Displaying items by tag: National Gallery of Art

At its October 2015 Board of Trustees meeting, the National Gallery of Art acquired a large number of drawings, prints and photographs that greatly strengthen its collection. Highlights include extraordinary drawings by Pieter Jansz Saenredam (1597–1665) and Hans Rottenhammer (1564–1625), a bound volume with over 200 15th-century woodcuts, as well as a painting from the Thesaurus series by Mel Bochner (b. 1940). Promised photographs include numerous outstanding gelatin silver prints by Diane Arbus (1923–1971), Richard Avedon (1923–2004), and Robert Frank (b. 1924).

Paintings by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey reside in the White House, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and museums at Yale and Princeton, but the best place to commune with Cropsey’s glorious 19th-century landscapes is in an oasis in Hastings-on-Hudson.

Not far from the rush of Metro-North trains on the Hudson Line, behind a commuter parking lot, is the Gallery of Art, which houses roughly 75 paintings spanning the career of an artist who idolized Thomas Cole and taught himself to paint well enough to join the likes of John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church in the Hudson River School’s top tier.

The National Gallery of Art added another 1,541 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art to its permanent collection earlier this month, bringing the total works it acquired from the dismantled Corcoran to almost 8,000.

The majority of works in this second round of acquisitions, voted on Oct. 1 and announced Thursday, are lithographs by the prolific 19th century Frenchman Honoré Daumier. The museum accepted 1,230 works by Daumier, including a large work from 1834 titled “Le Ventre Legislatif.”

Dia Art Foundation has named art historian and curator James Meyer to fill two leadership posts as the New York-based nonprofit known for its cavernous exhibition space in Beacon, N.Y., works to reassert its presence in Chelsea.

In January Mr. Meyer, now an associate curator of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will become Dia’s deputy director. He will also be chief curator, a newly created role that Dia’s director, Jessica Morgan, said reflected the foundation’s expanded scope.

Whether it achieved its goal of preserving the legacy of the Corcoran Gallery is debatable, but the landmark agreement that broke apart Washington’s oldest private museum has been an absolute bonanza for the National Gallery of Art.

After its board of trustees approves the next round of acquisitions on Oct. 1, the National Gallery of Art will have accessioned about 40 percent of the Corcoran’s collection, including priceless pieces by Edgar Degas, Frederic Edwin Church, John Singer Sargent and Carrie Mae Weems.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has lent one of its great treasures—Johannes Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663)—to the National Gallery of Art in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the landmark Johannes Vermeer exhibition, which opened here in November 1995 before traveling to the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague, in March 1996.

This luminous masterpiece, recently restored at the Rijksmuseum, will be displayed through December 1, 2016, in the Dutch and Flemish Cabinet Galleries. It will hang with Vermeer paintings from the Gallery's own collection, including Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664) and Girl with a Red Hat (c. 1665/1666)—the latter newly returned after being featured in Small Treasures, an exhibition shown in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama—as well as Girl with a Flute (1665–1675), attributed to Vermeer.

A rare early portrait by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), a self-portrait by Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–1668), a groundbreaking work by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), and a remarkable photograph of Alice and Lorina Liddell by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, are among works recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Three rare illustrated books and a portfolio, all highlighting aspects of the New World, were donated by Harry W. Havemeyer in memory of his father, Horace Havemeyer. Harry W. Havemeyer also pledged an extraordinary collection of 117 early American views and historical prints assembled by him and his father, in whose memory the pledge was made.

While New York's Museum of Modern Art has settled its union dispute, the ongoing staffing crisis at London's National Gallery of Art seems poised to continue, with a strike involving all union workers set to begin on August 17.

The Public and Commercial Services union has informed the museum of its plans, which include four additional days of strikes on August 4, 5, 6, and 12. The union voted overwhelmingly in favor of an all-out strike.

In its pre-Instagram, pretelevision, all-but-pre-photography day, George Caleb Bingham’s “The Jolly Flatboatmen” (1846) was a viral image, a joyous genre painting of America’s westward expansion that became wildly popular through mezzotints and lithographs. The work itself, considered one of the most important American paintings of its kind, has hung in the National Gallery of Art in Washington for so many decades — regularly since 1956 — that it long ago came to seem like a part of the museum’s fabric.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired works by three contemporary female artists and a Chicago outsider artist using funds from the museum’s Collectors Committee and other donors.

Cecily Brown’s painting “Girl on a Swing,” Martha Rosler’s photomontage “Cleaning the Drapes” and Roni Horn’s cast-glass sculpture “Opposite of White, v. 2” were added to the collection at the museum’s board meeting May 1.