National Gallery of Art | Videos

In this lecture, originally presented as part of the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History” on November 21, 2014, James T. Tice, University of Oregon, discusses a project that will provide scholars with an innovative tool to study the complex urban fabric of Rome as it has evolved over three millennia. Using advanced GIS technology, this multidisciplinary project intends to create a layered history of Rome by updating the Forma Urbis Romae, the cartographic masterpiece of ancient Roman topography published in 1901 by Rodolfo Lanciani. This map measures 25 by 17 feet and employs an innovative graphic system that represents Rome’s historic urban fabric as a series of layers from ancient to modern. The map remains the standard archaeological reference for Rome even though it does not incorporate the numerous discoveries uncovered since its original publication. Tice and his fellow researchers plan to critically examine, update, and eventually republish the Forma Urbis Romae map as an interactive website. One of the website’s constituent elements will be an evolving geo-database that will both solicit and incorporate contributions by internationally prominent scholars in the field.

Sally Mann, artist. In this presentation recorded on June 21, 2015, at the National Gallery of Art, acclaimed photographer Sally Mann reads from her revealing memoir and family history, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are described as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." Mann crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel, but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

Elizabeth Cropper, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, offers a welcome and introduction to the conference “New Projects in Digital Art History,” held on November 21, 2014. In the first lecture of the conference, Paul B. Jaskot, DePaul University, considers how specific kinds of art-historical problems relate to digital mapping methods. Jaskot focuses on this question through a case study of the digital visualization of space and the built environment at Auschwitz, a site of generic and mostly functional buildings that can be labeled, broadly, as vernacular. In this case study, stemming from Jaskot’s ongoing collaboration with Anne Kelly Knowles, digital mapping as part of the research process allows a more critical historical analysis of one of the most brutal architectural planning endeavors of the modern period. Furthermore, the study highlights the methodological potential of digital analysis for a renewed emphasis on vernacular architecture as a central subject of art history.

In 1990 the National Gallery of Art launched an initiative to acquire the finest examples of the art of photography and to mount photography exhibitions of the highest quality, accompanied by scholarly publications and programs. In the years since, the Gallery's collection of photographs has grown to nearly 15,000 works encompassing the history of the medium from its beginnings in 1839 to the present, featuring in-depth holdings of work by many of the masters of the art form. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of this initiative, the Gallery presents the exhibition The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund. On view from May 3 through September 13, 2015, The Memory of Time explores the work of 26 contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography's relationship to time, memory, and history. In this conversation recorded on June 14, 2015, exhibition curator Sarah Greenough and Mark Ruwedel discuss the significant contribution of his photographs to the exhibition and their place within the arc of his career.

Fifty of the most important and beloved paintings of Paris and its environs by impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) is the focus of the first major U.S. retrospective of the artist's work in 20 years. On view in the West Building, from June 28 through October 4, 2015, the exhibition offers visitors a better understanding of Caillebotte's artistic character and the complexity of his contribution to modernist painting.

In 1990 the National Gallery of Art launched an initiative to acquire the finest examples of the art of photography and to mount photography exhibitions of the highest quality, accompanied by scholarly publications and programs. In the years since, the Gallery's collection of photographs has grown to nearly 15,000 works encompassing the history of the medium from its beginnings in 1839 to the present, featuring in-depth holdings of work by many of the masters of the art form. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of this initiative, the Gallery presents the exhibition The Memory of Time: Contemporary Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Acquired with the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund. On view from May 3 through September 13, 2015, The Memory of Time explores the work of 26 contemporary artists who investigate the richness and complexity of photography's relationship to time, memory, and history. In this conversation recorded on May 17, 2015, exhibition curator Sarah Greenough and Vera Lutter discuss Lutter's work featured in the exhibition and permanent collection within the context of her career.

Narrated by Ethan Hawke, this film was made in conjunction with the exhibition George Bellows. Bellows arrived in New York City in 1904 and depicted an America on the move. In a twenty-year career cut short by his death at age 42, he painted the rapidly growing modern city—its bustling crowds, skyscrapers, and awe-inspiring construction projects, as well as its bruising boxers, street urchins, and New Yorkers both hard at work and enjoying their leisure. He also captured the rugged beauty of New York's rivers and the grandeur of costal Maine. This documentary includes original footage shot in New York City and Maine; examples of Bellows' paintings, drawings, and prints; and archival footage and photographs. The film is made possible by the HRH Foundation.

Giorgio Vasari wrote two biographies of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo: the text published in the second edition of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1568 is a much-revised version of the first, printed in 1550. Both works are profoundly teleological, since they are both based on a misleading notion of artistic progress: the first culminating in the figure of Michelangelo, who mastered all three major arts, and the second ending with the eulogy of the Accademia del Disegno, recently founded (1563) under the political auspices of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. As Alessandro Nova shows in this lecture, Piero's lives do not fit the theoretical model, and their meaning can be fully appreciated only when they are embedded in a network that connects Vasari's récit of Paolo Uccello's biography with his fictional life of Jacopo Pontormo. All three were represented as improper intellectual figures deeply absorbed in their creative process, and their behavior allegedly endangered Vasari's efforts to promote a new figure of the artist perfectly integrated into the courtly society of his time.​ Recorded on February 18, 2015.

