tyler's study of pigmentation in order to create strongly colored, lightfast paper pulps. Ritchie also discusses the expertise of veteran papermakers John and Kathleen Koller, who developed the paper for this project.

February 2013 - Gwendolyn H. Everett, assistant professor, department of art, Howard University Gwendolyn H. Everett, scholar and author of the award-winning children's book Li'L Sis and Uncle Willie: A Story Based on the Life and Paintings of William H. Johnson, provides an overview of William Henry Johnson's (1901-1970) career as part of the Five African American Artists lecture series recorded on August 3, 2003. Everett traces Johnson's determination to become an artist, despite a humble upbringing in South Carolina, to his years at a segregated elementary school where art was not part of the formal curriculum. In 1918, during the first Great Migration, Johnson moved to New York to pursue artistic training unavailable in the South. While living in Harlem and working several jobs to support himself, he was accepted into the prestigious National Academy of Design. Noted watercolorist Charles Webster Hawthorne provided critical mentorship at the academy, hired Johnson to work at the Cape Cod School of Art, and sponsored his further training in Europe. Johnson supplemented this sponsorship with prizes awarded by the academy and funds earned working for Ashcan School painter George Luks. In 1920s Paris, Johnson lived in the former studio of James McNeill Whistler and became acquainted with Henry O. Tanner, an African American expatriate artist who had achieved international acclaim and who would become a pivotal figure in Johnson's rise to prominence. Follow along as Everett illustrates Johnson's journey—marked by determination, strengthened by hard work, and bolstered by the support of influential artists—that led him to become one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century.

February 2013 - Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and professor of history of art, University of Texas at Austin. The exhibition Willem de Kooning: Paintings, on view at the National Gallery of Art from May 8 to September 5, 1994, was presented in honor of the artist's 90th birthday. The exhibition included 76 paintings that spanned de Kooning's career from the 1930s to the mid-1980s. In this lecture recorded on May 29, 1994, catalogue author Richard Shiff highlights four aspects of the artist's career. First, Shiff explores de Kooning's involvement with change: he thought of himself as always evolving, and his work could not be classified under a single style. Second, Shiff describes the physicality of de Kooning's work: the artist became involved with materials of real substance and engaged his body with these materials by pushing, pulling, and physically manipulating them. Third, Shiff shares how to look at and think about de Kooning's figures and representations, which initially might not be recognizable. Fourth, de Kooning resisted any description of himself more elaborate than painter: here Shiff addresses de Kooning's objections to abstract art—even though he made abstract work, he did not consider himself an abstractionist.

February 2013 - Tania Bruguera, artist; Tom Finkelpearl, executive director, Queens Museum of Art; and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artist. Socially cooperative art is a field not well understood by many, indeed even in the art world. Why is it art? Where does art end and social action begin? Who is the author of a cooperative project? In this lecture recorded on February 3, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, Tom Finkelpearl celebrates his latest publication, What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation, by providing an overview of socially cooperative art—where it comes from, what its artistic roots are, and why it can be considered valuable. Tania Bruguera and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, two of the most important artists working in America today in this field, then describe their work, focusing on a single project. Bruguera, Finkelpearl, and Ukeles take a careful look at how art can intersect with life and how artists are reimagining this intersection in the new avant-garde of participatory, activist, community-inclusive art.

February 2013 - Gwendolyn H. Everett, lecturer, National Gallery of Art. As part of the Artist in Residence lecture series, Gwendolyn H. Everett focused on Henry Ossawa Tanner's (1859-1937) visits to the Holy Land, and how this travel affected the later religious paintings for which he achieved international recognition. In this podcast recorded on August 9, 1987, Everett explains the formative influence of Tanner's upbringing in an educated, religious family in post-Civil War Philadelphia. Tanner's father was a minister and, later, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and his mother administered a Methodist school. Tanner enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as the only African American student in 1879, graduating in 1885. His professor, the artist Thomas Eakins, encouraged a progressive method of study from live models instead of plaster casts, which profoundly affected Tanner. after 1891 Tanner resided primarily in France; by 1895 his paintings were mostly of biblical themes, and in 1897 he made his first trip to the Holy Land, where his firsthand experience led to mastery of religious subject matter. He visited the region several times to explore mosques and biblical sites, and to complete character studies of the local population, as he had learned from Eakins. Tanner invigorated religious painting with modernism and with his deeply rooted faith, achieving renown in the international art world.

