National Gallery of Art | Audio

Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. The Simpson Collection at the National Gallery of Art is one of the few remaining private collections assembled with the participation of artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). The centenary of Rodin’s death offers an occasion to examine the large number of works that Katherine Seney Simpson and John W. Simpson, the first American collectors to meet Rodin, gave to the Gallery in 1942. In this lecture recorded on May 5, 2017, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain provides an overview of the Simpson collection of drawings and sculptures in bronze, marble, terracotta, and plaster, including Rodin’s portrait of Mrs. Simpson. The Gallery has benefitted since from the generosity of other donors, helping to build, as Yale University art historian Charles Seymour Jr. stated, “a first-rate collection” of works by Rodin.

Meredith J. Gill, professor of Italian Renaissance art and chair, department of art history and archaeology, University of Maryland, College Park. To think about angels among the world’s religions is to think about the question of embodiment. As messenger figures, they choose human form, yet they are incorporeal and without gender in their theological essence. Angels have long invited highly abstract and intricate categories of classification, particularly within the medieval university curriculum for which Bonaventure, the “Seraphic Doctor,” and Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor,” wrote foundational texts. Yet angels have also invited the most sublime feats of artistic imagination. In this lecture recorded on April 28, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Meredith Gill discusses several angelic episodes in Renaissance art, such as Tobias and the Angel and the Fall of the Rebel Angels, reflecting on mortal identity and experience in early modern times

Perry Y. Chin, architect, and Susan Wertheim, chief architect and deputy administrator for capital projects, National Gallery of Art. In celebration of the 100th birthday of architect I. M. Pei on April 26, 2017, Susan Wertheim honors Pei’s gift to the nation: his design of the National Gallery of Art East Building. Harmonizing with architect John Russell Pope's neoclassical West Building, the award-winning East Building, which opened in 1978, was designed by Pei in the modern idiom of its time. Magnificently realizing the long-term vision of Gallery founder Andrew W. Mellon and his children, Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the East Building has taken its place as one of the great public structures in the nation's capital. Designed at a crucial point in Pei’s long and productive career, the East Building won the American Institute of Architect’s Twenty-five Year Award in 2004, and Pei, considered a living legend, was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983. Wertheim first discusses Pei’s architectural legacy at the Gallery and then joins with his longtime associate Perry Y. Chin to share experiences working on the recently completed East Building renovation.

Jarob J. Ortiz, large-format staff photographer, Heritage Documentation Programs, National Park Service. In winter 2015, the National Park Service (NPS) advertised a job listing in search of the next Ansel Adams (1902-1984), the landscape photographer known for his 1940s NPS commission to document nature as exemplified and protected in US National Parks. The full-time position with the Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) required experience with large-format photography, which provides a higher resolution, is more durable than 35mm film, and allows the photographer more control to render perspective. The HDP administers the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), the federal government's oldest preservation program, and its companion programs: the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). Documentation produced through the programs constitutes the nation's largest archive of historical architectural, engineering, and landscape documentation. The HABS/HAER/HALS collection is housed at the Library of Congress. Milwaukee-native Jarob J. Ortiz was selected for the HDP position out of 5,000 applicants. In this presentation held on April 18, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Ortiz shares the photographs he has taken while serving in this important role.

Kimberly A. Jones, curator of 19th-century French paintings, National Gallery of Art. Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) was a central figure in the history of early impressionism who worked closely with the renowned artists Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Auguste Renoir (1840-1917). Killed in the Franco-Prussian War just prior to his 29th birthday, Bazille all but vanished from history before his talent could be fully recognized. To celebrate the opening of Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism on April 9, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Kimberly A. Jones provides an overview of the exhibition, the first devoted to the artist in the United States in a quarter century. On view through July 9, 2017, the exhibition examines Bazille’s place within the vibrant avant-garde art scene of Paris in the 1860s and the role he played in the birth of the impressionist movement.

John A. Tyson, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, National Gallery of Art. In his classic 1972 Artforum essay, critic Lawrence Alloway described the art world as a network. Taking cues from Alloway’s observation about the nature of art production in the 60s and 70s, John A. Tyson proposes that the era’s portfolios of printed multiples can be understood as networked coproductions. In this lecture recorded on April 3, 2017, as part of the Works in Progress series, Tyson historically contextualizes a selection of collective projects from the National Gallery of Art’s holdings: Walasse Ting’s “1-Cent Life” (1963), the Wadsworth Athenaeum’s “X + X (Ten Works by Ten Painters)” (1964), curated by Samuel Wagstaff Jr.; gallerist Leo Castelli’s multimedia “Ten from Leo Castelli” (1968), William Copley’s serial, boxed magazine S.M.S. (February-December, 1968); and, finally, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)’s “The New York Collection for Stockholm” (1973). These portfolios consist of works in a variety of traditional and nontraditional artistic media—from poetry to silkscreen to plastic sculpture and even a vinyl record. As signaled by Nam June Paik’s Untitled print from E.A.T.’s portfolio, the notion of broadcasting information with art—evoking televisual connotations of “network”—was of concern to many. While scaled to tabletops, these multiples had a wide range of distribution: how they respectively negotiate concerns for materiality as well as desire for decentralization and dematerialization merits further analysis.