Narrated by Willem Dafoe and with Alfred Molina as the voice of Paul Gauguin, this film was made in conjunction with the exhibition Gauguin: Maker of Myth. Gauguin (1848–1903) abandoned impressionism to create an art driven less by observation than by imagination. His gifts as an artist were matched by a talent for creating myths about places, cultures, and most of all, himself. This film explores his search for an authenticity he felt missing in modern Europe, a search that took him to ever more remote lands: Brittany, Martinique, and Polynesia. Never finding the paradise of his dreams, he recreated it in his paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints. The film is available for sale at the National Gallery of Art. The film is made possible by the HRH Foundation.

David McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author and recipient of the National Book Award, discusses a selection of American paintings and sculptures in the Corcoran Gallery of Art collection, now part of the National Gallery of Art. In this interview filmed in 2013 at McCullough's Martha's Vineyard home, the author of The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris provides enlightening commentary on American art and history as seen through the lens of works included in a 2013–2014 Corcoran installation titled American Journeys: Visions of Place. Many of these works will go on view in the American and European galleries beginning in May 2015. The film is made possible by the HRH Foundation.

This film was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns. Used by artists since the Middle Ages, metalpoint in its simplest form involves inserting gold or silver wire into a stylus to make drawings on paper prepared with an abrasive coating. Kimberly Schenck, head of paper conservation at the National Gallery of Art, demonstrates the process of preparing the paper; Mark Leithauser, the Gallery's chief of design, demonstrates various ways of drawing with metal; and Stacey Sell, associate curator in the department of old master drawings, comments on the techniques used by the artists. This film is made possible by the HRH Foundation.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820, Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this fifth lecture, entitled "The Laboratory of Brussels, 1816–1819: The Apprentice Navez and the Master David Redraw the Language of Art," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 19, 2015, Professor Crow demonstrates how the exiled David seized the medium of drawing to foster new ways of selecting and reorganizing fragments of a discarded past.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820, Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this fourth lecture, entitled "The Religion of Ancient Art from London to Paris to Rome, 1815–1819: Canova and Lawrence Replenish Papal Splendor," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 12, 2015, Professor Crow shows how Rome, where both Italian and English artists served as agents in the repatriation of ancient art, became an international nexus in post-Napoleonic European culture. The difficulties of this endeavor, captured by Lawrence in his portrait of the reigning pope, came to symbolize the larger conflicts underlying dynastic restoration across Europe.

n this lecture originally presented on November 20, 2013, speaker Jennifer L. Roberts of Harvard University explores one of the fundamental operations of printmaking—reversal—in order to trace its impact on American art across a spectrum of media. Behind every print lies a matrix (from the Latin for mother): a plate or block or stone or screen from which the print has been "pulled." And in most printing processes, the final print is a reversed version of the matrix. Although reversal may seem at first to be a simple geometrical switching operation, its material and philosophical complexity is profound; indeed, one may posit a kind of "negative intelligence" that informs any work of art that deploys reversal. To focus on reversal is to open up new ways of thinking about connections among the fine, decorative, and industrial arts in America, not least because so many prominent American artists from the 18th through the 20th century had backgrounds in print and printmaking. "Apprenticed as an engraver"; "trained as a lithographer"; "found initial success as a commercial artist": such are the typical preludes of American artists' biographies. A rigorous analysis of reversal offers an opportunity to expand the adventure of print from the preludes into the main narratives of the stories we tell about American art. The lecture addresses reversal in several contexts, from the nature prints of Joseph Breintnall in the 1730s to the handprints of Jasper Johns in the 1960s, with a core focus on the later 19th century in the work of James McNeill Whistler and the American trompe-l'oeil painters.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814‒1820, Art historian Thomas Crow will consider the period following the fall of Napoleon. During this time, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift, with old certainties and boundaries dissolved. How did they then set new courses for themselves? Professor Crow's lectures answer that question by offering both the wide view of art centers across the continent—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels—and a close-up focus on individual actors— Francisco Goya (1746‒1828), Jacques-Louis David (1748‒1825), Antonio Canova (1757‒1822), Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769‒1830), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780‒1867), and Théodore Géricault (1791‒1824). Whether directly or indirectly, these artists were linked in a new international network with changed artistic priorities and new creative possibilities emerging from the wreckage of the old. In this third lecture, entitled "Cut Loose, 1815–1817: Napoleon Returns, David Crosses Borders, and Géricault Wanders Outcast Rome," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 29, 2015, Professor Crow examines the displaced and wandering existences of David and Géricault, both in geographical and psychological exile, during which each was forced to reexamine and reconfigure the fundamentals of his artistic life.