Drawing on one of the earliest forms of photographic technology, Vera Lutter (German, b. 1960) creates monumental photographs of compelling architectural spaces. She first builds a camera obscura by darkening the interior of closed spaces—a suitcase, shipping container, or apartment—and leaving a small pinhole opening for light to enter. Placing light-sensitive paper opposite the opening, Lutter then exposes an image of the exterior view on the paper for an extended period of hours, days,...

Justin Wolff, associate professor of art history, University of Maine. In November 1937 Life magazine featured four lithographs by the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) in the article “Four Ways in Which the World May End.” In this lecture from the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held at the National Gallery of Art on October 22, 2016, Justin Wolff analyzes the so-called “End of the World” lithographs, part of the National Gallery of Art collection, in the context...

Nina L. Dubin, associate professor of art history, University of Illinois at Chicago. On the occasion of the exhibition Hubert Robert, 1733–1808 at the National Gallery of Art, Nina Dubin presented a lecture on September 26, 2016, that examined a series of Hubert Robert’s paintings from the 1780s. The theme of these works is courtship menaced by the potential for calamity. Male suitors climb ladders in an attempt to procure flowers for their female love interests or cling to tree branches...

Paige Rozanski, curatorial assistant, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. In this lecture held on September 26, 2016, as part of the Works in Progress series at the National Gallery of Art, Paige Rozanski sheds light on the discoveries she made during her research at the Dwan Gallery Archives and the Virginia Dwan Archives in preparation for the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971. Rozanski underscores the integral role this material played in planning...

Randall Griffey, associate curator, department of modern and contemporary art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. American painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) entered the modernist canon as a result of the abstract paintings he created in Germany in 1914-1915. But the paintings he created of his home state of Maine late in his career beginning in 1937 brought him his greatest acclaim during his lifetime. In fact, Hartley began his career in 1909 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery as a painter of...

Rachael Z. DeLue, associate professor, department of art and archaeology, Princeton University. The modern American artist Arthur Dove (1880–1946) drew inspiration from the natural world when making his paintings and assemblages, but he also played around with found objects, popular music, sound technology, aviation, farm animals, meteorology, language, and script, including his own signature. The circle motifs that appear persistently across Dove’s art serve to signify and connect these...

Narrated by John Lithgow, this film was made in conjunction with the exhibition Stuart Davis: In Full Swing. Stuart Davis (1892 –1964) was an American original. Trained as a realist painter, he became a pioneering abstract artist after seeing works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and other European modernists at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Davis’s exuberant, colorful compositions echo the dynamism of the American scene and the rhythms of jazz, the artist’s lifelong passion....

Jennifer Raab, assistant professor, department of the history of art, Yale University. What does it mean to see a work of art “in detail”? Speaking at the inaugural John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, held on October 22, 2016, at the National Gallery of Art, Jennifer Raab considers broader questions of detail, vision, and knowledge in 19th-century America by looking at a few of Frederic Church’s most famous landscape paintings. The John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art is made...

Swiss artist Jean Tinguely spent several months in Los Angeles in 1963 preparing for a Dwan Gallery exhibition, his studio a former factory rented by the dealer. Fellow artist Edward Kienholz escorted Tinguely and Virginia Dwan to a local hardware store where Tinguely gathered motors to operate his kinetic sculptures. The viewer operates Odessa by pressing a floor pedal, causing the sculpture to whir to life.

In April 1969, Virginia Dwan joined artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt on a journey to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The trio visited ancient Maya sites and took a boat ride on the Usumacinta River with Dwan filming their journey in Super 8 stock. Reflecting on her various travels, Dwan wrote, “I see the journeys as both adventure and metaphor of my ongoing quest for that which is beyond the clamor and the inherent struggles of contemporary life.”

Swiss artist Jean Tinguely spent several months in Los Angeles in 1963 preparing for a Dwan Gallery exhibition. In this kinetic portrait, Tinguely depicts gallery owner Virginia Dwan as a delicate arrangement of wires, a fireplace andiron, a radio circuit board, and a motor that causes the tuning dial to flicker between stations.

Artists Leonardo Drew and Jennie C. Jones with Pamela J. Joyner, collector. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art is widely recognized as one of the most significant collections of modern and contemporary work by African and African Diasporan artists. Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art draws upon the collection’s unparalleled holdings to explore the critical contributions made by artists to the evolution of visual art in the 20th and 21st centuries....

Virginia Dwan, collector, and James Meyer, deputy director and chief curator, Dia Art Foundation. The remarkable career of gallerist and patron Virginia Dwan is featured front and center for the first time in an exhibition of some 100 works, including highlights from Dwan's promised gift of her extraordinary personal collection to the National Gallery of Art. Founded by Dwan in a storefront in Los Angeles in 1959, Dwan's West Coast enterprise was a leading avant-garde space in the early...