February 2013 - Alison Luchs, curator of early European sculpture, National Gallery of Art Michelangelo created the statue now known as David-Apollo around 1530 to please the tyrannical governor of Florence, Baccio Valori. The double name of this unfinished work, which is on loan to the National Gallery of Art from the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, reflects contradictory evidence—both visual and documentary—concerning the subject. The graceful figure, its surface still veiled in chisel marks, embodies ambiguities and conflicts in Michelangelo's own life. This lecture, recorded on January 27, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, explores the mysteries surrounding the statue, the significance of its unfinished condition, and responses to it from later artists. The loan of David-Apollo opened the nationwide celebration 2013―The Year of Italian Culture.The sculpture is on view from December 13, 2012, to March 2, 2013.

February 2013 - David C. Driskell, artist, curator, and professor of art, University of Maryland, College Park . On January 11, 1990, the National Gallery of Art announced an initiative to address the underrepresentation of minorities—particularly African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans—in the museum profession. In response, David Driskell presented a lecture at the Gallery on February 11, 1990, on multi-cultural representation in art museum collections and exhibitions and among staff and visitors. Unresolved issues in our cultural history raise questions about why the arts have been divided along racial lines—if, as Driskell observes, all art emanates from the salient desire to express the inner urges of the human spirit. This quality we all possess is colorless, classless, and uncluttered by feelings of racial superiority. The insistence on dividing art in the United States along racial lines demonstrates a response different in both thought and action than that seen in older cultures and ancient societies. Driskell hopes that these impending initiatives allow us to enter the 21st century with a more holistic view of our history and the cultural pluralism that is the privilege of this nation.

January 2013 - Charles W. Haxthausen, Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Williams College. "My work," the German photo artist Candida Höfer has said, "is about making images of spaces." Yet both she and fellow photographer Thomas Struth are equally interested in the dimension of time andthe evidence of layers of history in the spaces they photograph. Although Struth's and Höfer's photographs are inevitably the products of a single exposure, of a unique, fugitive moment, their images manifest a temporal complexity and transparency. Recorded on January 13, 2013, at the National Gallery of Art, the lecture by Professor Haxthausen explores the ways in which these artists' work complicates how we think about the relationship of photography to time.

January 2013 - Harry Cooper, curator and head, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art, with original slides courtesy of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. On November 11, 1995, Roy Lichtenstein was in Japan to receive the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation. In accepting the award, he delivered a lecture on the evolution of his work since his Pop breakthrough of 1961. Thanks to the generosity of the artist's estate and foundation, Harry Cooper, the National Gallery of Art's curator of modern art, presented this lecture at the Gallery, with the original slides, on January 9, 2013—in honor of Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective, the first major exhibition of the artist's work since his death in 1997. The exhibition was on view at the Gallery from October 14, 2012, to January 13, 2013.

