Displaying items by tag: National Gallery of Art

The Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.’s oldest art museum, has been losing money for years and is currently in need of at least $130 million in renovations. The only major museum on the Mall that is privately owned, times have been tough for the Corcoran who must charge admission and raise large amounts of money to survive. Attendance has dropped drastically and donations to the museum have roughly halved since the recession.

The Corcoran’s commanding Beaux Arts façade and top-notch collection of 17,000 works including pieces by Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, and Willem de Kooning are simply not a big enough draw to keep the institution afloat, especially when every other institution on the Mall offers free admission. The Corcoran’s board of trustees are currently debating between a number of options to keep the museum active including selling the current building, combining forces with another institution, and moving out of the city.

While many find the loss of the Corcoran will leave the Washington Mall with a gaping hole, the museum announced that they have been discussing possible solutions with the National Gallery of Art, George Washington University, and a few other unnamed institutions. The Corcoran hired a real estate firm as its adviser in September and hopes to have its future mapped out by the first half of 2013.

The District of Columbia Historic Preservation League is looking to extend the landmark designation for the Corcoran’s exterior and interior. If the institution were approved, any major construction would be subject to public review.

Ever wondered what Luc Tuymans thinks of the Louvre? At Frieze Masters, you’ll find out. The highly-anticipated Frieze London spinoff's talks program is power-packed. Artist Cecily Brown will talk with National Gallery of Art director Nicholas Penny about how she uses traditional imagery and subject matter in her art, while Glenn Brown will discuss his appropriation of historical artwork with Kunsthaus Zurich curator Bice Curiger. Tuymans will offer insight into his decision-making process when painting iconic historical moments in a conversation with Louvre Museum senior curator Dominique de Font-Réaulx.

These events get at the heart of the inaugural Frieze Masters, which plans to mix Old Master treasures with modern masterpieces in an effort to lure collectors out of their comfort zones.

The first full retrospective of American artist George Bellows in more than three decades will open at the National Gallery of Art next year, the museum announced Thursday.

Bellows, one of the famed artists of the Armory Show in 1913, was an important transitional figure between the Victorian and modern eras. Widely known for his dramatic scenes of boxers and urban life, Bellows was interested in everything around him. His work is celebrated for its detailed renderings of dreary life in New York, with laundry hanging out apartment windows and people crowded on tenement steps. But he found a contrast in the lyrical views of snow in the parks, and in formal portraits, mostly of his family.

The exhibit, organized by the gallery, will include about 140 paintings, drawings and lithographs. The last major exhibition of Bellows’s work, concentrated on his paintings, was mounted 20 years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Thirty years ago the National Gallery did a show of his boxing paintings, and in 1957 Bellows was the subject of the gallery’s first solo artist exhibition.

“We want to establish a more expansive view of Bellows,” said Charles Brock, associate curator for the gallery’s American and British paintings. “He was a hugely ambitious painter, yet he is known in a very narrow way. This is a survey of his entire career.

In her second alleged attack on a world-famous piece of art in the past four months, Susan Burns, 53, was arrested for attempting to rip a $2.5 million Henri Matisse oil painting off the wall of the National Gallery of Art and slamming the frame three times against the wall, police said.

Burns, 53, of Alexandria, was being held at D.C. Superior Court, but a court docket indicates that Burns was to be “transferred immediately” from a D.C. jail to St. Elizabeths Hospital “and to be monitored closely.”

Her recent past includes a highly publicized arrest on April 1 for allegedly trying to tear an   $80 million Paul Gauguin painting off the wall of the National Gallery of Art. She pounded the painting, which was protected by a plexiglass shield, with her fists.

This time, with the museum surveillance cameras rolling, she walked over to Matisse’s “The Plumed Hat,” then “grabbed both sides of the frame holding said painting, damaging the antique original frame of the painting,” according to an arrest affidavit sworn by police Lt. Dexter Moten. “No damage to the painting itself was immediately apparent,” Moten said in the affidavit. Burns was charged with unlawful entry, contempt, destruction of property and attempted theft.