National Gallery of Art - Quick Takes

Descent from the Cross, Rembrandt Workshop, Oil/Linen, 1650/52, NGA


Adoration of the Magi, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Tempera/Wood, 1440/1460, NGA


The Kitchen Maid, Chardin, Oil/Linen, 1738, NGA

On Sunday, I went to the National Gallery of Art - West Building. These are some of my observations.

The Rembrandt paintings express such a broad range of thought and feeling - like life. Regardless of subject matter, he seems to consistently explore a portraiture of sorts. During this visit, I thought about the connections between the way he thinks about the head and the way he approaches landscape and narrative. I think his deep understanding of the head infuses his work with unrivaled emotional depth and awareness. I look at his work as often as possible and each time experience something different and new.

This time, the Italians offered me a fresh look at the round format. Aware of linear perspective and yet unencumbered by it, they freely altered scale to better express their ideas. A meaningful composition in the round reveals a more obvious relation between the composition and format and helps deepen my understanding of composition in general.

Looking at the space in the Chardin paintings was a remarkable visual experience. Instead of receding pictorial depth, his space seemed to also press forward - almost bubble towards the viewer. Two paintings - The Kitchen Maid and The Attentive Nurse - defy obvious and predictable pictorial space. In both, especially The Kitchen Maid, the figure seems to be on the verge of falling head first out of the painting. He is a genius at pictorial tension and balance.

What marvelous teachers!

Link National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

T.J. Clark, The Andrew Mellon Lectures, National Gallery of Art, 2009

Photo by Anne Wagner, © National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2009

"T. J. Clark, renowned art historian and George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and professor of the history of art at University of California, Berkeley, will present the Fifty-Eighth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts series, entitled Picasso and Truth, this spring at the National Gallery of Art in Washington...

...Tracing Picasso's path to the Reina Sofía's Guernica (1937), the lectures will center on a group of Picasso paintings from the 1920s, including Tate Modern's Three Dancers (1925), the Guggenheim Museum's Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), and the Tehran Museum's astonishing Painter and Model (1927). According to Clark, the 1920s were a period when Picasso attempted to revive or exceed the terms of cubism, experimenting with new kinds of space...

...The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in 1949, ' to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts...' " - National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Link Listen to the Lectures

Link TJ Clark, Wikipedia

Link NGA Lecture Abstracts Archive 2001 - 2008

Philip Guston - The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from Abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects." - Wikipedia

Link Full Text, Wikipedia

Link NGA, Washington DC

The Unheralded Pieces of the American Puzzle

Photo: Rob Shelley/National Gallery of Art

NY Times writer, Roberta Smith, comments on the recent reopening and redesign of the displays of American Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

"These 11 paintings are among 400 works of naïve art (300 paintings, 100 drawings) that the collectors Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch gave to the National Gallery between 1935 and 1980. As a result the National Gallery may be better prepared than almost any museum on earth to bring the strands of American painting together and make their reunion stick. The institution has the prominence and the depth in both naïve painting and the traditional narrative, as the current galleries excessively demonstrate."

Permalink Full NY Times Article - The Unheralded Pieces of the American Puzzle
Link National Gallery of Art

Lending a Hand - A Game

Go to the National Gallery of Art website, search the painting collection and select five paintings containing what you consider to be the most interesting hand or hands. E-mail the information back to this blog. The most creative and interesting submissions will be posted.

Your selections may be from paintings from any era or style, single or multiple figures, narrative or not. There are no restrictions on the number of hands or what they are doing. The hand or hands may be a single detail or from the entire painting. 

Link National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

 Jacque-Louis David, Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812, NGA

Rembrandt and Composition

Portraits present unique challenges with respect to pictorial composition. This is one reason landscape and still-life might be used to explain and explore compositional ideas. The ideas are far more accessible and obvious.

But perhaps because of these difficulties, portrait composition will reward us with more valuable information? Generally, what methods are used to analyze the compositional structures of painting or drawing? Are there more interesting and productive ways of looking at portrait composition? In the case of this self-portrait, what is the content (ideas) and how does the form create it? What do you think?