January 2013 - Ruth Fine, curator of modern prints and drawings, National Gallery of Art, and Calvin Tomkins, author and staff writer, The New Yorker. In this conversation with Ruth Fine recorded on March 17, 1997, Calvin Tomkins shares the history of his relationship with Marcel Duchamp and the process of writing a biography on this enigmatic artist. As a foreign news writer for Newsweek with hardly any knowledge of Duchamp or modern art, Tomkins was assigned to interview him in 1959. The interview was so fascinating that it led to Tomkins' first interest in modern art. After joining The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1960, one of Tomkins' early profiles was on Duchamp; two years later he was asked by the Time Life series to write its book on the artist. Eventually, Tomkins approached Duchamp's widow about the idea of writing a proper biography on the artist. Alexina "Teeny" Duchamp asked why he would want to do that, but granted permission as long as he did not write anything too personal. Tomkins relied on hours of recorded conversations between himself and Duchamp, as well as interviews with his contemporaries and letters from Duchamp saved by others. Duchamp saved nothing, traveling light all his life. In this biography, Tomkins demonstrates that Duchamp was agnostic about art, believing that life was more important

March 2013 - Mia Fineman, assistant curator, department of photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art The urge to modify camera images is as old as photography itself—only the methods have changed. Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photographs before the digital age. The exhibition, on view at the National Gallery of Art from February 17 to May 5, 2013, offers a provocative new perspective on the history of photography. In this lecture recorded on February 24, 2013, exhibition curator Mia Fineman traces photographic manipulation from the 1840s through the 1980s and shows that photography is—and always has been—a medium of fabricated truths and artful lies.

January 2013 - Sidney Geist, sculptor, and professor of sculpture, New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. In conjunction with the exhibition Rodin Rediscovered, on view at the National Gallery of Art from June 28, 1981, to May 2, 1982, Sidney Geist highlights some of the 366 catalogued works by Auguste Rodin that filled spaces on each of the East Building's four levels. With works from about 40 American and European collections, the exhibition recreated a typical Paris Salon of the 1870s. Twenty-nine sculptures filled the Upper Level Galleries, continued downward through the building with nine sections devoted to different themes of Rodin's work, and ended on the Concourse with a new eight-ton bronze cast of The Gates of Hell with its 186 figures. In this lecture recorded on September 27, 1981, Geist brings his unique perspective as a sculptor to the examination of Rodin's work, expressing how difficult it is to separate Rodin's technical ability from the mystical quality of his sculpture. This intertwining of the human and the divine, the mundane and the transcendent led Geist to remark of Rodin and his apprentice, Constantin Brancusi: "Sculpture is the place we read their spirits."

January 2013 - Emmet Gowin, photographer and professor of visual arts, Princeton University. In the first of two lectures honoring the exhibition Stieglitz in the Darkroom, on view at the National Gallery of Art from October 4, 1992, to February 14, 1993, photographer Emmet Gowin shares the relevance of Alfred Stieglitz's (1864-1946) work to his own. The exhibition of 75 photographic prints, chosen from the "key set" of 1,600 photographs given to the Gallery by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949 and 1980, spanned Stieglitz's career. It demonstrated how a photographer can alter the aesthetics of his art and meaning through cropping, scale, tone, paper selection, and printing process—and also the extraordinary commitment a photographer has to his work. One of the most important photographers of his generation, Gowin (born 1941) is the son of a Methodist minister and considered America and Alfred Stieglitz (1934) to be his second bible. For this lecture recorded on November 29, 1992, Gowin used the title of his undergraduate senior thesis, demonstrating his strong connection with Stieglitz and Robert Frank's The Americans (1958). Tracing the influence of Stieglitz throughout his career, Gowin shares how his work transitioned from photographing primarily human beings to making aerial photographs of toxic waste sites and nuclear reservations.

January 2013 - David Alan Brown, curator of Italian and Spanish paintings, National Gallery of Art. In 1974, Michael Whitney Straight, scion of the Whitney family and an American arts administrator, donated Giorgione's portrait titled Giovanni Borgherini and His Tutor to the National Gallery of Art. At the time of the donation, Straight was serving as deputy chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts. Straight's legacy as an art collector is often overshadowed by his self-admitted involvement within the Communist party. In this lecture given on October 1, 2012, David Brown sheds light on Straight's vocation as a collector by attempting to connect his activities as a Soviet sympathizer and agent with his interest in the Giorgione painting and the technical evidence gathered about it.