2011 Annual Report - National Gallery of Art

22
EXHIBITING
The Gallery offered the public an impressive
twenty-one special exhibitions this year. Seven
exhibitions—From Impressionism to Modernism:
The Chester Dale Collection; In the Tower: Mark
Rothko; American Modernism: The Shein Collection;
German Master Drawings from the National Gallery
of Art, 1580–1900; German Master Drawings from
the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, 1580–1900; Edvard
Munch: Master Prints; and Arcimboldo, 1526–
1593: Nature and Fantasy—continued from the
previous year.
The year began with an examination of the
relationship between photography and painting
in The Pre-Raphaellite Lens: British Photography
and Painting, 1848–1875. Thematic sections on
landscape, portraiture, literary and historical
narratives, and modern-life subjects, displayed
photographs and paintings as well as watercolors
and large volumes in five galleries to chronicle
the roles photography and Pre-Raphaelite art
played in changing concepts of vision and truth
in representation. Photographers looked to Pre-
Raphaelite subject matter and visual strategies in
order to legitimize photography’s status as a fine
art. Like painters, photographers wrestled with
the question of how to observe and represent the
natural world and the human face and figure. A
fully illustrated catalogue accompanied the
exhibition, and the Gallery’s website highlighted
the innovative techniques that distinguish
photography of the period.
Larger Than Life: Ter Brugghen’s “Saint Sebastian
Tended by Irene” displayed Hendrick Ter
Brugghen’s seventeenth-century masterwork
from the Allen Memorial Art Museum of
Oberlin College alongside the Gallery’s Bagpipe
Player, two of the Dutch artist’s most luminous
and lyrical paintings. Although these works
belong to different genres, they reveal the sure
fluidity of brush, exquisite color harmonies, and
sophisticated compositional orchestration for
which Ter Brugghen is renowned.
Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals celebrated the
city of Venice through a rich variety of
Venetian views, known as vedute, with some
twenty masterworks by Canaletto and more
than thirty by rivals including Michele
Marieschi, Francesco Guardi, and Bernardo
Bellotto. Responding to an art market fueled
largely by the Grand Tour, these gifted painters
depicted the famous monuments and vistas of
Venice in different moods and seasons.