National Gallery of Art | Videos

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 second lecture, entitled "At the Service of Kings, Madrid and Paris, 1814: Aging Goya and Upstart Géricault Face Their Restorations," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 22, 2015, Professor Crow examines how Goya and Géricault were similarly moved to transform artistic antecedents, dislodging even the primacy of the human subject as an adequate vehicle for expressing the violent uncertainties of their moment in history.

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 first lecture, entitled "Moscow Burns / The Pope Comes Home, 1812‒1814: David, Gros, and Ingres Test Empire's Facade," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on March 15, 2015, Professor Crow describes how key works by David, Gros, and Ingres, fashioned during this tumultuous two-year period, convey the tensions and fissures engendered by the unsustainable character of Napoleon's foundering empire.

Karen Thorsen, director of James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, and cowriter Douglas Dempsey discuss the making of their award-winning documentary, the challenges of restoring the original 16 mm film elements, and the necessity of ensuring access to this powerful film during the digital age. Produced in association with Maysles Films and PBS/American Masters, The Price of the Ticket premiered in 1990 at Sundance and went on to win numerous awards at home and abroad. An emotional portrait, a social critique, and a passionate plea for human equality, its extensive vérité footage allows Baldwin to tell his own story: exploring what it means to be born black, impoverished, gay, and gifted in a world that has yet to understand that "all men are brothers." "On-camera witnesses" include the late Maya Angelou (she reads passages from the author's writings), Amiri Baraka, David Leeming, Bobby Short, and William Styron. Now considered a documentary film classic, The Price of the Ticket has been restored with the help of the Ford Foundation, Maysles Documentary Center, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stan and Joanne Marder. This conversation and the world premiere of the film's restoration took place on October 12, 2014, at the National Gallery of Art. This program was supported by Dr. Darryl Atwell and Dr. Renicha McCree to honor the 90th anniversary of the birth of James Baldwin (1924–1987), American essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, and activist.

Kathleen A. Foster of the Philadelphia Museum of Art delivers the second biennial Wyeth Lecture in American Art, originally presented on October 27, 2005. Codified in the late 18th century as a full-length, life-size portrait with impressive costume and attributes of rank and identity, the Grand Manner portrait evolved in the 19th century to suit the status-consciousness of a new, bourgeois era. Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), born and educated in Philadelphia and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, painted about two hundred fifty finished portraits in his lifetime (apart from portrait-related figure subjects), most of which depict the sitter at life size but on a small canvas that shows less than half the figure. But from the very outset of his career, and with increasing frequency after 1889, he essayed full-length portraits in the Grand Manner. Between 1870 and 1909, when he all but ceased painting, Eakins produced 36 full-length portrait figures, either seated or standing. A closer look at the choice and treatment of these relatively few sitters teaches us much about Eakins, his methods, and his values. If, as Oscar Wilde remarked, every great portrait is a picture of the artist, this "grand" series reveals in the most ambitious format the identity of the artist, covertly buried in the elaborate perspective coordinates of each composition, or enacted in a private pantheon of colleagues—artists, scientists, and teachers—that embody his grandest aspirations and mirror his sense of self.

The experience of skating in the Sculpture Garden, surrounded by the grand architecture of national museums and monuments, is enhanced by views of splendid large-scale sculptures by modern and contemporary artists including Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Roxy Paine, Tony Smith, and others from the Gallery's renowned collection. The ice-skating season at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden runs from November through mid March , weather permitting. Located on the National Mall between 7th and 9th Streets along Constitution Avenue NW, the ice rink is a favorite Washington destination, attracting thousands of visitors to skate in the nation's capital.

Written and directed by Mary Hall Surface, the play Forward, 54th! was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art in 2013 in honor of the exhibition Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial. The Gallery staged 24 performances between September 2013 and March 2014. Through interweaving monologues and live Civil War-era music, this dramatic interpretation retells the rich stories of the people and events remembered in Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial.

Narrated by Adrien Brody, this film was made in conjunction with the exhibition El Greco in the National Gallery of Art and Washington-Area Collections: A 400th Anniversary Celebration. El Greco (1541 – 1614) was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete. He began his career as a painter of icons for Byzantine churches. Moving to Italy and then to Spain, his work fused lessons learned from the glories of Byzantium with the ravishing color of Venetian art and the elegant artificialities of Roman mannerism. Settling in Toledo, he created a passionate outpouring of work. He painted haunting portraits of saints and scholars, biblical scenes, martyrdoms, and miracles in a highly personal, visionary style charged with emotion and drama. His work puzzled many contemporaries, but later artists, including Picasso, considered him a prophet of modernism. This film was made possible by the HRH foundation

This film presents footage of Degas's masterpiece Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in situ at the National Gallery of Art. This wax ballerina is the only one of Degas's sculptures to have been produced by the artist himself, as opposed to the many posthumous casts of his works that survive. It is also the only three-dimensional work that Degas chose to exhibit during his lifetime. The video provides 360 degree of footage, as well as close-up shots of the ballerina's feet, face, and costume.