Christina Rosenberger, art historian. The abstract paintings of the American artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004) are often discussed in terms that approach religious devotion: they have been called a form of prayer, a revelation, even “purism in excelsis.” Martin’s carefully crafted works of art are designed to engender great floods of emotion in viewers. But what happens when we strip the rhetoric that surrounds Martin’s paintings away, and consider the art—the thousands of aesthetic choices that the artist made in her pursuit of a form of abstraction that was, to use her term, completely nonobjective? In this lecture held on March 19, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Christina Rosenberger charts Martin’s artistic evolution through careful attention to her form and facture, arguing that Martin’s early work (1947-1961) defines the terms for all of her subsequent artistic production.

Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, commissioner, American Battle Monuments Commission; chairperson, Historic Landmarks Preservation Center; commissioner, New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission; founder and chair, NYC Landmarks50 Alliance; chair, New York State Council on the Arts; and director, Trust for the National Mall. As the definitive resource on the architectural history of New York City, The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City’s Historic Buildings, 6th ed., documents and illustrates the 1,352 individual landmarks and 135 historic districts that have been accorded landmark status by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission since its establishment in 1965. Arranged chronologically by date of construction, the book’s entries offer a sequential overview of the city’s architectural history and richness, presenting a broad range of styles and building types: colonial farmhouses, Gilded Age mansions, churches, schools, libraries, museums, and the great 20th-century skyscrapers that are recognized throughout the world. In this lecture recorded on March 1, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art, Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel shares how so many of these structures have endured, in large measure, through the efforts of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and hundreds of private sector preservation organizations, large and small. Since the commission was established, New York City has become the leader of the preservation movement in the United States, with more buildings and districts designated and protected than in any other city

Diane Waggoner, curator of nineteenth-century photographs, National Gallery of Art. The first exhibition to focus exclusively on photographs made in the eastern half of the United States during the 19th century, East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography showcases some 175 works—from daguerreotypes and stereographs to albumen prints and cyanotypes—as well as several photographers whose efforts have often gone unheralded. Celebrating natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains, as well as capturing a cultural landscape fundamentally altered by industrialization, the Civil War, and tourism, these photographs not only helped shape America’s national identity but also played a role in the emergence of environmentalism. Diane Waggoner introduces the exhibition in this opening-day lecture recorded on March 12, 2017, at the National Gallery of Art. East of the Mississippi is on view through July 16, 2017.

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 14, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced When the Earth Trembled, the fourth program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 15, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced The Colorful World of Cinema, the third program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 14, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced Ladies First, the second program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.

Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder’s grandson and president of the Calder Foundation, in conversation with Harry Cooper, curator of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Perhaps no artist has a larger presence at the National Gallery of Art than Alexander Calder. His monumental mobile, commissioned for the opening of the East Building, has become nearly as iconic as the building itself. A part of the East Building renovation and expansion, Tower 2 now boasts the world’s largest display of works by Alexander Calder: more than 40 sculptures and paintings, spanning the period from the late 1920s through 1976 and including 19 long-term loans from the Calder Foundation. In addition to the works in the Tower 2 gallery and the atrium mobile, three Calder sculptures can be found around the Gallery’s campus: Obus (1972) was recently installed in the West Concourse Gallery; Tom’s (1974), on loan from the Calder Foundation, is on view outside the Seventh Street entrance; and another loan from the foundation, Cheval Rouge (1974), is installed in the Sculpture Garden. In this conversation recorded on February 26, 2017, Alexander S. C. Rower discusses the role of his grandfather’s art at the Gallery with Harry Cooper. This program is coordinated with the Calder Foundation.

Over the past decade, American artist Theaster Gates (b. 1973) has explored the built environment and the power of art and culture to transform experience. For the second exhibition in the reopened East Building Tower 3 galleries, Gates presents a new body of work—The Minor Arts—featuring several pieces created for the Gallery. The installation examines how discarded and ordinary objects, including the floor of a Chicago high school gym and the archives of Ebony magazine, acquire value through the stories we tell. In this conversation recorded on February 26, 2017, Theaster Gates and guest curator Sarah Newman discuss the works and themes of his exhibition Theaster Gates: The Minor Arts, on view at the Gallery from March 5 to September 4, 2017.

Elif Rongen, curator, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam. Belgian-born film impresario Jean Desmet (1875 – 1956) spurred the growth of a new urban film culture in Europe before and during World War I. Desmet’s collection of 35mm prints and related materials (including posters, handbills, correspondence, and other ephemera) is now a vast visual-historical archive preserved at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam. In 2011 the Desmet collection was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — one of the few film collections in the world to receive this designation. On January 14, 2017, EYE film curator Elif Rongen introduced Up in the Air!, the first program of short films from the Desmet collection for the six-part NGA film series Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory, 1906 – 1916.