2011 Annual Report - National Gallery of Art

einvention or appropriation of narratives and
myths drawn both from his European cultural
heritage and Maori legend.
The ultimate traveler, Paul Gauguin (1848–
1903) sailed in the South Pacific and lived
in Peru, Paris, Martinique, and Tahiti, among
other places. The exhibition featured iconic
self-portraits, genre pictures, still lifes, and
landscapes, on loan from around the world—
ranging from scenes of religious life near the
artist’s colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany to the
exotic canvases depicting the flora and fauna of
the islands of French Polynesia to the sumptuous
images of the islands of the South Seas.
A fully illustrated catalogue and brochure
accompanied the exhibition. An award-winning
documentary produced by the Gallery was made
possible by the HRH Foundation. Narrated by
Willem Dafoe, the film was screened during the
exhibition and broadcast on WETA and other
PBS affiliates. An audio tour offered commentary
by the exhibition curators and an expert on
Polynesian and Maori culture.
The third installation of the In the Tower
series focusing on developments in art from
midcentury to the present featured the work
of Nam June Paik (1932–2006). Born in Korea
and trained in Japan and Germany in aesthetics
and music, Paik settled in New York in 1964 and
quickly became a pioneer in the integration
of art with technology and performance. The
centerpiece of the exhibition was One Candle,
Candle Projection, 1988–2000, one of the artist’s
NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART 25
simplest, most dynamic works. Each morning
a candle was lit and a video camera followed
its progress, casting its flickering, magnified,
processed image onto the walls in a myriad of
projections. The unique, twenty-five-feet-high
triangular volume of the gallery allowed for
monumental candle images. In the Tower: Nam
June Paik also highlighted an important recent
acquisition, Untitled (Red Hand), 1967, a gift of the
Hakuta Family. A film about the artist and an
illustrated brochure accompanied the exhibition.
On view in the West Building, Lewis Baltz:
Prototypes/Ronde de Nuit featured works showing
the transformation of the American landscape
into an unending terrain of anonymous commercial
architecture. From 1967 through the
early 1970s, Californian artist Lewis Baltz (born
1945) made a series of photographs that focused
on the sides of warehouse sheds, stucco walls,
empty billboards, and other geometric forms
found in the postwar suburban landscape. He
titled these works Prototypes, referencing both
the industrially made model structures scattered
across California and the modern culture that
generated them.
In this first exhibition dedicated to the series,
some fifty Prototypes were on view along with
works by Donald Judd and Richard Serra—key
participants in the avant-garde dialogue that
inspired Baltz. The exhibition also included
Ronde de Nuit (Night Watch), 1991–1992, a
twelve-panel color tableau of surveillance sites
and the people who work in them. Dramatically
� Gauguin: Maker
of Myth