This 6-minute film features works from the exhibition In the Tower: Barbara Kruger, presenting Kruger’s profile works—images of faces or figures seen in profile, over which the artist has layered attention-grabbing phrases and figures of speech. The film is narrated by the artist, who discusses her background, process, and methodology. It covers Kruger’s early career beginning in the 1970s as she transitioned from her work as a layout editor for Condé Nast to the art world. By the end of the...

Carlos Garaicoa, artist, in conversation with Michelle Bird, curatorial assistant, department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art, and Andrea Nelson, associate curator, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. Carlos Garaicoa Manso (b. Havana, Cuba, 1967) studied thermodynamics before his mandatory military service, during which he worked as a draughtsman. He then attended the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana from 1989 to 1994. Garaicoa takes a multidisciplinary...

James Layton, manager, Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, The Museum of Modern Art; David Pierce, founder of Media History Digital Library and president, Sunrise Entertainment Inc. Color was an integral part of early cinema, with tinting, toning, and other processes adding imaginative dimension to black-and-white images. In this Rajiv Vaidya Memorial Lecture recorded on December 6, 2015, James Layton and David Pierce, authors of The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915–1935, illustrate the efforts...

Elizabeth Alexander, poet, essayist, playwright and scholar; chancellor, Academy of American Poets; director of creativity and free expression, Ford Foundation; and Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. Elizabeth Alexander is the author of six books of poetry, including American Sublime, a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize; two collections of essays; and The Light of the World, her critically acclaimed memoir on love and loss. Her writing explores such...

Melissa Beck Lemke, image specialist for Italian art, National Gallery of Art. When the National Gallery of Art opened its doors in March 1941, the original Andrew W. Mellon gift was augmented by a collection of Italian art donated by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Kress was the first to offer a donation in response to Andrew Mellon's call for contributions for the new national art museum. For the Gallery's opening, Kress gave almost 400 paintings and sculptures. Ultimately, the foundation...

Max Koss, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Provenance Research Fellow, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago When the National Gallery of Art opened its doors in March 1941, the original Andrew W. Mellon gift was augmented by a collection of Italian art donated by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Kress was the first to offer a donation in response to Andrew Mellon's call for contributions for the new national art museum. Ultimately, the foundation gave the Gallery a total of...

Chiyo Ishikawa, Susan Brotman Deputy Director for Art and curator of European painting and sculpture, Seattle Art Museum. When the National Gallery of Art opened its doors in March 1941, the original Andrew W. Mellon gift was augmented by a collection of Italian art donated by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Kress was the first to offer a donation in response to Andrew Mellon's call for contributions for the new national art museum. For the Gallery's opening, Kress gave almost 400 paintings...

Nick Sousanis, comics artist, educator, and postdoctoral fellow in comics studies, University of Calgary. Unflattening began as an experiment in making an argument through images and as a challenge to traditional scholarship as it is currently produced in American universities. It embodies the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning. In this lecture recorded on June 12, 2016 at the National Gallery of Art, Nick Sousanis delves into the distinct ways that comics create meaning...

Max Marmor, president, Samuel H. Kress Foundation. When the National Gallery of Art opened its doors in March 1941, the original Andrew W. Mellon gift was augmented by a collection of Italian art donated by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Kress was the first to offer a donation in response to Andrew Mellon's call for contributions for the new national art museum. For the Gallery's opening, Kress gave almost 400 paintings and sculptures. Ultimately, the foundation gave the Gallery a total of...

Follow the journey of Marc Chagall’s masterful mosaic, Orphée, from its original setting in a private Georgetown garden through extensive conservation at the National Gallery of Art to its installation in a secluded spot in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden. Chagall designed the 10-by-17-foot mosaic as a wedding gift to John and Evelyn Nef, Washington art collectors and philanthropists, proclaiming: “Nothing for the house. The house is perfect as it is. But I will do something for the garden: a...

Leo Villareal, artist, in conversation with Molly Donovan, associate curator, department of modern art, National Gallery of Art. Born in 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Leo Villareal began experimenting with light, sound, and video while studying set design and sculpture at Yale University, where he received his BA. He earned his Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in the design of new media, computational media, and embedded computing from New York University’s pioneering interactive...

Lee Ewing, National Gallery of Art photographer, explores the challenges of photographing Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. The only sculpture that Degas exhibited during his lifetime, Little Dancer is one of the Gallery’s most important works. So fragile that it is rarely moved, this masterpiece is known for its unique mixed media: pigmented beeswax, a cotton bodice and tutu, linen slippers, and human hair. This video provides an inside look at the process of bringing this most...