2011 Annual Report - National Gallery of Art

14
� Kerry James Marshall,
Great America, Gift of the
Collectors Committee
Collecting
With her pursed lips and elastic, buoyant limbs,
she appears to harbor a vital secret. It is the gift
of Victoria and Roger Sant.
Knight’s Heritage, 1963, is a pivotal sculpture
by Anne Truitt, an artist who spent most
of her career in Washington, D.C., working
at a personal and geographical tangent to the
minimal art of New York and Los Angeles. The
piece consists of a simple wooden box fabricated
to the artist’s careful instructions, but its intuitive
division into three unequal parts and
its subtly chosen and brushed colors bespeak a
lyrical, poetic sensibility. Purchased through the
Collectors Committee, it joins three later
sculptures by Truitt already in the collection.
Nam June Paik’s Cosmos was conceived in
1963 as one of his first pieces to use television
as an artistic medium and executed with technical
assistance in 2003. Two early, round TV
tubes hooked up to a camera show views of the
surrounding room in alternation with a swirling
pattern. All equipment is exposed, providing
a metaphor for Paik’s laying bare of mass media
and twisting its operations to replace passive
reception with interactive experience. The
work is one of several given to the Gallery by
the family of Ken Hakuta, Paik’s nephew and
artistic executor.
DRAWINGS A major gift of six old master
drawings was offered by Dian Woodner from
the distinguished collection formed by her father,
Ian Woodner. This gift included two Italian
Renaissance works, a rare sheet of figure studies
from the 1470s by the Paduan artist Francesco
Squarcione, and a handsome drawing by Perino
del Vaga from his series on Alexander the Great,
1540s. An important addition to the Gallery’s
collection of Netherlandish drawings is the
fantasy mountain landscape with waterfalls by
Roelandt Savery, executed about 1606 in black
and colored chalks. Two eighteenth-century
drawings are a complex and colorful rendering
of the portico of the Pantheon in Rome by
Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the bravura Bust
of an Old Man by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in red,
black, and white chalks. The Woodner gift also
included an unusually large portrait drawing
by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, executed
in 1857.