Speaker Bryan J. Wolf of Stanford University here presents the fifth Wyeth Lecture in American Art. In the years between 1967 and 1970, Philip Guston scandalized the New York art world by renouncing abstraction and turning instead to figurative modes of painting characterized by cartoonish images that mixed Ku Klux Klan hoods, idioms of popular culture, and a private vocabulary of cigars, light bulbs, legs, shoes, and other assorted—and often hairy—body parts. Buried within these often outlandish works are three recurring concerns: questions of pilgrimage, revelation, and epiphany that link Guston to Hudson River School painting of the nineteenth century; a covert interest in writing as a cultural logic that informs his painting practices; and an obsessive focus on line that distinguishes his art from the drips and gestural forms of Jackson Pollock. Ultimately, each of these concerns points to what can be seen as the real focus of Guston's figurative work: the history and memory of the Holocaust. Recorded on October 19, 2011.

The artistic collaboration between Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt is revealed through close examination of Cassatt's beloved painting Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) from the collection of the National Gallery of Art. Prompted by a rare letter from Cassatt to her dealer, Ambroise Vollard, referencing Degas's work on this painting, Gallery associate curator Kimberly A. Jones and senior paintings conservator Ann Hoenigswald spent years researching and examining the painting, on the hunt for Degas's contribution. In this short film, Jones and Hoenigswald shed light on their detective work and discoveries.

Julie Mehretu is best known for large-scale, densely packed paintings that combine meticulous rendering and seemingly spontaneous abstract gesture. Her work, including drawings and prints, is built up from multiple layers of archival, geographical, meteorological, and architectural imagery—designs, plans, diagrams, blueprints, ruins, charts, and graphs—traced and punctuated with calligraphic marks and obscuring erasures. She maps the histories of civilizations past and present, engaging with issues of social organization, globalization, and geopolitical connectivity. Mehretu has completed collaborative projects at professional printmaking studios across the United States, among them Gemini G.E.L in Los Angeles and Crown Point Press in San Francisco. For the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Lecture Series at the National Gallery of Art, Julie Mehretu joined Judith Brodie, curator and head of modern prints and drawings, on November 17, 2013 to discuss her career and artistic process, which can be seen firsthand in two prints: Circulation, in the Gallery's collection, and Circulation (working proof 9), on view through January 5, 2014 in the exhibition Yes, No, Maybe: Artists Working at Crown Point Press.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this sixth lecture, entitled "Constantine and Conversion: The Roles of the First Christian Emperor," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 11, 2014, Professor Grafton argues that in their retelling of the dramatic and exemplary life of Constantine, scholars and artists forged new forensic, historical, and multidisciplinary approaches. They used philological and antiquarian evidence to unpack a layered and incoherent body of evidence that exposed the apocryphal legends of what has been called an "inherited conglomerate." Protestant and Catholic writers concurred in their assessment that Constantine's reign marked a radical transformation of art and religion and was thus a historical moment of great consequence—yet one or two began to see Constantine in less dramatic terms, as the human, political figure that he was. The erudition and imagination of these scholars and artists in the early modern period produced sophisticated and acute views of the early church, from which we can still profit today.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton UniversityAnthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this fifth lecture, entitled "Martyrdom and Persecution: The Uses of Early Christian Suffering," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on May 4, 2014, Professor Grafton shows that early Christian martyrs were seen as the core of the true church and thus were used in the Renaissance by Catholic and Protestant scholars alike to defend either the status quo or reform agendas. Visual and textual references to ancient and modern martyrs were tightly linked in this period. Ancient martyrdom resonated with both the devout and the radical at a time when the theater of violence created by the first ideological wars in Europe made martyrdom not a distant, but a living experience, melding past, present, and future.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this fourth lecture, entitled "Relics and Ruins: Material Survivals and Early Modern Interpretations," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 27, 2014, Professor Grafton reveals Catholic and Protestant sensibilities as extremes that touched when scholars of both denominations feared the loss of tangible evidence of early Christian practice and ritual threatened in the course of modernization and destroyed in the wake of religious wars. Even as critical attitudes arose regarding the authenticity of these material remains, the past was seen in a new light in which they were acknowledged as witnesses to the pious traditions of the early church rather than as sources of corruption and deception.

Anthony Grafton, Princeton University. In this six-part lecture series entitled Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, Anthony Grafton focuses on the efforts of artists and scholars to recreate the early history of Christianity in a period of crisis in the church from the 15th to the 17th century. In this third lecture, entitled "Christian Origins and the Work of Time: Imagining the First Christians," originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art on April 13, 2014, Professor Grafton extols the religious imagination of the humanists who plumbed the early sources of Christian and Jewish traditions in order to write histories of the early church, producing unprecedented and radical visions of Christian origins.